March 2021 Archives

This is a little harder than shopping for buyer's agents, so congress critters might not be able to do it. But it's nowhere near as tough as high school algebra, so even if you're a politician you can just get your child, grandchild, niece or nephew to help you. High school aged children of your friends would work also. And if you're a politician who doesn't have any friends with children, you've got worse problems than getting the best home loan.

This problem actually breaks into two cases, one where you are looking for a purchase money loan and one where you are looking for a refinance.

For purchase money loans, the first step probably should not be an internet quote shop. Whether it's one of the ones where lenders advertise their lowest rates or one of the ones where you ask for four quotes (and get four hundred companies calling you), neither one of these is likely to be a good use of your time. At this point, you are trying to find out what loans are available to you, and how much of a loan you can afford based upon those loans. What you want is not someone who's trying to sell you their loan, what you want is someone who will tell you what's going on in the loan market right now, and how much you can afford (assuming the rates don't change).

What you need is a good conversation with a loan officer or six. At this stage, you're not willing to sign up for any loan, but you are looking for information that tells you whether or not that loan officer is likely to be a good prospect when you are. Are they willing to take you through the process verbally, and explain the results that they get and how they got them? They should use your salary as a starting point, move through a debt to income ratio and subtract from that your current monthly obligations, to arrive at what your monthly budget is for housing. From there, they can use current interest rates, as well as approximate tax rates and insurance costs, to show how much you can afford per month for housing. I would insist that they perform this computation based upon currently available rates for a fully amortized thirty year fixed rate mortgage with no more than one point of combined origination and discount. If you then want to choose an alternative loan type, and there may be reasons why you want to strongly consider doing so, you nonetheless know that you can afford the loan for the property you are considering, and that you're not getting in over your head with a loan that's going to turn around and bite you.

Now, just because the first loan officer gives you a number you are happy with is no reason to stop shopping. You want to have this same conversation with several different loan officers. The reason is confirmation. There is a large amount of pressure to qualify you for the largest loan possible, especially in the highly priced urban markets where most of the country lives. A little bit of difference can make a lot of difference on the property you think you can afford, which makes it a lot more likely that the average person will come back to them for the loan. They said they could get you a loan for $500,000, while the guy down the street said they could only get you a loan for $470,000. If, by some mysterious coincidence about as rare as gravity or air, people decide they want to stretch their budget to the maximum or beyond, who do you think most people in that situation will come back to? Most people buy a property at the highest possible end of the range they've been told they can afford. Actually, the most common thing that happens around here is that they'll go back to the people who said they qualified for $500,000 to see if there's any way they can stretch it so that they can qualify for this $530,000 (or $800,000) property they've gotten their hearts set upon. Since loan officers learn this pretty quick but you're still going to have to live with the consequences, you want to make certain they're not overpromising what you can deliver.

There are all kinds of incentives for loan officers to inflate pre-qualifications for loans. They get a higher probability of a larger commission check. There aren't any real reasons to give you the real numbers, as opposed to those highly inflated ones, except not wanting you to go through foreclosure and lose the property. The foreclosure thing is months to years away, and not certain, while the commission check is here and now and their benefit, as opposed to your problem. By the way, if you're one of those people who manage to beat the numbers and get through buying a property more expensive than you can afford, you're going to be thinking that loan officer walks on water and is your best friend in the world, because they got the loan through that "nobody else could." This is preposterous, but it's amazing the way that human psychology works, isn't it? With the way prices were climbing in 1996 through 2004, there were an awful lot of loan officers who got used to "betting on the market," and winning, because even if their client could not, in fact, afford the loan, they could refinance on more favorable terms when the rates dropped and the owner's equity went to more than fifty percent due to the general market. And if the rates didn't move by enough to save their house, they could still sell for enough to make what seemed like a mint. The predictable result was that these clients think that these loan officers are wonderful. Unfortunately, that's not the market we have today. That is unlikely to be the market we have at any point in the near future. As a result, you have these same people doing business with these same loan officers today, and losing their shirts as well as their homes.

