"Imagine a computer that never crashes, or gets infected by a virus. Imagine a computer onto which you never have to install any application. Imagine a computer that follows you wherever you go, be it at school, at work, abroad, or back home. This computer does not exist today, but it will in the future, and this future might be much closer than you think".
This is not a bad descriptor for the digital conveyancing project being undertaken by 247legal. Simple online collaboration between conveyancers and estate agents, vendors and buyers. And why stop there? The collaboration can be extended even further.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
res ipsa loquitur or why cant the govt leave our beaches alone
If the Bayside Council and Department of Sustainability & Environment are allowed to get away with the destruction of the Sandringham foreshore it will be a great tragedy.
The Royal Avenue groyne is one tragedy that has been allowed to remain for too long, the Southey Street groyne is an outrage. The damage to the Southey Street to Tennyson Street beach has been quick and swift with an entire beach being swept away in less than 2 months and that has been over the relatively quiet summer period. In simple terms, the groyne has been over-engineered and the results are obvious.
Quoting Wikipedia -
“The purpose of a groyne is to create and maintain a healthy beach on its updrift side, which in turn provides protection to the land behind. These effects are achieved through two main processes. First, groynes act as a barrier to physically stop sediment transport (sand) in the direction of longshore transport through the system. This causes a build-up of the beach on the groyne's updrift side. Secondly, groynes interrupt the tidal flow forcing the tidal current further offshore beyond the groyne end. This slows the tidal current inshore causing the deposition of heavier sediments and encouraging the beach to grow in size.
However, this is often accompanied by accelerated erosion of the downdrift beach, known as terminal groyne syndrome, as it occurs after the terminal groyne, which receives little or no sand via longshore transport. (It is important to realize that groynes do not add any new sand to the beach, but merely retain some of the existing sand on the updrift side of the groin.) If a groyne is correctly designed, then the amount of material it can hold will be limited, and excess sediment will be free to move on through the system. However, if a groyne is too large it may trap all sediment reaching it and this can cause severe beach erosion problems on the down-drift side, which in turn can result in coastal erosion problems.”
I can just hear DSE saying, well lets build another groyne. No. No. NO NO. Let mother nature care for herself with little or any guidance. REMOVE THE GROYNES. Renourish the beaches every few years if you have to. The GROYNES ARE AN EYESORE. I can hear the Heidelberg artists, Streeton, Roberts, McCubbin, Condor mourning the lost natural vistas.
In the eyes of the law, Bayside Council and Department of Sustainability & Environment are guilty of gross negligence. Res ipsa loquitur. This is the legal term from the Latin meaning literally, "The thing itself speaks" but is more often translated "The thing speaks for itself". The doctrine is applied to tort claims which, as a matter of law, do not have to be explained beyond the obvious facts.
Under the old common law rule, to use res ipsa loquitur in the context of negligence the plaintiff must prove that:
The Plaintiff here is the beloved Sandringham foreshore.
The defendants are the Bayside Council and Department of Sustainability & Environment.
The damage is not irreparable. But action must be swift. The two groynes need to be removed immediately. This is not a case of lets consult for the next 3 years. I don’t recall any public consultation before works started.
Please be put on notice, that if the work to remove the groynes is not begun by 30 June 2007, legal action will be instituted in the Supreme Court of Victoria by public outrage.
The Royal Avenue groyne is one tragedy that has been allowed to remain for too long, the Southey Street groyne is an outrage. The damage to the Southey Street to Tennyson Street beach has been quick and swift with an entire beach being swept away in less than 2 months and that has been over the relatively quiet summer period. In simple terms, the groyne has been over-engineered and the results are obvious.
Quoting Wikipedia -
“The purpose of a groyne is to create and maintain a healthy beach on its updrift side, which in turn provides protection to the land behind. These effects are achieved through two main processes. First, groynes act as a barrier to physically stop sediment transport (sand) in the direction of longshore transport through the system. This causes a build-up of the beach on the groyne's updrift side. Secondly, groynes interrupt the tidal flow forcing the tidal current further offshore beyond the groyne end. This slows the tidal current inshore causing the deposition of heavier sediments and encouraging the beach to grow in size.
