It’s a small homebuyers incentive, after all.
This weekend only, anyone who buys a custom built home from KB Home Mortgage, a subsidiary of Bank of America (BAC: 15.05 -0.53%) will receive as part of the package a “Walt Disney Dream Room.”
The construction company will agree to deck out a fully-licensed Disney-themed room in the home with either a calming green Classic Pooh theme, a royal Cinderella ‘palace’, a chic Cars room or a – gulp – Hannah Montana Hangout so a kid can “take a break from the spotlight.”
Sorry, Little Mermaid fans, there’s just no room under the sea for other dream room designs. However, even if a potential buyer who visits a KB Home over the weekend can’t decide right away, they can still pick... more»
IKEA is braving a new frontier in best practices, offering free furniture and “design expertise” to the buyers of New York City’s skinniest house.
The residence at 75 1/2 Bedford in Greenwich Village, squished between 75 and 77 Bedford St., presents a definite design challenge for the eventual buyers. With an interior only 8.5 feet wide (the exterior measures a deceptive 9.5 feet) and 42 feet long, the house bears a history of maximized space use — dating back to its establishment in 1873 — including a custom stove with a single row of four burners, built to fit, compared with the usual two rows of two.
The townhouse with its 990 square feet and three floors (plus a basement) was originally listed at $2.75m in late August, according to an article at NYDailyNews.com.
Despite... more»
It’s the latest innovation during the US foreclosure crisis: the bank branch robbery.
A 69 year-old Californian homeowner allegedly robbed a Bank of America (BAC: 15.05 -0.53%) branch in order to pay off his mortgage at its 17% interest rate.
An interesting post at RightJuris.com has the scoop.
The man claimed to need $50,000 to save his home from foreclosure but left the bank with $100,000, according to the post. He would not get far enough to make the payment, however.
The man later said he wanted to “get the money and get the hell out of there,” but he got a lot more when authorities arrested him.
“I don’t do this kind of [stuff]. I was stupid,” he said in a post-arrest interview.
A clip of the interview is available to watch... more»
ACORN Housing released a video on YouTube, in which an employee from the housing counseling agency’s Philadelphia office describes an alleged encounter with filmmaker James O’Keefe.
ACORN — The Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now — has come under fire after O’Keefe released a series of online videos he said he filmed using undercover cameras while posing as a pimp. The videos appear to show ACORN Housing employees telling O’Keefe and an associate how to falsify Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents and obtain a mortgage to open a brothel.
ACORN Housing’s video response comes near the end of a week of press coverage. Earlier this week, the Senate voted to block ACORN and its subsidiaries from receiving federal funds in a pending appropriations bill.
In the... more»
After beating up on the brokers, let’s give them a rest and bash the greenbacks!
Well, a report from Credit Suisse may do that for us. When the firm sat down with Giles Keating, the head of Credit Suisse Global Economics and Strategy Group, he noted that the dollar would be the first victim of the global economy’s recovery.
So, does that mean we’re recovering? Keating thinks so, even though he states that the resurgence is starting from a very low base and that we still have lots of unused capacity and high unemployment.
He points to the investors who were left behind by the initial pick-up in the stock market and their eagerness to put their money back to work, and he notes that policy makers have signaled that they would maintain a “very expansive economic policy” that will... more»
According to a report in MarketWatch, Genworth Financial is selling common stock to raise roughly $500m in new capital.
We say good luck to Genworth (GNW: 10.61 -0.47%) and hope brokers trying to sell the stock don’t cross paths with pop burlesque princess Lady Gaga. The artist recently told BBC Radio One that she is most driven to succeed in order to impress her father; and then sang a piano-only rendition of her hit Poker Face (not forgetting the line where she claims to be ‘bluffin’ with her muffin’).”
Certainly it’s catchy stuff. And now it’s bleeding over to brokers, with this latest version coming to us from a Wall Street insider:
Broker Face (sung to Poker Face - Lady Gaga)
I want to trade ‘em like they did... more»
An independent filmmaker posing as a pimp and an associate posing as a prostitute used undercover camera equipment to film ACORN Housing employees in Baltimore allegedly explaining how to obtain a mortgage to purchase a home to start a brothel, including lying to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
ACORN calls the entire incident a smear campaign, with the video being an unfair representation.
The video appears to show two ACORN Housing employees explaining how the “pimp” and “prostitute,” respectively played by filmmaker James O’Keefe and his associate, Hannah Giles, may falsify tax returns to satisfy lending requirements. When the duo tells the ACORN Housing employees they intend to bring underage girls from out of the country to staff the brothel, they are seen to encourage the... more»
Seven months after President Obama signed the Recovery Act in February with the promise of a transparent injection of nearly $800bn into the economy, we’re finally finding some clarity.
And the first celebration of local stimulus success comes not from California, where IOU’s are becoming currency, and not from Arizona, where the foreclosure pile continues to grow, or from Detroit, where unemployment plagues every street corner.
The news comes from Hollybrook Farms, a 124-unit affordable apartment community in Laurel, Delaware.
Last week, Delaware Governor Jack Markell and US Senator Tom Carper gathered with dozens of others to celebrate the rescued apartment project.
Hollybrook Farms received a combination of public and private funding last year to renovate the aging community, but in... more»
Homebuilder Hovnanian Enterprises announced a new marketing campaign that uses recent signs the economy may be recovering to encourage consumers to act on the notion that now’s the time to buy before prices return to normal.
Hovnanian’s “Pounce Before the Bounce” campaign was announced Thursday during a conference call detailing the builder’s fiscal third quarter results. (The company said it lost $168.9m, an improvement over the $202.5m loss one-year prior.)
The campaign is an interesting strategy on Hovnanian’s part, especially given that many industry observers believe this summer’s price increases are only a blip on the radar, and prices could go down when more REO properties — those stalled by the myriad foreclosure moratoria that are now winding down across the country... more»
Viral video or not, the grand prize-winning YouTube video will earn its maker a check for $9,000 or roughly three months of mortgage payments.
Building product manufacturer James Hardie Building Products (JHX: 33.01 +0.95%) unveiled a new contest for consumers of its exterior home siding.
James Hardie asks contestants to submit a YouTube video no more than three minutes long, showing the front-facing exterior of their home and completing the statement, “I love my Hardie home because….”
The contest runs through October 26 and will grant the winner “three months of mortgage payments,” according to a press release, to be awarded as a check for $9,000.
“The idea grew from the company’s participation in social media,” said... more»
