Instead of spending several years repairing his credit rating, which he said was marred by two forgotten cell phone bills and identity theft, the 37-year-old real estate agent paid $1,800 to an Internet-based company to bump up his score almost overnight.

Instantcreditbuilders.com, or ICB, helped Estruch boost his score by arranging for him to be added as an authorized user on several credit cards of people with stellar credit who were paid to allow this coattailing. Parents also use this practice when they add their children to their credit cards to help them build solid credit.

The pitch to those who are essentially renting their credit history for pay is seductive: You don’t need to worry about users of this service receiving duplicate copies of your credit cards, account numbers or any of your personal information. It’s essentially free money, they are told.

In the past if a borrower needed a few points extra to qualify for a loan program loan officers would ask them if any of their family members had an account they could get authorized on. Once the borrower is authorized as a user on the account, they do a rapid rescore and 75% of the time the prior history would be attached to the newly authorized user. This company however is taking it to a new level.

• Every active foreclosure investor works a lot more than people working 9-5 jobs.

• Serious foreclosure investors either have large sums of money of their own or have another investor backing them up.

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From Reuters and Richard Leong

A further decline in benchmark Treasury yields may spur massive buying of government bonds by mortgage investors, adding zest to a market already spurred on by the Federal Reserve’s pause in interest-rate increases.

A tumble in Treasury yields on hopes the Fed may lower its key rate in 2007 has hurt returns on mortgage investments. As falling yields have lowered mortgage rates, homeowners have been enticed to refinance their loans.

As a result, some fund managers and loan-service companies have been forced into so-called convexity hedging, buying Treasuries or using interest-rate swaps to receive fixed-rate payments on their investments to make up for expected lost income from mortgage holdings.

“The mortgage market has been awoken here,” said Terry Belton, head of fixed income and derivatives strategy at J.P. Morgan Securities in Chicago. “The rally (in Treasuries) has triggered some significant buying by mortgage hedgers.”