Solar Panels and Tax Credits

Continuing on with our newly adopted "green emphasis," we discuss a great technology that can also save many businesses and individuals money in the long run. Solar panels collect energy from the sun and convert the energy into electricity. Solar panels are generally placed on rooftops to have direct access to sunlight. The solar cells absorb the sun's energy during the day, and that energy is used to generate electricity.

The advantage of using solar is that it is a method of harnessing renewable energy that is clean. The disadvantage of using solar is that there is initially a sizable investment to purchase and install solar panels. That being said, solar panels can pay for themselves in a matter of months or years. Today more than ever, people are becoming very interested in both saving money and saving the planet with eco-friendly solar panels.

Burning oil releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and if that isn't bad enough, obtaining oil destroys the environment and the risks of devastating oil spills when oil is transported are just not worth it. The green advantages of solar panels are that solar energy, unlike oil, is a renewable resource. Solar energy is also non-polluting.

The money saving advantages for individuals and businesses are that by using energy from the sun, it is easy to reduce the ongoing and increasingly more and more expensive costs of lighting, cooking, working, entertaining, heating and cooling. With solar panels you can greatly decrease or even eliminate monthly electric bills.

That's what everyone already knows.

So -- What's New in Solar Panels?

A lot.

If you looked into solar panels in the past and thought they were too expensive, difficult to install or maintain - then it is time to look again. If you're considering solar panels for the first time as a way to adopt more green and economical practices, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Due to lower prices, more user-friendly options, new technologies and laws, it is now a great time to invest in solar panels.

In the past, solar panels were expensive, and silicon, which is used as a semi-conductor in solar panels, was in short supply as well. As interest in solar energy and solar panels increased, (mainly due to the demand for computer chips) the price of silicon rose over drastically. Things are leveling out today as silicon production has increased to over 25,000 tons in 2007. It is predicted that by 2010, silicon manufacture will reach over 75,000 tons.

Even though there is a heavier demand for solar panels these days, new technologies are being developed that are cutting back some of the cost on both solar panels and on gathering the sun's energy. A new solar panel technology uses heliotubes as a conductor to track the sun and gather sunlight. These panels are larger but they are much less expensive than typical solar panels and positioning them is considerably more flexible.

In addition to the lower costs and increased efficiency of solar panels, tax credits are also making solar panels more attractive and affordable. Tax credits are generally more valuable than an equivalent tax deduction because a tax credit reduces tax dollar for dollar while a deduction only reduces the amount of income on which you are taxed. In addition to helpful federal tax credits, there are additional options in certain cities or states. Pittsburgh, Portland and Denver are working hard to make it easier to go green using solar panels. In these cities and a few others, it is possible to recoup part of the initial investment in solar panels through credits.

Green Jobs in a Growing Lending Area

Recently I upgraded my lending areas to include the following states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington. Info203k is also one of those companies that is trying to make an effort to adopt environmentally safe business practices. So in light of that newly adopted green effort as well as expanded lending area, today's blog post is about green jobs in Oregon.

According to an article in the Portland Tribune, as well as a new state report, Oregon had more than 50,000 “green” jobs in 2008, and employers across the state expect to add many more in the next few years.

Oregon Employment Department’s “Greening of Oregon’s Work force: Jobs, Wages and Training,” reported that the state had 51,402 jobs in energy efficiency or renewable projects and a handful of other environmentally related fields. That accounted for about 3 percent of the state’s total employment.

By 2010, employers say they’ll add about 14 percent more green jobs, according to the state report.

Oregon’s Employment Department released information about the report Monday morning, June 29. The report was based on a survey of employers and found that "green jobs" consisted of 226 different occupations.

A green job is one that "provides a service or a product by increasing energy efficiency; producing renewable energy; preventing, reducing or mitigating environmental degradation; cleaning up and restoring the natural environment; and, providing education, consulting, policy promotion, accreditation, trading and offsets or similar services for related environmental projects."

Construction, wholesale and retail trade and administrative and waste services were the leading industries for most green jobs, about 47 percent of the total, according to the report. The amount of construction loans so first-time home buyers could make home improvements will spike dramatically and become a much larger part of the entire process next year.

The five occupations with the most green jobs were carpenters, farm workers, truck drivers, hazardous materials removal workers and landscaping and groundskeepers.

The average wage for green jobs in 2008 was $22.61 an hour.

According to the report, nearly a third of green jobs required a special license or certificate. The most common requirements were specific to occupations, such as an electrician’s license. Other common requirements were environmental cleanup or abatement certifications, equipment operator licenses and commercial driver’s licenses and prior on-the-job experience.

