June 29, 2023
Suffolk Law Hiring A Tenure-Track Real Estate Professor
Sargent Hall, Suffolk Law School
John Infranca of Suffolk University Law School asked that I post this because one of the positions is focused on Real Estate Transactions:
Suffolk University Law School in Boston expects to fill up to three tenure-track or tenured doctrinal faculty positions, starting in 2024-2025. We seek candidates with a strong record or promise of significant scholarship and a demonstrated commitment to excellence in teaching. Our search will focus on Property; Constitutional Law; and a third position open to a range of teaching and scholarly interests. Our needs in the area of Property include the first-year course plus advanced courses in Trusts and Estates and Real Estate Transactions. Our needs in the area of Constitutional Law include the first-year course plus advanced courses in First Amendment and Civil Rights (including the intersection of law and race, gender, and sexual orientation). Our additional needs include Family Law, Business Law, Technology Law, Professional Responsibility and Health Law.
Interested candidates should include in their application a curriculum vitae with a cover letter and scholarly agenda addressed to Professors John Infranca and Linda Sandstrom Simard, co-chairs of the Appointments Committee. Candidates are invited to share in their cover letter how they would advance the law school’s commitment to diversity and inclusion through their teaching, scholarship or service. When you post materials on Jobvite, do not send duplicate materials to the Chairs of the Appointments Committee via email.
Suffolk University does not discriminate against any person on the basis of race, color, national origin, ancestry, religious creed, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, age, genetic information, or status as a veteran in admission to, access to, treatment in, or employment in its programs, activities, or employment. Suffolk University is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer. The University is dedicated to the goal of building a diverse and inclusive faculty and staff that reflect the broad range of human experience who contribute to the robust exchange of ideas on campus, and who are committed to teaching and working in a diverse environment. We strongly encourage applications from groups historically marginalized or underrepresented because of race/color, gender, religious creed, disability, national origin, veteran status or LGBTQ status. Suffolk University is especially interested in candidates who, through their training, service and experience, will contribute to the diversity and excellence of the University community.
June 29, 2023 | Permalink | No Comments
May 9, 2023
Paying off Mortgages before Retirement
I was quoted in Should You Pay off Your Mortgage before Retirement? It opens,
Getting rid of what may be your largest monthly expense and unburdening yourself of debt are great benefits of becoming mortgage free at any age. But it may be particularly attractive as you approach retirement.
“Back in the 20th century, people used to burn their mortgage documents once they had paid the loan off,” said David Reiss, a law professor who specializes in real estate and consumer financial services at Brooklyn Law School in New York. “That practice reflected the freedom that many felt from no longer having to borrow to own their family home.”
Indeed, that emotional freedom helped make the idea of paying off your mortgage before retirement conventional wisdom for financial planning.
And there are still good reasons to consider it.
“It’s always helpful to pay attention to rules of thumb like, ‘You should pay off your mortgage before retirement,’” said Reiss. Those rules are often true under typical circumstances. But you want to understand the assumptions behind the rules and see how they compare with your situation.
Traditionally, the main reasons to pay off your mortgage before retirement are to get rid of the monthly payment (perhaps allowing for a better balance of income with expenses) and to gain the emotional benefit of having your home paid off, said Casey Fleming, a California-based mortgage advisor and the author of Buying and Financing Your New Home.
But there can be other considerations as well. These can include:
Each of these areas can provide good reasons to sunset a mortgage, but also good reasons not to. It all depends on personal circumstances, so it’s important to take a closer look.
Balancing income and expenses
For some people, retirement means shifting to a fixed income that may be lower than what they brought in during their working years. Eliminating a significant bill ahead of time — like a mortgage payment — may make living on a fixed income a little more affordable.
But that may not be the case for everyone.
“For instance, most people see a significant drop in income when they retire,” Reiss said. “If that is not the case for you — you have a great pension, your spouse is still working, etc. — then you have more flexibility when it comes to your mortgage.”
When matching income and expenses in retirement, it’s important also to take a long-term view. For example, if your spouse will retire a few years after you do, you may want to increase your mortgage payments to time their retirement with your loan payoff date.
Emotional benefits
When you carry a mortgage, someone else has a powerful legal hold on your home. Forget to pay your homeowner’s insurance bill? Your lender can buy coverage — very expensive coverage — on your behalf. Miss too many loan payments? Your lender can foreclose.
