Staci Hardee News Today

I am in Reno today, Spokane tomorrow, but I spent much of last week in Chicago which is very much a melting pot of languages. One can walk down the street and hear similar words for the same thing: Hypothèque (French), hipoteca (Spanish), hipotēka (Latvian), hypotheek (Dutch), and hypothek (German). You’ll have to figure out the word on your own. Renovation there is indicative of what is happening in many other cities: Developers and city agencies in Chicago are working tog...

As noted in yesterday’s commentary, mergers and acquisitions of lenders are in the news across the nation. For curious lenders, it is good to have a general guide in how a buyer goes about valuing a lender. I happen to be in rainy Chicago now, but 1,700 miles away, there’s interesting news from the Phoenix area and the desert. How would you appraise a perfectly fine home that had no water? Rio Verde, aptly named Green River, a neighborhood outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, with some ...

Fun with numbers! 1: the number of Chinese surveillance balloons over Montana. (That we know of.) Did you know that the last day of 2023 is 123123? (You heard it here first!) While we’re on random numbers, Atlanta has almost 25 thousand surveillance cameras, grabbing the honors as the most heavily surveilled city in the U.S. with 50 CCTV cameras for every 1,000 inhabitants. (“The research also suggests that there is little correlation between higher camera figures and lower crime i...