Monday Morning Cup of Coffee takes a look at the news coming across the HousingWire weekend desk, with more coverage to come on larger issues.
According to a report by Michelle Davis for Bloomberg, the U.S. secretly stunted the growth of JPMorgan for almost six years.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency placed restrictions on expansions for the big bank for violating banking regs, but now that the Trump administration has loosened restrictions on financial institutions, JPMorgan is back and can proceed with its expansion plans, according to the article:
In actions never before made public, Obama administration regulators prevented the bank from opening branches in new states as punishment for violating banking rules, according to people familiar with the matter. JPMorgan’s ambitious plan to expand nationally, announced earlier this year, was made possible by the Trump administration’s rollback of those restraints, which date from 2012, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing regulators’ impact on the bank’s plans.
JPMorgan has racked up more than $30 billion in penalties, legal costs and related obligations since the 2008 financial crisis, some of which stemmed from its acquisitions of Bear Stearns Cos. and Washington Mutual Inc. Missteps include excessive risk taken by the London Whale trader and failing to flag transactions related to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Privately, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency stopped JPMorgan from expanding into additional states while resolving compliance breakdowns as part of an unwritten regulatory policy, the people said.
According to the article, those with knowledge of the matter described the ban as “one of the more extreme ways they exerted their control behind the scenes.”
And now that the pressure off, JPMorgan can go ahead with its growth plans. And plans they have.
In September, the bank announced it is plotting an expansion of its business in the Philadelphia and Delaware Valley area and will be opening up approximately 50 new branch locations and add 300 new employees in the Delaware Valley region over the next five years.
Back in April, Chase announced that it was planning a massive expansion in the D.C. area, including adding as many as 70 new branches and hiring up to 700 new employees in northern Virginia, Washington, D.C. and Maryland.
And earlier this year, in February, the bank announced it was building a brand new, 70-story, 2.5-million square-foot, state-of-the-art headquarters in midtown Manhattan that will replacing the bank’s current 52-story building, which houses 15,000 of the bank’s employees. But construction isn’t happening at 270 Park Avenue just yet. It's expected to begin in 2019 and take approximately five years to complete.
The bank also announced recently that it is building a Silicon Valley-based fintech campus to house 1,000 of its employees as the bank looks to keep ahead of the changing landscape of digital payments. The new campus is expected to open in 2020 and will be located in Palo Alto, California, at Stanford Research Park, on a plot of land that formerly housed Lockheed Martin.
The folks over at Mental Floss have answered a question I was itching to know this Halloween… Is it required that a real estate agent disclose if a house is haunted?
According to Mental Floss’ Michele Debczak, that level of disclosure for potential homebuyers depends on the state.
From the article:
The law surrounding property stigmas changes depending on which state you're in. In Massachusetts, realtors aren't required to inform clients of a house's potentially disturbing history unless they ask about it. According to California law, sellers must disclose any deaths that have happened on the property in the past three years.
What constitutes a "haunted" house has proven tricky to legally define. In the 1991 case of Stambovsky v. Ackley (also known as the "Ghostbusters ruling"), New York State declared that sellers must disclose to buyers that they think a house is haunted only if they've already shared this opinion "to the public at large." But as long as they keep their paranormal encounters to themselves, they're under no obligation to speak up when it's time to sell the home.
Who would want to buy a haunted house, anyway? According to a new Realtor.com report, 33% would be okay with purchasing some spooky digs.
Realtor.com’s annual Haunted Real Estate Report shows that 33% of people are willing to take a chance purchasing a haunted home if there were something extra to sweeten the deal (and I don’t think they mean Halloween candy). According to the report, 15% of respondents (and 17% of Millennials surveyed) want a lower home price and 9% are tied, wanting a larger kitchen and a better neighborhood.
Eighteen percent of people wouldn’t require anything extra if having to choose between a haunted home versus a non-haunted home, according to the survey, which was conducted by Harris Interactive and asked 1,067 people in the U.S. The survey notes that almost 25% of people aged 35 to 54 said they wouldn't be affected by the haunted nature of the home while making a purchase decision.
How many people wouldn’t even consider a spooktacular home? 49% of those surveyed said no – There’s no price. And 61% of seniors surveyed insisted they would never buy a haunted home, compared to 41% of Millennials and Gen Xers.
Programming note: ReverseReview Editor Jessica Guerin is at the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association’s conference this week. Keep an eye out for coverage from her on the ReverseReview page or subscribe to the ReverseReview newsletter here.
Have a good week everyone!
