Category Archives: Real Estate

Scammers are tricking people out of payments as they’re about to close on a house

Posted on September 3, 2018 | Leave a comment

A new variant of wire fraud schemes is increasingly targeting homebuyers.

Buyers are tricked into wiring their downpayment on the day of closing to a fraudulent offshore account, often by criminals who have spoofed or co-opted their real estate professional’s email account.

Losses from these scams are typically not covered or reimbursed by the bank. Since the wires go overseas, it’s nearly impossible for victims to recover their money.

Victims have lost six-figure sums and had to cancel transactions on their dream homes due to this fraud.

It’s a nightmare scenario for any homebuyer: the day before closing, a scammer manages to trick you into wiring your down payment to an offshore account. You lose your hard-earned money and you lose the house, and there’s no way you can get either one back.

That’s how some criminals have adapted the common “business email compromise” scam – so-named because it used to almost exclusively target businesses – to focus on individuals, especially people who are involved in a pending real estate transaction.

Here’s how it often works: a person involved in a real estate transaction, such as a real estate attorney or realtor, has his or her email account compromised by malicious software, known as malware, sent by a criminal over email. Unbeknownst to the professional, the fraudster can now monitor the realtor’s emails to look for upcoming transactions.

Next, just as a closing date is coming near, the fraudster uses the compromised email account to send a legitimate-looking message to the buyer – which, coming directly from the realtor or attorney’s account, appears real. The note tells the buyer that there’s been a change of plans, and he or she needs to wire the down payment just before the closing date, supposedly to a bank account belonging to the seller.

But the account actually belongs to the criminal, and is typically overseas, out of the reach of U.S. law enforcement, Kalember said.

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San Diego County Median Home Price Hits Record High

Posted on August 31, 2018 | Leave a comment

San Diego County’s median home price hit its highest price in history in July, $579,750, while sales hit a four-year low, real estate tracker CoreLogic reported Thursday.

The previous record was $575,000 in May. Home prices have been breaking records on nearly a month-to-month basis all year. As of July, home prices had increased 8 percent in a year — the most of any Southern California county.

Home sales hit its lowest point in years in July with 3,607 sales. The last time sales were that low was July 2014, when the county was still coming out of the housing bust, when there were 3,530 sales.

Affordability constraints for many potential buyers could be the reason why sales are so low despite more homes on the market, said CoreLogic analyst Andrew LePage in the monthly report.

“The overall trend in recent months has been toward more listings,” he wrote, “suggesting that sales also remain weak relative to current housing demand because more and more would-be buyers are unable or unwilling to buy.”

Home inventory has increased slightly in recent months, but it is still below levels reached in years past, said data from the Greater San Diego Association of Realtors. There were 7,613 homes listed for sale in July, up from July 2016 when 5,828 homes were for sale, and 6,571 homes for sale in July 2015.

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US Pending home sales fell in July amid over heated markets

Posted on August 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

An index measuring contracts to buy previously-owned U.S. homes unexpectedly declined in July, signaling that buyers are balking at higher prices and a lack of choices in some regions, according to data released Wednesday from the National Association of Realtors in Washington.

Key Takeaways

Affordability constraints including rising mortgage rates, tepid wage gains and rising prices amid tight supplies continue to restrain prospective buyers even with a strong job market and tax cuts.

The decline reflected weakness in the South and West, which the industry group said included some “overheated” markets. The group highlighted Silicon Valley, Denver, Seattle and Nashville, Tennessee, as areas seeing a rise in listings from a year earlier.

The report is the latest sign of cooling in the U.S. housing market. An index of home prices across 20 U.S. cities increased in June at the slowest pace in nearly two years, data Tuesday showed.

The Realtors group maintained its forecast for a decrease in existing-home sales from 2017, expecting 5.46 million transactions, which would be the first annual decrease since 2014. At the start of the year, the group had projected a slight increase in sales.

Official’s Views

“Many of the most overheated real estate markets — especially those out West — are starting to see a slight decline in home sales and slower price growth,” Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in a statement. “Multiple years of inadequate supply in markets with strong job growth have finally driven up home prices to a point where an increasing number of prospective buyers are unable to afford it.”