First American Exec Identifies Source of Mortgage Meltdown

The Deseret Morning News reports:

Speaking Thursday to the Utah chapter of the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Network, Blake Heiner, vice president and regional counsel for First American Title Insurance Co., said fraud is a key component of the current mortgage meltdown.

“Right now, the focus (of many fraud schemes) is on real estate, because that market has been going up, home values have been going up,” he said. “It’s been easy money.”

That clears it up. I had thought is was the greed of those running the Real Estate and Mortgage industries.  It looks like offering ill-advised products, profiting off of conflicts of interest, the willful disregard of good business practices, and sloppy oversight of operations that helped perpetuate abuses like fraud weren’t really causes at all.

Blaming the subprime victim for the industry’s excesses isn’t working.  Blaming the victim never does.  So it appears the Real Estate industry will try to play the victims.  It might be hard for them to generate sympathy, seeing how they created the optimal set up for the fraud to occur in the first place.