SEATTLE, July 18 - Zillow.com today announced the formation of a Broker Advisory Board to provide counsel on existing Zillow services for the real estate industry, and evaluate ideas for future products and services. Zillow® has quickly grown its number of real estate industry partners since the launch of its listings feed program in November 2007, with nearly 3 million for-sale listings today, and hundreds of prominent listings partners. More than five million unique users visit Zillow every month, with 90 percent owning a home, and two-thirds buying or selling now, or in the next one to two years.

The members of Zillow’s Broker Advisory Board are 10 influential leaders in the real estate industry who are actively involved in running their respective companies: Steve Baird, President/CEO of Baird & Warner; Ken Baris, President of Jordan Baris; Bob Blount, CEO of RE/MAX Allegiance; Sherry Chris, President and CEO of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, LLC; Craig Cuyar, SVP & Chief Information Officer for the Realogy Franchise Group; Dan Elsea, President of Real Estate One; Pat Lashinsky, CEO and President of ZipRealty; Mike Montsko, President of Weichert Lead Network; Harley Rouda, Jr., CEO of Real Living; and Mark Woodroof, Managing Partner for Prudential Gary Greene.

“In selecting our Broker Advisory Board, we wanted a range of different types of companies represented — both franchise and independent, large and small, national and regional,” said Jorrit Van der Meulen, Zillow’s vice president of partner relations. “We asked people whom we know to be leaders in the industry, and we believe this Board will help us in planning and building our products and services in a way that serves the real estate community to our full potential.”

Trulia, the real estate search startup backed by high-profile venture firms Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, has raised $15 million in additional funding, bringing its total financing to $33 million.To be honest, a lot of real estate sites look pretty similar to me, and Trulia lacks a big attention-getting feature like Zillow, which will estimate the value of your home. But the funding should help Trulia stay competitive with the more heavily-financed Zillow, which has raised a total of $87 million.

Chief executive Peter Flint says the San Francisco-based company wasn’t in danger of running out of cash anytime soon, but taking on the additional financing gives Trulia some insurance in case the economic situation stays bad or gets even worse.

Interestingly, Flint says Trulia is still growing despite the general economic malaise, and the poor real estate market in particular. The company says it gets around 5 million unique monthly visitors. A spokesperson sent me comScore’s top 10 real estate sites for April, which shows it coming in at number seven — since the list is dominated by offerings from big companies like Yahoo Real Estate and MSN Real Estate, that’s quite good for a startup.

Compete also shows a pattern of healthy growth, albeit one that still leaves Trulia a little behind Zillow.

Trulia benefits from the general trend in which homebuyers are using the Web more and more in their real estate search, and advertising follows suit, Flint says. In the current climate, it makes sense that advertisers, have to be smart about where they spend their money.

By Roddy Boyd

NEW YORK (Fortune) — The two companies underpinning much of the global capital markets debt and derivative trading are in a world of pain, and various media outlets reported that the government officials were considering several options for intervention.

So what would government relief look like, and is it really necessary?

The current thinking, according to senior mortgage executives who describe themselves in frequent contact with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, centers around the U.S. Treasury Department’s offering some form of a guarantee to $1.5 trillion of their debt. Perhaps more important, such a guarantee would also extend to the $2.3 trillion worth of derivatives that both companies are party to in some fashion.

Another idea making the round of trading desks and hedge funds Friday includes a more “moderate” direct-investment from the Treasury of up to $10 billion for each company, perhaps in the form of buying triple-A debt securities directly from their portfolios.

The problems with this are obvious: Putting more mortgage credit risk on the taxpayer’s back is likely to be politically unpopular in the short term and would only immediately benefit the company’s shareholders.

The perception of shareholder benefit from government intervention is something that policy makers were greatly concerned about during the Bear Stearns crisis in March. As such, any plan to help Fannie or Freddie, real or prospective, is almost certain to wipe out the value of their common stock

As of late Friday, a huge government intervention appeared unlikely - at least in the immediate future. Freddie (FRE, Fortune 500) and Fannie (FNM, Fortune 500) both bounced back after reassuring words from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Senate housing committee chairman Christopher Dodd.

Dodd made a point of saying that the companies were sufficiently capitalized. And he’s onto something. Their combined equity capital bases are $75 billion to $80 billion.

A worst case scenario for credit losses is between $35 billion and $40 billion over the next 12 months, according to a report by Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group, an investor in mortgage-related assets. So concerns of immediate collapse seem overwrought.

