Real estate appraisal, property valuation or land valuation is the process of developing an opinion of value for real property. Real estate transactions often require appraisals because they occur infrequently and every property is unique, unlike corporate stocks, which are traded daily and are identical. The location also plays a key role in valuation. However, since property cannot change location, it is often the upgrades or improvements to the home that can change its value. Appraisal reports form the basis for mortgage loans, settling estates and divorces, taxation, and so on. Sometimes an appraisal report is used to establish a sale price for a property.
Predatory lending refers to unethical practices conducted by lending organizations during a loan origination process that are unfair, deceptive, or fraudulent. While there are no internationally agreed legal definitions for predatory lending, a 2006 audit report from the office of inspector general of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) broadly defines predatory lending as "imposing unfair and abusive loan terms on borrowers", though "unfair" and "abusive" were not specifically defined. Though there are laws against some of the specific practices commonly identified as predatory, various federal agencies use the phrase as a catch-all term for many specific illegal activities in the loan industry. Predatory lending should not be confused with predatory mortgage servicing which is mortgage practices described by critics as unfair, deceptive, or fraudulent practices during the loan or mortgage servicing process, post loan origination.
Structured finance is a sector of finance - specifically financial law - that manages leverage and risk. Strategies may involve legal and corporate restructuring, off balance sheet accounting, or the use of financial instruments.
An asset-backed security (ABS) is a security whose income payments and hence value are derived from and collateralized by a specified pool of underlying assets.
In economics, hedonic regression or hedonic demand theory is a revealed preference method of estimating the demand for a good, or equivalently its value to consumers. It breaks down the item being researched into its constituent characteristics, and obtains estimates of the contributory value of each characteristic. This requires that the composite good being valued can be reduced to its constituent parts and the market values of those constituent parts. Hedonic models are most commonly estimated using regression analysis, although more generalized models exist, such as sales adjustment grids.
The United States housing bubble was a real estate bubble affecting over half of the U.S. states. It was the impetus for the subprime mortgage crisis. Housing prices peaked in early 2006, started to decline in 2006 and 2007, and reached new lows in 2012. On December 30, 2008, the Case–Shiller home price index reported its largest price drop in its history. The credit crisis resulting from the bursting of the housing bubble is an important cause of the Great Recession in the United States.
A real-estate bubble or property bubble is a type of economic bubble that occurs periodically in local or global real-estate markets, and typically follow a land boom. A land boom is the rapid increase in the market price of real property such as housing until they reach unsustainable levels and then decline. This period, during the run up to the crash, is also known as froth. The questions of whether real estate bubbles can be identified and prevented, and whether they have broader macroeconomic significance, are answered differently by schools of economic thought, as detailed below.
A hard money loan is a specific type of asset-based loan financing through which a borrower receives funds secured by real property. Hard money loans are typically issued by private investors or companies. Interest rates are typically higher than conventional commercial or residential property loans because of the higher risk and shorter duration of the loan.
NVR, Inc. is a company engaged in home construction. It also operates a mortgage banking and title services business. The company primarily operates on the East Coast of the United States. In February 2010, NVR Inc was sued by the Attorney General of Delaware for failing to provide promised amenities for the residents of a housing development that the company built. In 2018, 23% of home settlements occurred in the Washington metropolitan area and 8% of home settlements occurred in the Baltimore metropolitan area.
Loan origination is the process by which a borrower applies for a new loan, and a lender processes that application. Origination generally includes all the steps from taking a loan application up to disbursal of funds. For mortgages, there is a specific mortgage origination process. Loan servicing covers everything after disbursing the funds until the loan is fully paid off. Loan origination is a specialized version of new account opening for financial services organizations. Certain people and organizations specialize in loan origination. Mortgage brokers and other mortgage originator companies serve as a prominent example.
First American Financial Corporation is an American financial services company which provides title insurance and settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industries.
Novation Companies, Inc.(formerly Novastar Financial, Inc.) owns and operates early-stage businesses in the technology-enabled services industry. It trades under the symbol NOVC.