What you need is to keep going, and keep having these conversations with loan officers. Why? The first one may have been the Marquis of Queensbury, but then again they may have been the Marquis de Sade. What you need is evidence. Evidence of confirmation. Evidence of consistency. Evidence that both they and all of the other loan officers you meet with are performing these pre-qualification upon the basis of sound loan underwriting and rates that are actually available and not too expensive in terms of up front cost, that they are remembering to make allowances for the expenses of property taxes and home owner's insurance, and association dues and Mello Roos and everything else that may be relevant. You're going to pay these things. Prospective loan officers should make appropriate allowances up front, because they're going to be part of what's coming out of your paycheck.

What's a sufficient number of conversations? At least three in any case, but I would keep going until I had talked with loan folks that have at least two or three significantly different approaches to your loan. Negative amortization is right out, of course, and you can cross anyone who suggests one off your list of possible loan providers (at this update, thankfully, those abominations that wrecked millions are essentially gone), but while you should do the calculations of what you can afford based upon a thirty year fixed rate loan, in most markets there are other loans such as a fully amortized 5/1 that are well worth considering, and that will serve most people better in most situations. Every single loan there is has its advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage to the thirty year fixed is that it is almost always significantly higher rate than other alternatives, and more people than not keep exchanging one thirty year policy of insurance that their rate won't change for another thirty year policy every two years. The question I would like to ask those people is "Why buy the thirty year guarantee in the first place?" Why not buy the three or five or seven year guarantee, if that's all you're going to use? Right now the costs may be very comparable, but the shorter fixed period loans are usually much cheaper. You want to budget as if you're going to that 30 year fixed rate loan (the most expensive there is), but there are many reasons why something else may suit your needs better when it gets right down to it.

Similarly, why spend money buying the rate down if you're not likely to keep it long enough to recover the money you spend in the first place? Spending $8000 in points, especially if you roll it into your loan where you're going to have to pay interest on it, may cut your monthly interest charge from $1960 to $1833. However, it takes between six to seven years to break even when you consider interest on the remaining (higher) balance.

It's possible one loan officer will cover several approaches. Much as it pains me to tell you this because I habitually do that, you should still talk to more than one loan officer. You want more than one person's word for one what is available in the way of rates and the costs to get them, and it is always a Trade-off between low rates and high costs. Not understanding that there is always a trade off between the rates available and the costs to get them is the most critical piece of knowledge that causes most mortgage borrowers to make bad choices that cost them tens of thousands of dollars.

Furthermore, you want confirmation of what loans and rates are available to you. If three or four loan officers independently tell you the same things, you've got a pretty good idea that they're approaching it correctly and giving you real information. The ones that make it up are likely to do base their usually inflated numbers upon different markups and mis-assumptions. Find a financial calculator on the web or buy one or use a spreadsheet, and check their numbers yourself. This is one of the largest sums of money you will be dealing with in one transaction in your life. You owe it to yourself to take the time and do the research to be certain you are getting good information. Due to the fact that real estate loans are very large amounts of money, and the loan transactions are very complex, there are a certain percentage of people in the industry who will use this opportunity to skim money effectively back into their pocket. These amounts of money, quite large by most standards, can be camouflaged under the cover of the much larger amounts of a very complex real estate transaction. Even the most honest loan officer is in the business to make money. This is in almost direct conflict with your desire to get the best loan possible at the lowest costs, but the loan officer who actually delivers the best loan to you has earned every penny of what they make, whatever it is.

Once you have credible, verified data on how much of a property you can afford, then you can start looking for buyer's agents, and actually looking at properties. Keep in touch with loan officers who you might be working with during the shopping process. Why? Rates can change. Actually, rates will change, and the higher up the scale and more highly qualified you are, the more often they tend to change. Sub-prime rate sheets might stay constant for a month or longer, with a modifier that may change or may not. Top of the line "A paper" changes every business day, at a minimum. Maybe not grossly, but it does change. I saw rates on 30 year fixed rate loans with equivalent costs go from about 5.25 to 6.625 in one month during late summer 2003. If you did the math based upon 5.25 and you qualified for $500,000, you only qualify for about $430,000 at 6.625. That is data that is supremely important to your property hunting. Do not allow a real estate agent to tell you that you can afford more than your real budget. Ever. If they say they can't find all of your desired characteristics within that budget and in your area, ask them for alternative suggestions. Compromising what you want is better than foreclosure. Going without is better than foreclosure. Fire the agent immediately if they won't work within your budget. When you find something you like and have a purchase contract, your procedure becomes very comparable to a refinance. The differences are comparatively small.

