Consumer Focused Carnival of Real Estate

The guidelines for this carnival.

As always, I arranged the entries that met guidelines into three levels, based upon originality, usefulness to the consumer, and how much thought and effort and research went into an entry.

STRONGLY RECOMMENDED

HOST'S CHOICE AWARD: An Excellent point from Reba Haas: Did you know that spot approvals can be used for FHA financing on condos?. Some people advise FHA loan property shoppers to start with the FHA approved list of condos. This is horrid advice, especially as those units usually know they're on the list and try to ask for a price premium. The rules have changed a bit (spot approval now requires 60% owner occupancy), but if the complex meets those requirements, you can get an FHA loan.

Your Host presents Finding a Good Buyer's Agent (And Eliminating Bad Ones)

RECOMMENDED

First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit

From Australia comes House-hunting expenses and how to minimize them (part 2). They must do things really differently over there.

Should You Buy A House If You Are In Debt?. Tellingly, none of the people he asked are either Realtors or Loan Officers, but the answer is "almost certainly not". No money at all for a down payment, no room in the budget for increased home expenses, and payments on $36,000 of debt that eat up (at a guess) about $900 out of a total back end monthly allowance of $1425 for housing plus debt service. So $525 has to pay for the mortgage plus taxes and insurance and maintenance? Not anywhere I know of. But halve the debt and double the income (or even just increase it a little), and the answer becomes quite different.

MET GUIDELINES

50 Tools to Research Your New Home, Neighborhood, and Community Some of the tools are useful, but others are a waste of time or worse.

How Do You Lower Your Real Estate Taxes? suffers a mandatory one category downgrade for explicit solicitation, but actually gives some decent information for Minnesota. If you're in California, the property will be automatically reassessed to the purchase price. If your value has fallen since purchase, your county tax assessor has a simple form. The San Diego Assessment Appeals Board website is here

Home Mistake needs a lot more analysis to say whether it really was a mistake, but it met guidelines.

Lowest Mortgage Refinance Rate Comparison by the Readers! is an entry I'm going to include despite some basic misconceptions because it allows me to tell you some of what is wrong about it. If you want the lowest rate, you're always going to pay a lot of points because there is a tradeoff between rate and cost, one that varies every single day (and often, within a day) dependent upon the bond market. Furthermore, it relied upon allowing lenders to tell you what they have - with absolutely no assurance that the lender intends to actually deliver what they talk about. Lenders are permitted to lowball quotes shamelessly, and neither a Good Faith Estimate, an MLDS (the California equivalent) or any other standard form you get at the beginning of a loan prevents this. New regulations take effect at the end of 2009 that will make it a little harder for them to get away with lying - but not much. I could go on at length, but I think the point has been made.

SPAM AND OTHER RIDICULOUS SUBMISSIONS

I got a blortload of spam submissions this month. Uselessly vague, misinformed, and flat out wrong information. I don't know who posted the carnival to the spammeisters forum, but it's not doing you any good. However, most of them at least mentioned real estate, and it's vaguely possible that some of them were written in good faith by hydrocephalic six year olds who have no clue what they're talking about. Be careful about what you trust on the internet - ask yourself what assurance do you have that this writer has a clue about what they're writing on, because I got at least a dozen submissions that would cost you tens of thousands of dollars if you paid attention to their advice. Nonetheless, because they were real estate articles, I could not fairly put them in this section.

A site named Make Money Easy Online submitted a post called Why Making Money Online is NOT so Easy. But he's not helping matters - in fact, his advice in this article would make it noticeably harder to make money online (seriously, advising someone it's okay to join Multi-Level Marketing schemes? The drug addicts in rehab know better than that!)

A site named Recession Thoughts submitted a post entitled Obama's Stimulus Plan Is A Complete Joke. Well, yes, and I'll even go one further and say the "stimulus" he signed was simply pork mislabelled - worse than a total waste. Nonetheless, it's completely inappropriate for this carnival.

For those who might object to the treatment their submission received, the relevant information has been in the guidelines since before submissions were being accepted for this carnival. Having been told to read the guidelines, you willingly submitted these posts. Live with it.

Consumer Focused Carnival of Real Estate will return in one month on March 30, 2009, here at Searchlight Crusade, unless someone else wants to host. Deadline for submissions will be Midnight March 28th.