Fannie Mae announced Thursday that it will relax its rules for buyers of certain condominium properties in Florida, one of the markets hardest hit by the housing downturn. The government-backed mortgage giant said it will give "special approval" designations to certain condominium projects in the state that may not currently meet Fannie Mae's mortgage eligibility criteria, automatically giving lenders the green light to originate and deliver mortgage loans to the GSE that are secured by the condo units. A federal judge in Maryland has granted Wells Fargo's motion to dismiss in a suit brought by the city of Baltimore alleging Wells Fargo's lending practices led to hundreds of foreclosures and cost the city millions of dollars in taxes. The judge said using the city's own figures, Wells Fargo is responsible for only a negligible portion of its vacant housing stock. Last week, the city of Memphis filed the same type of lawsuit against Wells, but the bank says, there too, the economic problems of the city cannot be attributed to a single lender. Lake Forest, California-based Real Estate Systems (RES.NET) has announced the launch of its Accelerated Management Platform (AMP). Until now, real estate agents were forced to manage their properties through separate processes and systems. RES.NET says it has changed that conventional silo approach with AMP. Although 2009 started out with record-setting home price declines, residential property values have rebounded substantially to close out the year posting a modest annual decline of 1.3 percent. Clear Capital says it's the smallest since the housing crisis set in three years ago. Several markets' stats stand out in the company's report, most notably the 1.1 percent quarterly price gain in Las Vegas - the first since 2007 for the city, whose bursting bubble echoed louder than probably any other place in the country. | | |
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