Short sales may be targeted for fraud
• A house in Kings Beach, Calif., was purchased near the height of the boom in 2005 for $530,000. On Oct. 28, 2009, it was sold for $247,500 to an investment group in a short sale — an arrangement in which the lender allows the delinquent owner to avoid foreclosure by selling to a third party at a price lower than the loan balance.

Ask The Builder
You do want to succeed at this task for any number of reasons. First and foremost is the safety of anyone who might walk under the window. You sure don’t want a flower box to detach from a wall and fall on someone’s head. It’s happened before and surely will happen again.

O.C. Real Estate News
Homeowners and the real estate agents who want to sell their homes usually spend a fair amount of time sprucing it up. If the property is a single family residence, there is landscaping to do. Other outside improvements may include patching and painting.

BUILDER
Typically, the top of the window box, once installed, is a inch or so below the window sill or the outer frame of the window. It’s easy to do the math to see where the bottom of the house piece needs to be in order for the box to be at the right height.

Number of ’underwater’ homes declines
“We are treading water,” Khater said. The data showed that about 10.9 million homes with a mortgage, or 22.7% of such properties, were in an upside-down position at the end of the first quarter. That was a slight decline from 11.1 million, or 23.1%, in the fourth quarter.

Fixed mortgage rates fall for seventh straight week
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, a benchmark for home lending rates, dropped below 3% on Wednesday for the first time since early December as investors sought safety in bonds backed by Uncle Sam. And mortgage rates also fell to levels not seen since then, according to the widely watched Freddie Mac survey of lender offering rates.