However, this is often accompanied by accelerated erosion of the downdrift beach, known as terminal groyne syndrome, as it occurs after the terminal groyne, which receives little or no sand via longshore transport. (It is important to realize that groynes do not add any new sand to the beach, but merely retain some of the existing sand on the updrift side of the groin.) If a groyne is correctly designed, then the amount of material it can hold will be limited, and excess sediment will be free to move on through the system. However, if a groyne is too large it may trap all sediment reaching it and this can cause severe beach erosion problems on the down-drift side, which in turn can result in coastal erosion problems.”
I can just hear DSE saying, well lets build another groyne. No. No. NO NO. Let mother nature care for herself with little or any guidance. REMOVE THE GROYNES. Renourish the beaches every few years if you have to. The GROYNES ARE AN EYESORE. I can hear the Heidelberg artists, Streeton, Roberts, McCubbin, Condor mourning the lost natural vistas.
In the eyes of the law, Bayside Council and Department of Sustainability & Environment are guilty of gross negligence. Res ipsa loquitur. This is the legal term from the Latin meaning literally, "The thing itself speaks" but is more often translated "The thing speaks for itself". The doctrine is applied to tort claims which, as a matter of law, do not have to be explained beyond the obvious facts.
Under the old common law rule, to use res ipsa loquitur in the context of negligence the plaintiff must prove that:
- The harm would not ordinarily have occurred without someone's negligence
- The instrumentality of the harm was under the exclusive control of the defendant at the time of the likely negligent act
- The plaintiff did not contribute to the harm by his own negligence.
The Plaintiff here is the beloved Sandringham foreshore.
The defendants are the Bayside Council and Department of Sustainability & Environment.
The damage is not irreparable. But action must be swift. The two groynes need to be removed immediately. This is not a case of lets consult for the next 3 years. I don’t recall any public consultation before works started.
Please be put on notice, that if the work to remove the groynes is not begun by 30 June 2007, legal action will be instituted in the Supreme Court of Victoria by public outrage.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Archiving
How many law firms think about archiving beyond long term off-site archiving of the physical file?
Having recently lost access to a store room where I retained completed files, I was compelled to turn to a commercial alternative for long term off-site archiving. I made the decision there was no economic incentive or benefit to retain files older than 7 years. These older files are now shredded land fill. Lost for all eternity. When a client rings wanting to know whether the contract date for a purchase was pre-September 1985 all I can do is shrug. On this point I am researching this actual point to determine if their purchase was pre-Sep 85. The answer may lie with one of the statutory authorities who record such things.
Or you simply keep paying the ongoing price of paying monthly archive storage fees and offset the price by charging clients with a retrieval fee.
The problem of physical archives is universal for all law firms.
A better solution lies in digitising legal records on a continual ongoing daily basis. In other words maintain a digital archive, at least for all deeds and important documents like the contract of sale. Every small law firm should start by buying 1 or 2 desktop document feed scanners. The payback is not just short term but long term as there is close to a zero cost to maintaining a long term digital archive.
The NYT published an interesting article on the issue of archives contained in libraries and other important collections. History, Digitized (and Abridged)
Having recently lost access to a store room where I retained completed files, I was compelled to turn to a commercial alternative for long term off-site archiving. I made the decision there was no economic incentive or benefit to retain files older than 7 years. These older files are now shredded land fill. Lost for all eternity. When a client rings wanting to know whether the contract date for a purchase was pre-September 1985 all I can do is shrug. On this point I am researching this actual point to determine if their purchase was pre-Sep 85. The answer may lie with one of the statutory authorities who record such things.
Or you simply keep paying the ongoing price of paying monthly archive storage fees and offset the price by charging clients with a retrieval fee.
The problem of physical archives is universal for all law firms.
