Reports

March 27, 2020

Hill TV Interview: The Hidden Costs of Home Building

While Fannie Mae forecast single-family housing starts to rise to 975,000 in 2020, the highest level since 2007 and a 10% gain over 2019, the hidden costs of home building could threaten this growth. In this video, Frank Nothaft, the Executive Chief Economist at CoreLogic, and Andy Winkler, the A...

February 6, 2019

Explaining to Homeowners Reconstruction Costs Versus Other Valuations

Because a home is most often a complete loss when it comes to wildfires, the destruction caused by these catastrophic events has been a personal and financial tragedy for many families. These and other natural hazards have forced Insurance Carriers to reevaluate the need for more accurate insuran...

September 21, 2017

The How, What and When of Mortgage Fraud Discovery: 6 Touchpoints O...

Part II of III in a series Based on my discussions with industry participants over the years, it’s safe to say most people believe that discovering fraud is mainly an origination workflow event. However, the truth is fraud can be discovered at a number of events in the life of a loan. Here’s a qu...

September 20, 2017

Five Reasons Why Mortgage Fraud is Hard to Detect

Part I of III in a series “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain. Unlike most common forms of financial fraud, mortgage fraud takes a long time to pre...

May 31, 2017

A Report Card for Commercial Building Construction

Why the Class of Construction is Significant If you think back to when you were in school, many of you would remember receiving a report card based on your intelligence, performance, participation, attitude and other measurable factors, which would help evaluate how you were doing as a whole, and...

April 5, 2017

The More, The Merrier

Homebuilders Are Building Larger Homes on Smaller Lots The housing market is hot this spring with many families trying to buy their dream home or first home before interest rates become too high, and yet housing inventory is still low. The inventory has been low for the past few years, and is one...

March 14, 2017

Foreclosure Report Highlights: 10-Year Retrospect of the US Residen...

National Foreclosure Rate Down to Less Than 1 Percent From a High of 3.6 Percent This year marks a decade since the start of the housing crisis.[1] Since mid-2007 more than 7.5 million homes have been foreclosed on according to a 10-year retrospect of the U.S. residential foreclosure crisis, “Uni...

September 20, 2016

Land Values Drive Home Price Volatility

When homeowners think about the value of their properties they usually focus on the physical attributes of their houses and pay less attention to the land parcels on which their houses sit. This makes sense since most people spend more time inside their houses than in their backyards. But in many...

August 29, 2016

How Big Is My House?

Let’s ask a professional… Many aspects of building appraisal or valuation require personal judgment, but one aspect that should not be in this category is the measurements of a house. The actual size of a building is either determined from accurate building plans or by the actual measuremen...

July 13, 2016

Determining Reconstruction Costs

Home features that have the greatest impact on reconstruction cost Reconstruction cost, not market value or assessed value, is used by insurers to determine homeowner coverage limits and is an important factor in determining a policy’s premium. Because of the many variables involved, the estimati...