Innovation Trio: SwapRent, FARJHO & TARELV

Shared Appreciation through Shared Cash Flows – the New Economic Owning, Renting and Own-Rent Switching Concepts as well as Business Methods for Managing Real Estate Properties – http://www.SwapRent.com

0701 2012 Shared appreciation methods could be used as a macro economic stimulus tool, not just narrowly be used to let distressed home owners hang on their homes only

While this very same topic has been repeated many times before, I still feel this is where the economic policy makers of our country need to understand most but have failed to do so thus far. Housing, housing finance professionals and mortgage experts may need to work together with the macro-economic policy makers for these new economic concepts’ potential implementation. Shared appreciation or equity sharing techniques and methods, when implemented in an isolated way to distressed home owners only, would not achieve the desired results because they may lack the normal free market incentives and motivations for free market investors’ participations.

This relevant past blog post http://peoplesally.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/1126-2011-we-need-to-blow-up-a-home-equity-bubble-using-equity-sharing-methods-not-debt-like-how-silicon-valley-blew-up-tech-company-stock-market-bubbles/ may illustrate these big picture economic concepts well. For more detailed execution methodology by the policy makers and central banks, please refer to Chapter 6 of the my earlier SwapRent paper (http://www.box.net/shared/v24qtqip4hlgff5l1646 ) published in the December 2009 issue of the Journal of Housing Finance International (HFI) by the Brussels-based International Union of Housing Finance (IUHF).

I would like to emphasize again that equity sharing or shared appreciation methods could not only be used to assist home owners to hang on to their homes in a narrow way, they should better be utilized to facilitate economic stimulus to the masses at the grassroots level to create jobs and revitalize our country’s economy.

The key concept is that only when these new equity sharing and cash flow sharing services such as FARJHO and SwapRent or any other methods and concepts provided by other economists are made available and offered to the public in general, not restricted simply to distressed home owners only, so that the market will indeed have a chance to recover due to these new methods that could foster positive market investment sentiments and expectations.

Free market investors would then more likely participate voluntarily to provide capital in a stampede. If executed correctly, no arms twisting of these free market investors would be necessary for them to throw money voluntarily into the housing market, as long as they themselves see the profit making potential. The way for our country’s economic policy makers could get involved in these new equity sharing based economic policy management tools, would not be that much different in the Fed’s current role of jawboning to create investors’ expectation in the interest rate markets.

Let’s hope the economic team hired by the next Presidential Administration would get to see the light soon.

Filed under: Cash Flow Sharing, Crowdfunding, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Federal Government, Housing, InvestorsAlly, Mortgage, PeoplesAlly, REIDeX, SwapRent, , , , , , , , , , ,

0603 2012 New non-debt financing alternatives for home owners and small businesses as stimulus to create economic activities at grassroots level

I was recently invited to submit a paper of my economic innovation research work by a government agency again. Here below are the gists of what I would like to present. It is a summary of only what FARJHO and SwapRent are about. The third leg of these related innovations, TARELV (http://www.tarelv.com) which is a new alternative currency pegging system based on real estate and land value, although much more interesting, still seems to be a bit ahead of its time and may remain an academic exercise for limited special interest groups at the moment.

So here below is a quick summary of what my current proposals are.

1.) The distinguishing features of FARJHO as a new business method for a new form of home ownership structure are three fold:

First, FARJHO allows home occupiers and property investors to own only one home at a time in order to maintain the sanctity and the freedom of the single family residence ownership. This is in sharp contrast to many community oriented equity sharing methods of Co-ops, Land Trusts, Kibbutz or Commune types of older equity sharing methods.

Second, as a brand new concept, FARJHO only allows individual member level debt financing to eliminate the foreclosure possibility which exists with conventional property level debt financing such as those in a SEM, a SAM or a Shared Ownership type of other existing equity sharing schemes. Home occupiers could still get foreclosed when they lose their monthly income capability under those older arrangements.

Third, FARJHO provides a natural built-in buffer to conventional renting to avoid potential eviction when the tenants temporarily lose their monthly income capability. The equity stake of the renter/co-owner of the FARJHO structure could act as an optional voluntary collateral against missed monthly rent payments and therefore provides property investors with enhanced investment security through less credit risks and at the same time provides the tenants/co-owners with more home occupying stability during the rainy days in their working lives.

All these new features were specifically designed to make the new home ownership structure of FARJHO more than simply an attractive financial investment vehicle for free market based property investors. Among its main goals is to also provide neighborhood stability and social harmony by eliminating the possibility of foreclosures and reducing the likelihood of eviction for home occupiers.

2.) The three features of SwapRent (http://www.swaprent.com) as a new non-debt financing alternatives for home owners and small businesses are:

It allows home owners or any property owners to share a part of the appreciation potential of their properties with other free market based investors through letting these investors share a part of the cash flow responsibilities in a real estate property ownership so that the current properties owners could obtain alternative temporary non-debt based either short term or long term financing that has never been made possible before.

These goals could be accomplished through the new economic owning, renting and own-rent switching concepts and business methods of SwapRent for managing real estate properties.

It allows home owners to separate the investment value from the shelter value of owning a real estate property, i.e. the issue of the management of the financial investment aspect of owning a home away from the issue of the stability of a suitable shelter or a place to live in.

FARJHO and SwapRent could indeed be used either together or separately.

I would like to emphasize the importance of understanding that both FARJHO and the SwapRent contracts could be perfectly used as new non-debt based financing alternatives for both home owners and small businesses to revitalize the national economy at the grassroots level. These new proposed financing alternatives seem to be exactly what our country and many other countries in Western Europe urgently need at the present time.

