TK Maxx admits to having credit card details for 45 million of its customers stolen between 2002 - 2005. The scam was first spotted last December, but the company only made the announcement yesterday.
More from The Times
If this is a "shade of the new blue chip", then we're all in deep shit!
[From WSJ via Seeking Alpha]
Analysts are speculating that New Century Financial, the beleaguered subprime mortgage lender, will shortly file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Their evidence is the disclosure that Barclays and Morgan Stanley, two of New Century's main lenders, are repossessing loans that had been used to secure financing. New Century will hand over the loans it made with Barclays credit lines; in exchange, it will be forgiven the obligation to buy back $900 million of those loans. Morgan Stanley will auction off $2.48 billion of New Century subprime mortgages that constitute the collateral behind New Century's $2.5 billion credit line from the investment bank. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Christopher Brendler: Both banks "felt so uncomfortable with" New Century's ability to repay them that "they decided to just take the loans and auction them off themselves...I'm surprised that New Century hasn't filed for bankruptcy already." All New Century's lenders are pulling their financing, and it has received default notices from Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, among others. If all its lenders demand mortgage repurchases simultaneously, New Century could owe $8.4 billion, an impossible sum that would force the company's liquidation.
Unfortunately, I don't have an online subscription, but the teaser reads quite lovely ...
JUNE is National Homeownership Month in America. National Foreclosure Month would be more apt. Some corners of the mortgage market—notably subprime loans aimed at those with poor credit records—have a nasty case of dry rot.…
last week, in his annual budget speech, UK Chancellor and soon to be Prime Minister Gordon Brown, announced to the nation that from October 1st 2007 all new zero-carbon homes costing up to £500,000 will pay no stamp duty and zero-carbon homes costing in excess of £500,000 would receive a £15,000 stamp duty tax reduction.
Unsurprisingly, Browns announcement was greeted with heavy skepticism and nobody I spoke with seemed to had ever seen or even heard of a zero-carbon house; but alas, we can reveal that - yes - there is indeed such a thing as a zero carbon house!
Spotted this weekend at the Birmingham Property Show, the "Eco Pod" boasts that it can "reduce energy requirements and costs by up to 90%, producing virtually no CO2 emissions"
But wait ... there's more ...
According to the website, the Eco Pod does not need planning permission "in the majority of cases" , yup, you heard right; all you need is "a flat firm (hard standing or concrete) level surface ... and we will do the rest."
And at prices starting at a meager £45,000 (waay under stamp duty), the EcoPod may be the answer to a lot of problems, or may indeed be the creation of a whole new set of problems, depending on who you speak to ... who knows, maybe the guy who invented it will build a £500,000 model, so we can at least get some satisfaction we're beating the government, whoopee, cant wait for that to happen !
Trump Organization announced this afternoon that they had successfully secured development funding for "Trump Toronto" the Organization's first official international project at the corner of Bay and Adelaide in downtown Tdot.
Trump secured $310 million from Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich, Austria's largest banking group; backed by their development partners Talon International Development with construction expected to begin this summer:
“With over $250-million in pre-construction sales from buyers world-wide, Trump Toronto is truly an international success story, I am very pleased that we were able to leverage our international business interests to secure construction financing with an exceptional European financial institution like RZB;” Talon Chairman Alex Shnaider was quoted as saying.
Bank of England minutes released this morning showed one policy maker voted for a rate cut this month and none wanted a hike. "That's quite surprising. As you know the general feeling has been that there is one more hike left in the pipeline yet," said Richard Hunter, head of UK equities at Hargreaves Lansdown
[Reuters]
Learn how to turn $1,000 into $66 million from Barbara Corcoran, the queen of New York City real estate. In this 5 minute interview, Barbara explains her companies early internet adoption (way back in 1990) and that the "power" has "moved to the consumer", which is actually not so bad for business, because - according to Corcoran, the more information the consumer has, the more business that's done ...
update ...
here's part 2 and part 3
All the talk on Wall Street and in the financial world this week has been centered around subprime mortgages and its effect on stock markets in particular and the overall economy in general. With the spectacular collapse of a few US based subprime lenders, many are proclaiming the end to end all ends. But is this really so?
Closing Specialist Diane Cipa in her blog offers some insider insight into the world of the subprime lender:
I believe subprime mortgage lenders and investment bankers factored into their risk analysis ridiculous lending standards and even probably accounted for a certain amount of borrower fraud. Anyone who makes loans without documentation and without borrower equity does so with open eyes. The yield offset the risk, so la-de-da.Food for thought and as Buffett told us last week: be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy. I'm about to get my greed on
The flaw in their analysis, the missing layer of risk to which lenders themselves were oblivious was fraud perpetrated by lending personnel, both inside employees and mortgage brokers. That's the nasty secret blatantly obvious to me and I have to think many honest lending and title professionals. Maybe not. Maybe I just thought it had to be obvious because of my underwriting background.
