Archive for April, 2009

PostHeaderIcon Dubai Hotel Guide – Hotels in Dubai For All Likings and Budgets

Planning a stay in Dubai for your business meeting or family vacation? Not a problem! Being the newest and preferred business and tourist destination of the world, Dubai offers a wide variety of hotels and accommodations.

Hundreds of hotels ranging from cheap hotels to the world’s only 7 star hotel (Burj Al Arab) are scattered across Dubai. More are still under development in the everyday ongoing construction such as the Burj Dubai. All the Dubai hotels comply with the unified system set by the Dubai Tourism authorities to ensure quality service and facilities.

The most famous Dubai luxury hotel is the Burj Al Arab, which is the only seven star hotel in the world. It is built in a form of a billowing sail. This luxury hotel soars as high as 321 meters above the Arabian Gulf.

Situated in the Jumeirah Beach area, this hotel is currently one of the world’s finest luxury hotels if not the finest. This high-rise building that dominates the coastline of Dubai is seen from different sides of Dubai and offers amazing color sculptures of fire and water at night.

The special services of this hotel include luxury chauffer driven limousine airport transfers in Rolls Royce, private golf cart rides when going to adjacent properties, and private hotel staffs for all rooms. The hotel was designed to serve the International Elite class with its excellent facilities that offer complete privacy and security for their top-rank customers.

The Burj Al Arab also offers sporting activities such as kayaking, surfing, sailing, paragliding, windsurfing, and deep sea fishing. Those who can afford to have a luxurious stay in Dubai can book online at the Dubai Tourism or at the Burj Al Arab websites.

Those who want luxury at more affordable prices can try other luxury hotels in Dubai such as the Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Raffles Dubai, Jumeirah Emirates Towers Dar Al Masyaf at Madinat Jumeirah, and many more. The Five Star Alliance, the alliance of luxury hotels recommends in their website the 27 luxury hotels in Dubai including the previously named Dubai hotels.

A cheap hotel in Dubai (or should I say discounted hotels) is more affordable for budget conscious tourists and are also available in all areas of Dubai. Shopping for these hotels can be done online where you can book one right away when you find it.

Aside from the current hotels in Dubai, more hotels are still to be completed in nearly halfway developments such as the Burj Dubai and in Bawadi. The Burj Dubai will be home to more luxury hotels such as the signature boutique Armani hotel. Bawadi, being one of the biggest entertainment walkways in the world will give way to the construction of 51 hotels more in the Bawadi projects.

These hotels are available in boutique, themed, and resort hotels that include the prospected world’s largest hotel, the Asia-Asia Hotel. Theme hotels will include Universal, Asian, American (countries), African, European, and Middle Eastern.

And with all that said, don’t forget the Dubai hotel apartments. The Bur Dubai area is loaded with these. These are like the extended stay hotels you are used to seeing in North America (Residence Inn’s and Towne Place Suites), except they are MUCH better.

These hotel apartments are truly luxurious with most of them with marble flooring. I suppose it is meant to give you a taste of what it would be like to live in a Dubai high rise apartment or condo. I have stayed at many of these and definitely recommend it as an alternative. I mostly recommend this if you are traveling to Dubai with your family (kids).

Dubai will be much more worth visiting if you book in one of its quality hotels. Hotel booking will be made easier and safer when done with the Dubai Tourism accredited hotels whether a luxury hotel or the more affordable ones. Dubai hotels will surely give you the services and amenities that will make you feel completely at home. Once you get there, you will see how easily it is to call Dubai your home (at least for the time being).

Visit http://www.Dubai-Information-Site.com for the best deals on Dubai hotels. The site has partnered with hand-picked agencies in Dubai to offer the best deals at the lowest prices up to 60% off!

PostHeaderIcon Back to the Drawing Board for Home Loan Modifications – Loan Modification Help Center

A growing recognition that the Obama Administration’s Home Affordability and Stability Program (HASP) is not working in its current design has fingers pointed all over Washington D.C. trying to place blame on mortgage servicers, investors and the administration itself. At hearings this week in Washington, comments ranged from encouraging to total frustration as expressed by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) who said, “It’s just hard to explain to the working families in America how it is we could move so fast with extraordinarily complicated deals with the huge financial institutions, and we are moving so incredibly slowly, mired in paperwork, in rules, in talking to banks back home.”

