Category Archives: Investing

Interest Rates: When is the Best Time to Lock?

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I always advise my clients to lock in their interest rate at the earliest opportunity. Gambling with a client’s interest rate is never advisable. In my business, I have a standardized system in place that we adhere to for all of our clientele. A mortgage loan cannot be closed without locking in a rate, and there are three
main elements to take into consideration:

  • Interest Rate
  • Points
  • Length of the lock

Locking in on a rate does not obligate the client to commit to the loan until the loan is actually closed. The lock simply eliminates any risk of the borrower being exposed to market volatility. It provides the security of having time to complete the mortgage and Real Estate transactions with some sense of order. The lender must disburse funds to complete the transaction within the rate−lock period, or else the original commitment to provide a loan at a certain interest rate will expire.


When a lender permits an extended lock−in period, the borrower will usually see either a higher interest rate or more points associated with the loan. The lender does this to minimize their own exposure to market volatility; hence the borrower pays for the lender to take on this risk.

For example, a 30−day rate lock commitment may cost the consumer one−half point, while a 60−day rate lock commitment could cost 1 full point. If the borrower needed an extended lock period, but did not want to pay points, the lender could make up the difference in the interest rate. In this case, typically, a 60−day lock would have a higher interest rate than a 30−day lock.

In my business, our standard procedure is to lock in a rate as quickly as possible once we have received the loan application. My team and I let our clients know that while interest rates fluctuate daily, most lenders do not want to lose any business. We know that in many cases, if there is a significant rally in the market that causes interest rates to drop .25% or more, we can ask the lender to renegotiate the rate. or understand that we will take the loan to another lender.

Often the lender allows for a renegotiation of the rate to avoid losing the loan to another lender. If we allow our clients to sit on the fence and not lock in a rate quickly, we would leave them exposed to market volatility. Then, if rates do increase, the borrower may be unable to qualify for the loan they want, which is a situation we try to avoid at all costs.

By knowing our clients’ needs and working intimately with them to make the right decisions, my team and I are proud to say that we have many clients who are raving fans.

home search progress…

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house Values House Values launched a new site today that combined aerial photography with real-estate listings and extensive neighborhood information. The Seattle Times notes that Home Pages “has information covering 92 percent of the nation’s metro areas.”

HomePages combines aerial photography with neighborhood demographics. When you click on an icon, neighborhood data such as local school information is given such as the student-teacher ratio, average class size and even the name of the principal. Of course you can view all the homes for sale , but I really like that it displays the homes in relation to neighborhood amenities — libraries, restaurants, theaters, churches, banks, police and fire stations among them. If you are interested in seeing where the future of real estate search is heading, this site is definitely worth checking out.

By the way, don’t overlook the value in their House Invaders’ game… 🙂

Baby Boomers Retire

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Reverse Mortgages Gain Popularity

“Baby Boomers,” people born between 1946−1964, will begin to retire in large numbers. As a result, the demographic shock of a shrinking labor force and its effect on Social Security, Medicare, and other government programs. By 2030, about 20% of the American population is expected to be 65 or older, according to the Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB).

With rising costs of living and a dwindling budget to accommodate the elderly and disabled, we will see increased usage of the reverse mortgage. This loan allows equity to be taken out of the home to meet day−to−day expenses, and was designed in the late 1980s to help those who owned property, but lacked sufficient income to live on. However, there are benefits and disadvantages to be known before going into this type of loan. In most loan scenarios a home will go into foreclosure if payment is not made. If payments are made, the debt decreases and equity increases. The opposite holds true for a reverse
mortgage; equity is taken out of the home to sustain the family, causing debt to increase while equity decreases. There is an exception − if the actual value of the home increases, less equity will be lost overall.


Most reverse mortgages are set up so there is no monthly payment as long as the owner or co−owner(s) resides in the home. There are no minimum income requirements, and the money can be used for any purpose. Equity disbursed from this type of loan is tax−free. Depending on the type of plan, reverse mortgages will usually allow the owner to retain the title to the property until they have lived in a different residence for 12 months, sell the property, die, or the end of the loan term is reached.

On the flip side, reverse mortgages can be more costly than a normal equity loan. Interest is added to the principal balance each month, and the amount of interest owed is compounded over time. The interest will not be tax deductible until the loan is paid off, in part or in full. Also, since the reverse mortgage uses equity in the property, this constitutes a loss of assets one could pass on to heirs.

The Federal Trade Commission warns of abuse with this type of loan, as they have received reports of predatory lenders taking advantage of the elderly. It is best for the individual interested in a reverse mortgage to research and obtain counsel from reputable sources.* HUD does not recommend consulting an estate planning service to obtain a referral to a lender. HUD provides this information free to the public. Even if the home was not originally an FHA loan, the reverse mortgage can be federally secured.