In addition, investors are hoping Fannie and Freddie’s funding needs for the immediate future could be put to rest if Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke allows both companies to borrow directly from the so-called discount window, like commercial banks do. That would mean they wouldn’t need to go to the public debt markets to raise money to keep operating.

However, Federal Reserve spokeswoman Michelle Smith told CNN late Friday that no discussions with Fannie or Freddie about access to the discount window have taken place.

Smith added that “the Fed is following the situation with Fannie and Freddie closely” and that she was “not prepared to discuss the range of options and alternatives” available to the Fed regarding Fannie and Freddie.

And besides, both GSE’s continue to enjoy widespread support from the debt market, where they are large-scale issuers of short-term debt that isn’t subject to revocation, like repurchase agreements. Veteran mortgage analysts told Fortune that Fannie and Freddie have their financing needs in place through the end of next year. In fact, save for the U.S. government, the GSE’s likely pay the lowest borrowing costs in the world on their debt.

As shareholder value is wiped out by billions daily, the GSE’s debt continues to appreciate in value, according to prices from mid-afternoon Friday trading.

Where Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have gotten into real trouble before is when their funding costs sharply outstripped their interest income, as happened in the early 1980s when the Paul Volker-era Federal Reserve ramped up interest rates to choke off inflation. Though interest rate increases might be in the offing again, few forecasters see dramatic hikes in the offing.

Buying a foreclosure home can provide great opportunities for people who want to buy a house at a great price. One company helps would-be homebuyers navigate the pitfalls of buying a bank owned home or other house that has been affected by foreclosure.

San Francisco, CA July 3, 2008 — Foreclosures and the American real estate market’s price declines have continued to dominate news headlines across the country for well over a year, but one company is bucking the bad news trend. Sacramento, CA-based The Home Buying Center.com (www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com) has been helping connect home sellers who want to sell a house quickly with investors for years, and they have expanded their service offering last year to help consumers find and buy foreclosure homes.

“For the first time homebuyer who waited until now to buy a home the deals are everywhere,” said company president, Patrick McGilvray, J.D., CFP®. “It’s important that prospective buyers understand that buying a foreclosure house can be a great opportunity to buy a house at a cheap price, and they must be aware of some of the possible pitfalls.”

The pitfalls McGilvray mentioned can include buying houses in an ‘as-is’ condition with hidden problems that may not have been visible during a casual inspection such as dry rot or problems with a cracked foundation. Buyers, he cautioned, must do significant homework before signing on the dotted line. Additionally, he said that it is crucial for would-be home buyers to be pre-qualified for a mortgage loan.

“That’s why working with a team like ours can be a real advantage,” McGilvray said. “We provide the consumer access to the nation’s largest network of foreclosure and pre-foreclosure homes via thousands of real estate investors and real estate agents who specialize in bank owned homes. We also have the resources needed to help hopeful house buyers get qualified for a mortgage.”

The company was originally founded as a website devoted to connecting people who wanted to sell a house quickly at a discount to a real estate investor, but, because of requests from customers, they started offering a foreclosure location service for buyers in 2007. McGilvray said that their company has been growing rapidly since their inception and that they had recently taken some venture capital money in exchange for equity from an angel investor.

Despite the downturn in America’s housing market, which McGilvray thinks could still take years to fully recover from, he is optimistic about real estate services and the internet’s ability to connect consumers with exactly what they are looking for quickly and easily. When asked where he thought should consumers turn to first to help them find answers to their real estate questions, he answered with a smile, “Other than The Home Buying Center.com? Why Google, of course.”

Next month, Michelle Augustine plans to walk away from her four-bedroom house in a Sacramento, Calif., subdivision and let the property fall into foreclosure. But before doing so, she hopes to lock in the purchase of another home nearby.

“I can find the same exact house as what I live in right now for half the price,” says Ms. Augustine, 44 years old, who runs a child-care service out of her home. She says she soon will be unable to afford her monthly payments, which will jump to $4,000 from $3,300 in August, and she doesn’t want to continue to own a home that is now worth $200,000 less than what she paid for it two years ago.

In markets hit hardest by falling home prices and rising foreclosures, lenders and brokers are discovering a new phenomenon: the “buy and bail,” in which borrowers with good credit buy a new home — often at a much lower price — then bail out of the “upside down” mortgage on their first home.

Homeowners are able to pull off this gambit — which some lenders and real-estate agents call mortgage fraud — by taking advantage of mortgage-lending practices that allow them to buy a new primary residence before their existing residence has been sold. And with the lending industry in disarray as it tries to restructure millions of mortgages, some boast they are able to pull off the strategy with ease.

