Recently, 16 members of ERA Team VP Real Estate attended the 2012 ERA International Business Conference in New Orleans, La.

While in attendance at the International Business Conference, Bill Soffel, a local real estate broker, was recognized as one of the nation’s top ERA brokers by global real estate leader ERA Franchise Systems LLC. Soffel accepted the President’s Circle designation for superior performance on behalf of ERA Team VP Real Estate.

The President’s Circle is a group of ERA companies across the nation that rank among the Gold Level for the top 50, Silver Level for the top 100 or Bronze Level for the top 200 in either number of residential sales completed or total amount of completed sales in the ERA network.

“This is an excellent example, for our brokers and the entire real estate industry, of what can be accomplished through innovative thinking and close attention to customers’ needs, regardless of market conditions,” said Charlie Young, president and chief executive officer, ERA Franchise Systems LLC. “Bill’s achievement is a testament to his unwavering commitment to ERA’s core values of innovation, collaboration and superior service as well as his impressive business acumen and deep knowledge of this market – all of which are invaluable assets to homebuyers and sellers in Western New York.”

Individual Associates of ERA Team VP Real Estate were honored as well. Jane Grice and Karen Goodell of ERA Team VP Real Estate in Chautauqua were each awarded a Beyond Excellence designation by ERA Franchise Systems LLC. The designation recognizes the ERA network’s top producers for excellence in real estate sales.

To qualify for the Beyond Excellence designation, ERA sales associates or selling-brokers must have achieved 45 total closed units or $100,000 in adjusted gross commission in 2011.

“An unparalleled commitment to service has clearly contributed to the successes of both Jane Grice and Karen Goodell and I am pleased to congratulate each of them on this impressive accomplishment,” Yuong said.

Anne Walters, ERA Team VP Real Estate’s office coordinator, was also honored during the ERA International Business Conference. She was named a top three finalist for the ERA Office Coordinator of the Year Award by ERA Franchise Systems LLC, in recognition of her local and national contributions. Soffel nominated Mrs. Walters for the award because of the role she has played in the company’s success.

“Anne has been with my organization since 2002, and has been instrumental in the successful coordination of our real estate sales division as we have navigated through both good and poor market conditions, through the rapid changes within the real estate industry, and most importantly, through all of the change and growth that is part and parcel to the transition from an independent company to a franchise company,” Soffel said.

For more information about ERA Team VP Real Estate, visit www.myteamvp.com or call one of the main office locations at 789-2600 in Chautauqua; 699-4800 in Ellicottville; or 585-968-2113 in Cuba.

Article source: http://post-journal.com/page/content.detail/id/604145/Realtor-Named-One-Of-Nation-s-Best.html?nav=5003

QUESTION: My husband and I purchased our first home in 2011. The home is a four-story townhouse in Washington, D.C. Built in the 1880s, it has had many owners and updates.

After living in the home, we noticed the home shakes every time a truck drives down the street. The home is four stories tall and has a basement. If we slam the door, the second floor shakes. The seller was a real estate agent and had the home for several years. He did not disclose this, and now we think the home has serious and costly structural problems. The shaking just isn’t normal. Do we have any recourse?

ANSWER: Unless you know that the house has serious and costly structural problems, you probably don’t have much to complain about. You knew you were buying a home from the 1880s. It’s about 130 years old and is still standing. When the home was built, there were only horse-drawn carriages going down the street, and now you have trucks that are many tons in weight going down your street. It has probably been shaking this way ever since trucks started going down the street.

Presumably, you had an inspector come to the home and go through it before you bought it and did not find any deficiencies in the construction — or at least you decided to buy the home, anyway. The only way you’ll know for sure whether the house has structural problems is to hire a structural engineer to investigate. If you hire a structural engineer, even if he or she finds that the house is not built to today’s standards, that does not mean that it is deficient. The structural engineer will have to find that there has been some recent or new deficiency in the structure that is causing the shaking problem.

Even if you find out that there is a deficiency in the home, shaking alone may not constitute a sufficient problem for the seller to know that the home had a deficiency that needed to be disclosed to you.

There may be a way to make the problem better by installing additional supports or taking other action; you can see what it would cost to do so. But taking that action may be like improving the home and not a true fix to a deficiency that needed to be disclosed to you.