*Visit the HUD page on this subject at http://www.hud.gov/offices/hsg/sfh/hecm/rmtopten.cfm, consult AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) at http://www.aarp.org, and the National Center for Home Equity Conversion at http://www.reverse.org.

The future does not belong to the collective, long-term agent

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I’ve been having an interesting dialog (via email) with a real estate agent who I completely respect. He brings up some interesting issues that I thought were worth bringing to the general public (these ideas want to be free instead of locked up in Google’s email archive 🙂 )

…I can certainly appreciate their (Trulia) desire to ‘break the monopoly’ but keep in mind that the MLS is just a compilation of broker-represented listings. Brokers own those listing and ultimately decide where they go for marketing purposes. ‘Breaking the monopoly’ would mean one would either have to get consensus of a critical mass of the Brokers (90%+) or become a broker oneself and start listing lots of homes. Both are unlikely… Much better to find a way to accomplish the goal of improving search within the ground rules of existing copyright law (think old Napster, new Napster)…

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I really dislike the inefficiencies in the current MLS system, and yet, I can see how everyone benefits from the increased information sharing. If the choice was between the current MLS set-up and a situation where agents all held onto their own data, I’d definitely prefer the current MLS situation…

sunflowersBut that’s not the choice anymore. Before the advent of the internet, it was only logical that agents needed to work together and form a cooperating system so that they could share listing information. And I can totally understand that agents needed listing rules in order to ensure that one rogue agent (or homeowner) didn’t screw up the whole listing situation. I can completely appreciate this history…

But what I’ve described is the historical legacy of the the MLS, not the future. The internet has changed the situation dramatically by making the sharing of information extremely easy! Rather than protecting themselves from one rogue agent or one greedy home owner, real estate agents now need to protect themselves from an onslaught! There is no way that a company that aggregated listing data from agents (as in Trulia) could have been built 10 years ago. And yet today, it seems shocking that such a site wasn’t available a week ago.

I think the comparisons to between Trulia and the old Napster are misleading, and ultimately wrong.

But first the similarities: The old Napster was fought by the recording industry because they facilitated the sharing of valuable information (music), just as Trulia will likely be fought by the real estate industry because they are facilitating the sharing of valuable information (listings).

But the way that music and listings gain value could not be more different. The value of music is embedded in each and every song and can be easily monetized for consumers (Recording industry: “that song will be 99 cents!”). The value of listings are embedded in the entirety of all the listings and each individual listing cannot be easily monetized for consumers (Real estate industry: “that listing will be 99 cents!”).

Flag over waterBut far more important… The ultimate client of the recording industry (musicians) benefit only if a song is sold and not if it is illegally downloaded. In contrast, the ultimate client of the real estate industry (home buyers and sellers) benefits every time a listing is seen (illegally or not!). As these aggregating services become more and more popular (options like Trulia, Craigslist, Ebay Real Estate, Google Classifieds, and Zillow), real estate agents are going to be constantly challenged to decide between their individual AND short-term interest (list the home as widely as possible) and their collective AND long-term interest (keep their monopoly on listings!).

In the battle of individual/short-term interests vs. collective/long-term interests, I’d put my money behind the former every time.

Agents: Are you prepared?

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[photopress:richard_williams_mining.jpg,thumb,alignright]In response to my post highlighting how great the technology behind Trulia is, I received some emails from real estate agents who completely disagreed with me, although only one agent, John Lockwood , took the initiative to responded on the record). Thank you John! I’m going to pick on your comments in this post only because you had the willingness to state a lot of agent’s fears publicly… With that said, I continue to welcome your feedback!

Hoarding the data? That’s a good one. Have you seen my Sacramento Search Page — to name just one place where I’m not hoarding it? I make my living publishing the data, and I’m licensed to make my living publishing it.

John, I clicked on your search site the other day for the first time, and I felt like I’d seen the site a million times before. The search is bad and does not serve your clients well. Sure you’ve published the homes that are for sale, but you haven’t added anything of value that I couldn’t get from 1000 other real estate sites in Sacramento. You haven’t taken it to the next step and provided anything particularly useful to your potential clients. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the goal of your search site is to tease your potential clients so that they will call on you to find out whether or not a particular home will work for them. And I don’t blame you for any of this because the coding required to build a more interactive site that would really serve your clients is very tricky. In reality, you are running on a business model that has been very successful and easily replicated all over the country.