For refinances, you have a property already. There is an existing loan that has to be paid off. If you're in a purchase situation, you should already be in contact with several lenders, and you don't really care about any existing loans on the property because they aren't your problem.

But now is the time when you want to do some intensive lender shopping. Furthermore, you really want to compare what everybody has at the same point in time, if it's at all practical. For instance, generally the available rates will be a little bit lower in the middle of the week. They will more often than not be higher on Monday, Friday, and Saturday than they are on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This isn't always true, especially if the financial markets are reacting to some large event, but it seems that it happens more often than not.

In a purchase situation, talk to your existing prospects and keep adding others until you get enough of them. For refinances, you want to move quickly in order to be a fair comparison. Whether you are buying or refinancing, ask every one of them this set of questions you should ask prospective loan providers. What you are looking to do at this point is choose who you are going to sign up with. Before you do that, you want to cross-check what every single loan officer tells you with the available evidence. Weigh what you know against what you are told by any given loan provider, and what that loan provider tells you as compared to other loan providers. Most often, the preponderance of the evidence will clearly support the ones you should sign up with.

Now, I know I said this earlier. Not only does it bear repeating as many times as I can find an excuse for, the folks interested only in refinancing might have been skipping ahead. Remember that you can get the a loan officer who's the equivalent of the Marquis of Queensbury, but more of them are closer to the Marquis de Sade, and most will be somewhere in between. The bigger the lie they tell you, the more likely it is you will sign up with them. The government really did try to change this with the 2010 Good Faith Estimate, but they can still low-ball the hell out of that tradeoff between rate and costs to get you to sign up. Sure, it's possible you might walk away at document signing, although not likely. If you don't sign up with them, they are guaranteed not to make any money.

When I first wrote this article, it was possible and feasible to lock every loan at sign up. That has now changed to the point where even I cannot do it any longer. If I lock a loan and don't actually fund and deliver it, the lender charges me (which really means all my future clients) a stiff penalty. This is now universal even for direct lenders, so good loan officers who are trying to deliver a lower cost loan are not locking at sign up any longer. The only lenders who can lock at sign up are those who have built inflated margins into their loans, so that they can pay for those charges out of the increased profits they're making. There is now a decision making process on when to lock a loan that I take every client through.

There is always a Trade off between rate and cost in real estate loans. It's like gravity. Exactly what the available trade offs are varies over time, and varies from lender to lender at any one time. Remember, that lender can low ball you pretty badly to get you to sign up, and once you sign up, you're not likely to discover that they did low ball you until time to sign documents. Very few people continue to look at the market once they have chosen a provider. The reason many loan providers want a deposit is so they can hold that money hostage for you signing the final documents. Unless no one else can do your loan, I would never even consider putting up a deposit with a lender. What they're telling you by requiring a deposit is that they want you to stop shopping. If they are telling you about a loan that really exists, and their loan prices really are good, there is no reason for a loan to require a deposit. You will pay for the appraisal when it happens, but that's less than a deposit.

I do advise you to ask your other prospective providers about whether the loan you choose is deliverable, however. Mind you, there's a strong incentive for them all to say "no" but then ask them "why isn't this loan deliverable?" If the answer starts discussing wholesale pricing and lender incentives and bonuses that they have and others do not, listen carefully. What that loan provider makes is tied up in how costly your loan is really going to end up being. When they explain why the loan margin really isn't there to deliver the competition's lower quote, listen to them. Then take it back to the people who provided that quote and say, "convince me you can actually do this". This includes making enough money to make it profitable for them - at least a couple thousand dollars. The provider making this money is not a problem and not a reason to try and negotiate it down - what they make does not equate to "profit" let alone what the people doing your loan actually get to spend. Remember, you've already decided this was the best loan available based upon the bottom line to you! What it is is insurance that they will actually deliver this loan they are talking about because nobody does free loans. My clients who ask this find out exactly what loan from what lender I'm basing my quote upon and much I plan to make on the loan - and if that's a problem for them, they can go get someone else's more expensive one!

