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How to Get More Likes on Your Facebook Page | Chappaqua Realtor
via jeffbullas.com
We Are Now So Close To The End of The Era Of Crisis | Chappaqua Real Estate
Using Gift Money for a Down Payment | Chappaqua NY Real Estate
It’s not uncommon for first-time home buyers to ask: “Can my mom and dad give me money to help me buy this house?”
The good news is yes, you can receive a gift from your parents to buy a house, but the way that you actually receive the gift is very important. Mom and dad can’t just leave money under your pillow like the Tooth Fairy did when you were younger.
The process of accepting a gift for your down payment isn’t complicated, and by following these simple rules, you can be sure that the underwriter who is reviewing your file will look at it with an approving eye.
Write a gift letter
If someone is going to be gifting you money to help you buy a house, you’ll first need a gift letter. The gift letter needs to be a short, sweet letter that is hand-signed by you and the person giving the gift. It needs to contain the following:
- The relationship between the home buyer and the person giving the gift.
- The amount of the gift.
- The address of the home being purchased.
- A statement that the money is a gift and not a loan that must be paid back.
Establish a paper trail
Next, you’ll need to create a paper trail. This is important because underwriters will look for where the money came from and where it went. In simple terms, they will look for proof that the money came from your parents’ account and went into yours.
Each situation will be slightly different, but be ready to provide paper proof of your parents’ account having money in it, money coming out of that account, a deposit into your account and proof that your account now has the money in it. Accuracy matters when creating this paper trail, so make sure each transaction is for the exact amount of the gift.
Write a gift letter and use this shortcut
Creating a paper trail correctly has proven to have its fair share of hassles. Getting copies of transactions is time-consuming, and underwriters seem to question every little thing in the process (“where exactly did the $10,000 transfer that I see coming into mom and dad’s account come from?”).
The good news is that there’s a shortcut when it comes to gift letters — one that makes the entire process easier.
Simply add one sentence to the letter that says: “Will wire the gift directly to escrow at time of closing.”
If you add this line to your gift letter, you can avoid all of the paper chasing that most underwriters will require. A day or two before closing, you can get wiring instructions from your escrow agent for mom and dad to wire the exact amount of the gift directly to the escrow company working on your transaction.
via zillow.com
Judicial foreclosures jump in December | Chappaqua Real Estate
Judicial foreclosures jumped in December, according to Eugene-based Gorilla Capital. The Associated Press
Court-supervised foreclosures — the alternative to the out-of-court system lenders have favored for decades — jumped in December, a reseller of foreclosed homes reported.
Lenders filed 681 judicial foreclosures in 24 Oregon counties where Gorilla Capital operates. The Eugene company buys, redevelops and sells foreclosed homes.
November saw 446 judicial foreclosures, a decline from 522 in October.
The number of judicial foreclosures has climbed over the past year as regulation and legal trouble for lenders complicated the nonjudicial foreclosure process. Nonjudicial foreclosure activity dropped to almost nothing in July, when a court ruling and a new state foreclosure mediation program simultaneously changed legal requirements to foreclose outside the court system.
Still, judicial foreclosure activity trails the nonjudicial foreclosure activity seen a year ago.
The Oregon Supreme Court and the Oregon Legislature may both make decisions in coming months that could shift foreclosures back to the nonjudicial process, which banks prefer because it is speedier and cheaper.
via oregonlive.com
Chappaqua Real Estate | A Practitioner’s Guide to Social Selling
Complex sales involve a number of different people. You will find multiple decision makers, buyers, each having a completely different role and need than the next one. As a sales professional, it is up to you to work within the ranges of expertise and knowledge to present your solution in a compelling manner. This is where social media and social selling helps!
Know Your Buyers
Social media helps you get to your prospects unlike ever before. Sales is built upon the concepts of empathy and insights which is why a winning sales professional thoroughly researches their prospects before meeting and keeps tabs on real-time updates and buying triggers. Here are some examples how this can be done:
1) Look at your buyer’s website regularly.
2) Download and read their annual reports and check for mentions on trade websites
3) Set up Google Alerts for your buyer’s business and for key decsion makers in the organization.
4) Create Twitter lists with your buyers, listen and interact with them.
Ofcourse LinkedIn is is vitally important here as well. For a great rundown on why sales is social and how LinkedIn helps sales teams, check out this webinar from Ralf Vonsosen, Head of Marketing for Sales Soultions at LinkedIn.
