Homeowners Quotes & Sayings

Someday we might look back with a curious nostalgia at the days when profligate homeowners wastefully sprayed their lawns with liquid gold to make the grass grow, just so they could then burn black gold to cut it down on the weekends. — Alok Jha

A decline in the national housing price level would need to be substantial to trigger a significant rise in foreclosures, because the vast majority of homeowners have built up substantial equity in their homes despite large mortgage-market financed withdrawals of home equity in recent years. — Alan Greenspan

The Chinese Communist Party has seen fit to protect most property rights because it recognizes that it has a self-interest in doing so. But the party faces no legal constraints other than its own internal political controls if it decides to violate property rights. Many peasants find their land coveted by municipal authorities and developers who want to turn it into commercial real estate, high-density housing, shopping centers, and the like, or else into public infrastructure like roads, dams, or government offices. There are large incentives for developers to work together with corrupt local officials to illegally take land away from peasants or urban homeowners, and such takings have been perhaps the largest single source of social discontent in contemporary China.33 — Francis Fukuyama

More Americans own their home than ever before. Nearly 70 percent of American's are homeowners. So it is a good time for us to asses the positive impacts of homeownership on families, communities and on the nation's economy. — Randy Neugebauer

There is no better way to quickly buoy hard-pressed homeowners than helping them take advantage of the currently record low fixed mortgage rates and significantly reduce their monthly mortgage payments. — Mark Zandi

I think even when homeowners love their room, it's still a shock, because you left your house, went to sleep, came home and your room was dramatically and drastically different. — Paige Davis

Homeowners want solar power. It's cost-effective. We invented a business model that makes it really easy for consumers to switch to solar - and that's solar-as-a-service. — Lynn Jurich

I have talked to people across the country struggling in the face of an altered climate. New Jersey homeowners are trying to rebuild after Superstorm Sandy. Miami government officials are trying to plan for rising seas and flooded streets. California farmers are trying to make it through the state's worst drought on record. — Frances Beinecke

One way for communities to create affordable housing is for local communities to adopt land-use rights. Local governments or community land trusts would provide financing to homebuyers, who would then make land contributions on their properties in perpetuity. As a result, communities would get reimbursed for the goods and services they provide to homeowners, while property buyers would primarily become home buyers not land buyers. — Martin Adams

What Habitat does is much more than just sheltering people. It's what it does for people on the inside. It's that intangible quality of hope. Many people without decent housing consider themselves life's losers. This is the first victory they may have ever had. And it changes them. We see Habitat homeowners go back to school and get their GEDs, enter college, do all kinds of things they never believed they could do before they moved into their house. By their own initiative, through their own pride and hope, they change. — Millard Fuller

Based on the overwhelming array of luxury products manufacturers have recently introduced, homeowners want anything that makes their lives more comfortable at home. Whether it involves heating/warming accessories or spa-like home environments, it's part of the 'cocooning' phenomena that has resurfaced. People are spending more time at home and they want to be comfortable. They want to use their home to its full potential, not just as a place to eat and sleep between workdays. — Stephanie Miller

In fact, there are more homeowners today than ever before in the history of our Nation and more minority homeowners than ever before in the history of our Nation. — Todd Tiahrt

Every day there are homeowners in California who will either receive relief so they can stay in their home, or will be in the foreclosure process and potentially lose their home. And that always weighed heavily on my mind. — Kamala Harris

It's just as easy to buy a $12,000 watch in East Hampton as it is to pick up a carton of milk, and new homeowners are so impatient that they landscape their front lawns with 'mature gardens' of full-grown trees. — Steven Gaines

Energy efficiency should be on the priority list for all home improvement work these days. Canny builders will be able to provide homeowners with energy efficient measures which help them to save money and the planet. — Sarah Beeny

The pro skaters I know are responsible members of society. Many of them are fathers, homeowners, world travelers and successful entrepreneurs. Their hairdos and tattoos are simply part of our culture, even when they raise eyebrows during PTA meetings. — Tony Hawk

Homeowners refinance their loans when interest rates go down. Businesses refinance their loans. — Elizabeth Warren

The problems of 2008 were never cured. The Federal Reserve's solution to the crisis was to lend the economy enough money to borrow its way out of debt. It thought that if it could subsidize banks lending homeowners enough money to buy houses from people who are defaulting, then the bank balance sheets would end up okay. — Michael Hudson

Since I work in home solar, I can't resist focusing on the amazing developments happening here. What many homeowners don't know is that they can have solar installed on their roofs without owning the panels or paying the high upfront costs. — Lynn Jurich

The combination of these two trends - declining real wages and inflated asset prices - led the American middle class to use debt as a substitute of income. People lacked adequate earnings but felt wealthier. A generation of Americans grew accustomed to borrowing against their homes to finance consumption, and banks were more than happy to be their enablers. In my generation, second mortgages were considered highly risky for homeowners. The financial industry re-branded them as home equity loans, and they became ubiquitous. Third mortgages, even riskier, were marketed as 'home equity lines of credit. — Robert Kuttner