On a regular basis, I hear various folk advising people that they can avoid all this by "just picking a large, reputable provider." Nonsense. This is wishful thinking at its worst. Large scale reputation is established by advertising. Think about that for a moment. "Large reputable providers" spend millions per week trying to get the suckers to come in. Who pays for that? It certainly isn't the people who work there! "Large reputable providers" will sit you down in a nice comfortable chair in a beautiful office, and lull you with talk of how well they are going to take care of you. Somehow, they manage to deflect the conversation away from exact numbers and exact quotes. You can't compare loans without specific numbers. Then, this "large reputable company" is going to deliver a loan with a rate that's a quarter of a percent higher and costs you two points more than you could have had, not to mention higher fees - and they'll still be low-balling you! Trusting yourself to a "large reputable company" without the exact same due diligence isn't avoiding the issues of shopping a loan in that jungle out there - it's intentionally delivering yourself into the hands of the head-hunters. These companies do not compete on price. They compete on the basis of serving cattle who want to be comfortable. Serving them up to be slaughtered. On a $400,000 loan, you just wasted $8000 up front, and $1000 per year. Glad you could avoid that hassle, glad to avoid talking to sales people, glad you could avoid taking half a day off work to shop loans? You've paid handsomely for that avoidance. Kind of like committing suicide because somebody might murder you.

The main issue in all of this is finding the loan on the best terms available to you. The main obstacle to that is the fact that lenders can low ball their quotes shamelessly, and it's legal, so it takes some serious research to figure out what is likely to be real from what is not. The new rules for 2010 change a lot of that, but still leave gaping loopholes that any loan officer who tries can sail an ocean liner through.

When I first wrote this, I said "Unless there is something external holding the whole process back, such as "Your house isn't going to be finished for two more months," I will bet money that a loan done in thirty days or less is better than one that takes sixty days or longer." This is still a valid principle in that the loan that is done faster is likely to be better. The problem is that new government rules and regulations and Wall Street required underwriting checks inspired by their new requirements have added a minimum of about 3 weeks to the time it takes to do a loan since then. I used to be able to reliably fund a purchase money loan in 21 days or less without any extraordinary effort, a refinance in three extra days to cover the right of rescission. The way the process has been externally complicated, it is questionable if even the best loan officer trying their hardest will have the loan funded within 45 days of application. Sixty days is more likely. Plan for this. It's just a fact of life - one more "service" provided by your elected representatives. But better sixty than ninety or more.

You need to do your due diligence up front. Real estate loan rates change every day, and whatever reason it was that caused you to need or want a loan is almost certainly time critical. For purchases, you've got a purchase contract that's good for only so many days before they'll start charging extensions. For refinances, if it's to get cash out, you have a time critical need for that money, and if you don't get it on time, you're likely to have to pay it out of your checking account or put it on a credit card, if you can. For refinances without cash, just to get a lower rate, those attractive rates are not going to last forever, The one thing I can guarantee is that the available rates are not going to be the same by the time you go to sign documents at the end of the process. If the lender doesn't deliver what they talked about, it's going to cost you a large amount of money. Therefore, you really want to do enough due diligence to give them a reason to actually deliver that loan they talked about in order to get you to sign up.

Caveat Emptor

Original Article here

do your property taxes go up in California when you refinance your property?

This is one of those urban legends. People are concerned that because the house is appraised by the lender, the assessor is somehow going to find out that their property is worth more and send their tax bill soaring.

However, thanks to Proposition 13 in California, the formula for property taxes has little to do with current market value or what the home is really worth. The formula is based upon the purchase price plus two percent per year, compounded. If you can document that your home is worth less than this amount, contact your county assessor's office. But if it's worth more, they cannot increase it beyond this number.

