Michael Olenick: Is Shadow Housing Inventory Vastly Larger Than Widely Believed?

By Michael Olenick, founder and CEO of Legalprise, and creator of FindtheFraud, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha). You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick

The turn of the year is the time to make predictions and projections. I’m optimistic that the tide will finally turn for the American middle-class, suffering silently in a one-sided economic war. I don’t think this will be because of altruism, or even justice, but rather simple pragmatism. Specifically, I believe that parasitic financial institutions have pushed the boundaries so far that they’ve put their host, the middle-class itself, at risk. One new bit of information suggests the housing front is in more perilous shape than most pundits believe.

One challenge when performing any type of analysis is that information is scattered in many different places, and even when disseminated by the government its accuracy is oftentimes questionable. We’ve already seen existing home sales for recent years revised downward from their already dismal position, with barely a yawn from the public and no accountability whatsoever from government regulators who used that information when more reliable sources existed.

I don’t understand why accurate housing data, which is supposed to be open to the public, is so hard to come by. The housing crisis arguably rises to the level of a national emergency, one we can see and fee every day as it ripples through the economy. Despite that, government-owned Fannie Mae still keeps loan-level data away from the public, it’s extremely difficult to get data from Freddie Mac, and MERS’ database remains a black hole.

There is one piece of data only recently released — and, as far as I can tell, has gone unnoticed — that, if true, suggests the housing market is in such dire straits we’ve finally reached a critical mass where only radical out-of-the-box solutions will work. If this information, which comes of a highly suspect albeit well connected insider, is accurate, then extend and pretend has finally reached its natural end.

Check out the rest here…

~

4closureFraud.org