Just try to think, when home owners and small business property owners who could not get conventional bank loan financing have run out of all other means, including perhaps items to bring to the pawnshops, wouldn’t it be nice for them to have a new way to get paid by letting other people share a part of the equity of the homes or other real estate properties that they own in the form of either shared equity ownership or simply shared appreciation rights rather than a collateralized or mortgaged debt that would need a steady income stream to service the monthly payments and/or a burden to repay at maturity date.

The delivery of these new innovative services could be performed under the Internet based crowdfunding portal sites such as http://www.farjho.com for FARJHO and/or http://www.reidex.com for SwapRent to bypass the Wall Street middlemen and get the economic benefits of these new services delivered directly to mom and pop small business folks on Main Street. More consumer choices is always a good thing under free market capitalism.

While old school economists like Paul Krugman could continue to bang their heads against the wall to convince governments to tax citizens more, issue more debts and print more money to inflate away the debt problems of the US and many Western European countries, they seem to genuinely naively have a blind faith that there will always be a greater fool to continue to be willing to lend more money or to be taxed more no matter how much worse the situation may get. Why can’t these people simply calm down and think outside the box for once?

Outside of debt financing there are many many other ways to finance economic activities. The equity sharing method should not be confined only at the corporate level in the form of either private equity participation or a stock market IPO.

Countries, sovereign entities at higher levels (e.g. using TARELV) and home owners, small businesses at the lower levels (e.g. using FARJHO and SwapRent) should all be seriously educated on how to take advantage of the new equity sharing concepts and methods made possible by these innovations and their current commercial availability beyond being simply academic theories now.

This also brings back my favorite academic side topic. Try to imagine, if a new Greek TARELV Drachma is backed by the total aggregate real estate and land value of Greece, wouldn’t that be a more attractive currency for foreigners to invest in and hold on to? If the Greek government fails to deliver to let the TARELV Drachma exchange back into other currencies later, you’d end up getting to own a Greek Island?

Germans would most probably vote ja ja with their feet and each individually rushes to pump money into Greece for the rescue of their fellow Europeans! Isn’t that how a free market is supposed to work? There just has to be more innovative free market choices of financing alternatives made available to avoid having to keep on beating the dead horse to pile up more and more debts and taxes to solve economic problems. Again, more info on TARELV is available at http://www.tarelv.com.

Filed under: Cash Flow Sharing, Crowdfunders Choice, Crowdfunding, Currencies, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Federal Government, Housing, InvestorsAlly, Mortgage, PeoplesAlly, REIDeX, SwapRent, TARELV, , , , , , , , , ,

0303 2012 What is the difference between the cash flow sharing SwapRent solution and a Shared Appreciation Mortgage? – SwapRent is similar to a separate flexible employment contract substitute to hold on to the house

When I said before SwapRent was a bit ahead of its time since its birth in 2006, I meant that most people were unfamiliar with what economic value it could bring. After the financial crisis, most economic policy makers were still learning what property equity sharing concept is and what methods are out there that could be used to solve our current housing led economic crisis. Sadly after more than 5 years, it still appears that the law makers, financial regulators, economic policy makers of the federal governments are only starting to realize the value of the concept and making recommendations for the private sector banks as well as the GSEs, housing agencies to learn how to apply these concepts through the only term in this equity sharing field that they know of, i.e. shared appreciation mortgage.

 
As one of the most superior and advanced methods to deliver the economic benefits of property equity sharing, ownership sharing or appreciation sharing, the SwapRent related methodologies have been made available to private sector banks, housing finance agencies of the federal, state and local governments through various direct communications and educational campaigns since 2007. It seems that all those efforts were in vain. Now that these supposedly wise men at the government are being called upon by the politicians to study the application of shared appreciation mortgage again to solve the housing finance led economic problems of our country. So let’s take another try to see whether they could comprehend it now or are willing to think outside the box to learn something new.

 
The new creation of a SwapRent transaction is to allow a free market exchange, between an arms length investor and a property owner, a series of cash flow payment responsibility for a period of time vs. a portion of the upside appreciation right and the downside depreciation risk obligation of the property in question at the maturity date of that cash flow paying commitment time period.

 
This new SwapRent contract could be flexibly offered separately, super-imposed on and be artificially attached to a conventional mortgage, be combined as a package and/or be detached at any time so that the SwapRent contract could be traded by itself independently, like a free market based derivative financial contract, in an open exchange to allow price discovery and capital regeneration. It is therefore much more flexible, effective, efficient and useful than the old, obsolete, flaw-ridden and rigid shared appreciation mortgage, the shared equity mortgage that have been around for more than 30 years as well as their most recent reincarnation of shared ownership mortgage.

 
The unfortunate thing is that these academics and economic policy makers whose task is to study, research and come up with a better mouse trap than the old shared appreciation mortgage simply went straight back into those old, obsolete, flaw-ridden and rigid shared appreciation mortgage concepts and methods again. They do not seem to be able to jump out of that old mortgage box to start thinking outside the box. The longer these incompetent policy makers continue to squat on their jobs the more our country’s economy will continue to hemorrhage. It appears a competency issue that only history will prove on hindsight.

 
Anyway, since the information of the SwapRent based solutions have been made widely available in many written articles at this blog, at SwapRent home page, in many published newspapers and academic journals already, there may not be a need to repeat all those info here again. Let’s take a quick look at what SwapRent concept can do on more than helping cure distressed non-performing mortgages and assisting home owners to hang on to their homes instead.

 
The way to think of this swap between receiving a series of monthly cash flows vs. giving up a part of the future upside potential could be interpreted and applied to many other events in our daily economic lives.