I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans. — Barack Obama

One of the biggest insurance mistakes boat owners make is endorsing their boats onto their homeowners policies, which may not cover their losses from a major storm. — Scott Hall

The big fear of the 1980s mortgage bond investor was that he would be repaid too quickly, not that he would fail to be repaid at all. The pool of loans underlying the mortgage bond conformed to the standards, in their size and the credit quality of the borrowers, set by one of several government agencies: Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Ginnie Mae. The loans carried, in effect, government guarantees; if the homeowners defaulted, the government paid off their debts. — Michael Lewis

Why is it possible to rescue S&L buccaneers in the early '90s and provide guidance to levered Wall Street investment bankers during the 1998 long-term capital management crisis, yet throw 2 million homeowners to the wolves in 2007? — Bill Gross

Homeowners' Association: the means whereby people who own homes are able to transfer their rights to the neighborhood control freaks. — Ron Brackin

Disasters redistribute money from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, and even from those who once lived in the destroyed city to those who replace them. It's remarkable that this redistribution can happen so smoothly and quickly, with devastated regions reinventing themselves in a matter of months. — James Surowiecki

Once a reporter stood in front of a fire as it consumed a house and then he turned to see the homeowners and their little son watching it burn. The reporter, fishing for a human interest angle, said to the boy, "Son, it looks like you don't have a home anymore." The little boy promptly answered, "Oh, yes, we have a home. We just don't have a house to put it in." — Barbara Johnson

When Steve Eisman stumbled into this new, rapidly growing industry of specialty finance, the mortgage bond was about to be put to a new use: making loans that did not qualify for government guarantees. The purpose was to extend credit to less and less creditworthy homeowners, not so that they might buy a house but so that they could cash out whatever equity they had in the house they already owned. — Michael Lewis

For an economic recovery program to be effective, it must not only create a short-term economic boost but also generate lasting value. Home Star would accomplish that by breaking down the key barrier between homeowners and money-saving retrofits: upfront costs. — Peter Welch

Along Maine's Kennebec River alone, thirty-six companies operated fifty-three icehouses with a total capacity of a million tons. But over the next few decades, cheap electricity devastated the business, first by making the artificial production of ice more economical and then by spurring homeowners to replace their iceboxes with electric refrigerators. As Gavin Weightman writes in The Frozen-Water Trade, the huge industry simply melted away. — Nicholas Carr

Tax systems are essentially the mechanisms by which societies decide what people have to share with each other versus what they can keep for themselves.

Instead of taxing production and consumption, we can simply capture land value instead. Maxim: Keep what you earn, pay for what you use.

In such a system, employees, consumers, business owners, business investors, homeowners, farmers and even retirees would be better off. Only those who use land inefficiently or seek to profit from it directly would lose - land speculators, banks, mining companies, extractive industries. — Martin Adams

In a forbearance, the homeowner pays interest and principal on a smaller mortgage, at least for a time, but still owes the full amount. The lower monthly payment helps with affordability, giving stressed homeowners a break. — Mark Zandi

Many savers are also homeowners; indeed, a family's home may be its most important financial asset. Many savers are working, or would like to be. — Ben Bernanke

For many people, the mortgages they took out before 2008 are so high that they would be better off walking away from their houses. That is called "jingle mail," returning the keys to the bank and saying, "You can have the house. I can buy the house next door that's just like this for 20% less, so I'm going to save money and switch." That's what someone like Donald Trump or a real estate investor would do. But the banks are trying to convince the mortgage debtors, the homeowners, not to act in their own self-interest. — Michael Hudson

Competition among insurers would bring down the cost of health care insurance, just as it brings down the cost of car or homeowners insurance. — Andrew P. Harris

Too many families and homes remain unnecessarily vulnerable to natural disasters like hurricanes. While mitigation will never eliminate the risk to homeowners, it could reduce loss and, in many cases, save a family's home. For every $1 spent on mitigation, $4 in post-storm cleanup and rebuilding is saved. — Tom Rooney

I've made an incredible amount of money stealing fans from homeowners. — Douglas Wilson

If God did not intend the cat to live happily with humankind, why is there a meow in the middle of the word 'hoMEOWner'? — Leonore Fleischer

As homeowners see the value of their homes decline, they become more likely to delay purchases of the big items - like automobiles, electronics and home appliances - that are ballasts of the American economy. When those purchases decline, large manufacturing firms, suddenly short on funds, could begin laying off employees. — Charles Duhigg

Homeowners who refinanced their mortgages took out cash and reduced their monthly payments at the same time. Much of the cash obtained by refinancing was spent on consumer durables, home improvements and the like. — Martin Feldstein

You're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government! — Dave Barry

Unfortunately, throughout the housing crisis we've seen innocent homeowners who have been victims of shady mortgage lenders and unscrupulous individuals who have used a down market to line their own pockets at the expense of others. This bill is designed to send a message by revising our laws to ensure criminals are brought to justice and that law enforcement has the tools to uncover these fraudulent schemes and go after the bad actors. Criminals should be put on notice that ripping off homeowners and taxpayers won't be tolerated. — Chuck Grassley

