4/21/09

San Francisco mortgage fraud story

OK, I had to google it after writing the below post. And I got all of one story found here.

A Tennessee man who conned an elderly woman into taking out a fake reverse mortgage in which he pocketed $140,000. Terrible story, yes. On the scale of the scams I've found in Southern California and Utah, not so much.

Are San Francisco's values "safe" if we didn't have the kind of mortgage fraud these other areas have had? I'm not saying that, but it is VERY obvious when homes were falsely assumed to be worth $1 million more than they actually were, and people bought more homes based on those comps, the decline in valuations is going to be catastrophic. When hundreds of homes in one community are "bought" for $300,000 when they were only worth $150,000, that's a 50% drop just when the fraud is removed, never mind the craze southern California experienced. So if we avoided large scale scams, we're in a much more normal cycle.... if you can call the near-great-depression-two "normal".

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