 
For example, use you yourself, the body and mind owner, as a case in point. You, like all of us, have a need to receive a series of monthly cash flows to buy groceries to feed your family and pay rent or mortgage payments for your home as a shelter. After you have applied for a job and been hired by your employer, you have effectively entered into a SwapRent transaction. Your boss has simply agreed to provide you with a series of monthly cash flows (your salary) for a period of time (your employment contract period) in exchange for your upside productive potential. Whatever you could produce for the company during the contract period will simply become the company’s material or intellectual properties and become exclusively the company’s financial rewards. Even if you have a great money making idea and developed a patent on it, that would become the company’s property and the company will make all the upside financial rewards out of that patent and all your other future economic productivity to make the patent financially valuable.

 


On the other hand, if you are an entrepreneur or a small business owner, you receive no fixed monthly cash flows from anybody else since you have no boss but you get to control your own destiny and get to enjoy the entire upside potential rewards of your own talents.

 
Similarly, what the SwapRent related concepts and methods were originally designed to do for you, the real estate property owner, as a comparison case in point, is quite similar. You may have a need to receive a series of monthly cash flows to pay for a part, or in whole, your monthly mortgage payments which may become delinquent when you have lost your job, either completely or got a lesser paying job instead. So you could, out of free will, decide to give up a part, or in whole, the future financial price appreciation potential of your home property in exchange for receiving the series of monthly cash flows that you need now to continue to keep the legal ownership of your house. If you do not receive any cash flows from any body else, you would of course get to enjoy the entire potential upside appreciation, i.e. assuming you have some other non-free market based magical way that you would not get foreclosed.

 

 

In this example above, the new concept and method of the cash flow sharing SwapRent contract simply provides another way for you to obtain a series of monthly cash flows to meet your daily responsibilities in your economic life. Taking a job was the only choice in our capitalism society before. Now with the invention of SwapRent, you the consumer, have been given another free market based choice, if you happen to own a real estate property already.

 
From an employer’s or an investor’s perspective, the way for them to derive more upside financial returns and grow economic potential for their capital and resources, they could either hire a person by giving him/her a series of monthly cash flows to enjoy the whole upside of his/her talents through a job or an employment contract, or they could simply provide a series of cash flows to a property owner in exchange of either a part, or in whole, of the upside financial appreciation potential of his/her property for a period of time.

 
I hope the analogy provides a better way to understand what the new SwapRent transaction is about and what kind of power it could provide as an additional consumer choice alternative to our daily economic lives on a pure free market basis.

Filed under: Cash Flow Sharing, Economic Viewpoints, Federal Government, Housing, Mortgage, REIDeX, SwapRent, , , , , , ,

0301 2012 Crowdfunding – Capitalism for the 99%

We have recently started a new venture as an idea spin-off from our past venture www.reidex.com at REIDeX, Inc. and the current www.farjho.com at InvestorsAlly, Inc. The way both reidex.com and farjho.com have been trying to deliver the economic benefits of SwapRent and FARJHO to consumers are based on the power of Internet by eliminating the financial service middlemen and offer a service that is better, faster and cheaper than the conventional brick and mortar financial services businesses. This concept used to be called simply C2C e-commerce or later, peer-to-peer Internet matching service. Now, it is called crowdfunding.

 
Therefore it appears that we have been trying to provide the Internet-based crowdfunding services for real estate through both SwapRent and FARJHO as early as 2006 before the term of crowdfunding even emerged in the cyberspace. The reason why that InvestorsAlly has been offering crowdfunding service for home equity sharing is that FARJHO simply corporatizes single family homes and hence make it feasible to use this peer-to-peer matching concept for home owners to raise non-debt but equity based financing.

 
The use of C2C and peer-to-peer concepts could even be traced way back to the REIFO Exchange venture ( http://www.box.com/s/mnm7xhel0uhp9hkehad7 ) started in 2002 as chronicled in the Los Angeles Times article in 2003 ( http://www.box.com/s/qh42krrm2biiv55rkloj ). The ideas of the REIFO Exchange venture were later taken by CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) to let consumers trade futures and options contracts on a different real estate index. Details of this would not be released until 2014 when the 10-year NDA we had with CME expires.

 
The later over 10 year’s journey of transforming these sophisticated concepts to simpler new consumer-oriented products and services while keeping the similar economic benefits has not been an easy one. The new cash flow sharing concept and method of the SwapRent service through REIDeX seemed to be a bit complicated to the average consumers and the commercialization effort of SwapRent was perhaps a bit ahead of its time, no matter how powerful and useful the service could become to consumers and for our national economy.

 
To use an analogy again, it was almost like trying to convince people for a test drive by handing over the key of a new Hybrid SUV to people who are only used to riding horses. The shock and resistance to the new way of transportation were severe. Some people say that there is no traffic rules and if you launch it would create a lot of liability. Other people say that it is way too difficult for consumers ever to learn how to use it. Although the consumer acceptance may eventually take place but we could not wait that long to make a business venture commercially viable. So in 2010 we have pulled back the SUV and created a much simpler bicycle to offer to consumers through a new company InvestorsAlly, Inc. The bicycle analogy is the new FARJHO service. The FARJHO matching service is neither a derivative contract nor does it have anything to do with mortgages like what a SwapRent transaction would be, but rather a very simple new home ownership structure.

 
Through our marketing and educational effort the FARJHO idea seemed to have taken off and become viral in the Realtor community in Southern California since early 2010. Home owners and Realtors have begun to beat a path to our door for helping aspiring home owners with this new equity sharing FARJHO service to own homes since then but there is only one problem left – there have not been enough joint property investors in the current market to satisfy the demand from the aspiring home owners for the FARJHO transactions. Much more effort would be necessary to conduct more educational training under the current regulatory environment for potential investors. In the regard, I am glad to report that we have recently launched our first $20 million FARJHO Reg D private placement fund. More info is available upon request for qualified accredited investors in the US.

 
Nonetheless, we have yet again temporarily put aside the bicycle for more sophisticated users only and created another much simpler tricycle for the vast consumers for an even easier commercialization. Hence the Crowdfunders Choice (CFC) was born in January, 2012.