The report was funded, in part, with Employer Workforce Training Funds administered by the Oregon Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development.

Taking Advantage of the Desperate - Foreclosure Prevention Scams

Kenneth R. Harney of LA Times discusses foreclosure prevention scams and what companies are doing to get money from desperate families threatened with the nightmare of losing their homes. In his blog post below, he discusses the types of letters these companies send people, the exact language and offers that appear in these letters, and how they seem to have found loopholes in the system in order to operate under the radar.

How's this for a business plan? A company buys or rents lists of recent default filings from across the country -- thousands of people who have been notified by lenders that if they don't get their mortgage payments back on track, the next step will be foreclosure.

Then they send each homeowner on the list a personalized letter with an urgent message: "We know you're having a tough time right now, but we can save your home! It's not too late! We know how to get through to your lender and work things out to save your house. Call this toll-free number immediately!"

The letters go to rich people, poor people, owners of big and small houses, and they generate hundreds of callbacks.

But in most cases, the panicked homeowners who agreed to pay a fee of $1,200 to $1,300 for the foreclosure prevention services in advance receive little or nothing in the way of help.

The homeowners lose their houses to foreclosure, and the rescue company keeps sending out letters and pocketing fees.

Late last month, the Federal Trade Commission settled with a Florida company -- United Home Savers -- that allegedly operated like this and victimized more than 3,100 homeowners nationwide. The company and its officers denied any legal wrongdoing as part of the settlement but have shut down the firm and agreed to a $4.1-million judgment and close monitoring by federal officials of their future business activities. However, most of the judgment was suspended because United Home Savers and its principals had only about $22,000 in their bank accounts when the FTC froze their assets under court order. United could not be reached for comment.

The 3,100 victims, in other words, probably won't see a dime in restitution.

"What really hurts," said Harold Kirtz, the FTC lawyer who led the government's case against United Home Savers, " is that a lot of these people not only lost money upfront, but they also fell further behind on their mortgages" during the weeks and months while they waited for United's staff counselors to work things out with their lenders.


United is just one of hundreds of alleged foreclosure rescue operations that have prospered in the mortgage market bust. Reilly Dolan is familiar with many of them. He is the FTC's assistant director for financial practices and the coordinator of Operation Loan Lies, a federal-state effort that has targeted 189 companies allegedly running mortgage modification or foreclosure prevention scams. The FTC alone has brought or settled 19 cases against firms of this type in the last 12 months, Dolan said. "And more are coming."

"This is now one of the top priorities" at the FTC, Dolan said, because the sheer breadth of mortgage foreclosure problems "has caused a lot of scams to come out of the woodwork."

Kirtz, who is based at the FTC's Atlanta office, said even well-educated, financially knowledgeable consumers can fall prey to loan modification and foreclosure prevention rip-offs because "they are in a very vulnerable state," threatened with the loss of the roof over their head. As a result, they don't ask the questions they should, and they don't look for the clear warning indicators of potential fraud. What telltale signs should tip off financially distressed homeowners?

* No. 1: If the company claims to be able to guarantee success in preventing foreclosure, no matter what your financial situation or mortgage details, don't listen further to the pitch. Nobody can guarantee you'll get a loan modification, and nobody can guarantee that your lender won't pull the plug and foreclose.

* No. 2: Although there is no federal law against collection of upfront fees for loan modification assistance -- unlike so-called credit repair operations, through which fees are prohibited until services are completed -- any company asking for $1,000 to $4,000 in advance should be checked out thoroughly by the homeowner before any payment.

"We can't say all advance fees are illegal," Kirtz said. But when the fees are for things like processing and administration costs, he said, "in most cases they're probably bogus."

* No. 3: Mortgage modification companies that claim to have special inside connections allowing them to make your payments directly to your lender -- provided you send your monthly checks to the modification company, not to your regular servicer -- are almost certainly intent on one thing: cashing as many of your checks as possible, pocketing the money and leaving you unprotected and heading for foreclosure.

Twitter for Real Estate

Real estate agents and many others in the industry are scanning for clients on these and other popular online social networking sites. Is this a good way to sell a home or are agents' sales pitches getting lost in the post?

Agents who use the social media to market themselves and their homes say they hope to generate referrals — the equivalent to a phone call to a friend about a new for-sale sign on a lawn two or three years ago.


When you finally break down like everyone else and sign up for Facebook or Twitter, you expect to get a stream of random messages from the people that make up your virtual social network — but wait- pitches, pictures and updates on homes for sale? That's different.