Indeed, certain family transfers can preserve this lower tax basis. Mom and dad deed it (or will it) to the kids, and the kids keep paying taxes on it based upon a purchase price of perhaps $60,000 (Plus thirty-odd years of compounding at two percent, so maybe $115,000) when comparable homes may be selling for $600,000.

There are two major exceptions. First, a sale. If you sell it to someone else, then repurchase, you don't get the old tax basis back. Second, improvements. If you take out a building permit, the assessor will add the current value of your improvements to your tax bill. This can, in situations like the previous paragraph, result in a tax bill that literally doubles if you add a room. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons for the growth of the unlicensed contractor industry, because licensed ones have to make certain the permits are in order, and homeowners are trying to sneak one over on the county. This is why a very large proportion of properties in MLS have the notation that "this addition may not have been permitted." They know good and well that the addition wasn't permitted, and quite likely isn't to code, either. If it's built to code it's usually grandfathered in to subsequent updates. Subsequent owners can get forgiveness as innocent beneficiaries who bought the house like that, and so the purchase price included the value of that room (and occasionally, the state finds it worth its while to go after the previous owner for back taxes and possible penalties, and I believe that the incidence of this will likely increase dramatically in the next couple of years). If it's not built to code, however (an offense unlicensed contractors often commit), the subsequent owner can be looking at a large mandatory repair bill, or perhaps even demolishing the addition they paid for if the county inspector deems it unsound. You want to be very careful about properties with the "addition may not have been permitted" disclosure.

Other states, by and large, still follow the assessment model California used to follow, pre-Proposition 13. They have county records of the property characteristics, and evaluate the home based upon those characteristics, whence comes your assessment, and hence, your property tax bill. This still encourages unlicensed contractors and working without required permits, with effects much the same as the previous paragraph, which is definitely not good, but in this case subsequent owners have nothing but incentive to keep improvements off the county books, where in California, subsequent owners have motivation to want improvements updated into county records. I am not aware of any state which follows a model whereby refinancing will alter your tax bill.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

This really ticks me off.

I just got done going around about this with a clueless Realtor. According to them, it's not available. It's simply pending contract signatures. But it's showing as "Active" in MLS.

This is not a minor issue. Let me illustrate why. After I was told it was sold, I had a friend call and inquire about the property. He was told it was "available." The agent wanted to set up a time to get together and show it to him, and were there any other properties he wanted to see?

Now I'm fully aware that this may be an instance where that agent wants both halves of the commission, in which case they are violating their fiduciary duty to their listing client by telling me "We accepted another offer." But I'm going to presume that everything is exactly as they told me, in which case they are still violating both MLS and ethics rules, as well as trade law.

If everything they told me is absolutely true, they are still using the property as bait for a "bait and switch" game. If what they told me was true, they do not in fact have the property available for sale. My client and I did come in and make an offer, but they're telling me that the property is not available. But for those people without an agent who call, they're using it - dishonestly - as a means of gaining buyer clients. People should never call the listing agent, but more people do than don't. This is not a small ethics or practices issue. I understand that the hardest issue in obtaining clients is getting that first initial face to face meeting - I face that very same obstacle. But if someone gets a first meeting with you because they claim to be listing a property that is not, in fact, available, exactly how is that morally different from just making it up out of thin air (an activity that is also quite common)?

In fact, they claimed that their listing client didn't want it marked as pending yet. I understand the position they're in, but what the client wants is not on the list of available options. If the property is not available, it cannot be in the Active register. That's what we all have to agree to in order to get access to MLS. That's what the ethics we agree to as Realtors says. If you're not going to play by the rules, you shouldn't have access to MLS, and you shouldn't be able to call yourself a Realtor. There's also a section of commercial law that deals with false advertising. Somebody advertises something people want, the FTC and various state regulatory agencies have grounds to get very interested if you do not in fact have it. You might ask Big Bear supermarkets about that. Such an action is what put them out of business around here. I guarantee that six figure real estate is lot more important than 5 cans of peas for $1 in the estimation of the regulators.