 
CFC simply focuses on introducing the peer-to-peer technology platform to help entrepreneurs raise equity financing. It is not a proprietary concept that we will need to sell again, which has always made launching new businesses much more difficult. It therefore seemed to be much easier to introduce these crowdfunding concept and method as there have already been many tried-and-true web sites offering similar platforms to conduct peer-to-peer micro-lending or to raise donations for creative projects or for political purposes.

 
The reason it is a much simpler tricycle vs. the bicycle of the equity crowdfunding business model of FARJHO is that the real estate component has been removed from the crowdfunding business model and therefore the new peer-to-peer matching services offered through CFC could be offered to a much broader audience, i.e. people would not have to have prior knowledge or experience with the real estate industry. In addition, people who would like to use the service no longer have to learn some new economic innovative concepts or methodologies any more. Sales calls would not turn into another economic lesson or a heated debate anymore!

 
As explained in the introduction at its web site ( http://www.CrowdfundersChoice.com ), our goal at CFC is to become the Crowdfunder’s Choice for helping entrepreneurs raise start-up equity financing with a special twist – we would like to make this new venture, crowd-sourced, crowd-funded and crowd-owned whenever permissible under securities regulation in order to act as a living proof that this new crowdsourcing business model would work under an unfettered free market capitalism.

 
Our target is to get the 99% of our population to have access to entrepreneurial start-up financing on Main Street in order to keep our free enterprise capitalism alive through promoting and maintaining a more democratic version of capitalism vs. the crony capitalism being practiced and abused by the privileged economic elites on Wall Street. The political image also seems to be a perfect match to the values of PeoplesAlly Foundation.

 
Hopefully through our new alternative funding services some of these entrepreneurs may get to rise up to become a member of the 1% one day. If not, even the top 10% or even top 30% will do, in the true spirit of capitalism. That indeed is our intention – wealth creation for the 99%. It is quite all right to take risk and work hard to become a member of the 1%, as long as they do not transform into a 1%’er or a member of the 10%’ers at the expense of the rest of the 99% or the 90%.

 

 

Filed under: Cash Flow Sharing, Crowdfunders Choice, Crowdfunding, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, InvestorsAlly, REIDeX, SwapRent, , , , , , , , , ,

1003 2011 Let FARJHO and SwapRent bring housing finance from the sleight-of-hands on Wall Street to the common people on Main Street – Food for thoughts for the Occupy Wall Street protesters

The Occupy Wall Street protesters’ movement seems to be gaining steam and momentum but what do they want to accomplish?

How about telling Wall Street to stop meddling with our housing finances? Furthermore, the angry protesters that occupied Wall Street seemed to be only able to focus of what have been stolen but they are definitely out of touch on what is about to be stolen again by the very same thieves while they are risking their lives physically protesting to on Wall Street.

First, the best economic solutions and/or new economic systems could be totally ruined if left in the wrong hands again. We need more people’s active participation and the support of PeoplesAlly Foundation to further our causes of FARJHO and SwapRent for the benefits of the people on Main Street. Let’s work together to keep Wall Street big banks’ dirty fingers off these new democratic solutions.

Second, we will need to prevent another financial heist like those happened in 2008 from happening again. In Russia and other third world countries the oligarchs have to make some special efforts to steal the national assets behind closed doors. It would actually be a lot of hard work for them and perhaps a few investigative journalists would have to be poisoned or murdered along the way. Here in America, they do it right in the open by spinning the media with wrong information and manipulating the public sentiment with political influence. They did it times and again right in front of our eyes and there was not a thing that we, the folks on Main Street could do about it. The case in point is FHFA’s current plan to sell the REOs (foreclosed homes) that they own to privileged private sector firms.

The distrust of the federal government’s housing plans is not unwarranted. Remember when the financial crisis first emerged in 2008 and the federal government came up with their first solution that left many of us flabbergasted? While people are losing homes and jobs left and right everywhere, the first thing they did was to come up with a plan to use tax payer’s money to give more than one thousand dollars to the mortgage servicing firms owned by their crony friends for each of the loan mods that they worked on? (Goldman Sachs used to own a major mortgage servicing firm Litton Loan Servicing and only sold it in June this year after many robo-signing scandals.)

You may also have seen how “housing experts” or securities analysts from the investment banks such as Morgan Stanley etc. keep spinning the story on TV and in the press media that the federal government has no experience in running the renting business as the sole reason why GSEs/FHA should sell their REOs to the private sector firms in bulk at discounted prices. It would be another big feast, if not steal, for their crony friends in Washington DC and on Wall Street again while being empowered by the almost zero cost of fund to build up their war chest, thanks to Bernanke and the Federal Reserve Board. It is like hitting another Super Jackpot again!

Let’s hope the cronies would not get it their way to buy in bulk at deep discount our national assets owned by the GSEs/FHA again. If they get it their way, they would become the new serfdom landlords to millions of working class people on Main Street. It will turn America into an oligarch state without a middle class. Can you imagine United States of America is about to become a nation of renters to a few handful of oligarchs!

The availability of the information of FARJHO and the services to the GSEs/FHA may have a chance to stop these pending thefts if more information is made public and understood properly by people on Main Street on what kind of financial heist is about to happen all over again.

Don’t wait to protest after it has happened again. Protest to stop it from happening at all!

Filed under: Cash Flow Sharing, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Federal Government, Housing, InvestorsAlly, PeoplesAlly, REIDeX, SwapRent, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

0910 2011 Our response to FHFA’s RFI – FARJHO and SwapRent from PeoplesAlly Foundation and InvestorsAlly, Inc. – A letter to the Fed, the Administration, GSEs, HUD, SEC, CFTC, other Agencies and the State Governments

Here below is a recent update letter to many of my academic friends who possess well established expertise in economics, economic history, finance, derivatives, laws, mathematics, housing, housing finance, urban planning, real estate, business studies, public policy and political science in various leading universities around the US and in selected foreign countries. I thank them for the various feedbacks and support through the years.

