Realtors for Ventura | Oxnard | Camarillo

The Atlantis space shuttle took off this morning without a hitch – and I missed it. The last of all our space shuttles. I was so bummed I told Leslie I’m not going to work today. Why did I miss it? Frankly, I thought weather was going to scrub the mission today.

I’ve made 3 dedicated trips to Florida just to see a shuttle launch – and been deprived each time. The last trip was last November and after sitting around a week, the shuttle still was “broken”.

Leslie’s been with me the last 3 trips and we’ve done the “touristy” thing in Florida waiting out the shuttle delays, spending a week each time. But this time I was going solo, and at the last minute, just to make sure things looked good.

Wednesday, the weather forecast looked poor for a Friday launch (70% no-go). Yesterday afternoon had severe lightning strikes and heavy rain, and NASA could only launch this weekend or be delayed until the middle of July, so I held off.  I thought if Sunday’s forecast looked okay, I’d leave today for Florida. But this morning I got up early and it appeared I’d made the wrong call – things were looking okay for a launch, and launch they did! I’ve been bummed out all day…

This was the title of a major Wall Street Journal article this week.

The sub-title was “Three essential clues may signal if better times are ahead”.

I was curious – what were the clues? From a twist on the old “location, location, location”, the WSJ asked: What are the three most important things to consider when buying a house? Answer: Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. Read the rest of this article »

Many of you know I’m (slowly) building a replica of an old Tiger Moth bi-plane. I’ve got the 4 wings pretty much done, but I was sitting in the hangar one day trying to visualize how I would get the nuts onto the aileron brackets once I had the wing and aileron covered in fabric.

You can see tolerances are pretty tight (for a wood airplane) and there’s no easy way to get a wrench into that space above the spar where the bracket sits. The bolts will go UP through the spar and bracket.

I’m in a hangar with 4 other guys building airplanes and we looked and studied, looked and studied some more, but the ultimate solution was I had to start over and make new brackets. Why? Here’s the reason and pictures of how I built new brackets.

Read the rest of this article »

Yesterday the US Treasury stated Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase were not fulfilling the goals of the Making Home Affordable program (using taxpayer TARP money) and as needing “substantial improvement” in handling the flood of requests for loan modifications. Because of these shortcomings, the US Treasury is withholding financial incentive payments that were designed to encourage the large banks to aggressively tackle underwater loans through loan mods or HAFA short sales.

Well duh – any Realtor working in the trenches can share their horror stories about interminable delays, lost paperwork and multiple submissions of paperwork that has plagued the real estate business because of these issues! Despite all the talk bank leaders tell Congress that they’re “doing everything possible” to handle the tsunami of short sales and loan mods, it’s obvious they’re not doing enough to staff up their resources to handle these issues.

In April the number of Notice of Defaults (NODs) was on par (low 400s) with the number of Notice of Trustee Sales (NTSs) – i.e., properties that are going to sale. For May, there was little change in the number of NODs but the number of NTSs jumped by 127 to the mid 500s. The number of Trustee Deeds (REOs) is creeping up. See the details on this chart.

Data is from Foreclosure List Service with permission.