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Holiday home sale can work in seller’s favor | Bedford Hills NY Homes
Year end seems like an odd time to sell your home. However, it has been a long time since we’ve seen a home sale market that approximated normal. So, I wouldn’t necessarily abide by the guidelines that applied to another time.
2011 was a lackluster year for the housing market. The spring and summer markets, usually a busy time for home sales, were sluggish. The market picked up in November 2011. Many sellers who chose to sell then had a successful result.
Several factors contributed to this. Interest rates were low. The bad global news — the catastrophic earthquake in Japan, Greece on the edge of bankruptcy, problems in the eurozone, and a stuck-in-the-mud unemployment rate — had been absorbed and digested by consumers. Buyers began to believe that home prices were bottoming; there were years’ worth of pent-up demand.
Sellers in some areas who sold at the end of last year presented their homes well and priced them right for the market. Some received multiple offers, although this didn’t always result in a higher price. Many were sold and closed by the end of the year.
The dynamic that contributed to this seemingly unusual phenomenon was a high demand from buyers who’d been waiting for years for the right time to buy and a paucity of homes listed for sale at that time.
HOUSE HUNTING TIP: Most sellers aren’t inclined to sell their homes during the late fall and winter months, so they wait until spring. But then they are confronted with more sellers bringing their homes on the market. Buyers have a choice. You aren’t the only game in town.
Some sellers worry about the holidays. If you travel during the holidays, this might be a perfect time to have your house on the market. You won’t be inconvenienced by showing activity and open houses.
Sellers who are home for the holidays can ask their agent to remove the lockbox and have showings made by appointment through their listing agent.
The showing activity will be slower during the holidays, but the buyers who are looking are serious. Sometimes, buyers who have been transferred will take the opportunity of time off over the holidays to go house hunting.
The other alternative is to ask your agent to remove your home from the active market, but make sure the real estate agent community knows that the home is still for sale. You wouldn’t want to miss out on a good opportunity. The best bet is to keep your home actively listed. Most homes look festive and inviting at this time of year.
Depending on weather conditions, which can put a damper on showing activity, early in the year before the spring season is often a good time for sellers, particularly when interest rates are at historic lows, buyers are out in force and most sellers are waiting until April or May to bring their homes on the market.
Some sellers are inclined to wait until spring to sell because they think that the improved housing market will result in a higher sale price. There’s no way to know. Hopefully, prices will be higher then. But in most areas it will be only marginally higher.
The spring market is bound to have more inventory of homes for sale than we’re likely to see between November 2012 and March 2013. More homes for sale could dilute the buyer pool for your home. When your home is one of the few on the market, you have a better chance of a quick and profitable sale.
THE CLOSING: If you and your home are ready for sale, and the weather isn’t slowing the market down, go for it.
via inman.com
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FHA may require bailout, after all | Bedford Hills NY Real Estate
A federal agency that insured more than half of all loans for first-time homebuyers last year may soon look to taxpayers to shore up its dwindling finances.
Throughout its 78-year history, the Federal Housing Administration has paid for itself through upfront and annual mortgage insurance premiums charged to borrowers. But next week the agency will issue an independent financial audit that may set the stage for the FHA’s first-ever draw from the U.S. Treasury, Bloomberg reports.
The FHA has been hard-hit by defaults from loans made from 2005 and 2008 and has taken steps to strengthen its capital reserves, including raising mortgage insurance premiums three times in 2010 and again this year. The agency has also tightened credit standards and prohibited seller funding of buyer down payments, a practice the agency estimates will cost it $14 billion on loans issued before 2009.
As of June 30, 25.8 percent of FHA’s 2007 loans, 24.9 percent of its 2008 loans, and 12.2 percent of its 2009 loans were seriously delinquent, according to the Wall Street Journal.
While loans made in subsequent years have been of higher quality, new income from those loans may not outweigh the losses from the previous housing bubble-era loans, Bloomberg said, citing anonymous sources.
In last year’s annual report, the FHA noted its capital reserve ratio, which measures reserves in excess of what’s needed to cover projected losses over the next 30 years, had dropped to 0.24 percent from 0.5 percent in 2010. But an expected recovery in home prices prompted the agency to project capital reserves would return to a congressionally mandated 2 percent ratio by 2014.
This year’s report may be more pessimistic than last year’s because of changes in its economic modeling, lower expectations for home prices, and a revised assessment of loans from earlier years that have been refinanced more recently, Bloomberg said.
The FHA has repeatedly said it will not require a taxpayer bailout. The National Association of Realtors has supported that stance, and urged Congress not to take steps that might discourage homebuyers, such as raising FHA minimum down payment requirements.
Earlier this year, the FHA got some breathing room after receiving a one-time payment of almost $1 billion from a $25 billion national mortgage settlement with the nation’s five biggest servicers.
The government has since sued one of the servicers, Wells Fargo, for “hundreds of millions of dollars” due to alleged “reckless origination and underwriting of its retail FHA loans over the course of more than four years, from May 2001 through October 2005.” The bank claims that the lawsuit violates the terms of the $25 billion settlement and has asked a federal judge to throw the case out.