The upshot? I told them to get it off the active list by 9:00 the next morning, or face a formal complaint to MLS and the Association of Realtors. I have a client that wants that property. If it's in MLS, they understandably want to know why their offer is not being considered. If I don't take action, my client will be justifiably curious as to whether I am somehow complicit in whatever is going on. This problem could be more severe than the listing agent is representing it. It could be a fiduciary and agency failure on their part, trying to get both halves of that commission, requiring a client to employ Dual Agency in order to get the property, in violation of fiduciary duty, agency law, and RESPA. It could even be an Equal Housing Opportunity issue. But one thing is for certain: as long as it stays active on MLS, there is something major significantly wrong. This isn't a minor bookkeeping issue. This is the bedrock of what we agree to in order to participate in the system, and someone who cannot adhere to this should not be in the business at all.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

A search hit that I got:

What is the reasonable amount of notice to give when changing contract terms in California

Unfortunately for this person, a real estate contract is not something like Lando Calrissian's bargain with the Empire in Star Wars, where Darth Vader was free to alter it at will backed by Stormtroopers and Star Destroyers.

The real estate contract is negotiated until both sides are in complete agreement as to the terms the exchange will be made upon. There cannot be any differences in the terms of the proposed agreement and accepted agreement, or you aren't done negotiating yet. Actually it's stronger: If you're not in complete agreement as to terms, you don't have an agreement.

Once accepted by both parties, the contract terms are not unilaterally alterable by either party. You can, in most cases, walk away from the deal completely if something isn't right, but you can't say, "The deal is still on, but you're paying me $5000 more than you thought," any more than they can tell you, "And I get your car, too!"

If something pops up such that you don't think it's a good exchange to be making any more, in most cases you can walk away from it, albeit with possible consequences for the deposit. In such cases, if the other party wants to keep the deal going, they can offer concessions, just as you can ask for concessions, but you cannot force them to change the terms of the contract. The same thing holds true in reverse. They can't force you to alter the terms of the contract, but if they're ready to walk away and you want to keep them in the contract, you can offer concessions or ask what it would take to keep the transaction going. If you don't like what they say, you don't have to accept those terms, any more than they had to accept the contract in the first place.

In some cases (consult a lawyer in your state), the other party can force you to live up to the original contract via a court action called a suit for specific performance. It's also possible for them to sue you for more money than the deposit. I consider this an excellent reason not to sign a contract you're not completely satisfied with. I also consider it an excellent reason never to offer something I wouldn't happily accept as a purchase contract - because the other side can always just accept the offer and it then becomes a binding contract. But notice the essential elements: offer and acceptance. Both parties declaring their acceptance of the terms.

In short, contracts to purchase real estate are two-sided contracts, and are not alterable by any party to it without the agreement of all parties. Any alteration of terms must be agreed to by both parties, and if you cannot agree on those alterations, the contract is essentially dead. There are circumstances, however, where the other side can hold you to the original contract. Consult a lawyer for details.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

I have to admit to being conflicted. The numbers say no. The psychology says yes. Let's examine both.

Most first mortgages out there are between six and seven percent, and tax deductible at a marginal rate of about 28%. If you're one of those folks with something in the low fives or even below, enjoy it while you've got it, because the odds of getting something better when you move to a more expensive home or need to refinance are pretty slim.

I'm going to do the numbers based upon 6 percent, with 28% marginal deductibility. This has limits; to wit if your mortgage interest gets to be low enough that you don't hit the threshold where it is worthwhile to itemize, but instead take the standard deduction, that deductibility didn't do you any good. But above that threshold, which is most people, every dollar in interest you spend gives you back 28 cents. I'm also going to assume a 30 year fully amortized mortgage.

Obviously, you don't want to pay an effective 4.32 percent interest rate for no good reason at all, but this does not take place in a vacuum. If you didn't use that money to pay down your mortgage, you could use it to invest elsewhere. For instance, let's assume you could make 8% net on average if you invested this money elsewhere. This is a reasonable average when you consider ordinary income tax, capital gains tax, and possibly a certain amount of tax deferment.