Transparency in our federal government’s policy making process is always a good thing for our country and for our democratic society. As one public figure recently said, the best way to keep a secret is to do the right thing.

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Dear AcademicAlly,

How are you?

Here below is the latest development regarding our efforts to help solve our nation’s housing-led economic crisis. As you know I have been in touch with many of the government folks regarding FARJHO and SwapRent on an academic basis within the past few years since 2007. Please feel free to let me know if you would like review some of their earlier feedbacks. Yours and your colleagues’ academic input and critiques on our proposal would be highly appreciated.

We have provided our FARJHO and SwapRent solutions to the FHFA and submitted our response to their August 10th RFI project (see below) from both PeoplesAlly Foundation ( http://www.PeoplesAlly.org ) and InvestorsAlly, Inc. ( http://www.InvestorsAlly.com ). The non-profit will provide the educational services and the counseling of home owners which we have spent tremendous time to build and to create a political voice within the past year. InvestorsAlly will focus on providing the technology platform for the FARJHO matching services at http://www.farjho.com as what it was always set up to do since the inception.

For a thorough understanding of the new FARJHO methodology to own homes one home at a time, here is the link to my draft paper on FARJHO ( http://www.box.net/shared/yfhkjbqre4idf1kgrtc4 ) which is to be published by the housing finance journal HFI in their upcoming September or December issue as a sequel to my earlier article on SwapRent ( http://www.box.net/shared/v24qtqip4hlgff5l1646 ) published in the December 2009 issue.

Please note again the link to a copy of our response is at http://www.box.net/shared/hpfqqajd1aremco716lr . There could be many area that you and your colleagues could help improve this project. Your active participation to further fine tune our proposed methods, the deployment channels and delivery procedures would be very welcome. It is all for saving our country’s economic future. Let’s work as a team.

Let’s hope that these unwise policy decisions made or to be made by our federal government, intentionally or not, will not turn our country into an oligarch state without a middle class soon. Your active participation may help change the course of history. Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions. Thanks.

===============
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2011 11:54:07 -0700
To: Email addresses suppressed
From: Ralph Liu <ralph.liu@investorsally.com>
Subject: Our response to FHFA’s RFI – FARJHO and SwapRent from PeoplesAlly Foundation and InvestorsAlly, Inc.

Dear Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Regional Presidents, Administration, Treasury, FDIC, HUD, GSEs, SEC, CFTC, Congressional Staff and Other Relevant Agency Officials,

cc. State Governments, State Housing Authorities

How are you? I would like to give you guys an update on the latest developments of our FARJHO and SwapRent efforts.

On August 10th FHFA, the regulator of GSEs issued a RFI asking for ideas from the public on how to deal with their REOs portfolios. Here is the link to their original request. http://www.fhfa.gov/webfiles/22366/RFIFinal081011.pdfrding

We have submitted our public response to FHFA from PeoplesAlly Foundation and InvestorsAlly, Inc. in early September. Here is the link to a copy of our response for your kind review and comments. http://www.box.net/shared/hpfqqajd1aremco716lr

The advantages of our FARJHO based proposal are:

1. It eliminates the need to let privileged private parties have access to and engage in quick short term buy-low-sell-high flipping activities at preferential bulk sale discount prices to profit from the potential privatization of our national assets owned by the GSEs and FHA.

2. It helps avoid the federal government, the elite private equity firms in DC or hedge funds on Wall Street from becoming new long term serfdom landlords to low income working families on Main Street by allowing renters to become partial co-owners of the home properties through FARJHO LLCs.

3. Potential wealth created from a future recovery of the US housing market will be able to be channelled through FARJHO back to small town investors, mom’n’pop’s self-directed IRAs, state, county and local pension funds, church groups, non-profit endowments etc. on Main Street to fix the local government’s pension liabilities and budget deficits by investing on a more level playing field with other elite institutional investors on Wall Street who already have exclusive access to the use of leveraged low cost of funds as a result of the Fed’s loose monetary policies to profit from the potential price appreciation.

4. Through the new Borrow-Pool-Buy (BPB) member level borrowing concept that replaces the old Pool-Borrow-Buy (PBB) property level financing practice in other conventional equity sharing schemes, future foreclosure possibilities could be totally eliminated once and for all in this new FARJHO home ownership structure.

In addition, I would like to take the opportunity to invite your attention again to the applications of SwapRent as a new economic policy management tool that goes beyond its initial objective of creating housing affordability. A successful implementation could provide the governments with a new way of economic stimulus method similar to how governments have been managing the countries’ economic activities by adjusting the interest rate levels at the moment.

Since 30’s and 40’s Keynesian economy and 50’s and 60’s Monetarism could not function well in a technologically very different modern world in 2011 where hot money flows freely and instantaneously across borders, a new economic policy management tool has to be created so that the stimulus money could have “the stickiness effect” and stay in local communities to have the desired economic stimulus objectives of creating local jobs for the domestic economy. That is exactly what a new SwapRent market could deliver.

For an introductory description of how this could work please kindly review Chapter 6 of the SwapRent article published at the December 2009 issue of the Journal of Housing Finance International published by International Union of Housing Finance (IUHF) at http://www.box.net/shared/v24qtqip4hlgff5l1646 . The following two blog posts also explain how this could be done in local communities through championing by local politicians on a free market basis without relying on any handouts from the federal government.

http://peoplesally.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/02202011-it-is-not-keynesian-it-is-not-monetarist-perhaps-we-could-call-it-swaprentism-any-better-suggestions/

http://peoplesally.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/0802-2011-implementation-strategies-of-farjho-and-swaprent-good-economic-stimulus-public-policy-or-cornering-the-real-estate-market-by-investors-for-profits/

All information contained in our proposal to FHFA are non-confidential in nature and therefore are free for public distribution. Please feel free to share with us your thoughts and comments. Thanks.