In some cases, homeowners are coached through the buy-and-bail process by real-estate agents and brokers who see nothing wrong with it. Some blame the phenomenon in part on lenders’ unwillingness to cut deals or restructure loans made when home prices were inflated. “It’s just a business decision,” says Linda Caoili, a Sacramento real-estate agent who is working with Ms. Augustine and others who are considering walking away from their mortgages. “If you’re upside-down $250,000, why would you keep it? It just doesn’t make sense.”

To be sure, walking away from a mortgage, even if legal, has plenty of drawbacks: Borrowers lose the ability to take out unsecured loans, since foreclosures can stay on a credit report for seven years. In some states, lenders can sue for assets, including a new house. Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage underwriter, recently revised the amount of time borrowers with a foreclosure must wait to receive a home loan to five years from four. Proposed Fannie Mae guidelines, which could take effect later this month, also would require those borrowers to make a 10% down payment and meet a minimum credit score after the five-year period.

While buy-and-bail is on the rise, the practice doesn’t appear to be widespread. Credit is much tighter now than it was during the real-estate boom, and most families with an upside-down mortgage likely will hold on to their homes and hope the market improves in the future — even though many of them could lose their properties.

Still, with home prices falling rapidly in some parts of the country, a growing number of frustrated consumers are willing to take the risk — especially in so-called nondeficiency states such as California and Arizona, where it is more difficult for a lender to sue consumers who walk away from their mortgages. Borrowers who bought or refinanced their home with a personal line of credit, however, instead of a home-purchase loan — a common practice during the housing boom — could be sued by a lender in those states. Borrowers also could be on the hook if lenders can show that homeowners committed fraud by misrepresenting themselves on their loan application.

Yet even in cases in which a lender could attach a lien on the new home, some homeowners simply assume that lenders are too swamped. “So many people are foreclosing, is it cost effective for lenders to go after all of these people?” says Steve Hawks, a Las Vegas real-estate agent who handles lender-owned properties.

That works in the favor of borrowers such as Blair Morrow. Last year, he rented out his Sacramento home when he moved to Houston for a new job, but he lost those renters in February. He quickly arranged to buy a new home in Houston, fearing that his old residence would be foreclosed and he would take a big hit on his credit.

“I had 30 days to make a decision: Live in a rental house the rest of my life or buy a house and walk away from the one in California,” says Mr. Morrow, 56, who works at a car dealership. He wrestled with the decision for a while, but justified it once Countrywide Financial Corp., the lender for his first home, approved the new home loan. “Countrywide didn’t say peep,” he says. Countrywide didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Ms. Augustine, the Sacramento day-care provider, became a first-time homeowner in November 2006 by taking out two loans with nothing down to cover the $426,000 home purchase. With her home valued at about $220,000 now, she is actively looking in nearby communities for another one to buy before the bank forecloses on her current home.

The mortgage industry is starting to wise up to the practice and is scrambling to fight back. Buy-and-bail is “certainly fraudulent and unfortunately on an uptick,” says Gwen Muse-Evans, vice president for credit policy and controls at Fannie Mae. Although she doesn’t have data to quantify the size and scope of the trend, Ms. Muse-Evans says overwhelming anecdotal reports have prompted the agency to draft tougher regulations aimed at closing one big loophole that allows underwater homeowners to qualify for new home loans.

That loophole currently works like this: Homeowners provide a rental agreement showing that they will rent out their first home, and underwriters allow rental income to cover as much as 75% of the mortgage payments on the first home when determining whether the borrower can make payments on two homes. This allows homeowners to secure a second mortgage that they might not otherwise afford.

Under revised Fannie Mae guidelines, which could take effect next week, loan applicants who claim they will rent out their first home will have to produce supporting evidence, including an executed lease agreement. Borrowers also will have to prove that they can pay the mortgage, property taxes and insurance for both residences. The guidelines will make an exception only for borrowers who have at least 30% equity in their current home.

Of course, many individuals still can qualify for that second loan because of a strong credit and cash position. If they “have the intention of fraud, then at the end of the day there’s really little you can do to totally prevent that,” says Ms. Muse-Evans.

Some private lenders aren’t waiting for Fannie’s lead. In April, underwriters handling bank-owned properties at IndyMac Bancorp Inc. told brokers they would require borrowers purchasing new homes while retaining their existing home as a rental to prove that they could make full payments on both homes to qualify for a loan. A memo sent to a Southern California broker said the policy change was prompted by “losses from individuals walking away from properties after the acquisition of a new home.”

