©2010 AP

The administrator of a $20 billion oil spill compensation fund said Wednesday he's been besieged by real estate agents and brokers, demanding that they become eligible for payments.

 

©2010 Marketwatch.com

With no federal tax credit to entice buyers, today's home sellers have to get even more serious about making a deal.

 

That means pricing aggressively -- low enough to compete with foreclosures in some markets. It's a conversation that stings, said Summer Greene, a real-estate agent for a Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate brokerage office in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.  

 

"It's like telling them that their children are ugly," she said. Read more.

© 2010 Dow Jones

 

U.S. policymakers need to tackle the revamp of government-controlled mortgage finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday.  

 

"Clearly, this is something we need to take on pretty soon," Bernanke said during testimony before the House Financial Services Committee.  

 

The two mortgage finance firms have been under government control since September 2008, and both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have acknowledged that Congress needs to revamp the nation's system for financing home mortgages. The Obama administration is expected to release a proposal for the future role of the two firms later this year. Read more.

© 2010 Washington Post

 

People who applied for a mortgage as of June 1 might see their finances -- specifically their debt -- under renewed scrutiny days before they are scheduled to complete a home purchase.

Fannie Mae, the giant government-run mortgage finance company, rolled out a new policy this summer that encourages lenders to retrieve a borrower's "refreshed" credit report just before a loan closes.

 

©2010 Ecreditdaily.com 

 

The Federal Housing Administration will require new borrowers to have a minimum FICO score of 580 to qualify for its flagship 3.5 percent down-payment program – and those with scores of less than 500 will no longer qualify for FHA-insured mortgages. 

 

The FHA is seeking public comments on several policy changes aimed at bolstering its depleted capital reserves, while keeping intact its mission of facilitating home ownership in underserved communities. 

 

The new policies, first announced in January, will also require new borrowers with credit scores of less than a 580 to make a cash investment of at least 10 percent. Read more.

©2010 Greenwire.com

 

Decades of mapping, advances in satellite imagery and a dedication to scientific decisionmaking has resulted in the first comprehensive, interactive land cover map of the United States.

 

"It's the best imagery we have right now, the best characterization of land cover that exists as far as I know," said John Mosesso, manager of the Gap Analysis Program (GAP), a project of the U.S. Geological Survey that created the map.

 

The map depicts the extent of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other habitats from coast to coast. USGS has made it searchable by state and region at three different levels of detail using eight, 43 or 590 classification categories. That means a user can view the map as broadly as forest or shrubland, or as specifically as Mediterranean California Lower Montane Black Oak-Conifer Forest and Woodland.

And it is available for anyone with computer access.

 

"It doesn't do much good to have data sitting somewhere where people can't get at it," Mosesso said.

 

The habitat information can be combined with maps of species distribution and protected areas to see where there are conservation holes. While this can be used for endangered species, GAP's motto is "Keeping common species common." USGS makes no specific recommendations, but the hope is that resources managers will use this information to proactively fill in conservation gaps before habitats are fragmented by development and wildlife pushed toward extinction.

 

But to do that accurately and effectively, managers need the baseline data these maps provide. "It's vitally important for scientific decisionmakers and resource managers to have a clear understanding of exactly what they are dealing with," Mosesso said.

 

In the past, decisionmakers relied on information observers collected based on where they had been and happened to have seen. Now, satellite imagery provides a systematic snapshot of the entire country.

 

"It creates a framework to monitor changes over time," said Rob McDonald, a conservation scientist with the Nature Conservancy. "That's a really powerful thing for conservation.

 

 

"USGS has been working on this multimillion-dollar map for most of a decade, attacking large regions at a time. Prices for satellite images have come down dramatically in the past 20 years, enabling the mapping team to purchase images for much of the United States. Instead of government agencies pooling resources to buy just one image per site, USGS could afford three images per location to capture seasonal variation, which increases accuracy in categorizing habitats, said Kevin Gergely, GAP's national program coordinator.

 

The satellite images are not like the street-view photographs in Google maps; they are numerical values expressing how much light is reflected from the surface of the Earth. To translate those numbers into corresponding habitat categories, scientists from USGS and partner organizations spent hours in the field recording on-the-ground conditions. Surveyors matched the field samples with the satellite numbers, and trained computer models to convert the reflection values into tangible land cover categories like forest, grassland, wetland, human use and so on.

 

Once this process was completed for the Southwest, Northwest, Southeast and California by 2009, surveyors had enough consistent data to combine with the Forest Service's Land Fire database and, voilà, they had pieced together the first complete national land cover map.

 

The map is 1:100,000 resolution, which is less detailed than a 1:24,000 topography map. It cannot tell viewers how many trees are in a forest, but it can identify the dominant tree species. A broad brush stroke is important for large-scale planning at agencies like the federal Bureau of Land Management or state departments of fish and game. The map helps them see where large tracts of diverse ecosystems still exist so they can work to preserve whole habitats, rather than just single species.

 

"We'll never map or have knowledge of where every species is," McDonald said. "A coarse filter helps you protect species you don't know or even think about."

 

USGS scientists may publish findings based on the map in a peer-reviewed journal, Gergely said.

 

Click here to view the mapping program.

©2010 ASAE 

 

The Senate Finance Committee held its first hearing Wednesday to examine the impact of extending the 2001 and 2003 middle-class tax cuts past this year while acknowledging that extending the cuts could cause a budget crisis.  The cuts are due to expire at the end of the 2010 calendar year.

Committee members and the panel all agreed on the necessity of extending the middle class tax cuts to help steady economic recovery, but opinion diverged on the length of the extension, as well as the possibility of extending the cuts for the top rate as well.  Committee chair Max Baucus (D-MT) reiterated his support for a permanent extension of the middle class cuts (defined as families earning less than $250,000 annually).  However, according to the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA), some House Democratic leaders and economists are concerned that the $2.5 trillion in estimated lost revenue from the middle class cuts will be needed in the long-term to pay down the deficit.

"The income tax is a mess and badly in need of an overhaul," said Leonard Burman, a tax policy analyst and member of the hearing's panel.  "Permanent extension of the tax cuts would make such a reform far more difficult and would signal to the market that our budget problems are only going to get worse."

Republicans on the panel also raised the concern that failure to extend the tax cuts for the top bracket would hurt small businesses; some small business owners simply report their income from their business on their personal tax forms.  Ranking member Charles Grassley (R-IA) argued that failing to extend the cuts for the highest bracket (which would rise from 35% to 39.6% next year) would hurt many small businesses' ability to hire new employees.  The estimated cost of extending the top-rate cuts would be $1 trillion over 10 years.