Category Archives: Investing

LPMI, PMI and 80/20 Mortgages…Oh My!

Posted on by
26

Note:  I should have titled this post:  “LPMI, PMI and Piggy Back Mortgages…Oh My”.  I just realized my error thanks to Bill’s comment.   My bad…my apologies!  And there’s no way for me to 80/20 in the title. 

LPMI (Lender Paid Mortgage Insurance) is one of my favorite mortgage products to use for clients with less than [photopress:wiz.jpg,thumb,alignright]20% down.   Here are some of the benefits of an LPMI mortgage:

  • Loan amounts up to the conforming loan limit (currently $417,000 for a single family dwelling).
  • Mortgage interest tax deductible for adjusted gross incomes over $100k (unlike PMI).
  • Convenience of one mortgage payment vs. two mortgage payments on a property.
  • Often provides lower payments a lower total mortgage payment than the “piggy back

Tech Thursday: Are you addicted yet?

Posted on by
12

After a Wacky Wednesday, I thought it might be time to return to real estate technology…

ShackPrices adds mass transit to their listing search and Greg continues to be impressed… (so am I)

USA Today provides an idea for a potential update to ShackPrices… What if Galen included the emotional map of each area?

Speaking of new online mapping tools, Joel has a nice write up on a new home search site out of Toronto called Real Estate Plus that was built by Fraser Beach…

The vFlyer folks published a huge list of Web2.0 sites… There are some obvious omissions (I would have found a place for sites like Cyberhomes, Sellsius, PropertyShark, RealEstateShows, HomeHugg and, of course, Shackprices), but overall, it was a valiant effort to capture the cutting edge of the online real estate front…

[photopress:dustin_reptile.jpg,full,alignright]The Real Estate Zealot gives some good background on using Yahoo’s JumpCut to edit and stream real estate videos… (If YouTube made the previous list, then JumpCut appears to have earned a spot as well…)

Nothing too big, but I have been working with some others to build some new themes and widgets for a WordPress website for a Move Trends website that went up a little bit ago… (Note: I also took control over the “hat” at the top of Move.com, so don’t be too surprised if I start sending traffic to random places! LOL!)

The release of the updated Google Analytics has been a real joy! I spent way too much time this evening clicking on the “Entrance Sources” option for popular pages on RCG (it feels much more informative than the previous layout). In the process, I’ve learned a ton about where and how traffic is reaching the site and I’ve actually learned that some of my previous assumptions were completely wrong. (However, considering I’m not using any of the goal tracking or funnel analysis, Seth thinks I should just quit… but I’m having way too much fun to quit…)

I’ve also been wasting spending way too much time on Facebook recently (it ramped up after Joel’s recent post). Fight it if you wish, but I predict online social networking is in your future…

UPDATE: Shortly after hitting publish, Trulia announced some major enhancements to their website… Bloodhound has the details (including a podcast by Bryan).

Bribery to Work with the Builder’s Preferred Lender

Posted on by
152

When ever I’m working with a home buyer who may be considering new construction, I know I might lose them to the builder’s in house lender.   Often times the builder will offer an enticing credit to the buyer’s closing costs only if they obtain their financing from the builder’s preferred lender.

How can having a Loan Originator (in this case, they are a retail sales mortgage person, or what ever Jillayne refers to them as  🙂  since they wait to be fed from the builder, often sitting at the construction site) who’s livelihood is supported by the Seller (i.e. the Builder) be in the Buyer’s best interest?    Who is looking out for whom?  How do you know the Loan Originator will not disclose the Buyer’s private information to the Builder if pressed?

Enough of my questions…here are some of my recent dealings with the Builder credit when working with the preferred lender.

UPDATE 12/12/2018: Unfortunately, it looks like part of the this original post is missing.

What's in the best interests of agents?

Posted on by
138

Jan at the logical dog has set up a petition that requests the NWMLS board to reverse it’s decision and continue sending listings to Realtor.com.

This got me thinking about the often-interesting dynamic between the “best interests” of brokers vs the “best interest” of agents, which is something I’ve heard Russ Cofano talk to quite eloquently. However, I really don’t have a feel for how agents feel about this issue. Is the decision to stop sending listings scene as something that was “thrust” upon agents, or is it something they advocated for? Because of the NWMLS unusual status of a “broker-owned” MLS, I’m assuming the former, but I’ve been wrong before so I’d be interested in hearing from agents in the audience…

Homepages.com – Now less bad

Posted on by
6

I was reading an article on HouseValues on the Motely Fool. I discovered they relaunched their site recently. Anyway, here’s a quick rundown of the things I noticed…

  • They are now using MS Virtual Earth instead of their old flash map
  • I like how they integrated “Home Buying”, “Home Selling”, “Loans” into tabs onto one site
  • Home value feature is still a lead generator for agents
  • More ads from non real estate advertisers (T-mobile, Dish Network)
  • Site feels sluggish

It’s a little better, but not by enough to change any business issues that the company has.

How about those SEO tweaks?

Posted on by
24

I thought about labeling this post “Does SEO work?” or something similar until I realized that is just stupid. SEO stands for search engine optimization and not only does it work, but in many ways, it is the basis for why blogs work so extremely well for promoting yourself as an expert within a niche topic (as Rhonda has done… Or even a nationally recognized expert!)

So where am I going? I recently had another meetup with my project blogger and I realized I hadn’t made some simple SEO-related tweaks to his wordpress blog that I made to RCG last December. The tweaks I made were to:

  • edit the title tag of all my posts
  • add keywords to the blog

I gave one update to this post, but essentially failed to follow through, so I’m hoping to remedy that right now. 🙂

First, I’m a bit surprised that many of my one week observations held steady. For example, RCG is still the #1 result for [Agent Recommendations]. Also, RCG has essentially dropped off of Google’s radar for a search that used to be our #1 organic traffic generator: [Seattle Real Estate]. My expectation was that Google’s algorithms might be temporarily confused by my changes to the site, but that they would pick up our new configuration after a while and continue to drive us traffic on this key search term. No such luck after four months.