An IndyMac spokesman said the bank hadn’t changed its policies and had always “underwritten loans with an eye towards insuring that our borrowers could readily rent out their current property and/or reasonably support both payments.”

Realtors say the new guidelines could put further pressure on sales, but Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, says the impact of such guidelines on sales would be marginal. He calls Fannie Mae’s response appropriate because any artificial increase in home sales hurts the average consumer.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hawks, the Las Vegas broker, says he receives one to two dozen inquiries every week from individuals inquiring about a buy-and-bail. “People are starting to ask how much their good credit is worth,” particularly when their home is underwater by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The tactic doesn’t appeal to people such as John Ristuccia, a 48-year-old Buckeye, Ariz., paper-company sales director whose job was moved to Houston in August. He is trying to complete a “short sale” for $425,000 on his five-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot home, which was appraised for $800,000 last year. In a short sale, a lender allows the sale of property for less than the amount due on the outstanding loan and often forgives the remaining debt.

Even though he might be able to qualify for a second home loan, Mr. Ristuccia says he wouldn’t consider sticking his bank with his suburban Phoenix property. “Just personally I’ve got a problem with that,” he says. “I really can’t put it in terms other than it feels wrong.”

SACRAMENTO, CA – The Federal Housing Administration (http://www.FHA.gov) believes that it will lose $4.6 billion as a result of mortgage defaults by American homeowners.  The news was announced this week by Brian D. Montgomery, the commissioner of the FHA.

Leading the groups of defaulting mortgage borrowers are first-time homebuyers, minorities, and lower income homeowners.  One of the common threads amongst all three groups is the prevalence in which they were steered into risky adjustable rate mortgage loans by mortgage brokers and lenders.

The FHA will be tapping into its $21 billion capital reserve to cover the losses.  Montgomery said that the FHA would need to try to end seller financing down payment programs that comprised 35 percent of loans involving the government program in 2007.  He did add that the FHA is solvent.

Real estate and foreclosure expert Patrick McGilvray, J.D., president of The Home Buying Center.com (http://www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com), commented, “some local real estate markets saw greater than 100% price appreciation in between 2001 and 2005.  For the home buyer who bought at the top of the market a huge number of them will end up defaulting on their mortgage loan.  These people really need to seek help as soon as they realize they will not be able to keep up their payments.”

SAN FRANCISCO – Economists cannot determine the particular impact of foreclosures in the world’s eighth largest economy, California. They reckon it’s either merely a disturbance caused by the subprime issue of the mortgage lending industry or the state is indeed headed for a downturn. Los Angeles-based Beacon Economics’ Christopher Thornberg anticipates California’s economy to worsen as more households cut their spending to adapt with increasing mortgage payments particularly on the subprime and adjustable-rate loans that were availed by borrowers with weak credit.

Furthermore, DataQuick Information Systems’ report shows that 17,408 homes in California are due to foreclose in the second quarter. The foreclosures have spiked to about 800% from a year ago. A portion of California’s 8.4 million residential properties is also pushed by markets that are soaked in subprime loans.

The largest mortgage lender in the U.S., Countrywide Financial Corp. has cut down its 2007 forecast due to an anxiety over delinquencies also coming from borrowers with more stable credits and will no longer be contained within subprime borrowers. On the other hand, president of TheHomeBuyingCenter.com Patrick McGilvray is optimistic towards the market. Sacramento-based firm TheHomeBuyingCenter.com corresponds troubled homeowners with investors and homebuyers. Some experts also contradict Countrywide’s anticipation as they believe the troubles will remain among weak-credited borrowers and their lenders. They also have no worries on potential recession or decline on consumer spending.

Chief economist for the state Department of Finance Howard Roth finds California overcoming the turbulent foreclosures after going through the worse housing market state in early 1990s brought about by gutted aerospace payrolls. More than 500,000 jobs were lost in those years. In June, the state’s unemployment rate was 5.2% far from the almost 10% rate between 1992 and 1993. Roth believes that the housing market in the state will soon recover.

SACRAMENTO, CA – In the first quarter of 2008 home foreclosures in the United States reached a peak and the pain was felt by all types of borrowers, not just those with the now infamous subprime adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs).

While subprime borrowers led the pack in allowing their homes to go to foreclosure many so-called prime and alt-a borrowers were unable to consecutively make payments on their houses as well. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association (www.mbaa.org), .99 percent of home loans in America entered the foreclosure process in the January to March time frame. The number the previous year was .58 percent.

