Those of you who are Inman News Subscribers might be interested in tomorrow’s podcast. First time I’ve agreed to do one of these. Apparently they take questions from callers, but their promo piece below doesn’t seem to announce how someone hears it at the time it is “on” or how someone calls in. If anyone knows that, can you post it in the comments please? Thanks.
An Exclusive Inman News Subscriber Benefit!
Monday, March 5, 2007
11 a.m. Pacific / 2 p.m. Eastern
Blogging for Business: Putting Your Personality Online
Hosted & Moderated by Inman News Managing Editor, Jessica Swesey
The number of real estate blogs has exploded over the last year and some agents are finding success in acquiring new clients using this simple and inexpensive medium. Listen to some of the top real estate bloggers in the country as they share practical know-how on what brought them to blogging, what makes a good blog and how they’ve found time to integrate this habit into their overall business plans.
Featured Speakers:
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Noah Rosenblatt, Founder, UrbanDigs.com Noah started UrbanDigs.com, a weblog that offers tips for both buyers and sellers to help maximize profit in the New York City housing market in late 2005. In 2006 Inman News recognized Noah’s blog as the “Most Innovative Real Estate Weblog. What's the Point?[photopress:MPj03853990000_1__1.jpg,thumb,alignright] Brian Brady recently suggested that I explain how mortgage interest rates can be priced with or without a discount point since I’m now posting mortgage interest rates on Fridays here at RCG. One point is one percent of the loan amount. Typically, but not always, one point equals 0.25% in interest rate. You may hear lenders refer to discount points or origination fees…for me, they’re one in the same. I’m paid eitiher way. If you’re a buyer shopping rates, look on the Good Faith Estimate for the origination fee and discount points and add them together. That’s how many points you’re paying to buy that interest rate for a certain period of time.
If a borrower is planning on living in their home more than 5 years and not refinance during that time, then paying the point may be the right choice.
Zero Down Loan? You Better Have a 620 Credit Score or HigherUpdate 11/11/2008: This is post is more of a reflection of the times. Zero down loans are not available with convetional financing at this time. Private or hard money may have zero down loans available. FHA with a loan from family members is the closest to 100% financing that I’m aware of. As with any posts about mortgage guidelines, be mindful of when they were written as guidelines have (and will continue to) change. I’ve been working on a zero down rate quote for Jillayne, since she requested that two weeks ago when I did my posted my first Friday rate’s on RCG. She was curious how 100% loan to value mortgages compare based on different credit scores. At the company I work for, we have around 80 (woops…make that 78 now) lenders we work with. A majority of our business is handled in our credit line (Mortgage Master is a Correspondent Lender) and some business is “brokered”. Typically this is subprime or unique loans with added risk. As a Loan Originator, you wind up selecting 3-5 of your favorite “a money” sources, a few “alt a” lenders and of course, and I like to have around 3-5 sub-prime lenders. These are the lenders and representatives you rely on, get to know their products and trust their underwriting. Back to Jillayne’s request, last night I called my three preferred subprime resources for my rate quotes…what’s the lowest credit score they will lend to at 100% ltv and is the rate and program? Thanks to RCG’s Tim, I’ve just learned that one of those resources I’ve relied on, New Century…and the only one that I work with who did quote yesterday an 80/20 with a 600 mid-score is facing troubling times to say the least.
Every day I’m receiving memos from various subprime lenders with details of (much needed) tightening guidelines. If you currently have clients shopping for a new home and they are using subprime financing (you might know this if they’ve told you their credit is not great, if the mortgage is a 80/20 with a prepayment penalty, etc.) you just might want to contact the Loan Originator to make sure the preapproval is still valid. If that client has a credit score below 620, they may (1) not be approved any longer or (2) be approved for an entirely different rate (much higher). Subprime lenders are either eliminating their zero down products all together or are raising the credit score requirements. Previously, a 580 – 600 mid-credit score was no problem for 100% financing. They were beating down our doors to do these loans! Now, the new standards for mid-score (with the lenders I work with) seems to be 620. This is a significant jump that will delay some rentsers from buying homes until they improve their credit. Which again, I think this is good. I’ve mentioned this before, but this is so important. If you have clients who have used subprime financing who have purchased homes in the past 1-2 years, this could be a good reason to pick up the phone and call them. Hopefully they received good counseling from their Mortgage Planner AND they took the advice to heart…working on cleaning up their credit usage, managing their spending, etc. With the subprime market tightening, if those subprime borrowers have credit scores below 620 when their prepayement penalty is up and their fixed payment is adjusting towards the sky, they may be are in a very tough situation. Jillayne, this post is all ready a bit long… I promise I’ll have your zero down rates posted soon! 2007 Still looking like a Seller's MarketI ran my stats this morning to track where the market is heading for 2007, based on properties For Sale, In Escrow and Closed so far since the first of the year. I use the stats for Bellevue, Redmond and Kirkland as the basis for my market research, as this area has a huge component of housing in almost every market segment,and represents are high expectations for market conditions. When this area turns weak, we need to take notice. So far, it appears that my prediction that 2007 will meet or exceed that of 2006, appears to be on target.