If you buy an older home and some of the elements of the home have aged and become weak, the seller has to disclose to you any problem they know about as a result. If the seller knew, for example, that a center beam of your home was cracked and deteriorated and could fail at any time, it would seem that the seller should have disclosed that to you. However, if the roof of a home is old but is not leaking, and you move into the home and it then starts leaking, you can’t blame the seller for the leak or for the cost of replacing an old roof. You knew the roof was old, and an old roof can start leaking at any time.

You have to take responsibility for your actions and the purchase you decided to make. You need to review the situation, get some expert advice from people who are familiar with homes like yours. You might start by asking your neighbors who live in homes of similar age whether their homes shake when a truck drives past. Assess what, if any, corrective action must be taken, and then talk to an attorney when you have all of this information.

If the fix to your problem is relatively inexpensive, you may want to do it and move on. If the fix looks to be quite expensive, then you may have to investigate the problem more and then determine whether any disclosure laws were broken and whether the seller would have any liability for nondisclosure.

Tell us how things end up once you gather more information.

Ilyce R. Glink’s latest book is “Buy, Close, Move In!” Samuel J. Tamkin is a Chicago-based real estate attorney. If you have questions, you can call Ilyce’s radio show toll-free (800-972-8255) 11 a.m.-1 p.m. any Sunday. Contact them through her website, www.thinkglink.com.

Article source: http://www.freep.com/article/20120520/BUSINESS04/205200406/Owners-of-1880s-house-may-not-have-recourse-over-vibrations

Should federal officials lecture state lawmakers on policy? The general counsel for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, certainly seems to think so.

At issue are two bills backed by California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris to set new rules for the foreclosure process. The bills ran into stiff opposition from lenders, so the top Democrats in the Assembly and state Senate moved them to a conference committee in the hope of working out a compromise that could keep them on track.

Alfred Pollard, who was a longtime banking industry executive and lobbyist before joining the FHFA, blasted the bills in a letter to five members of the conference committee. In addition to offering some specific technical objections to the bills, Pollard went on at length about the drawbacks of slowing the foreclosure process.

“State laws that stretch out the period for legitimate foreclosures — after every effort is made to avoid foreclosure and to keep homeowners in their homes — result in no added benefit for the homeowner and produce harm to the housing finance system and to neighborhoods,” Pollard wrote. “Adding impediments to actions undertaken after default and layering restrictions on legitimate foreclosures, thereby permitting homeowners to stay in their homes for hundreds of days while not paying their mortgages, property taxes or homeowners’ association dues, costs neighborhoods, costs lenders and, ultimately, costs local taxpayers and future borrowers.”

Pollard conceded that even lenders must obey the law. “However,” he warned, “adding new laws, procedures and requirements where sanctions have been applied and remedial steps taken, may only add to delays and produce no different outcome for homeowners who have received appropriate efforts at loan modifications or foreclosure avoidance approaches.”

He went on to argue that the state didn’t need to address problems in the foreclosure process because federal regulators and law enforcement officials are addressing the issue. In fact, he contended, “should a borrower be treated improperly, laws in all states have always provided protection for them from fraud or deceptive practices.”

To which one can only say: Really?

Pollard must have been so busy trying to regulate Fannie and Freddie — admittedly, a full-time job — that he had no time to speak to any of the people across the country who’ve worked with defaulting borrowers. Or to the state prosecutors who’ve investigated lenders’ practices.

Or maybe he thinks it’s just peachy to have one set of bank employees foreclose on and repossess a home while another set is working with the homeowners on a loan modification.

That’s not to say Harris’ bills should pass as-is. Pollard offered some valid criticisms about the way the measures were drafted; for example, lawmakers should ensure that they don’t provide new avenues for fraud, and the definition of “robo-signing” is too broad.

The FHFA also has a legitimate interest in the legislation. Its mandate is to protect taxpayers from excessive losses at Fannie and Freddie, which are under federal conservatorship. If California passes laws that deter lenders from cutting their losses on loans backed by Fannie or Freddie, the FHFA’s job would be that much harder.