In response to the drop in wealth suffered as a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis, homeowners and firms did attempt to increase savings in financial assets by reducing expenditure on durables. — Dale T. Mortensen

The neighborhood homeowners always knew when she ran by, because they suddenly felt the desire to organize their sock drawers and finally replace those burned out light-bulbs they'd been meaning to. — Sarah Addison Allen

Insurance is meant for extraordinary circumstances. You don't use car insurance to pay for oil changes or gasoline; you have it as protection in case you have a terrible accident or your car is stolen. You don't use homeowners' insurance to pay your electricity and water bills; you have it as protection in case a fire or other catastrophic event produces a large expense. Obviously, any insurance policy that promises to cover every small, ordinary expense is going to be much more expensive than one that covers only extraordinary expenses. — Harry Browne

Just as homeowners set physical property lines around their land, we need to set mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual boundaries for our lives to help us distinguish what is our responsibility and what isn't. — Henry Cloud

As the United States has become an older nation, reverse mortgages have grown into a $20-billion-a-year industry, with elderly homeowners taking out more than 132,000 such loans in 2007, an increase of more than 270 percent from two years earlier. — Charles Duhigg

The decline in home equity makes it more difficult for struggling homeowners to refinance and reduces the financial incentive of stressed borrowers to remain in their homes. — Ben Bernanke

I'm more of a sprinter than a marathoner when it comes to many aspects of life. For example, when I'm running. Over short distances
up to two yards
I can run faster than cheap panty hose on an itchy porcupine. But over long distances, I'm not so impressive.
I try to compensate for my lack of long-distance endurance by having good form. I'm told that my running style is quite majestic. That's probably because I learned to run by watching nature films in which leopards chased frightened zebras. Now when I run, I open my eyes real wide and let my tongue slap the side of my face. If you saw it, you'd be saying, "That's very majestic." And then you'd run like a frightened zebra. That's why my homeowners association voted to ask me to do my jogging with a pillowcase over my head. — Scott Adams

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped "in a futile attempt to attract white residents," as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood's future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties. — Isabel Wilkerson

other times these payments were not applied in a timely manner so as to render the payment 'late.' By not applying the payment in a timely manner, BoA could disqualify otherwise qualified homeowners from securing a permanent HAMP modification. Mackler at times — Paul Kiel

Homeowners and business owners across the country agreed to pay premiums, communities agreed to adopt building codes to mitigate flood dangers, and the Federal Government agreed to provide insurance coverage to policyholders after a disaster. — Bob Ney

We're dabbling in eugenics all the time, breeding ideal crops to replace less aesthetic or nutritious or hardy varieties; leveling forests to graze cattle or erect shopping malls and condos; planting groves of a few familiar trees that homeowners and industries prefer. — Diane Ackerman

Evidently there is no need for delay, no need for further study, if the government takes a loss and Wall Street makes a profit, but it is absolutely necessary to delay if homeowners might have a chance to cut their mortgages and stay in their homes. This is wrong, and it is time to fight back! — Elizabeth Warren

Two courses were open to us. We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private business and to the Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put that program in action. Our measures have repelled these attacks of fear and panic ... We have used the credit of the Government to aid and protect our institutions, both public and private. We have provided methods and assurances that none suffer from hunger or cold amongst our people. We have instituted measures to assist our farmers and our homeowners. We have created vast agencies for employment. — Herbert Hoover

No matter the location of the build site, the religion, gender or ethnicity of the homeowners or volunteers, there is a sense of authentic community that links Habitat partners. It's exactly this kind of shared commitment that has sustained Habitat for three decades, and, similarly, it will be a renewed commitment that's necessary to meet the challenges ahead. I don't have to remind you that the need for decent housing is immense. Our tenacity is equally vast. — Jonathan Reckford

If we leave the European Union it's a risk to our economy - it's a risk to pensioners, it's a risk to homeowners, it's a risk to people in work. — George Osborne

Home Star is a common sense idea that would create jobs and provide a boost to local economies, while helping families afford their energy bills. By encouraging homeowners to invest in energy efficiency retrofits, Home Star would create 170,000 manufacturing and construction jobs that could not be outsourced to China. — Peter Welch

One more time? We've done this. We've done this at least four times where there's a new government program to help homeowners who have trouble with their mortgages. None of these programs have worked. I don't know why anyone would think that this next idea is going to work. All it does is delay the clearing of the market. As soon as the market clears and we understand where the prices really are - [that] will be the most important thing we can do in order to improve home values around the country. — John Boehner

Despite a lingering low inventory and increasing prices, consumers still have the confidence to purchase a home. More and more people recognize the many opportunities in this market and the significant value of low interest rates. As job creation and wages continue to improve, many more first-time buyers are now making the decision to become homeowners. — Dave Liniger