Ralph Y. Liu
Managing Director
PeoplesAlly Foundation
23 Corporate Plaza Drive, Suite 133
Newport Beach, CA 92660
Tel: 1-888-456-8881 x 888
Fax: 1-888-315-3831
Direct: 1-949-371-9139
peoplesally@gmail.com
http://www.PeoplesAlly.org
http://www.twitter.com/SwapRent
http://SwapRent.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphyliu

Filed under: Cash Flow Sharing, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Federal Government, Housing, InvestorsAlly, PeoplesAlly, REIDeX, Section 8, SwapRent, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

0819 2010 How and when to apply the new FARJHO (Flexible And Reversible Joint Home Ownership) structure?

The following information is on how to apply the new economic concept of the separation of shelter value (use value) and the investment value (economic value) of a conventional ownership of a real estate property. For more details please visit our commercial site at http://www.InvestorsAlly.com or our non-profit operations at http://www.PeoplesAlly.org to assist low income working families with increased housing affordability and enhanced neighborhood stability.

Example 1 – From aspiring home owner’s perspective:

A home seeking person who currently rents identifies a property in a geographical area of his/her choice. He/She has the 10% of the property in cash from his/her own savings and would like to seek to jointly own the property with other investors as the ideal home owning structure.

The reasons could be because that he/she may not have enough monthly income to qualify for a conventional mortgage, prefers to use the discretionary monthly income for other household expenses, does not think the property value may increase in the near term, for his/her particular religious belief that rejects the lending/borrowing concepts or simply any other personal preferences.

He/She commits to pay a pre-agreed rent to the FARJHO LLC that holds the title of the property for a specific period of time. The remaining 90% property ownership could be shared among up to nine other individual, corporate institutional or even governmental entities.

Example 2 – From joint property investor’s perspective:

A group of investors have identified and bought a particular single family house at bargain price through a syndicated LLC structure either through a short sale process or from a bank’s REO portfolio.

The syndicator of the FARJHO LLC tries to find a long term renter of this single family house in order to generate stable long term rental income. Many renters do not commit to the long term and do not usually care about the houses that they rent.

The syndicator/property manager makes an offer to a qualified renter who has the ability to pay for a small percentage of the property value and invites him/her to join the LLC as a minority stake holder/member himself/herself. Once the renter becomes the minority homeowner, he/she may intend to stay for the long term and would treasure the property and take good care of it as thought it were his/her own. In fact it is indeed his/her own, albeit partially. Although he/she does not have the economic income capability normally required to own the property entirely he/she gets to enjoy the high quality home in the neighborhood of his/her choice.

Through buy/sell agreements between LLC members, the homeowners could increase his/her equity ownership through buying existing member’s interests. Alternatively, he/she could use SwapRent contracts to do so when they become available at REIDeX in the near future. In the worst case scenario, he/she could also become a LLC member in another property in the same neighborhood whenever he/she has the increased economic ability to do so and would like to have more investment exposures.

Comparing with conventional commercial property investments, FARJHO offers property investors less worries about vacancy and expenses. The investor’s SGI (Scheduled Gross Income) equals to his/her GOI (Gross Operating Income) and also to his/her NOI (Net Operating Income) since both annual vacancy loss and expenses are most likely zero in a FARJHO structure.

Example 3 – Current application opportunities in the US:

A homeowner currently has a deeply underwater house. He/She contemplates a strategic default on his/her own house but does not like the idea of becoming an apartment renter. A buy-and-bail strategy sounds more appealing to him/her. He/She could use an all equity based FARJHO (SM) structure to become the minority owner/renter of an alternative property in his/her neighborhood before he/she begins discussions with his/her current mortgage lending bank to give up his/her existing homes in either a short sale or a flat out walkaway foreclosure.

The strategic defaulters usually could not secure another mortgage to buy another comparable home before or after he/she walks away from his/her existing home. To qualify for a new mortgage on a second home, he/she has to either have 30% net equity in his/her existing home or a very large fully documented monthly income to qualify for the mortgage payments of two homes. This is often not the case with most upside down homeowners.

An all equity based FARJHO co-ownership structure makes it convenient for a smoother transition to a long term comparable or even nicer and often more spacious home through a partial equity ownership without having to lose the homeowner status by becoming a conventional apartment or house renter. It may turn a somewhat embarrassing, face-losing event into a move-up in prestige as a partial owner of a much bigger and nicer house!

Example 4 – How to use borrowing (through Borrow-Pool-Buy, BPB method) to achieve leveraged higher investment returns under FARJHO:

In a FARJHO transaction, each individual member co-owner can decide whether to borrow for their portion or not. Cash rich investors do not have to borrow. No group decision or action to borrow together is necessary. If some of the co-owner members want to borrow individually for themselves, then the borrowing leverage (LTV) is up to each of the members individually and their individual lenders using the percentage ownership in the legal entity or the corporation as the collateral.

So let’s say a home which is worth $100,000 is being bought by a FARJHO LLC. Three members, A (20%), B (40%) and C (40%) pooled the capital to form the LLC to begin with so that the LLC had the money to buy the home. LLC did not and will not borrow any money or use the property as collateral to borrow any more money. Since neither the FARJHO LLC nor the home property itself owes any money, therefore there is no possibility of a foreclosure of the home property, ever!

Member A was supposed to be the home occupier (AHO), so he pays the LLC a market based rent every month for 3 years say in a 3-year lease as an example. It could be any lease maturity and will be determined by all the members in the LLC.