But it strains credulity to argue that the current system is working or that lenders are making “every effort” to avoid needless foreclosures. Lenders and loan-servicing companies have been timid, in part because they failed to scale up to meet the volume of defaults, in part because of the restrictions imposed on them by investors, and in part because they feared that more borrowers would default just to take advantage of the situation.

There’s no question that foreclosure was the right result for millions of borrowers who took on foolish risks or who lost so much income in the recession that they could no longer afford to be homeowners. But the collapse of the housing bubble exposed a system so flawed, it led banks to foreclose on an untold number of homeowners who could have been rescued by the right kind of modification, one that saved the lender money in the long run.

State officials are right to try to fix that system, given that the foreclosure process is governed by state law. And Pollard’s critiques about bill drafting can help that process. But he should save his foreclosure advocacy for when he returns to his former employ.

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Article source: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-federal-regulator-lobbies-legislature-on-foreclosure-bills-20120518,0,2465559.story

Tax revenue from Facebook’s $104 billion IPO may not fill California’s $16 billion budget deficit, but it will likely give a boost to Silicon Valley’s already inflated real estate prices.

The median home value in Menlo Park, Calif., the home of Facebook’s headquarters, is $1 million, up 4.5 percent year-over-year according to the Zillow Home Value Index.

Old and new Facebook workers are buying up property in the Bay Area, adding to the demand from tech workers at nearby companies like Google, Zynga and LinkedIn.

In the nearby town of Cupertino, home of Apple Inc., the median home value is also $1 million, up 1.6 percent year-over-year, according to Zillow.

Around the time that Facebook announced its IPO and started its road show, there was an influx of multi-million dollar real estate coming onto the market in Silicon Valley, said Zillow chief economist Stan Humphries.

“Sellers clearly want to take advantage of those reaping rewards from this historic financial event,” Humphries said.

Home prices have already been rising in many high-end neighborhoods and cities in the area, and Humphries said he expects they will continue to increase as the young Facebook IPO beneficiaries look to make moves in the real estate market.

Michael Dreyfus of Dreyfus Properties specializes in residential real estate in the towns of Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Woodside, Portola Valley and Atherton.

“There’s no way there’s not going to be an effect,” Dreyfus said of Facebook’s IPO and the local real estate market.

He said he knows sellers who have waited for two years, not yet listing their homes in anticipation of the IPO.

While Facebook’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, Dreyfus said the hottest area is in neighboring Palo Alto.

“Palo Alto is ground zero for all of this, particularly because the younger money has always preferred Palo Alto because it’s a more urban environment,” Dreyfus said.

Downtown Palo Alto, by Stanford University, has numerous coffee shops, a movie theater, restaurants and bookstores.

“The schools are excellent, you can send your kid to public school and you are in the mix,” Dreyfus said.

Dreyfus said the dotcom bubble and Google’s IPO have educated property owners into becoming “savvy sellers.”

“They’ve seen this song before, they think they can play it, and they may be right,” said Dreyfus, who knows sellers who have held off and not responded immediately to increasing demand.

One reason for sellers’ patience may be that companies and some regulations prevent some stockholders from selling their shares until a specified time. That “lockup” period means Facebook employees won’t be using stock proceeds to buy homes in cash just yet. The period may be 90 days for institutional buyers and 180 days for employees. Companies like Zynga and LinkedIn have inititated more than one lockup period. Some lockup periods can encourage employees not to sell stock for as long as a year.

While most of his clients have been established executives who have moved to California to work at tech companies, the homes Dreyfus sold to Facebook employees in the past two years tend to have been to young families.

“I’m 50, so they all seem really young,” he said.

When asked if he was participating in any Facebook employee-related sales on Friday, Dreyfus said one of his two offices was planning to host a party celebrating the IPO’s completion.

“We’re tired of hearing about it,” Dreyfus said. “Imagine that every real estate conversation has worked Facebook in.”

Though grateful for the boost from Facebook and every other tech economy, he hopes people will focus on living “fundamentals.”

“The story is about all the companies in the Valley and how well they’re all doing,” he said. “And we want everyone to take a deep breath because we are really fortunate to live in this place.”

Article source: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/facebook-ipo-give-pop-silicon-valley-real-estate/story?id=16379764