A better solution lies in digitising legal records on a continual ongoing daily basis. In other words maintain a digital archive, at least for all deeds and important documents like the contract of sale. Every small law firm should start by buying 1 or 2 desktop document feed scanners. The payback is not just short term but long term as there is close to a zero cost to maintaining a long term digital archive.
The NYT published an interesting article on the issue of archives contained in libraries and other important collections. History, Digitized (and Abridged)
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
US mortgage crisis looming
First the New York Times
While real estate prices were rising, the market for home loans operated like a well-oiled machine, providing ready money to borrowers and high returns to investors like pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and other institutions. Now this enormous and important machine is sputtering, and the effects are reverberating throughout Main Street, Wall Street and Washington.
Already, more than two dozen mortgage lenders have failed or closed their doors, and shares of big companies in the mortgage industry have declined significantly. Delinquencies on loans made to less creditworthy borrowers — known as subprime mortgages — recently reached 12.6 percent. Some banks have reported rising problems among borrowers that were deemed more creditworthy as well.
Like worms that surface after a torrential rain, revelations that emerge when an asset bubble bursts are often unattractive, involving dubious industry practices and even fraud. In the coming weeks, some mortgage market participants predict, investors will learn not only how lax real estate lending standards became, but also how hard to value these opaque securities are and how easy their values are to prop up.
Mortgages requiring little or no documentation became known colloquially as “liar loans.” An April 2006 report by the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, a consulting concern in Reston, Va., analyzed 100 loans in which the borrowers merely stated their incomes, and then looked at documents those borrowers had filed with the I.R.S. The resulting differences were significant: in 90 percent of loans, borrowers overstated their incomes 5 percent or more. But in almost 60 percent of cases, borrowers inflated their incomes by more than half.
Is Australia insulated against the cracks in the mortgage market that are widening in the US?
No, not whilst Australia's median house prices continues to be increasing. And certainly easy credit like the lo doc loan products keeps fueling the price increases.
crikey.com.au weighs in on the same topic
Glenn Dyer writes:
Some of the biggest names in US finance have been caught up in the spreading collapse of the so-called sub-prime mortgage market.
These include Citigroup, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, GMAC and General Electric's finance arm, GE Money which operates in Australia and aggressively markets similar loans through the Wizard Home Loans operation it bought in late 2004.
The crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market (that's what we call no doc/low doc housing loans with no deposit) is worsening with the second biggest lender in the area likely to go bankrupt very shortly.
It's just not an isolated event: the sub-prime mortgage market in the US has been responsible for much of the boom in home prices over the past two years as more and more money has been lent. Some US analysts say that it has been the single most important factor in the US housing boom, which peaked last year and then collapsed, threatening the rest of the US economy.
Now billions of dollars of mortgages are going bad as default rates skyrocket, people lose their homes and new lending dries up.
GE Money bought a small sub-prime lender called WMC Mortgage Corp (US) in April 2004, fed it billions of dollars and watched it jump from number 12 to number five among sub-prime lenders.
Last Friday it shut off new loans, closed several offices and laid off at least 20% of its staff, some 450 people, as the realisation grew that it is going to lose a lot of money for GE.
The reason for the problems is that many loans were sold not only as 100% financings with no deposit and no or low documentation, but they contained cheap starter rates where the initial interest rate was held down for six months to more than a year.
Those higher rates are now kicking in and many people can't afford them: as well as the value of their houses being dragged down by the fall in the overall housing market. It's a horrible double whammy that has seen the industry contract and turn off the lending tap in the space of a month.
And why is this important in Australia? The purchase of WMC gave GE Money a taste for similar businesses and six months later it bought Wizard Home Loans and its parent, from a group of investors which included PBL, founder Mark Bouris and ABN Amro.
Last weekend saw Wizard advertising a new offering of a no doc/low doc loan with 100% finance (ie, no deposit), the very product it has stopped offering in the US because the business is imploding. Here's the Wizard website with its 100% finance offered in the banner headline at the top of the page.
There are growing problems with no doc/low doc/no deposit loans here, especially in the suburbs of western and southwestern Sydney where foreclosures are still rising and house prices are falling.