Real Estate writer Alex Veiga goes on to discuss what realtors are doing, their strategies and why it might not be a bad way to business these days in her blog below.

"Tweeting is the same way," says Duane Hopper, an owner and broker at Century 21 Real Estate Center in Seattle, referring to the term for posting messages on the micro-blogging Web site Twitter.com.

"There is a multiplier effect that can take place, particularly on very hot information," adds Hopper, who posts information about homes he's trying to sell and promotes himself on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and ActiveRain.

Twitter lets users create profiles where they can post messages of up to 140 characters that can be viewed by anyone with Internet access on a PC or mobile phone.

Hopper started using the site last fall. Since then, he's racked up more than 600 people who have elected to "follow" his tweets. (By comparison, celebrities such as Britney Spears have hundreds of thousands of dedicated tweet recipients.)

A recent look at Hopper's Twitter page revealed more than 20 tweets, although not all the posts were real estate-related.

Hopper liberally mixes tweets about the Mariners baseball team — "Getting excited for Home Opening Day for the 5-2 Mariners" — with posts on his daily real estate rounds: "On my way to paint For Sale Post at our hot new Kirkland listing. Can't anyone get the color right?"

But often, Hopper's tweets are listings of homes for sale that read like word-stingy newspaper classified ads: "At Juanita Multi-level photo shoot," started a recent post. "Listing coming. Hurry if you have buyers. Under $500K, 2,190 feet. 3Bed 2.5Bth."

Hopper also sometimes includes Web links to a virtual tour of the home.

Jo-Ann Cervin, a buyer's agent with ZipRealty in Las Vegas, began using the site just last week under the handle "LV_Cheap_Houses," but she's wasted little time posting a barrage of bulletins urging readers to buy now.

So far, she's got 44 users subscribing to her tweets, which mostly consist of homes for sale or calls to action like this one: "Las Vegas bank owned properties are seeing multiple offers! The great deals are going QUICK!"

Cervin isn't worried that the barrage of home listings via tweets will scare off those who subscribe to her missives.

"They're choosing to connect with me," Cervin says. "I'm not spamming."

On Facebook, which boasts more than 200 million active users, many real estate firms have profile pages that sometimes feature home listings and discussions about real estate. Some agents set up commercial Facebook pages, which are open to all users.

Many agents use one of several Facebook applications designed to highlight home listings on their profile page, such as eListIt's My Listings widget. Others let users pipe in video tours.

John Ammirati, an associate broker with Century 21 Prevete in Long Insland, N.Y., created a Facebook page for his company so his agents log in and post listings and information about open houses.

"We're just starting to get into video," he says.

Hopper takes a more subtle approach on Facebook, however.

He tries to keep it personal, posting photos of a recent vacation, for example, while only sprinkling in real estate listings and links to virtual home tours.

"I don't want to overwhelm people," Hopper says. "It's like getting unsolicited advertising if you overdo it."

Cervin also only recently began playing up her real estate business on Facebook. She hopes her friends will refer her to would-be homebuyers. She's also on ActiveRain, where she blogs about real estate and, ultimately, hopes to nab some client referrals from other agents on the site.

Still, Cervin says she hasn't received any business directly from her social networking activities — yet. "At this point it's free advertising," she says. Hopper concedes he also has yet to find a buyer directly through social networking. But he's confident it is helping, even if only to broaden the chance that another real estate agent in his network will see his home sale tweets and recommend a listing to a client. "I'm getting good activity on my properties," Hopper says. "I feel that some of it is coming from that."

For anyone considering selling their home on their own, the sites may help get the word out. The trick is getting connected to as many real estate professionals as possible.

A search for the term "real estate" in Twitter turns up hundreds of people or businesses tweeting on the subject. So one way is to sign up to receive real estate agents' tweets and then engage them with details of your home.

(Full disclosure: the Associated Press sends news headlines on Twitter, and searches tweets for breaking news and photos.)

Ammirati, who began using Twitter in December and now fires off tweets six days a week to nearly 600 people on the site, suggests finding real estate-oriented groups with more than 100 tweet trackers and join the pack.

Another option is to use applications like twitpick, which allows users to share photos through Twitter.

Ammirati, who also uses Facebook, ActiveRain and LinkedIn, now takes photos of homes being listed for sale with his firm and posts them on Twitter via twitpick.

Social network has begun to pay off for Ammirati.

Since he and his agents began using Facebook and other sites about a year ago, the efforts have brought in at least four clients.

"Part of it is the agents themselves reconnecting with some people in the past," Ammirati says. "Sometimes it's hard to quantify how this networking leads exactly to (new clients)."