A house price index (HPI) measures the price changes of residential housing as a percentage change from some specific start date. Methodologies commonly used to calculate a HPI are the hedonic regression (HR), simple moving average (SMA) and repeat-sales regression (RSR).
LendingTree is an online lending marketplace headquartered in the United States. The business platform allows potential borrowers to connect with multiple loan operators to find optimal terms for loans, credit cards, deposit accounts, insurance, etc. LendingTree allows borrowers to shop and compare competitive rates and terms across an array of financial products. Founded in 1996, the company is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina with offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Chicago, Seattle and others. Other additional services include financing tools, comparative loan searches and borrowing information.
A mortgage loan or simply mortgage is a loan used either by purchasers of real property to raise funds to buy real estate, or by existing property owners to raise funds for any purpose while putting a lien on the property being mortgaged. The loan is "secured" on the borrower's property through a process known as mortgage origination. This means that a legal mechanism is put into place which allows the lender to take possession and sell the secured property to pay off the loan in the event the borrower defaults on the loan or otherwise fails to abide by its terms. The word mortgage is derived from a Law French term used in Britain in the Middle Ages meaning "death pledge" and refers to the pledge ending (dying) when either the obligation is fulfilled or the property is taken through foreclosure. A mortgage can also be described as "a borrower giving consideration in the form of a collateral for a benefit (loan)".
Automated Valuation Model (AVM) is the name given to a service that can provide real estate property valuations using mathematical modelling combined with a database. Most AVMs calculate a property’s value at a specific point in time by analyzing values of comparable properties. Some also take into account current asking prices, previous surveyor valuations, historical house price movements and user inputs.
The Standard & Poor's CoreLogic Case–Shiller Home Price Indices are repeat-sales house price indices for the United States. There are multiple Case–Shiller home price indices: A national home price index, a 20-city composite index, a 10-city composite index, and twenty individual metro area indices. These indices were first produced commercially by Case Shiller Weiss. They are now calculated and kept monthly by Standard & Poor's, with data calculated for January 1987 to present. The indices kept by Standard & Poor are normalized to a value of 100 in January 2000. They are based on original work by economists Karl Case and Robert Shiller, whose team calculated the home price index back to 1890. Case and Shiller's index is normalized to a value of 100 in 1890. The Case-Shiller index on Shiller's website is updated quarterly. The two datasets can greatly differ due to different reference points and calculations. For example, in the 4th quarter of 2013, the Standard and Poor 20 city index point was in the 160's, while the index point for 4th quarter on the Shiller data was in the 130's. Shiller claims in his book Irrational Exuberance that such a long series of home prices does not appear to have been published for any country.
This article provides background information regarding the subprime mortgage crisis. It discusses subprime lending, foreclosures, risk types, and mechanisms through which various entities involved were affected by the crisis.
An investment rating of a real estate property measures the property’s risk-adjusted returns, relative to a completely risk-free asset. Mathematically, a property’s investment rating is the return a risk-free asset would have to yield to be termed as good an investment as the property whose rating is being calculated. The underlying drivers for property ratings are the dividends and capital gains over a certain holding period, and their associated risks or variances. Similar to other financial ratings developed for mutual funds and stocks, it can be assumed that investors have constant relative risk aversion over the wealth derived from other sources and from their investments. For simplicity, it can also be assumed that the investment return is not correlated with other sources of wealth but represents 100% of the investor's wealth. A property’s investment rating is then a transformation of the risk-adjusted averaged return to a single number that conveys the property’s long-term potential to yield profits.
CoreLogic, Inc. is an Irvine, CA-based corporation providing financial, property, and consumer information, analytics, and business intelligence. The company analyzes information assets and data to provide clients with analytics and customized data services. The company also develops proprietary research, and tracks current and historical trends in a number of categories, including consumer credit, capital markets, real estate, fraud, regulatory compliance, natural hazards, and disaster projections. The company reported full 2020 revenue of $1.6 billion. As of 2021, CoreLogic is a Fortune 1000 company.