It's not the crisis it is in the US but it makes you wonder how GE can continue to offer this sort of finance here, with our problems, and knowing the problems that it has got itself into in the US.
While real estate prices were rising, the market for home loans operated like a well-oiled machine, providing ready money to borrowers and high returns to investors like pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and other institutions. Now this enormous and important machine is sputtering, and the effects are reverberating throughout Main Street, Wall Street and Washington.
Already, more than two dozen mortgage lenders have failed or closed their doors, and shares of big companies in the mortgage industry have declined significantly. Delinquencies on loans made to less creditworthy borrowers — known as subprime mortgages — recently reached 12.6 percent. Some banks have reported rising problems among borrowers that were deemed more creditworthy as well.
Like worms that surface after a torrential rain, revelations that emerge when an asset bubble bursts are often unattractive, involving dubious industry practices and even fraud. In the coming weeks, some mortgage market participants predict, investors will learn not only how lax real estate lending standards became, but also how hard to value these opaque securities are and how easy their values are to prop up.
Mortgages requiring little or no documentation became known colloquially as “liar loans.” An April 2006 report by the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, a consulting concern in Reston, Va., analyzed 100 loans in which the borrowers merely stated their incomes, and then looked at documents those borrowers had filed with the I.R.S. The resulting differences were significant: in 90 percent of loans, borrowers overstated their incomes 5 percent or more. But in almost 60 percent of cases, borrowers inflated their incomes by more than half.
Is Australia insulated against the cracks in the mortgage market that are widening in the US?
No, not whilst Australia's median house prices continues to be increasing. And certainly easy credit like the lo doc loan products keeps fueling the price increases.
crikey.com.au weighs in on the same topic
Glenn Dyer writes:
Some of the biggest names in US finance have been caught up in the spreading collapse of the so-called sub-prime mortgage market.
These include Citigroup, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, GMAC and General Electric's finance arm, GE Money which operates in Australia and aggressively markets similar loans through the Wizard Home Loans operation it bought in late 2004.
The crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market (that's what we call no doc/low doc housing loans with no deposit) is worsening with the second biggest lender in the area likely to go bankrupt very shortly.
It's just not an isolated event: the sub-prime mortgage market in the US has been responsible for much of the boom in home prices over the past two years as more and more money has been lent. Some US analysts say that it has been the single most important factor in the US housing boom, which peaked last year and then collapsed, threatening the rest of the US economy.
Now billions of dollars of mortgages are going bad as default rates skyrocket, people lose their homes and new lending dries up.
GE Money bought a small sub-prime lender called WMC Mortgage Corp (US) in April 2004, fed it billions of dollars and watched it jump from number 12 to number five among sub-prime lenders.
Last Friday it shut off new loans, closed several offices and laid off at least 20% of its staff, some 450 people, as the realisation grew that it is going to lose a lot of money for GE.
The reason for the problems is that many loans were sold not only as 100% financings with no deposit and no or low documentation, but they contained cheap starter rates where the initial interest rate was held down for six months to more than a year.
Those higher rates are now kicking in and many people can't afford them: as well as the value of their houses being dragged down by the fall in the overall housing market. It's a horrible double whammy that has seen the industry contract and turn off the lending tap in the space of a month.
And why is this important in Australia? The purchase of WMC gave GE Money a taste for similar businesses and six months later it bought Wizard Home Loans and its parent, from a group of investors which included PBL, founder Mark Bouris and ABN Amro.
Last weekend saw Wizard advertising a new offering of a no doc/low doc loan with 100% finance (ie, no deposit), the very product it has stopped offering in the US because the business is imploding. Here's the Wizard website with its 100% finance offered in the banner headline at the top of the page.
There are growing problems with no doc/low doc/no deposit loans here, especially in the suburbs of western and southwestern Sydney where foreclosures are still rising and house prices are falling.
It's not the crisis it is in the US but it makes you wonder how GE can continue to offer this sort of finance here, with our problems, and knowing the problems that it has got itself into in the US.
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