I don't watch Good Morning America so I missed that report on their investigation. Interestingly, right after I came across that video I saw this article about the Fed looking into taking aim at ending abusive lending practices.

I don't know about you but I'm wondering what proposed penalties they are considering if new lending guidelines are violated?

The Illinois Safe Toys Shopping Guide

In my previous blog, Merry Christmas from Illinois, I highlighted a new simple and easy to use shopping guide for toys that have been recalled or banned from being sold in Illinois stores that can be downloaded and printed out at the Read Full Post

Just in Time for Christmas

Unless you've been SO busy that you never get the chance to watch the news, you've more then likely caught the several reports on the news about dangerous levels of lead in some of the very popular childrens toys that were imported in from China. Thomas the Train, Dora the Explorer, etc... very popular toys for the little ones.

It really did not make us too happy for little and extremely important reasons. As real estate professionals that understand what lead poisoning can do for Children under 6, it's certainly something that needs to be paid attention to. (There certainly are very valid reasons for disclosing the dangers to potential home buyers if you are selling a home built before 1978.)

We hear about all of the recalls,…

It really was no secret for anybody that understands the very nature of supply and demand that real estate speculators caused the artificial appreciation rates that Las Vegas saw in 2004 with 52% appreciation rates. The fall out this year has not been very pretty and the media certainly is not helping out but as seen from the article above, the media also helped fuel the very problem of real estate speculation to begin with.

From doing some research and looking at Bank repos in Las Vegas for the past several months and tracking the numbers, I came across a bank repo in Las Vegas (The Ridges in Summerlin) that was listed for $5,780,000. I was telling somebody else about it since the community location is absolutely phenomenal and when I went to pull it up…

Can anybody confirm this? I've been extremely busy with some things and I jumped on Active Rain to post a quick blog and noticed all kinds of advertising including a HomesbyOwner.com banner directly to the right of the very blog that I was posting.

Are they seriously taking the chance of corrupting their system and becoming another R.com?

I was actually posting an article over on Active Rain and looking for a used car salesman picture and came across this video. I particularly like how this guy keeps selling even after getting crushed!  Enjoy! 

Top Gun Motors - Watch more free videos

It was bound to start and we predicted that it would happen well over a year ago. New Home builders in Chicago that would start offering great incentives for potential buyers to purchase their homes. Through years of experience working with new home sales there are several things we have learned and some of these are:

New Home Builders Are in the business to sell Homes

New home builders typically do not sit around on standing inventory and price their homes to see what will happen. They price their homes to sell and offer incentives so they can pay off their construction loans which are at a higher interest rate then your typical standard mortgage.

New Home Builders Don't get their advice from the Media or their Neighbors

They hire professionals to…

I'm watching Bill O'Reilly on Fox and the headline comes flashing across the bottom of the screen - Barry Bonds breaks Home run record with #756!

I don't even flick the channel over to ESPN or even bother to jump on line to check out the details. In fact, I don't even know where he hit it and I'm not even interested for something that was such a monumental achievement.

Automatically the assumption readers will have with my above statement is that I am not a baseball fan or I don't like Barry Bonds.

Quite the opposite -- I grew up loving baseball and lived and breathed it. I have boxes and boxes of baseball cards from when I was growing up and probably have several of Barry's rookie cards but I'm not even going to look. For some reason, I lost complete…