Identify Trigger Events
The problem with the above is that they deliver surface-level information that may not help close a deal. With social media and social selling you can take it a step further by:
1) Finding out who are key decision makers by using LinkedIn, Xing, and other social sites.
2) What’s happening in real-time with their buyers.
3) What needs and challenges their buyer faces on a daily basis.
Craig Elias, a good friend/colleague of mine and creator of Trigger Event Selling, offers downloadable worksheets to help identify personal buying triggers and to help qualify buyers based on trigger events.
Monitor Your CompetitionEveryone wants to know what exactly their competitors are doing on a daily basis. In many sales situations, a differentiator or USP from your competition may be so small that any tiny advantage may mean the difference between a win or a loss. Social selling tools can help you monitor your competitors and get a leg up and an opportunity to be proactive instead of reactive. Tools like HootSuite allow you to build a custom dashboard to help you monitor all of your competitors and look for buying triggers from your customers. Where do you start?
1) Set up a Goolge Alert for your competitors (key people in the company, brands, products, etc).
2) Follow competitors, prospects, and thought-leaders on Twitter keep a pulse on what they’re saying.
3) Monitor Slideshare and Scribd for new documents or presentations from your competitors.
4) Join key applicable LinkedIn Groups and monitor how your competition are positioning themselves.
While many worry about the threat of social media, if you’re in sales, it’s time to look more closely at the opportunities. There has never been a better time to embrace to find new customers, craft pitches that meet their specific needs and bring the right people together to make the sale.
Use Internal Collaborations Tools to Get the Right Help at the Right Time
One free internal collaboration tool that my sales team uses on a daily basis is HootSuite Conversations, which is an internal communication tool for sharing real-time information amongst key members in your organization. Collaboration tools like this allow you to:
1) Find expertise on unique subjects within your own company.
2) Create groups to collaborate on unique sales opportunities.
3) Publish updates to make talented coworkers in your company aware of how they can help you.
4) Collaborate and share important documents very easily.
Too many people have been worrying about the threats and dangers of social media when a carefully crafted strategy can eliminate most of the guesswork. Social selling will help you and your sales team look closer at each of your opportunities, create unique value propositions, meet the specific needs of the buyer at the right time, and bring the right people together needed to close the sale.
Multilender websites let borrowers see pricing | Chappaqua NY Real Estate
This series of articles is about opportunities available to consumers to save money on a mortgage in 2013. The first article was directed to those with an existing mortgage carrying an interest rate above the current market rate who could refinance profitably but haven’t — for reasons that don’t make sense. This article is directed at those looking to find the best possible deal on a refinance or home purchase loan.
Importance of posted prices: Mortgage lenders every morning reset their “posted prices,” which are the prices they will commit to at that time to a borrower who meets their qualification requirements. On a given transaction, posted prices will vary from lender to lender, and in a well-functioning market the shopping borrower would find the lender posting the best price on her deal and grab it. But that turns out to be quite difficult to do.
Agents don’t necessarily quote posted prices: The problem is that posted prices are not public information. Lenders deliver them to their loan officers, brokers and others authorized to offer their loans to the public. But these agents are not obliged to quote posted prices to mortgage shoppers, and in many cases they do not.
Agents looking to snare the shopper as a customer may price below the posted price (called “lowballing”). It is a common practice because it is often the only method available to the agent to separate herself from the others. After the customer is committed, the agent may price above the posted price (“highballing”) to increase the profit margin.
If the market price subsequently declines, the shopper will receive the early price quote instead of the new and lower posted price. If the market price increases, the shopper will pay the new posted price or higher, probably with an explanation and perhaps even an apology.
Why lowballing works: Agents can’t be held to the prices they quote to shoppers because market prices will change before the price is locked. The information provided by a borrower upon which a price quote depends must be confirmed by the lender before the price is locked.
Validation of some features, such as credit score, is quick, but others including property value usually take days to complete, and sometimes weeks. While the applicant is waiting for the lender to validate her information, the posted price is likely to change with changes in the market, making the early price quote obsolete.
Why highballing works: The typical applicant has no way to know whether she is getting the lender’s posted price at the time the price is locked. By that time, furthermore, the applicant may be committed to the transaction, having invested in an appraisal that is not transferable to another lender, and possibly paid other fees as well. Indeed, if the transaction is a home purchase with a firm closing date, there may not be time to start the process again.