As noted earlier, taking back that power made paying off the mortgage a celebratory event. Not only did people burn mortgage documents, but some also hung eagles over their doorways, using the symbol of American freedom to herald their freedom from mortgage debt to visitors.
Yet you’re never truly free of foreclosure risk — you’ll still have to pay your property taxes even after you’ve extinguished your mortgage. And most people should still carry homeowner’s insurance, even when a lender doesn’t require it — which means you’ll have to answer to your insurance carrier. If they don’t like the wood-burning stove in your garage, you’ll have to take it out unless you can find another company that approves having it.
Still, many people feel differently about their homes once the mortgage is paid in full.
Liquidity
Paying off your mortgage before you retire — assuming that you’re not already on schedule to do so — means using assets you might otherwise allocate elsewhere.
Generally, if you have enough money in your retirement fund to handle your living expenses comfortably, plus a cushion for extraordinary expenses (like medical bills as you get older), then it’s safe to pay off your mortgage, Fleming said.
But it may be unwise to use liquid assets, such as stocks, bonds, and cash, to pay down your mortgage as you approach retirement because home equity is far less liquid. If, after you retire, you wish you had that money back, you may have to look at options for selling your home, refinancing it, or getting a reverse mortgage, all of which require time and fees.
Return on investment
Paying off any sort of debt gives you a guaranteed return on investment. If you’re carrying a mortgage at 7 percent, paying it off may be attractive because you typically would have difficulty earning a guaranteed 7 percent long term anywhere else.
Of course, with a lower mortgage rate or a higher risk tolerance, early mortgage repayment becomes less attractive from an ROI perspective. So, it becomes a personal choice about risk and lifestyle.
Taxes
Another argument in favor of paying off your mortgage before retirement is if you won’t lose a tax deduction by doing so.
“The standard deduction is pretty high now, and many seniors don’t benefit anymore from the mortgage interest tax deduction,” Fleming said.
If your standard deduction is greater than your itemized deductions — and for the vast majority of Americans, it is — you can’t reduce your tax obligations by deducting your mortgage interest.
However, the standard deduction in effect today could halve in 2026. The doubling of the standard deduction that became effective in 2018 is one of many tax code provisions that’s set to expire at the end of 2025.
And even if your mortgage interest by itself doesn’t get you over the standard deduction threshold — in 2023, that’s $13,850 for single taxpayers, $27,700 for married taxpayers who file jointly, and $20,800 for heads of household — when combined with other itemizable deductions such as charitable donations and state and local income taxes, paying off your mortgage early might increase your tax bill.
“If you pay off a mortgage early, you are saving on mortgage interest, but you may also be giving up the mortgage interest deduction,” Reiss said. “If you do not pay it off early, you can earn interest in a bank account, but you will be paying taxes on that interest. You want to think through the consequences of your choice to see which is the most financially attractive, including the tax consequences.”
May 9, 2023 | Permalink | No Comments
May 8, 2023
Blockchain Coming To Your Block
Joseph Bizub, Justin Peralta and I wrote the lead story for latest issue of N.Y. Real Property Law Journal, Blockchain Coming to a Block Near You: How FinTech is Changing Real Estate Investing. You can find it on page 5: bit.ly/BlockchainStory. It argues,
Until recently, real estate with a small footprint – one-to-four-family homes as well as small retail, office, and industrial buildings – were generally within the purview of small investors who invested locally. Today, because of technological advances, these owner-occupants and investors face competition from an emerging class of decentralized finance (DeFi) investors. Fintech companies are presenting DeFi investors with new approaches to the challenges that real estate investing traditionally poses: illiquidity, high capital requirements, lack of diversification, and opaque markets. This article focuses on how fintech companies are meeting those challenges and suggests that while much of their vaunted innovation is simply old wine in new bottles, there is good reason to think that they will be driving a lot of investment in small real estate transactions in the future, in no small part because people like shiny new bottles.
You can also find the draft on SSRN and BePress.
May 8, 2023 | Permalink | No Comments
February 6, 2023
American College of Mortgage Attorneys
Just announcing that I have been selected as a Fellow of the American College of Mortgage Attorneys, one of only a couple dozen in New York. ACMA fellows are nominated by their peers, and the designation recognizes excellence in the field.
