Week in Review: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced plans Sunday to take control of troubled mortgage giants

What a fun week on the 4realz Hotlist…  I wasn’t exactly sure what type of microposts people would throw up, but was pleasantly surprised at the results.

There’s a lot of stuff going up on the Hotlist, so if you’re low on time, here are the highlights from the past week:

• Huge News of the week: “Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced plans Sunday to take control of troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, replace the companies’ chief executives and provide up to $200 billion in capital to restore the firms to financial health. The Treasury’s plan puts the two companies under a conservatorship, giving management control to their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or FHFA. In return for agreeing to provide as much equity capital as needed later to cover losses stemming from mortgage defaults, the Treasury gets $1 billion of preferred stock in each company without providing any immediate cash.”  (hotlist)
• Notorious Rob came through with a great post on how discounting can affect the perceived value of your products/services: How to get out of this pickle? (hotlist).  Joshua Jarvis also hit the topic of pricing: “Are you Walmart Pricing your listings? If you aren’t pricing your listings strategically (as well as correctly) you’re missing the boat (or the internet).” (hotlist)
• Twitter has been so effective in reaching out to consumers for some of my clients that I was so glad to see Irina pick up this story from Business Week: turning twitter into a business prospecting tool. (hotlist)
• Jay Thompson writes: “Seeing Dustin’s recent post reminded me of a similar situation I had with a comment just a couple of weeks ago. One torqued-off agent couldn’t handle the truth.” (hotlist)
• “The National Association of Realtors is expecting total sales of resale homes this year to drop 11.4 percent compared to 2007 and the median price of resale homes to fall 7 percent — both projections are down from an earlier forecast.” (hotlist)
• Mark Madsen gives us the fun list: 8 Most Obnoxious Internet Commenters (hotlist)
• If you have a bit of time, listen to this talk from TED on creativity rom ken Robinson: “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.” (hotlist)
• Ardell put together a great post on lease purchasing that (on comment #200) earned this great praise from Benjamin Day of Colorado:  “So for all the mundane details, the legal citations, the everything elses… THANK YOU from the real estate world.”  (hotlist)

I think it goes without saying that I’ve been doing all my microposts on the 4realz Hotlist and going to save 4realz.net posts for the more traditional (but infrequent) blog posts.    The beauty of the Hotlist is that you can join in with me in documenting anything of interest that’s going on around the web and help get you featured on both 4realz.net and my email newletter.

Tags: fannie, freddie, home, hotlist, lease, lease purchasing, mac, Marketing, mortgage, NAR, pricing, sales, takeover, ted, twitter