The key to effective shopping is access to posted prices: To avoid lowballing, mortgage shoppers must have access to the posted prices of the lenders being shopped. This assures that their selection of the lender with the lowest price is correct. To avoid highballing, they must have access to the posted prices of the lender they have selected when that lender locks the price. This assures that they are receiving the correct price.
The only way that shoppers can compare posted prices of competing lenders and check that the locked price is the posted price is to access a multilender website that obtains the posted prices of participating lenders for disclosure to shoppers in real time. There are three: mortgagemarvel.com; zillow.com; and mtgprofessor.com, which is mine.
Don’t confuse multilender sites with lead generation sites, such as LendingTree.com and LowerMyBills.com, which do business with hundreds of lenders. These sites do not collect price data from lenders. Rather, they collect financial information including Social Security numbers from shoppers, which is sold to the three or four lenders who will pay the most for it. The shopper remains completely vulnerable to lowballing and highballing by those lenders.
Next week: saving interest on the mortgage you have now.
via inman.com
Chappaqua Realtor | 5 Great Social Media Networks You May Never Have Heard Of
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. These are some of the names in social media networking that you will be familiar with due to their global popularity. These days, Facebook is pretty much ubiquitous with over 900 million users across the world actively using the site to keep up with friends and learn about their favourite celebrities.
Twitter, although relatively new to the social media scene, also has a massive following with approximately 500 million user accounts active on the site. A much more recent addition to the top social networks is Pinterest, which has seen an explosion in the number of users and activity in the past year.
But if you’re looking to branch out, there are a few other social media sites that you may want to explore. Take a look through our list of the top five social networks that you are as yet unlikely to have come across.
1) Tumblr
Tumblr is a blogging service that combines some of the most popular features of Twitter, Pinterest and other blogging sites such as LiveJournal. Easy to sign up for and simple to use, Tumblr offers users the ability to “follow” other Tumblr users in a manner not dissimilar to Twitter and to “reblog” posts by other users in a similar way to Twitter’s retweeting or Pinterest’s repinning.
The ability to search Tumblr tags is one of the things that make it very appealing. Its simple search engine allows you to trawl through all posts made on the site on a particular topic and quickly find interesting posts or inspiration. It’s especially good for ideas about food, craft and interiors.
2) Goodreads
Goodreads as a social network is based around the enjoyment of literature. The site allows you to build a virtual book shelf of books that you have read, are reading or wish to read in the future and see reviews of these books or contribute your own. It’s a great way to keep track of the books you’ve enjoyed and share these with friends, as well as seeking recommendations for new books to read.
The site is very popular with up-and-coming authors, particularly those who are self publishing on sites such as Amazon or Smashwords, who use the site to contact potential readers and befriend them as well as market their publications.
3) Last.fm
This social media network has been quietly going about its business in the background for a number of years. Users of the site are able to download a small piece of software that enables them to “scrobble” every piece of digital music they have to one of a variety of media players. These records are then used to match you with other users who have similar tastes to your own, and recommend bands that are similar to those that you listen to but whose music you may not yet have heard.
Last.fm is particularly good for friends as you can see what your mates have been listening to and share tracks with them using the site’s messaging service.
4) GetGlue
Another network based on entertainment preferences, GetGlue enables its users to check in when watching a movie, TV show or listening to music and lets you share this activity with your other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
Similar to last.fm, GetGlue also makes recommendations for things you may like to watch or listen to based on your viewing or listening history.
5) 43 things
This network is simplicity itself. 43 things allows users to list their goals then share them with a community of over three million people who can cheer you on as you strive to accomplish them.
The site enables you to link with Facebook or sign up independently. People who are working towards similar goals can encourage one another to hit their target.
Conclusion
There are lots of social networks outside of the big three that are just waiting to be discovered. Whether you’re looking to find new material for enjoying your spare time or need that little bit of encouragement to finish your to-do list, take a look at some of these sites and get inspired!
President Obama’s paradoxical presentation on the ‘fiscal cliff’ deal | Chappaqua NY Realtor
Chappaqua NY winter Farmer’s Market | Chappaqua Realtor
Ossining Winter Farmers Market
Market open Saturdays, 9:00AM – 1:00PM, 01/05 – 05/18
Ossining, NY
Parking Lot on the corner of Spring & Main Streets (Map it »)
Market Host: Greater Ossining Chamber of Commerce
Founding Year: 1991
via trulia.com