In terms of borrowing, Member A did not borrow to come up with the $20,000 since he would not want to pay a loan payment in addition to the rent payment very month. Member B does not like to be burdened by the debt service so he did not borrow to come up with the $40,000 cash either. Member C likes to punt and strongly believes in using leverage to achieve high returns. On the other hand, he does not have enough money for the required $40,000. Say he only has $10,000 in savings so he borrowed $30,000 from a lender using his 40% share or member interests in the LLC as the collateral for the lender. The leverage that Member C uses is 75% LTV of his partial member interest in the LLC and his down payment equals to 25% of the value of that partial member interest.

So in the example above, cash was used to purchase the property entirely and no borrowing using the property as the collateral was involved. Borrowing activity, if any, will be conducted only at the member level at each member’s discretion only. That is exactly the spirit of the new FARJHO concept and method to own homes, irrespective which country the homes or the home owners are located.

Example 5 – Section 8’ed FARJHO – AHOs who are Section 8 rent payment assistance recipients

A current Section 8 rental assistance payment recipient inherited $50,000 from his parents. She does not want to put it in the stock market or any mutual funds which she is not familiar with and she thinks those Wall Street stuff are too risky. She wanted to use it to buy a home but the amount is not big enough to buy in an all-cash deal. She can not use it as a down payment to borrow any mortgage because no lenders would be interested in talking to her due to her low income status. The lenders do not believe that she could generate enough monthly income to service a mortgage payment.

She heard about the new Section 8’ed FARJHO program from the local housing authority from her city. She found out that she could team up with a few free market based Joint Property Investors (JPIs) to form a FARJHO LLC to buy a home together and get the new home qualified as a Section 8 property. She could then simply apply the rent payment assistance from the existing Section 8 program as the rent payments to the FARJHO LLC. In this way she would not only just be a renter but also become a partial home owner under this FARJHO arrangement.

Since she is not restricted to renting from a multi-family apartment complex in the run-down districts only, she decides to buy a REO single family house from the Fannie Mae Homepath program in a decent neighborhood as her dream home. The cost of the house is $300,000 in a city in Southern California. In this FARJHO structure she would own 1/6 of the equity ownership of the FARJHO LLC.

The remaining balance of the house price was paid by five other free market based investors. Investor A and B who put in $30,000 each are individuals using their retirement money in their respective IRA accounts. Investor C who put in $100,000 is a local public employee pension fund. Investor D is a foreign individual and he put in $40,000. The remaining $50,000 was put in from an individual property speculator who prefers to use leverage to enhance the potential investment returns. He put down $10,000 cash and borrowed $40,000 so that he could deduct the interest expense for this investment.

The Section 8 recipient gets $1500 monthly rental assistance from HUD every month. She contributes an additional $200 so her total monthly rent paid to the FARJHO LLC is $1,700. This equates to an annual rental yield of 6.8% to all members of the investor group in the FARJHO LLC which the Section 8 recipient/renter herself is also a member of. That is her annual investment income for each year she stays in as a 1/6 interest member. In addition, she will also enjoy the financial value of 1/6 of the potential appreciation of the home property.

The free market based investors are interested in teaming up with the Section 8 recipient over other regular higher income AHOs because they might think, rightfully or wrongfully, the credit risk is much lower since the bulk of the income rent payments would come from the assistance of Uncle Sam!

Filed under: Cash Flow Sharing, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Housing, InvestorsAlly, PeoplesAlly, REIDeX, SwapRent, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

0802 2011 Implementation Strategies of FARJHO and SwapRent – good economic stimulus public policy or cornering the real estate market by investors for profits?

A very obvious winning strategy of implementing either FARJHO and SwapRent alone or together is to simply concentrate the investments and focus on a few selected neighborhoods in the US, perhaps some mid-sized cities in Southern California.

Let’s have a quick review on the economic concepts of the investing dynamics first. Real estate market as an investment asset class is often more about the Beta than the Alpha as compared to investing in the stock markets. Although that sounds a bit academic to many people but what it means is actually very simple. The way the real estate market moves ups and downs depends more in sync with the country’s economy policies made by the government as a whole, even with the consideration of regional economic factors and/or individual homeowner’s specific maintenance and caring of their properties. The residential real estate market in the US normally behave with a much higher correlation to government dictated lending policies than individual home improvements.

On the other hand, individual companies could much easily out perform or under perform the US stock market and behave individually based on their own individual earning power, management merits and demerits, irrespective what the government’s fiscal or monetary policies are.

As a result, whenever there is a lack of prudent and wise governments policies, the entire country’s homeowners in America suffer. The supply and demand factor of the residential real estate market has always been solely determined in the US by the interest rate levels and the degree of the looseness of credit for people to borrow to own homes.

In the past, local governments or free market based private sector investment companies could not alter the local market supply and demand factor since the interest rate levels and home mortgage credit policies have been determined solely at the federal level and by the big banks on Wall Street. In addition, single family houses are much more difficult to manage than apartments as income producing investment properties in the past since people who could rent were usually urged to buy with or without the ability to service the mortgage loans. As a result, renters for single family houses in the suburbs are difficult to find and keep. The arrival of FARJHO and SwapRent have finally found a way to change that situation.

Now through the new FARJHO structure, SwapRent transactions and their secondary markets, local government housing agencies, pension fund managers, free market based private sector investment companies and/or individual investors could finally alter the local property supply and demand factor and drive the prices of the local property markets up (and down if necessary) irrespective of what the federal government’s fiscal, monetary and housing policies are at any given point in time.