I have wondered for years why lender quality control departments weren't picking up the garbage and doing away with it.
Properazzi.com can boast to be the first official 2.0 pan-European property search engine with a listing database of about 1.3 million properties from damn near every country in Europe, both sales and rentals. Properazzi also has the ability to search for properties beyond Europe, I found search results for Turkey (officially/unofficially Europe), and was able to perform searches in Israel and Cairo, but unfortunately wasn't able to find any listings there (yet). I'm not sure if this is by design, or if the developers intend to expand the database to include Africa and the Middle East. Given Dubai's volcanic property market and growing markets in Qatar, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, it may not be such a bad idea.
But for the moment, Properazzi comes with the standard Google Map API, and uniquely offers users the ability to price listings in 90 different currencies and to perform searches in 30 different languages. It's fairly easy to navigate the map, although I did expereince some difficulty in zooming in on specific local neighborhoods in London such as Clapham Common, or Sofia in Bulgaria. Nevertheless, the search box did a good job producing results for these locations and the results page offers users a feedback feature which invites suggestions to new property websites, which is quite thoughtful.
Overall, Properazzi.com offers an enjoyable and rather satisfying search experience. The site has also been shortlisted for the Red Herring 100 Awards, a celebration of the 100 most innovative companies in Europe, which will be held later this month in Cannes.
According to this documentary it is, with scientists freely admitting to having a "vested interest in creating panic". nice try Al Gore
Foxtons have been doing some aggressive (and technically impressive) guerrilla marketing lately. However I wonder about their overall strategy, and a lot seems to be timed with their well publicized IPO intentions or in an effort to score a private equity buyout.
Looking at the Foxtons video advert, reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend recently who reminded me that you hardly ever see anybody over 30 working at Foxtons; which is great for sex appeal, but not so good when trying to sell property in London. In essence, Foxtons appear to be trying to appeal to a younger, more tech savvy demographic, but the problem is that most young tech savvy people in London can't afford or don't buy property in London. And the few that can and do, well why would they use Foxtons, given their less than stellar reputation. 
I'm going to assume that the company makes the bulk of their revenue from lettings. I'm basing this on the fact that they're so obviously appealing to young people, and young London may not buy, but they sure do rent.
This poses another problem since a lot of landlords - especially those that have significant portfolios - are dubious about doing business with the big F(u), a company that has been known to and caught on camera forging landlords signatures. Nevertheless, the company has been making strides to clean up their act, and joining the Ombudsman Scheme for Estate Agents was definitely a big step, although they're not yet members of the more influential and credit worthy National Association of Estate Agents.
From the people who brought you the very useful TheyWorkForYou.com (check out the Nestoria implementation), mySociety launched the impressive Neighbourhood Fix-It earlier this week.
How it works
Basically Neighbourhood Fix-It uses maps supplied by Ordinance Survey enabling people to report, view, and discuss local problems in their neighbourhood and also to report problems to their local council by simply locating them on the map. The service is post-code specific, free to use and currently available only in the UK. As a registered charity, mySociety is accepting donations, however Neighbourhood Fix-It was developed via a grant from the Department for Constitutional Affairs Innovations Fund.
U.S. private equity firm Apollo said Countrywide PLC, Britain's largest estate agency had agreed its 1 billion pound takeover offer. The news came late Friday, hours after Countrywide subsidiary Rightmove announced profits had doubled in a year and reported 85% revenue growth.
Crucially:
"A number of key shareholders, including ones who voted against the previous offer from 3i, have indicated their support for Apollo's offer for Countrywide," Christopher Sporborg, Countrywide Chairman is quoted as saying.
Expect some heat in regards to this deal as more and more people express skepticism about private equity firms and what they're really about. The National Car Parks sale is being watched by London's business and political community in light of union opposition to equity group 3i's proposed sale to an Australian investment bank, after just 18 months of ownership. Ironically it was 3i who backed a takeover bid for Countrywide late last year, which failed spectacularly this past January.
Rightmove plc, the self proclaimed "number one property website," today announces results for the year ended 31 December 2006, its first full year results following flotation on 15 March 2006
Highlights:
* 85% revenue growth from £18.2m to £33.6m
* Pre-tax profits increase 101% from £8.8m to £17.7m
* Website usage up more than 80% over 2005 and consistently top 10 (Hitwise)
* Overall advertiser membership increased 42% from 11,483 to 16,321
* Pipeline of new advertising products and services on track for Q1 2007
delivery
* Customer members (estate agents) up 42% to 16,321 (2005: 11,483)
* 93% Customer retention rate for the third year in succession
* Announces new interactive map service Aboutmyplace
* continued benefit from commercial agreement between Rightmove and Countrywide including the agreement to list all Countrywide properties until at least March 2009.
[complete report]
