Political Quotes

“I rise to speak about a housing matter. I have two amendments, but I am only speaking about them today, I will not be calling them up. I did want to speak very briefly and very generally about both of them. There are two very important matters that come before us as parts of our debate on housing. The first involves appraisals. We know that one of the biggest concerns a lot of people have in attacking the problem of subprime mortgages and the aftermath of a lot of bad loans was that faulty and sometimes fraudulent appraisals were part of that. The first amendment I will speak of today deals with the question of how do we get a second independent appraisal for properties that are so-called flipped properties. When you have a property that may go into foreclosure and then it is sold later, sometimes we have instances where property is sold at a grossly inflated price that does not reflect the true value, and then down the road another purchaser, a homeowner, would buy it, and then you have extraordinary inflation, often fraudulent inflation of the cost of a property. Our office has worked closely with Senator Martinez on this as well. What this amendment does is to make it very clear that, in those instances where you have a house flipped within 180 days of the date of purchase, there will, in fact, be a second independent appraisal done.”