There are basically three types of borrowers:
1) The “how much money do we need
The Educated Rate Shopper
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Category Archives: Investing
Follow the Money…
Have you ever wondered where mortgage money comes from? Years ago, the money came from your local banker. If your credit was good, and the bank had the available funds, you had yourself a home loan, and you diligently made your monthly payment to that same bank.
These days, the majority of all conforming home loans begin the same way as they did years ago, but they now follow a trail that most often leads to three major institutions: Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association); Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation); or Ginnie Mae (Government National Mortgage Association), then on to Wall Street.
Please understand that there are many variation of this, and I’m speaking of standard conventional loans. Depending on a many circumstances, some loans follow different pathways.
We begin the process with a mortgage professional as we always have. We answer the questions, jump through the hoops, and sometimes feel our whole life is being reviewed, but all goes well, and we end up with a home loan. Now it’s here that the trail can take some turns.
If you placed your loan with a bank, it frequently appears that your loan is still with that bank, but in most cases the bank is simply “servicing
Getting Ready for a Home Inspection
Having attended many, many home inspections, I would like to offer a few tips regarding getting ready for an inspection (sellers) and what to bring to an inspection (buyers).
There are a few things that a seller should do to get ready for an inspection. One is to change your furnace filter. I like the big bright blue ones for the inspection. When the inspector pulls out a filthy, dirty sometimes crumpled up filter in front of the agent and buyer, there is always a 15 second staring at the filthy thing that transpires. Just take my word for it. It’s not a pleasant 15 seconds. Check your filter before the inspector arrives.
For those not buying or selling property, go check your filter. They cost very little. Keep a new one in there monthly or every other month during heating season and year round if you have forced air and air conditioning.
Also for sellers, the inspector will be spending some time with the buyer at the furnace, hot water tank and electrical panel. Make sure these are not covered with an inch of dust and dirt and are not blocked by boxes and storage items. Most times the inspector has to move things to get to these, which can put him in a bad mood. Trust me, you don’t want a crabby home inspector. At a recent inspection we had to move a whole storage cabinet to find the whole house GFI in the garage. So yes, wash that hot water tank and change that filter and make sure three people can comfortable get to and stand in front of these areas.
Buyers should bring some graph paper for drawing out the floorplan, a measuring tape for measuring the refrigerator opening if you are going to buy a new refrigerator, a clip board and pad for making notes, and of course your check book to pay the inspector. The Home Inspection is one of the few things you pay at time of service in a real estate transaction and is generally not transferred to the closing sheet. Sometimes you can be reimbursed for the inspection, so be sure to tell your agent or escrow closing person to show the cost as a POC on the HUD 1 if you have seller paid costs built into the sale price.
There are very few things you can do to get ready for a home inspection. Putting in a clean furnace filter is #1 for a seller.
Trulia Lands in New York
I just got an email announcing that Trulia launched in New York!
Congratulations Pete and Sami! I know that was pretty high on your list of ToDo items!
Are you wondering what Trulia is?
I wrote a post on their service when they launched in California. In general, they have one of the nicest interfaces around for real estate search. If someone is looking for inspiration on how to build a tight real estate search that is focused on providing a maximum of useful information to buyers, they they need to look no farther than Trulia to see how it can be done.
So is there anything wrong with Trulia? I only have two qualms about their service. One, they launched in New York before Seattle! 🙂 and two, they don’t have a comprehensive database of homes (The California agents I’ve talked to have all mentioned that Trulia does not include a lot of homes that are available and did include a lot of homes that had already been sold.)
With those two caveats in place, it is my opinion that they have one of the most interesting real estate search tools available!
More:
- An agent in San Francisco has some nice things to say about Trulia in this post.
- And Curbed gets excited about Trulia in New York before they launched here.
Walkable neighborhood: Capitol Hill
I’m going to vote for 15th Avenue, home of the Victrola, Seattle’s best bagels (at the creatively named Bagel Deli), mediocre or dive bars, and Seattle’s crummiest QFC as one of Seattle’s most walkable neighborhoods. Trader Joe’s and 2 organic food stores are within 8 blocks, Safeway is right across from Swedish Medical Center and, most importantly for a walkable neighborhood, one can walk right out into the street without fear because there are so many pedestrians that they almost mingle with the slow moving bikes, cars, and buses – an accidental implementation of an unconventional “traffic calming” idea that I love. Dustin can definitely tell you more about this if you’re curious.
As the Seattle Times once pointed out, Seattle could definitely do a better job embracing car alternatives I propose street living rooms. And maybe more mass transit.
I also like the art at the Victrola right now:
Throw your walkable neighborhood review in the comments and we’ll see what we can do to get a list of the best and the worst neighborhoods for walking.
-Galen
ShackPrices.com
Happy Birthday Lenderama
Lenderama turned 1 year old today!
Rather than let Lenderama slow down in its old age, it is pretty obvious that Todd Carpenter is going to make sure Lenderama is always on the cutting edge! Just before announcing his one year birthday, Todd released a dynamic bookmark tool that mashes-up the Firefox browser, RSS feeds and del.icio.us.
I’ve been playing with the bookmark tool for a few hours now, and I’m completely impressed. He’s categorized more mortgage related sites than I knew existed! It includes news sites, forums, directories, and a huge number of lenders. While this list could be useful if you’re a potential home buyer or a real estate agent, this bookmark tool is a must if you’re a mortgage broker.
