Real Estate News & Updates from the Monadnock Region
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R.H. Thackston & Company REALTORS with offices in Keene, Bellows Falls and Winchester announced the following personnel updates.

November 29th, 2011 | Posted by Dick Thackston in Real Estate News - (0 Comments)

Keene - R.H. Thackston & Company REALTORS with offices in Keene, Bellows Falls and Winchester announced the following personnel updates.


Dick Thackston, the company’s principal broker, received special recognition from the New Hampshire Association of REALTORS Honor Society. Earlier this year Thackston was made a lifetime member of the New Hampshire Association of REALTORS Honor Society. Every year the New Hampshire Association of REALTORS Honor Society recognizes the REALTORS within individual local REALTOR Boards for their outstanding participation in both civic and REALTOR affairs by using a points system for the various activities that individual members participates in over the course of a year. Thackston was recognized by the Honor Society as the highest number of points earned for any member of the New Hampshire Commercial Investment Board of REALTORS, (NHCIBOR) were he is a primary member. Thackston has been a member of NHCIBOR for several years; this is his first year as NHCIBOR’s high point winner for the Honor Society. Thackston is also a member of the Monadnock Region Board of REALTORS were he has also been recognized for earning the highest points in the past.  Thackston will be serving as Treasurer of the Monadnock Board of REALTORS in 2012 and is a member of the New Hampshire Association of Realtors, the National Association of REALTORS, National Council of Residential Brokers and Real Estate Buyer’s Agents Council. Thackston is an accredited real estate instructor by the New Hampshire Real Estate Commission and a licensed real estate broker in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont.

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Professors We Love: William Snavely. By Dick

November 7th, 2011 | Posted by Dick Thackston in News - (0 Comments)

In the late 1970s, I arrived at George Mason University, a somewhat ambivalent philosophy major. No longer do I remember how work-study in the Economics Department came my way but I found myself working in the Department for several semesters.

The Economics Department at the end of the 1970s was not yet the world-renowned home of Nobel laureates in a shining building on the Fairfax campus. Rather it was located in an old ranch house on a residential street a short drive away. Distance from Campus was not a burden. This odd bit of office space was filled with men and women of vision and hope lead by a man who had plenty of both, William P. Snavley.

Snavley, Bill to his friends and colleagues, was the head of the Economics Department. He led the department from a few classes in the School of Business in a community college to a separate department within the then-College of Arts & Sciences. Snavley was responsible for laying the foundation of the current Economics Department, which began to attract world-renowned economists both as visitors at first and as staff later. He was a consensus builder. He built consensus within the Board of Visitors and the department to expand offerings, first to offer a master’s program and later a doctoral program. The understanding and acceptance that these programs were not only desirable, but vital to the development of the University was by no means universal at the time.

Snavley made a difference in my life because he was unflappable, optimistic and patient. His physical presence and demeanor were that of a carefully groomed and bespeckled economist thoughtful in all deeds and actions. He was happy to demonstrate riding a bicycle backwards while sitting on the handle bars when someone rode to the Department on a sunny October afternoon.

As a student, I was no world-class scholar; as a philosophy major, I was dreadful, I became an economics major. Snavley never came out and said anything, but he seemed to recognize potential and encourage effort, both of which I needed. After much effort on the part of Snavley and the other members of the Economics Department, I managed to graduate with a degree in Economics.

While working in the department, I learned that the tools of an economist are analytical thinking, cost benefit analysis, and even price theory, all of which have been immensely helpful. Yet, the most universally applicable skills have been those I observed in Snavley as a department head: establishing goals, consensus building, and delegation. The tools I gathered in the Economics Department under Snavley as he led the transition of the department to a world-class economics program, have allowed me to survive and prosper as an entrepreneur over the last three decades.

First Published in the “Mason Spirit” Fall 2011 Issue, a publication of the George Mason University.

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Up to Four Million Foreclosures to be Reviewed by Government!

November 3rd, 2011 | Posted by Dick Thackston in Mortgage News | News | Real Estate News - (0 Comments)

By Dick Thackston CRB, ABRM, ABR

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has begun sending out letters to borrowers who have faced foreclosure since 2009. It is estimated that approximately four million borrowers foreclosures may have been mishandled between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2010. Federal regulators and most of the nation’s largest home mortgage servicers announced earlier this week.

Cases will be reviewed by Federal Regulators as a result of an agreement established in April of this year in which the nation’s fourteen top mortgage servicers agreed with regulators to hire independent consultants to evaluate foreclosure processes and determine if borrowers had experienced financial injury as a result of errors or abuses by servicers. It will be up to the independent consultants to evaluate cases and determine compensation if any due to borrowers.

The Comptroller of the Currency as well as the Federal Reserve will be sending mails between now and the end of the year to notify potential victims of their rights. A mass media campaign is planned as well to direct borrowers to the website www.IndependentForeclosureReview.com or the toll free number 888.952.9105. All requests for review must be submitted by April 30, 2012.

The mortgage servicers and the government agreed that the servicers would pay all the expenses associated of setting up the program. Under government supervision they have hired eight independent consultants that have designed the program to be at no cost to the borrowers. The consultants have set up the website and call center noted above. The program is designed to encourage borrowers from all lenders to use one portal and there is uniform branding and product design to be clearer in the public mind than a number of different sites would be to the public.

There are several basic patterns that the consultants will be looking at to determine wrongdoing and these include miscalculation of fees, a foreclosure that happened while a borrower was under bankruptcy court protection and the most common one in my experience a foreclosure that was done while a borrower was waiting for a response on a loan modification.

This program is a direct result of last year’s robo signing scandal and the investigations that followed. About a year ago it came to public light that many mortgage servicers were cutting corners on due process when foreclosing on properties and either not properly executing documents or simply faking documents to expedite the large number of foreclosures they had on their hands.

This program is a good solution to an unfortunate situation. Objectively, most of these borrowers were in fact behind and many if not most were ready and willingly left their properties to begin over, however that does justify short cutting the legal protection of property rights built into our system of property ownership over the last thousand years from Common Law to Current Law.

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