I want a real estate search site that provides more useful information? I want recommendations. I want to know if the home is a good value. I want to know if the neighborhood is appropriate for me. You’re website provides none of that… and I’m not a good enough coder myself to implement any of these improvements. I think the search site that you offer lacks so much consumer friendliness, that I don’t even bother putting a link to my version of it on this site’s sidebar. Making interactive websites that improve with user experience is what gets the self-proclaimed web geeks all excited and sure that Trulia represents the first example of real estate entering the next version of the web.

[photopress:polina_vasily_stalin.jpg,full,alignleft]While the times are changing in the real estate industry, I think the majority of people WILL always want some expert advice before buying a home. It is not like buying a plane ticket, and consequently, the internet will not replace real estate agents in the same way it has replace travel agents. A home is simply too big of a purchase for most people to feel comfortable making it over the internet.

Onto another of your points, I wish I could say that I had more respect for a real estate license, but I don’t. (Considering you are from California, you might be interested to know that I’m licensed to practice traffic engineering in your state.) Recently, I decided it might be useful for me to have a real estate license, so I spent $250 and took an on-line course. It was the “60-hour” course that is required before you can take the Washington state exam. It was so easy, I doubt I spent 30 hours in total reading through their material and answering the multiple-choice questions. For comparison, I had to get a four-year degree and spend month’s studying before I was ready to take the all-day traffic engineering test. For me, all a real estate license means is that the person meets a minimal level of competency. It is all too common to find a licensed real estate agent who is simply not knowledgeable enough to do a good job. You have to search much harder to find a licensed lawyer, doctor, or engineer who simply cannot do their job.

Reading through the rest of John’s comments, I only have one general “big picture” comment. Nobody owes real estate agents anything, least of all their clients. That is an important enough comment to repeat in a different form. Home buyers and sellers do not owe real estate agents anything. Maybe it’s just the engineer in me that hates inefficiencies, but if someone else can provide a tool that makes home buyers and sellers better off, it is the real estate agents that need to adapt. Buyers and sellers should not have to adapt to an inefficient system designed by real estate agents for the benefit of real estate agents.

[photopress:hurley_patterson_cousins.jpg,thumb,alignright]So where does this leave us…

It won’t take long for the industry to see some major changes. It may be through Trulia and their opt-in database. It may be from some type of Craigslist on steroids (think Google Classifieds). It may be the product of a dream from Rich Barton or Barry Dillar. Whatever the solution is, it is being created right now and it will provide huge benefits to home buyers and sellers. All this is happening while NAR still has it’s head in the sand and is worrying about whether or not discount brokers can get access to MLS listings…

Does this mean that every real estate agent is going to be out of a job in a year? No way! There are still so many people that require the expert handholding of a well-informed agent. However, it does bring up some interesting questions for real estate agents who rely on the internet to get clients:

Are you preparing for a time when everyone will have access to better information? How? Are you just planning to fight these changes? Most importantly, do you have a web strategy to take advantage of these changes?

Trulia better real estate search

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Just as the pun is obvious, the implementation by Pete Flint and his crew at RealWide of a new real estate search engine is obviously awesome… Their new real estate search engine available and can be found at: Trulia.com

If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, then you know I’ve been following the development of new mapping technologies pretty darn closely and this is far-and-away the best implementation yet. Pete and his crew didn’t take anything for granted and put together a whole new real estate search engine! I mentioned that this site was coming out a few weeks ago, and the implementation lives up to everything Pete told me it would be.

So here’s some features I like love:

  • The search interface is as simple as entering a city name or a zip code! The UI is beautiful.
  • The filtering by other features like Price, Bedrooms, Bathrooms and Price is fast and very intuitive!
  • When click on more detail for a listing, you get the VERY useful information like the price per square foot, the days on the market, as well as details for other recently sold homes and similar homes in the area!
  • The color coded recently sold homes is awesome!
  • I really like the the location of your search is stored in the url. This allows me to easily save and or send an area of interest. For example, here are the homes for sale in the part of Los Angeles where I grew up: http://www.trulia.com/CA/Eagle_Rock/90041/. (Also notice that it has neighborhood facts on this page.)
  • It has RSS feeds so that I can subscribe to my zip code and be updated each time a listing comes on the market.
  • And the best part is that I’m sure there’s more I’m going to like, but I’ve only had a few minutes to play!

I really liked the site when I first saw it, but the more I play the more my opinion of the site improves. The best part is that I’m pretty darn sure that if I keep playing with the site, I’m going to find more gems! This site is a true work of art! Thank you Pete!

