The Fed, Barry Habib, Jaime Dimon and more

KPanchuck reports in HousingWire:

Home Depot CEO Frank Blake thinks the housing market recovery will take at least two years due to "lingering issues in the mortgage credit market and a large inventory of distressed properties".
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It looks like three top Fed officials are ready to raise interest rates.  This is suppose to allow more people to go back to work.  We will see.
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The IMF is saying that a zone wide depression in Europe is coming unless Germany leaves the union and the other countries are allowed to compete with their own currencies.  All that talk about austerity and stimulus hasn't worked.  This will affect us here in the US including the real estate market.
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Leon Pannetta is saying we are ripe for a cyber attack that would wipe out all information in the computers it attacks.  In other words, have your files on seperate drive and on paper to be able to reconstruct your business if the worst happens.
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JP Morgan Chase CEO Jaime Dimon says mortgage servicing costs will remain elevated until 2014 then will decline significantly.  He says it is a rough prediction, but reducing costs will be wonderful seeing that we will have a 3% tax on real estate sales starting in January 2013.
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The housing recovery is not the same as the mortgage recovery.  Because of the refi's, there will be fewer repeat buyers.  The refi mortgage will keep people in their homes longer.
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For your buyers who want a home, but have bad credit, they can go to a mortgage loan officer to work on a credit restoration plan or to the National Foundation for Credit Counseling website, nfcc.org, to set up an appointment for help.  It is free or very low cost according to Clark Howard.
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Barry Habib recommends that we real estate agents list properties in the round figures since buyers want to see properties in round figures such as $250- $300 or $100-$275- no 999 figures.  Round figures will show up on more searches than, say $249,900.  $250,000 will show up on $200-$250,000 searches as well as $250,000-$300,000.  More searches, more sales.
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Elizebeth Duke, a Federal Reserve board member, says there are 4 million vacant homes not even on the market.  This doesn't include the vacation homes or homes in between being moved into after sales.  Then there is the 1.4 million shadow inventory homes which are at least 3 months behind in mortgage payments.  I still haven't heard what the lenders actually plan to do about all this.