To learn how to install this tool, check out the Bookmark Spotlight site.
Electricity isn't a competitve advantage anymore
I find all the F.U.D. regarding opening up MLS data to be kind of overblown. Perhaps, it’s because I’ve been a software engineer my entire career, and the notion of technology changing business models and society at large seems anti-climatic to me. Perhaps, I have this attitude because my former employer, embraced the notion of “Only the Paranoid Survive“? Regardless of the root causes, the fact that the N.A.R., and other members of the real estate industry are so scared of the upcoming tidal-wave of technology changes just seems so short-sighted.
After all, during the past 100 years or so, the only constant has been change. So the fact that more technological change is coming, shouldn’t surprise anyone. I don’t remember the explosion of digital photography during the past decade cause anywhere near this much fuss, do you? What about the growth of photocopiers & other printing technologies during the last 40 years? Before computers, I’ve heard that people used to use a device called paper to exchange & store information, and the ability to manage these paper records efficiently was a key competitive advantage for many businesses. And yet, I can’t help but wonder if the MLS placed the same kinds of restrictions on printed property listings 30 years ago that they are trying to place on digital property listing today. Surely those all free real estate magazines at the grocery store are harming agents & brokers, by giving away valuable information for free?
I’d argue that associating digital photos with electronic MLS records on free web sites has done more to decrease the value that people place on a real estate agent, than anything I or other software engineers are going to invent during the next few years. Maybe the embrace of digital photography was just a way to get back at all those real estate magazine publishers?
Anyway, my advice would be to tell the powers that be to get over it. Things are changing: deal with it. Nobody thinks electricity is a competitive advantage anymore and in a few years from now, I suspect nobody will give the new generation of real estate web applications a second thought. I suspect very few realtors are afraid of the value that maids, handymen, and landscappers bring to the real estate industry but yet somehow software engineers & database administrators are out to destroy the industry. I can’t speak for all IT professionals, but I think it’s safe to say our area of expertise is NOT in the sale, finance, or purchase of properties (which should be the core competency of any real estate agent/broker). Similarly, it’s foolish for the real estate industry to think that they can job a better job of developing tools that let Joe & Jane Consumer search & browse listing data than software engineers. After all, if the engineers at Google can search 20 billion web pages in a fraction of second, processing the 20,000 properties in the MLS is sleepwalking by comparison.
On a related thought, how did people buy & sell homes in the “dark ages”? That seems more mind boggling to me than anything I or the folks at Zillow are going to be doing in the next year.
In closing, it’s not geeks with SQL Servers or even free web servers you should be scared of. It’s those real estate androids showing homes at a holodeck near you that should keep you up at night. That’s REALLY going to shake things up.
Robbie
Caffeinated Software
Real Estate Search Article
Search Engine Watch has a real estate search tool write up. It’s mostly links, but some of them haven’t been mentioned here. I like to think that our write ups are a little more coherent.
Not mentioned is the much improved (aesthetically) Redfin (even in the last week or two – take a look!) and the still nascent ShackPrices.
-Galen
ShackPrices.com
Playing With Rain City Guide's Real Estate Search Tool
Robbie Paplin of Caffeinated Software has built a great home search tool for the Seattle area and he put some very interesting posts together giving background on his effort, but I’m not sure he’s done a great job letting everyone know just how cool it is.
So, let me clarify the situation… The search tool is AWESOME!
What’s so cool about it?
Google Earth. It exports any and all of your searches to Google Earth! This means that you can get extremely clear aerial images of the home and nearby neighborhood. 
Real Simple Syndication (RSS). Every search can be exported as an RSS feed an imported into a Blog Reader.- Sort by Price/SqFoot. . This is subtle improvement, but it can lead to some surprisingly relevant insights. On any search, let’s say “Seattle Homes” or even “Million Dollar Listings“, you can sort the results by the price per square foot. (This would be an even more useful feature if more homes didn’t have “0” listed as their size, but that’s better left for another post… 🙂
Search Statistics. With every search result, a box is presented that gives you statistics like the average list price and size for homes for that search. - Complete Seattle Listings. Unlike some of the other search sites that are cropping up, we’ve got a complete list of homes that are for sale by real estate agents in Seattle. (I’d tell you that it is “MLS” data, but I don’t think I’m allowed to say that… 🙂
So who might find this search tool useful?
- Home buyers who want to be updated on new homes as they hit the market! (it only takes a few hours (minutes?) for a home to be listed by an agent before it hits our servers and is picked up by the blog reader of your choice!
- Home owners who are curious what homes are being listed in their neighborhood (or zip code!)
- Real estate agents (like home buyers) who want to be notified of listings as they hit the market via their RSS reader!
And I’m sure there are others…
By the way, because of the nature of RSS feeds, I’ve been able to present the results from selected home searches as they get listed on my sidepanel. I’m sure that there are a ton of other interesting ways to use RSS feeds on real estate sites… Any recommendations?
Heard around the web:
Falling out of love with your 2nd mortgage?
Those of you with variable home equity line of credit, do you ever find yourself thinking, “I’ve got two loans -the first mortgage has a great rate and the second is a variable home equity line of credit with a steadily climbing interest rate.