The trade association first began measuring loan delinquency rates in 1979, and this year’s results were the highest on record at 6.35 percent.

On a positive note, the Mortgage Banker’s Association senior researcher, Jay Brinkmann, predicted that most states should see a trailing off of foreclosure activity by years end. But, troubled states like California, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada, which saw record prices spikes in residential real estate values, may see their foreclosure woes persist well into 2009.

For the homeowner who is trying to sell a house in the current market the challenge can be finding a qualified buyer who is pre-qualified for a mortgage loan. Many buyers have reported that they are simply not able to get funding for a house purchase despite having good credit and down payments available.

Real estate and foreclosure expert Patrick McGilvray, J.D., president of Sacaramento, CA-based The Home Buying Center.com (www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com) said, “For people looking to buy a foreclosure house there are opportunities aplenty. It’s important for these buyers, though, to get pre-qualified for a home loan before they go shopping because sellers, especially lenders with a large inventory of bank owned REO houses don’t want to spend time with people who aren’t ready, willing and able to buy.”

SACRAMENTO, CA – The current housing crisis in the United States has resulted in greater difficulties for borrowers who want to borrow money from mortgage lender to buy a home. Gone are the days when homeowners could sell a home fast and buyers could easily get a mortgage loan .On Wednesday at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (see www.sifma.org) conference Jack Malvey of Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. commented, “We’re going through a tough spell with regard to credit…The subprime debacle…will be followed by years of tight credit.”

Malvey blamed excesses in so-called structured finance and collateralized debt obligations, essentially securities created by pooling mortgages together to create bond-type investments, for the crisis. He predicted that the overall market would be healthier after two years or so, but for the country the wait could feel like a long time.

Residential real estate sellers and buyers are likely the ones to feel the brunt of the pain in addition to Wall Street’s financial firms, many of who have seen their stock prices slide during the past year.

One company that helps homeowners and homebuyers buy and sell homes, www.TheHomeBuyingCenter.com, reports that their counseling activities are way up. “We counsel home sellers and buyers about their realistic options in today’s market. We provide the option of selling a house quickly and directly to a nationwide network of investors, but many people don’t have enough equity left in their homes to qualify for an investor purchase. For these folks the counseling process explores their other options including short-sales and ways for them to talk to their lender about loan modifications,” said company president Patrick McGilvray.

The other main thing McGilvray said his company does is help people looking to buy a home find ways to buy a foreclosure home either from an investor or via a bank or other lender after the house has been foreclosed on. These houses are also known as REO homes, and for the pre-qualified buyer, they can represent a tremendous deal.

SACRAMENTO, CA – After 14 years at the helm of one of America’s premier teaching and research universities, the University of California, Davis, Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef announced today that he is stepping down in 2009.

Vanderhoef announced plans to take a sabbatical leave for one year starting in June of 2009 and indicated he would return to his duties as a professor of plant biology in 2010.

Two of the milestones achieved during Vanderhoef’s stint at the helm of UC Davis included an expansion of the student body to 30,000 from 22,000 and an increase in faculty size by 44 percent. In addition to the student and teacher growth, over 4 million square feet of classrooms, laboratories, clinical settings, and performance and office space were added including the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.

One of the lesser known yet noteworthy activities, especially in terms of current US-Iranian relations, undertaken during the Chancellor’s time in office was an official university delegation trip to Iran to establish academic and cultural ties with the University of Tehran. Deans of the colleges of agricultural sciences and engineering traveled to Iran with the Chancellor in 2004. The prominent Sacramento real estate developer Mohammed Moe Mohanna, a native of Iran, led this delegation which became the most significant U.S. delegation to Iran since the Revolution of 1979.

Mohanna, a well-known international civic leader, is very involved in numerous philanthropic activities and serves on the board of the UC Davis Foundation. When asked about his thoughts on the retirement of Vanderhoef he commented, “Larry is really a remarkable human being. He is a very courageous and visionary leader with global understanding. Larry promotes the internationalization of education and turns nations into people. He has been a champion of crossing boundaries and building bridges. To me, Larry personifies the great American values that we all cherish.”

Vanderhoef faced considerable pressure from others when he agreed to be a part of the delegation and wrote at the time of the trip, “perhaps in the process, one small step can be taken toward a return to normalcy in the Middle East.”

The current president of the University of California, Robert Dynes said of Vanderhoef, “all the other chancellors [of the UC system] and I look to him for wisdom and experience.” UC president-designate Mark Yudof said, “I have, from afar, watched the UC Davis campus go from relative obscurity to the front ranks among the nation’s research universities.”