The full data is on my site, with more graphs, but here are the quotes of particular relevance. “…75% of the market will still be a SELLER”S MARKET in 2007, based on how the year is opening up so far. We do not begin to see inventory tipping over into a balanced or buyer’s market until we get over $800,000 in price, which only represents about 25% of the housing market, in the area I have chosen to examine.” “The dominant portion of this market is between $200,000 and $600,000…which is by and large “the safer zone” representing 63.6% of all home buyers and sellers in the Bellevue, Kirkland and Redmond markets and the area most likely to rise at 15% to 25% or greater in value by the end of this year.”
“Statistics not compiled or published by NWMLS.” NWMLS is the data source I used to compile the data and I created and published the graph. MLS rule to post this. Some people intuitively understandAre You Financially Prepared for a Disaster?[photopress:2001_02_28_quake.jpg,thumb,alignright] It’s hard to believe that just six years ago today, the Nisqually Earthquake rattled our cages. I was just getting ready to quote interest rates for a purchase at my office when I was so shook (literally) that I accidentally quoted rates for a 15 year amortized mortgage instead of the 20 year amortized that my client was interested in…needless to say, I honored my quote. You never know when an emergency might happen, whether that’s an earthquake, a tree crashing through your roof or a illness or death in your family. Life happens to all of us when we least expect it. The anniversary of this event reminds me of being prepared for such emergencies. A few months ago, I read an article from the Financial Planning Association which, among other things, discussed creating a simple three ring binder that contains your important financial information. I thought this was brilliant. In the event you need to leave your home quickly or if you have your partner in the hospital, you need to be able to access your important information quickly instead of running around your house or riffling through filing cabinets, etc.
I know…you all ready have the emergency kit with three days of water and food on your to-do list! This is just food for thought. Low flow toilets and old houses[photopress:DSC_8889.jpg,thumb,alignright] A relative of mine just replaced the old high-flow toilets in all 5 units of his building with low flow toilets. The result: a water bill that is $100 a month lower – the replacements should pay for themselves in six months. The toilet of choice: Toto Drake. It’s approximately $200 and it gets rave reviews on the internet. I live in an old house (1908) with the requisite sloping floors and rusty iron pipes that come along with it. We already have low flow toilets (usually excellent Sloan Flushmates) which were purchased on Consumer Reports rave reviews. See the second rave review above – the only toilet they liked better than the Toto has a flushmate system. HOWEVER! Consumer Reports clearly does not have an old house that has charmingly rust-flecked, low pressure water. See, the Flushmate system works by storing up pressure from the pipes in a sealed tank and uses that pressure to forcefully push water out when you flush. There is no need to rely on gravity to move water through Flushmate toilets, although there are no mentions of them being used in space on the internet. When you put one of these suckers in a house with rusty pipes, little bits of rust get into the workings of the tank and the flushes get progressively worse over time until you’re left with a toilet that pushes the tank water down about a half inch on the flush and then gurgles at you. When this happened, I found myself cussing (a lot) at an inanimate object. So last Thursday I found myself doing a midnight toilet installation of a Toto Drake. It comes with excellent instructions which should be supplemented by these instructions. And now that it’s done, I very highly recommend it. In fact it’s amazing. For decency’s sake, I will not go into further details. The moral of the story:
Mortgage Blogging…Greg just pointed us to the latest installment of the Inman Blogging series (requires a subscription after today)… He also beat me to the punch on the best quote of the whole series so far by RCG’s own Rhonda Porter:
Craig Does the Daily ShowI don’t think the man behind Craigslist has a mean bone in his body… or a desire for any gold plated riches. Redfin's First YearIn a follow up to Dustin’s post, I started to examine Redfin’s numbers in a bit more detail.
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Redfin released a