The very simple concept for local community economic growth is that the more fresh new money pumped into the local economy the more likely the local economic activities could be revitalized when the money is put in good productive use. The FARJHO structure and SwapRent transactions could make this simple economic concept a reality and make the economic miracles happen in the local communities without having to rely on tax payer’s money or risking a hyper inflation by altering the interest levels further.

First FARJHO could help any new home buyers and joint property investors buy more homes using cash on hands without relying on credit for debt financing and hence create demand for homes and support the local property price level.

Second, on top of the demand created by FARJHO, SwapRent could help distressed homeowners hang on to their homes and hence remove the selling pressure in the local property markets. In addition, as also explained before, SwapRent could also help speculators buy more properties by sharing partial appreciation with other free market investors and hence increase even more buying demand for homes. Furthermore, SwapRent could also be used to finance local small business investments by entrepreneurs who are property owners and hence create more jobs. Even rich home owners who do not need the cash could also take advantage of the free market based SwapRent program and hence increase dispensable income and create higher consumption powers in the local communities. These were all fully explained in previous blog posts.

http://swaprent.com/blog/2011/02/19/02202011-it-is-not-keynesian-it-is-not-monetarist-perhaps-we-could-call-it-swaprentism-any-better-suggestions/

http://swaprent.com/blog/2009/12/06/12062009-how-small-business-owners-could-use-swaprent-transactions-to-create-jobs-at-grassroots-level/

The main reason why the FARJHO structures, SwapRent contracts and the associated secondary markets could work much better in bringing back the local economic prosperity than the conventional ways of property ownership is that they could attract much more fresh new investors’ money through the ease, the flexibility and the reversibility features with which the real estate investors could manage their investments much better, faster and cheaper. FARJHO and SwapRent in a sense will make the previously “un-investable” single family houses an “investable” new asset class for institutional investors around the world.

As some free market based investors are currently comprehensive about the lack of obvious immediate appreciation potential for the US residential real estate markets due to the current unhealthy government sponsored economic policies, aspiring home owners, local government agencies and free market based investors could indeed create by themselves the demand for properties in the local market through FARJHO and SwapRent. When the more fresh new money has been poured into the local economy, the more likely the property value would have been driven up, the more free markets investors would be further drawn to investing in the local markets and the more aspiring home owners from neighboring communities would also choose to relocate to these local communities to own homes. Creating the local property appreciation and economic prosperity in a confined geographical area could indeed become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The key concept here is that smarter investors would most likely want to focus all their investments in a few selected neighborhoods with those wise local government officials who want to help facilitate these investment and economic revitalization processes to attract fresh new money so that there would be enough gun powder concentrated on these selected area to get the bang on the buck to artificially create the necessary debt-free property appreciation. With the local property value appreciation, all the current local government deficits, local economic weakness, local resident’s joblessness and the associated social problems could all be eliminated in one fell swoop.

In a sense, maneuvering these property price dynamics could be interpreted as cornering the market for illicit profit by a few individuals to benefit themselves. However if the end results are to benefit not the privileged few but the majority of the home owners in these local communities and the local governments, then cornering markets could indeed be euphemized and re-termed “economic stimulus” to bring back local economic prosperity instead.

In reality, cornering the markets of stocks and bonds was exactly what our federal government and the Federal Reserve Board have successfully tried to do in order to make the Wall Street folks richer and the big businesses awash with cash in recent years with their wasteful fiscal policies and unconventional monetary policies that have built up our country’s uncontrollable national deficits. Since the bubble building techniques that they have employed were based on money they did not have, those bubbles are doomed to burst some time down the road. Perhaps they had hoped for that there would be enough bread crumbs to fall to Main Street for people there to survive but that did not happen and of course would not happen.

What they had failed to find a solution for is a viable way to reinstall the debt-free or less debt dependent property-based wealth in local communities and to revitalize the economic prosperity on Main Street throughout the country to make the majority American people rich again. FARJHO and SwapRent were designed to accomplish just that.

If the incumbent Administration officials could not understand and handle this, certainly the new generations of aspiring politicians should take heed of it before it is too late.

Filed under: Cash Flow Sharing, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Housing, InvestorsAlly, PeoplesAlly, REIDeX, SwapRent, , , , , , ,

02/20/2011 The advantages of Cash Flow Sharing vs. Equity Sharing in stimulating our national economy

There have recently been growing number of people who suddenly realized that the simple “equity sharing”, “shared appreciation” or “shared ownership” concept of owning a real estate property could be a viable solution to our country’s mortgage lending or housing finance mess.

Few have had the “Eureka moments” yet about the fact that these simple economic concepts could be modified to create a new economic stimulus program to revive the economic prosperity of our country.

The learning process has been kind of long and the progress has been slow. We need much more people who have the media power or the access to op-eds at leading newspapers to endorse these simple ideas.

The disconnection of moving these shared appreciation related concepts from rescuing the housing finance crisis to further using them as economic policy management tools is due to the lack of the awareness of new innovations already available of some newer concepts and more importantly, newer improved “methodologies” to make implementing these “Shared Appreciation” goals feasible and practical.

That is where the newly invented “Cash Flow Sharing” concept and method come in and that was also exactly one of the key rationales behind the creation of the SwapRent(SM) contract back in 2006.

For more details about the SwapRent(SM) transactions, please visit the SwapRent.com home page again to have a more systematic way to the understanding of these new concepts and methods.

I would like to emphasize only one point here. As compared to the “Shared Equity” method where cash recipients could simply squander way to the new found up-front cash, “Shared Cash Flows” would allow Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”, not the capital providers, to have a better control on how the SwapRent(SM) cash flow recipients would utilize these new cash flows to invest more in local small businesses and to create more local jobs under free market based principles.

This is exactly what our country needs right now and it should always be the goal of any economic stimulus programs conducted by the governments.

Filed under: Cash Flow Sharing, Economic Viewpoints, REIDeX, SwapRent, ,

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