In a report released last month, the Center for American Progress, a research organization Bloomberg says is aligned with Democrats, says the FHA’s falling capital reserve ratio is a “legitimate concern” but notes the fund still has $21.9 billion in its financing account to cover all of its expected insurance claims over the next 30 years, and the fund’s capital account has an additional $9.8 billion to cover any unexpected losses.
“That’s not enough to meet the 2 percent capital ratio target, but the agency still has plenty of cash on hand to cover its insurance liabilities based on reasonable expectations in the housing market — and even has some extra money set aside for a rainy day,” the report said.
Nonetheless, should the recovery stall and home prices begin to decline, the FHA may need “temporary support” from the Treasury, the report said.
“This support would kick in automatically — it’s always been part of Congress’ agreement with the agency, dating back to the 1930s — and would amount to a tiny fraction of the agency’s portfolio,” the report said.
“It would also be a bargain, considering how taxpayers have benefited from the agency over the past eight decades — and especially the past four years.”
Three to four years ago, the FHA stepped in when the private housing market was collapsing, and, as a result, since then between 3 million and 4 million families have been able to buy a home and another 2 million have been able to refinance through the FHA program, according to Carol Galante, acting FHA commissioner and assistant secretary for housing, speaking at a housing forum hosted by Zillow and the University of Southern California’s Lusk Center for Real Estate last month.
Citing Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, she said if FHA lending had not expanded when it did, the housing market would have cratered and taken the economy with it.
Today, the FHA guarantees about 15 percent of all U.S. mortgages and insures about 7.6 million loans with total outstanding balances near $1.1 trillion, triple the amount it backed five years ago, Bloomberg said.
via inman.com
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How to Run an Online Background Check for Free
By Sarah Jacobsson Purewal, PCWorld
I know what you’re thinking–but hear me out. Plenty of reasons for doing an online background check exist, and not all of them are sketchy.
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In fact, everyone should do at least one online background check on–you guessed it–themselves. After all, if you can find out sensitive information about yourself with a little (free) online sleuthing, there’s no telling what employers, stalkers, and ex-girlfriends or -boyfriends will be able to uncover.
So here’s how to do a thorough online background check without dropping any cash.
If You Know Your Target’s Name
If you know name of the person you’re looking for, the first places you should check are the usual venues–good old search engines and social networks. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all good stepping-stones for discovering valuable information about people.
Searching Your Social Networks
Social networks are fantastic sources of information–and it’s all completely self-volunteered. This is why social networks are particularly handy for employers–because if it’s on your Facebook page, it’s not only information about you, it’s information you’ve chosen to share with the world.
Facebook is indisputably the social networking standby–no surprise, as it boasts 500 million users. You can search for people by name and e-mail address, and modify the results by location, school, and workplace. If nothing shows up, they may have made their profile private and unsearchable.
If that’s the case, you can do a site-specific Google search, and any public pages or groups they may have commented on will show up. For example, my personal Facebook profile is private and will not show up in Facebook search results, but if you type site:Facebook.com “Sarah Purewal” into Google, you’ll see that I have commented on PCWorld’s Facebook page. You can now see my profile picture, as Facebook doesn’t allow users to make this private, even if you still can’t search for me using Facebook’s search.
Alternatively, you can use Openbook.org to search across Facebook’s public pages (including status updates) for any search string you want and find search results listed with names, profile links, and pictures–perfect for your background check.
Other social networking sites, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, are also worth a look. LinkedIn usually reveals much less information about a user, because it’s primarily a work-oriented social network. However, it is an excellent place to verify user’s résumés and work histories (though, of course, a user can lie on his or her LinkedIn profile very easily).
Twitter is a different type of social network. Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter asks for very little identifying information from their users. Thus, you’ll often find people’s Twitter accounts via their Facebook or LinkedIn pages–not necessarily by searching Twitter. Twitter can still give you a wealth of information, though it’s more likely to give you an insight into their personality, interests, and style, rather than information you can use to find their address or phone number.
Find the Basics: Phone Number and Address
Okay, so you’ve Googled your target and discovered all of their sordid beer-bong photos on Facebook, but what you really want is to be able to contact them. How can you get their phone number and address?
Look up phone numbers with ZabaSearch. (Click for full-size image.) ZabaSearch is a fairly accurate phone number lookup service. It offers a free way to look up people’s phone numbers (you can narrow it down by state), along with premium services for reverse phone number and social security number lookups. I say “fairly accurate” because while ZabaSearch’s database includes listed and unlisted numbers, it’s hit-or-miss when it comes to cell phone numbers–and who doesn’t have a cell phone these days?
WhitePages.com also offers a free phone number lookup, and throws in an address to boot. WhitePages appears to update its database more frequently, as it found a recent address change of mine that ZabaSearch missed (within the last year). However, it does not list unlisted numbers. WhitePages also offers a premium, reverse phone number lookup, and will show you the location of the phone. Of course, this is simply the location of the phone’s origin, and is based on the phone’s area code–when I look up my phone number, for example, it says my phone is likely located in Conway, South Carolina. (This is incorrect, as my phone is currently located in California, but my phone’s area code is from South Carolina.)
Criminal and Public Records
Finding an address or phone number is child’s play. Only when you’re looking for criminal and public records do things start to get interesting. If you want to know if your hot coworker has ever been divorced, or if your neighbor might be running a drug ring out of her apartment, this is how you can find out.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 