With predictions for 3.5 million foreclosures by the end of this year and 9 million by the end of 2012, the fact that the program has initiated less than 150,000 loan modifications as it enters its fifth month has industry experts trying to figure out what went wrong and what can done to fix it. While there isn’t yet a full spectrum solution to the issue, the problems of the program have become well defined. They include:  

1)    When the program was announced in February, there was little to motivate lenders and servicers to hire staff, provide training to processors in the nuances of the program’s guidelines, and build infrastructure to support the flood of requests. While it’s true that the plan provides incentive payments to lenders and servicers, at $1,000 per year for a successful loan modification, the incentives aren’t enough to offset the costs of implementing a full scale department which, in effect, generates only losses.

2)    Executing loan modifications results in recordable losses for lenders and investors. In the Spring Congress, hearing the pleas from the mortgage industry, ended the long standing requirement that mortgages be marked to market periodically to reflect losses on the books of lenders and investors. If loan modifications were being handled quickly and efficiently the resulting losses would leave many in the industry short on capital requirements and/or struggling for survival.

3)    Investors, even with the passage of the safe harbor bill, can still stand in the way of modifications. Congress passed the bill in May to give servicers more freedom in choosing the concessions they grant in a loan modification and to protect them from lawsuits served by the investors that actually own the mortgages. The problem is that the pooling and stripping of mortgages by insurance companies, pensions and Wall Street institutions can make determining who owns what a job in itself. Even when ownership is clearly defined, servicers and their investors are trying to avoid adversarial relationships as much as possible so getting a sign off on loan modifications can either bog down the process or result in non-approval of the loan modification.

4)    The defeat of the cramdown provision in the administration’s foreclosure initiative, which would have allowed judges in bankruptcy court to decide on principle reductions, gives lenders and investors the last word on a modification. Had the provision passed, the threat of having principle balances reduced by an uninterested third party would encourage more approvals and greater concessions in loan modifications. “You have got to have some leverage, something to hold people’s feet to the fire,” said Center for Responsible Lending spokeswoman Kathleen Day. “If you tell the industry this [judge] can do the loan mod if you don’t, that is going to get their attention.” Defeated in the Senate, revisiting cramdowns is seen as a political nonstarter but other actions like the threat of the repeal of certain tax advantages could prove to be a motivator for getting loan modifications done.

5)     The program is now being criticized for being too complex and for not strongly emphasizing principal reductions. There is talk now of abandoning the original guidelines and replacing them with blanket programs intended for any one that originated a mortgage that they clearly couldn’t afford between 2005 and 2008. The simplified plan would focus on principle reductions to bring home values closer to the principle balances of the mortgages on the properties. Despite its simplification, the tentative design of that plan has its own issues as well. The first is that statistics are already showing that buyers that clearly couldn’t afford their homes have already been foreclosed. The second is that a massive round of write-downs on properties and mortgages would devastate the financial industry.

6)    The program is fighting the wrong battle. According to Nicolas Retsinas, director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the original plan was well designed for the issues that started crisis but the cause behind most foreclosures has now changed. The original targets of the program including stated income, negative amortization, and other loans that buried homeowners have largely run their course while growing unemployment is now the fuel behind foreclosures occurring on prime, jumbo prime, and fixed interest loans. “The issues have changed, and in some ways the solutions haven’t kept up with the problems,” Retsinas summarized. “The most effective intervention would be to put people back to work.”

Another mistake made by the administration was the dismissal of private efforts by law firms that negotiate loan modifications on behalf of homeowners. By encouraging homeowners to take on the labor intensive and complex task of doing home loan modifications on their own the administration put thousands of people in a position where they were negotiating terms on mortgages that they didn’t understand in the first place. With untrained and overworked processors on the other end of the phone it’s no wonder many loan modifications never got off the ground.