ACMA comprises 500 attorneys in North America who are experts in mortgage law. Fellows must have distinguished themselves as practitioners in the field of real estate mortgage law through their skills and practice experience, bar association activities, lecturing, authoring articles and program materials, participation in the legislative process, and writing briefs and/or arguing cases that are significant to mortgage transactions.
Fellows share a commitment to giving back to their profession, improving and reforming laws and procedures affecting real estate secured transactions, and raising the level of professionalism of lawyers practicing in this area.
February 6, 2023 | Permalink | No Comments
January 27, 2023
Biden’s “Bill of Rights” for Renters
I was interviewed for a CBS in Austin (and other local Sinclair affiliates) news story, Biden Administration Proposes ‘Bill of Rights’ to Protect Renters in Tight Housing Market. The text of the story opens,
Data shows that more than a third of Americans — about 44 million people— rent their homes. As rent prices soar amid inflation and supply struggles, the White House has just announced a plan to address the problem.
The national average rent-to-income (RTI) reached 30% for the first time in our 20+ years of tracking history, up 1.5% from year-ago or 0.2% from Q3, keeping the growth rate constant throughout the second half of last year,” a new report by financial services firm Moody’s Analytics says.
Now, the Biden administration is hoping to ease some of that market pressure with regulations that would include potential limits on rent hikes in certain properties.
The proposal is meant to make renting more affordable and protect tenants but some close to the issue say they don’t want the government to get involved.
The rent hikes have affected people of all age groups in cities nationwide but now, in a non-binding “Blueprint For a Renter’s Bill of Rights,” the Biden administration provides guidelines to protect them.
According to the plan, the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will explore ways to take action against practices that prevent people from getting and staying in housing.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says it will propose requiring certain tenants who miss a rent payment to get 30 days’ notice before ending their lease. For certain properties, the Biden administration also asked the federal housing finance agency to look into potential limits on rent hikes.
Rents have gone up dramatically in many communities in ways that we didn’t expect as you said during the COVID crisis. I think we’re seeing major major long-term trends that are playing out that isn’t great for renters,” said David Reiss, a professor at the Brooklyn Law School.
Reiss believes the White House’s multiagency approach is more about looking at best practices for processes like eviction but it isn’t dramatically changing the landlord-tenant relationship.
The National Apartment Association provided a statement saying that they’ve “made clear the industry’s opposition to expanded federal involvement” in that relationship, adding that “complex housing policy is a state and local issue.”
Reiss says since rent regulation is currently left up to every state, it’s important for renters to know their rights.
“You want to know if you have a right of notice as to when you’re rent is gonna increase and what happens if a landlord doesn’t give that to you. You’re going to want to know if there’s a limitation on rent increases, and you want to make sure that your rent does not increase at a higher level than that,” Reiss said.
January 27, 2023 | Permalink | No Comments
January 26, 2023
How Fintech Is Changing Real Estate Investing
Joseph Bizub, Justin Peralta and I have posted a short article, Blockchain Coming to a Block Near You: How Fintech Is Changing Real Estate Investing (also available on SSRN here). It opens,
Until recently, real estate with a small footprint – one-to-four-family homes as well as small retail, office, and industrial buildings – were generally within the purview of small investors who invested locally. Today, because of technological advances, these owner-occupants and investors face competition from an emerging class of decentralized finance (DeFi) investors. Fintech companies are presenting DeFi investors with new approaches to the challenges that real estate investing traditionally poses: illiquidity, high capital requirements, lack of diversification, and opaque markets. This article focuses on how fintech companies are meeting those challenges and suggests that while much of their vaunted innovation is simply old wine in new bottles, there is good reason to think that they will be driving a lot of investment in small real estate transactions in the future, in no small part because people like shiny new bottles.
January 26, 2023 | Permalink | No Comments
January 13, 2023
CBC Interview on Appointment of Special Counsel
I was interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Company in Special Counsel to Investigate Biden’s Handling of Classified Documents. The clip explains that a “special counsel has been named to investigate U.S. President Joe Biden’s handling of two batches of classified documents after more sensitive government materials were found in his personal home.”
January 13, 2023 | Permalink | No Comments
