Posted September 3, 2008 - 12:58 by Xin Lu
It is currently a buyer's market for real estate in most of the United States and there are many ways a buyer could negotiate for a deal beyond getting a great price. Here are some of the concessions sellers are willing to make and some ideas for buyers at the negotiations table.
Posted August 25, 2008 - 12:25 by Julie Rains
It’s the American Nightmare: your neighbor, in an effort to avoid foreclosure, sells his house for thousands less than he paid two years ago, causing your home to plummet in value. It’s scary, but is it true? Several years ago, a real estate agent I had intended to hire seemed to think that a low sales price on one house meant a full-scale neighborhood decline. It didn’t. Since then, I’ve learned how to divine home values by looking at public records and applying the methodology used by professional appraisers. I’ll show you how to do your own public-records search, and explain why online home-valuation sites may or may not get the home-value number right.
Posted August 23, 2008 - 13:40 by Mary Webber
The homeowner wants to make the sale. The broker wants to make the commission. The lender wants to make the loan. It'd be nice to see all these folks made happy, but first... the appraisal. How does the appraisal process work? Get your appraisal questions answered by an expert with two decades of experience.
Posted August 15, 2008 - 02:37 by Philip Brewer
Many people who live in the far-out suburbs move there because they can buy more house for the money than they can in town. As an example from where I live, a house in Champaign-Urbana would cost about $60,000 more than a comparable house in one of the nearby towns or villages. If you do the math, though, $60,000 is a pretty small sum, compared to the cost of owning one extra car.
Posted August 14, 2008 - 17:43 by Xin Lu
This week a story from The Detroit News reported that homes are being listed in Detroit for $1. One particular $1 home sold for cash after being on the market for 19 days. The buyer seems to have gotten the deal of a lifetime, but did she?
Posted July 31, 2008 - 13:31 by Julie Rains
It has occurred to me that tapping into one’s home equity can be like pawning a gold necklace, television set, or other personal item with resale value. Both involve using collateral, either to borrow thousands of dollars through a home equity loan or home equity line of credit aka HELOC – or to borrow $50 for a very short period of time. I think it is interesting to compare and contrast these two types of loans.
Posted July 29, 2008 - 03:53 by Philip Brewer
I don't think much of the "buy low, sell high" model for house purchases. I think a house should be purchased as a place to live, in which case the main questions are whether you want to live there and whether you can afford it, not whether prices have hit bottom. Still, it's a question of interest to a lot of people, so I've been meaning to write an article on the topic. Happily, Vladimir Klyuev, an economist with the International Monetary Fund, has written it, so I don't have to.
Posted July 24, 2008 - 15:05 by Xin Lu
In my last article I wrote about the one aspect of the $300 billion dollar housing bailout that I thought made sense, but the full text of the bill known as H.R. 3221 is over 700 pages so it is too complex to discuss in any one blog post. Today I shall highlight some of the more questionable and dangerous aspects of the bill.
Posted July 23, 2008 - 16:21 by Xin Lu
The United States House of Representatives just passed a massive mortgage bailout bill that includes many changes to the Federal Housing Administration and the Government Sponsored Enterprises. One particular change in the bill is that seller-funded down payment assistance through a third party is now prohibited in obtaining FHA loans. This in direct response to the unscrupulous behavior of many seller funded down payment assistance charities that sprang up in the past decade.
Posted July 17, 2008 - 12:56 by Xin Lu
My husband said that when we do buy a house he wants to just buy it with cash so we can own it outright and in our way say "screw you" to the banks. I like that idea, but just like any financial decision, there are pros and cons to doing this.
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