In the past couple of weeks I’ve experienced three, seemingly unrelated events that may actually be related. I’m not yet sure what , if anything these may signal but perhaps time will tell. The first was my reading a couple of articles indicating that Federal Regulators are getting tougher on Banks and scrutinizing more closely their assets, securities, practices, loans, etc. Secondly, I was working on two transactions whereby M&I Bank was negotiating discounts on non-performing ,land secured, loans to induce the sale of these assets to individual buyers. Abruptly, the negotiations were put on hold because, we were told , the FDIC was at their offices for an extended period of time and they would be focusing on internal issues for perhaps the next 45-90 days. Finally, I’ve noticed a distinct change in attitude about selling REO Assets from one of my client Banks. They have recently become more motivated, and thus aggressive, about pricing and selling their vacant land properties. A year ago they took the position that they were satisfied, if need be, to ride out the market and wait until their Tucson Land regained a good deal of it’s value before selling it. That seems not to be the case anymore.

Are banks pushing harder to get back to normalcy by moving out REO’S?  Are the Feds more concerned than we know about the amount of bad loans out there?  Do we have a lot more or a lot fewer land foreclosures than last year,  still in the pipeline? The answers to these and so many other related questions are not clear to me. But it sure is an interesting time in Real Estate.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 7:03 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.