The only problem I see with it is that it is not available for Seattle (yet!). THIS IS A HUGE DRAWBACK. I want Trulia! And Pete, I’ll wait for a little while, but I’m not a very patient person! 🙂

UPDATE: I just got an email from Pete and he says “You’ll be pleased to hear our primary focus is building out coverage to other states. No promises when Seattle is live, but we’re working hard on it.” I’ll try to be patient!

The Reservations of Greenspan

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Church Scene It’s no surprise that Alan Greenspan remains highly skeptical of the housing market, and considering he has access to a lot more data (and a lot better researchers!), I’m going to defer to him on the national issues.

Greenspan continued to register concern about soaring house prices and risky mortgages on expensive homes.

He also repeated his warning about signs of “froth” developing in some local markets that may be driving house prices to “unsustainable levels.”

Here’s are two quotes I found interesting:

  • “The vast majority of homeowners have a sizable equity cushion with which to absorb a potential decline in house prices”
  • “Speculative activity may have had a greater role in generating the recent price increases than it customarily had had in the past”

I think these quotes explain why the Seattle market is going to be fine despite his reservations. The employment market is healthy and I haven’t seen the type of speculation that is occurring in the SouthWest. Here’s a link I wrote a few weeks ago on the riskiness of the Seattle market.

It’s getting more expensive to borrow money

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Image 59
The federal reserve has been raising interest rates for more than a year and that means that it is getting more expensive for homeowners to raise money by borrowing against their equity. For example, the prime rate is now at 6.5%, while it was only at 4% at the beginning of 2004. However, with the substantial increase in the value of nearly all homes during the past few years, home owners are still finding it convenient to refinance their mortgages and withdraw cash.

The Seattle Times had an article today about how this “cash-out” refinancing will have the largest influence on first-time home buyers, who used home-equity lines for “piggyback loans”: “Unable to foot a 10 percent or 20 percent down payment, many bought homes with little or no money down by taking a first-lien mortgage and one or two home-equity lines, according to Mary Boudreau, owner of Penfield Financial, a Fairfield, Conn., mortgage broker.”

The Federal Reserve and Mortgage Rates

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Beeswax dragonConsumers are often misled when it comes to the subject of the Federal Reserve and how it affects mortgage interest rates. Often the media is the culprit causing the confusion. In the last few years, the Fed has taken action that caused mortgage interest rates to move in a direction other than what consumers expected, because the media provided weak reporting on the subject.

The Federal Reserve affects short−term interest rate maturities, the Fed Funds rate, and the Overnight Lending rate. These factors have a direct impact on the Prime rate. If you took only this into consideration, you may mistakenly conclude that changes made by the Fed will cause a similar movement in mortgage interest rates. However, mortgage interest rates are dictated by the trading of mortgage−backed securities, which trade on a daily basis.


The real dynamic at the heart of interest rate movement is the relationship between stocks and bonds. Stocks and bonds compete for the same investment dollar on a daily basis. There is literally only so much money to be invested. When the Federal Reserve feels that interest rates need to be decreased in an effort to stimulate the economy, this reduction in rates can often cause a stock market rally. When the market becomes bullish, the money to invest in stocks comes from the selling of mortgage−backed securities. Unfortunately, selling mortgage−backed securities to fuel stock market rallies causes interest rates to go up, not down.

Historically, there have been many times when the Federal Reserve has increased interest rates. Stocks then sell off in fear that the increase will affect corporate profit margins, and the liquidated stock assets need a place to park until the next rally comes along. The safe haven is found in mortgage−backed securities which cause mortgage rates to drop. The daily ebb and flow of money is what matters most when it comes to the movement of mortgage interest rates. I make it a point to continuously monitor interest rates for my clients, and advise them of opportunities to manage their mortgage debt at a better rate. This is the foundation of my business model as a Trusted Advisor.

Latest stab at on-line mapping

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Eating LeavesGalen over at shackprices alerted me to a new google maps search by Windermere. I can’t say that I’m surprised to see that Windermere updated their search since their VP of technology told me they would be releasing something soon… None the less, it is always interesting to see what gets produced. My initial reaction is that they’ve built a really clean home search tool (note that they still consider this a BETA site).

Out of the sites that I’ve seen, this is currently the best home search (MLS search) site. Some features I like:

  • As you zoom in to your area, the number of available homes (based on your search criteria) gets updated. This works real fast demonstrating that the Windermere people have thought-through their spacial analysis backend.
  • It is integrated well into the standard MLS search. Nothing will surprise someone who has searched for a home on the internet.

If you are looking for a home in Seattle, I’d highly recommend the Windermere tool. Although there is some good news for all the other people building home search sites. The Beta site that Windermere has published does not do anything really innovative, so there is still plenty of room for someone to break the field wide open. I’m still waiting for someone to use the power of the web to improve search results.