Mortgages

If I were asked by a seller what separates me from other agents to get them the best price for their home, I’d answer their question with a question of my own. What type of mortgage do you have on the house now? If the answer were an FHA, VA, or USDA mortgage, I’d then […]

The conventional wisdom for people with a house they own who want to buy a new home has always been that they sell their current home before they made an offer on a new home because no seller wants a “contingent” deal on their sale. Also known as a Hubbard Clause or a sales contingency, […]

Years ago, I was the listing agent on a property where an offer came in significantly below asking price. The pre approval accompanying the offer was for the exact amount offered, tens of thousands of dollars below asking. My client asked why, if they were only approved for $450,000, that they’d even look at a […]

You’ve read it before, unless you just learned to read (in which case house hunting is a long way off for you), on financial platforms, blogs, real estate websites, magazines, newspapers, and maybe even ancient hieroglyphs: get pre approved before you start looking at homes. This is what you’ve never read from any credible source: […]

Perhaps you’ve heard the news that the Federal Reserve announced today that it will buy $40 billion per month of mortgage backed securities to keep rates low. Lots of terms have been thrown around, like quantitative easing, QE3, short term rates, and I even heard one guy mention Malaysian nutmeg, but I think he was […]

If there is one thing we can learn from the real estate market of the past 5 years it is that mortgage rates alone will not cause a recovery. When rates went below 6%, then 5%, and now below 4%, the results have remained largely forgettable. But what few consider is the long term damage […]

A number of short sale clients have shown me letters, mostly from Chase, offering them an almost incomprehensible amount of money if they’ll do a short sale. It would seem hard to believe, in a world where short sale sellers typically walk from closing with the clothes on their back and no proceeds, that lenders […]

In a high cost area like Westchester County, one of the biggest obstacles to home ownership by otherwise qualified  buyers is saving for a down payment. With rates so low, it is a shame for some people to be forced to wait to save, only to have rates and affordability negatively affected by the time they have their money saved […]

If everyone put 20% down on their home that the housing market would probably be healthier. And in other news, if I french kiss a skunk, I won’t be the most popular guy in an elevator. It’s all theory. Not everyone can put 20% down. In practical application it is a terrible idea. And we’ve […]