The National Association of Realtors said that median sales price for previously occupied homes rose in 91 out of 152 metropolitan areas as it was compared 1st quarter of this year with the same three months of the last year.

20 cities have seen double-digit price increases, a sharp improvement from the fourth quarter of last year, when prices rose in about 40 percent of cities. What helped homes sales to jump this spring? The tax credits in the amount of $8.000 for new buyers and $6,500 for current owners who hurried to purchase a home and take advantage of the incentives expired at the end of April of 2010.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, about 2.2 million households used the first-time buyer credit as of late March of 2010. The cost is 16 billion dollars. As a result of the government incentives and credits, one million of additional sales was generated. It helped to bring down the inventory of unsold homes.

Walter Molony, NAR spokesman comments, “Without that tax credit, if we had an additional million unsold homes on the market, the inventory would be so out of whack that we would be seeing priced continuing to decline and we might still be in recession.”

Now the housing tax credits are over, so home sales can soften in the months ahead, and prices will not increase. As banks unload now their backlog of foreclosed homes, prices also could be hurt. According to CoreLogic, today nearly a quarter of all U.S. homeowners owe more on their loans than their homes are worth. It means that rising prices have a long way to go.

Housing experts project home prices will remain almost flat for the next two years or maybe will increase slightly in the second half of this year. It can happen only on one condition, if unemployment and the economy will not take a turn “South”, for the worse.

Brief statistics: The national median price was$166,100, or 0.7 percent below the first quarter of last year. Sales of foreclosures and other distressed poperties made up 36 percent of all sales.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37083597/ns/business-real_estate/

Recently one hopeful in the past, but not now homeowner shared his experience with Chase in a comment “Chase’s Own Catch-22.” Here what he wrote,

“Chase has been reading a lot of Kafka lately. Especially, the Castle, and they’re inspired! There are lots of people caught in a terrible loop of Chase “loosing documentation” and making people continually re-send in forms for an MHA even after they are approved for one by the government.

So we had a Chase bank mortgage specialist at a Chase bank fax all our forms for us, but Chase still claims they didn’t receive all required information and then demanded even more information not asked for an the application. Since we own and live in a duplex we must now send them proof we do not have not formed a homeowners association with our housemates, for example. But the real test of their devious cleverness is a scam based on their own bank statement paparework.

Please admire its Kafka-esque brilliance. On Chase bank statements they leave the last page “left intentionally blank”, but they do not number this last page. For example, a Chase account may have 6 pages and all the pages say, i.e., 1 of 6, 2 of 6, but page 6, the blank one, is not numbered 6 of 6. We have been continually turned down for an MHA because we are not sending them. Chase-holder of our mortgage and the bank where we have our accounts–complete bank statements even though we do send them 6th page. Since it doesn’t say 6 of 6 they claim our application isn’t complete and make us start over from the very beginning.

Going on Month 7 Evidently that’s nothing, most people who have tried have been trying for twice this long. There is one recorded incidence of Chase approving an MHA but it was too late and the house was already in foreclosure…

Anyone see the movie Brazil? That is just brilliant, don’t number your statements properly so that anyone sending them in as proof of a bank statement will have an incomplete statement. Brilliant!”

Editorial Commentary: Do you see what is going on? Chase bank really feels that making billions of dollars on late fees, etc. in bad economy, give this customer-unfriendly financial institution a right to be and act above the law, to make false statements and promises, to print false advertising, and play dirty games with working people who are not so brilliant in such manipulation.

Chase as other banks-behemoths need healthy reforms. These reforms are needed immediately. Otherwise, it will destroy thousands and thousands people’s lives. But that can be done only by the thoughtful government who can initiate these reforms and put them through to the benefit of a whole nation.

First of all, these huge banks must be disassembled and turned back into several smaller community banks which understand the customers needs and give them more attention, so people will not have to go through a nightmare, as they go now with JP Morgan Chase bank.

Smaller bank’s different departments are able to communicate better with each other than giant banks like Chase, Bank of America or Citigroup. There one department doesn’ know what other department does. People will not have to send several times important documets only to get answer that the bank lost them or even better, “maybe was shredded.”

In a small community bank your call will be answered by a well-trained bank employee located here, in the U.S., but not by operators hired somewhere in India or Philippines who have no idea about banking business, but can, at least, patiently read to you nonsense printed on a list of paper– the bank’s instructions to ask your name, address, SSN and the number of your loan. Very often you get a feeling that they want to get rid of you A.S.A.P. by suddenly disappearing from the line. So sad, and such disrespect to customers who are forced to give their SSN and more to someone across the ocean, in another country just to be left with UNANSWERED QUESTIONS!

Will you call such bank back to waste your time? Of course, you will not call again because you are in desperation: a) you wasted your precious time; b)you did not get any answer you had been looking for; c) you got upset that nothing is resolvable with this bank. And what is next? You are giving up, aren’t you? That is exactly what Chase bank and other big banks want you to feel… Too bad! This has to be radically changed.

Submitted by Argo.

]]>