As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that Google is still somewhat confused. My logic stems from the fact the page Google has decided is most relevant (using this search term) from RCG changes on a weekly basis. This week it is the link to Robbie’s articles which shows up somewhere down the middle of the page (if you show 100 results per page on Google as I do)

[photopress:robbie_search_result.jpg,full,centered]

However, the real genesis of my SEO tweaks were to see if I could get the “other” search engines to send RCG a higher percent of our organic traffic. The idea is that Google was sending about 92% of the organic traffic to RCG and I wanted to see if I could get MSN and/or Yahoo to send more. As you can see from this Google Analytics chart for stats from the month of March, 2007, I failed:

[photopress:search_origin.jpg,full,centered]

Google sent 91.73%, or approximately 92% of all organic traffic to the site in March of 2007, which means there was essentially no change at all! In other words, the SEO-related changes I made did not have the intended effect of increasing the percent of organic traffic that RCG received from non-Google sources.

However, I’d be ending too soon if I made it sound like the SEO changes were not beneficial. Here is the marketing summary from Google Analytics for the month of March 2007 compared to the month of November 2006 (i.e. well after the changes to before the changes!).

[photopress:stats_mar07_nov06.jpg,full,centered]

What you see is that our visitors from organic sources is up 138% between those months and the visitors from organic Google searches is up 139%. This is almost double the increase from “referral” sources which makes me think that the changes I made to the site were effective and not just background growth!

(Of course, it can’t go unnoticed that the Seattle Bubble sent us over 2000 visitors in March. Wow! That’s well worth a juicy link to the most bubblicious real estate site in Seattle. 😉 )

Also of note… Google really seems to like our article on moving to Seattle. I love that my “little bit of serendipity” has turned out to be so helpful. You can never tell what post is going to kick start an interesting conversation.

Finally, as a treat, I thought I would present the chart that never fails to impress at my seminars. In March 2007, there were almost 25K people who came to RCG once and never returned. 🙁 (that is NOT the impressive part…). On the flip side, there are over 1,800 people who have visited the site more than 200 times.

[photopress:visitor_loyalty.jpg,full,centered]

For the RCG contributors (and commenters!) who wonder how widely that your stuff gets read, realize that there are a HUGE number of people who read without ever letting their presence be known. If you fall into that category (at least 95% of the regular readers do), feel free to introduce yourself in the comments any time! (The first comment is free.) 🙂

So, to wrap this up as a “project blogger” post… I’d highly recommend that anyone starting their own blog get Google Analytics. It’s free, easy to use, and provides a wealth of information about how people use your site! 🙂

Two offers to refi in one day…just how lucky can a gal be?

Posted on by
8

In our mail today, we received two very attractive offers to refinance our current mortgage.   Wow, how [photopress:MPj03876060000_1_.jpg,thumb,alignright]exciting!  Here are the details:

Offer One–This is your “Final Notice”

Reducing our current mortgage rate to 1.75% for 5 years.   A Senior Rate Reduction Consultant is waiting to assist you.   The APR on this offer is 6.308%.

This offer will expire on May 14, 2007.  Here’s my favorite part:  No other notices will be issued and no representatives will call you.    (Darn…the clock is ticking!)

Offer Two…Takes the Cake! (It’s even printed on pink paper)

“Your Mortgage Master loan in the amount of $375,000 can be restructured to a (you better sit down for this one) a 10 year payment at only $79.  This is not a typographacial error.   Your payment rate is only 1/4% and is fixed for 10 years….

Call us today and have no house payments until June 2008“.

Of course I had to call them!  The gentleman was very friendly (much nicer than the chaps I dealt with trying to help Jillayne uncover the Vacation Mortgage).    First you must meet their guidelines.   “Slick” tells me that one of their biggest “catches” to get around is loan to value…lucky for me,  we meet the 70% or less LTV requirement.   You also must have credit scores of 680 or better and not plan on moving for 3 years or you’ll have the opportunity to pay a prepayment penalty.

Me:  What is the rate based on?

Slick:  0.25% interest only

Me:  I mean, what is the base rate?  How much is the deferred interest?

Slick:  Wow, you seem to know a lot!  6.750%

Me: At what point does the mortgage recast?

Slick: 150% (yep…that’s what he said….150%).   I can’t believe it either!

This means that every month you make the 0.25% interest only payment of $79; the difference between that and the fully amortized payment is tacked on to the back of your loan.   This difference is $2,322.17.

This would be allowed to continue until my original mortgage balance of $375,000 reaches $562,500!   I estimate this would take 80 months (or just shy of 7 years).  Although the rate is fixed for 10 years, the loan will recast into a fully amortized mortgage when it reaches the 150% cap.

If we assume that my house is worth $550,000 today and has a mortgage balance of $375,000.   In 7 years, we know that if I did this refinance with Slick, my mortgage balance would be $562,500.   We really have no guarantees on what my $550,000 home will be worth in 7 years.    Not to mention what would happen to my credit scores having a mortgage balance that was increasing over the original loan balance.

Last but not least…we’ve finally uncovered the “vacation mortgage” mystery!  With this program, they also offer to give you 12 months off of your mortgage payment as a “credit”.  It’s very easy for this type of lender to do.   At $79 a month, 12 months of mortgage payments would be $948.   It’s simply priced into the loan by rebate, margins or the prepayment penalty.  

Pretty slick….huh?