Now, some people might think to add in the difference in interest paid, but that is not correct. The payment is constant. Whatever you didn't pay in interest was already applied to principal. To count it again would be double counting.

Let's say you've got $100 extra per month, and a $400,000 loan. I'm going to go yearly 10 years out, then at 5 year intervals. The median time in a property is about 9 years, which means a whole new set of decisions about which property to buy. This is only a valid experiment so long as all of the starting assumptions stay constant, and when you have a whole new set of decisions about which property to buy and for how much, all of that goes out the window, as it is no longer controlled only by the variables chosen at start. Truth be told, refinancing should probably halt the experiment as well.

For the below, I have just summarized the differences. Extra principal is how much more you've paid the loan down with the extra amount, if you did so. Tax cost is the total tax cost of the interest you didn't pay. Investment is how much the money you'd have if you didn't pay the extra towards your mortgage, but socked it away in an investment account. Gain/loss is the net result, positive if you came out ahead by adding to the payments, negative if you should have invested the money.

As you can see, the numbers come out fairly strongly for not taking the extra and making payments, but instead finding an alternative investment for the money. Don't get me wrong - the return on investment of paying your mortgage off is guaranteed, while the return on alternative investments is anything but. Still, diversification and reasonably prudent risk calculation together with due diligence build a case for the alternative investment that has probability so strongly on your side it might as well be mathematical certainty over the long haul. Any time you have cash, whether it's an extra $100 you made this week or $100,000 you made investing over the last 20 years, you always have the option of taking it out of the other investment and paying off your mortgage. But the numbers come out pretty strongly for the alternative investment.

However, the psychology says yes. There's a major sense of accomplishment in paying off the property. Furthermore, once you don't owe the money, you've got it in the form of equity, as opposed to cash, which is all too easy to spend. In fact, most folks will fall off either the investment wagon or the extra payments wagon over time. Money you don't owe cannot be called due. If there's a temporary setback in the market, extra payments make it that much less likely you'll ever be upside down or in an impacted equity situation, although you could also apply the cash from the investment account to your equity or to the rest of your finances, to keep from having to do a cash out refinance. Finally, there's the reduced stress from being mortgage free for (in this case) thirty six months earlier, if you are one of those rare people who actually manages to pay their mortgage off.

I also have a spreadsheet that compares the net financial result between never refinancing, refinancing every 5 years and keeping a target of paying all loans off in 360 months from the time you bought, and refinancing every 5 years but making the minimum payment. In the vast majority of cases, the last situation comes out better, largely due to the effects of leverage, but leverage is always a two-edged sword. If things go the way you want, it makes them even better. If things don't go the way you want, it makes them even worse. There are lots of folks getting bit hard by over-leveraging real estate right now. The usual numbers say that making larger payments is likely not the best use you have for the money. But there is a certain psychological comfort in owing less and paying off the mortgage sooner. Furthermore, in a down market like right now, making larger payments might mean you end up able to sell or refinance when you need to, without those potentially nasty consequences of being upside-down.

Caveat Emptor

Original Article here

The inspiration for this article came when I checked my referral logs and found an article where somebody was essentially saying "If you want to be depressed, go read this site and then go rent somewhere for the rest of your life".

I can understand where the sentiment is coming from, particularly if they were of the sort of person who wants to meander around occasionally looking at houses until they find one they like, then sign a couple of papers and move in. Lest it not be obvious to you, these are the elements of disaster. I would never put an offer in without looking at at least ten to fifteen properties in the area, without aggressively shopping the mortgage market, or without taking positive steps to insure that I have at least as much leverage over the service providers as they do over me.

The fact is that for most people, the largest transactions of their life are all going to be real estate related. When the average transaction is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and those transactions are so complex as to defy understanding by non-professionals (and some alleged professionals), you have the elements for a system that's going to suffer abuses. Many past abuses have been corrected through the passage of legal impediments, but many others remain, and some are illegal but keep happening anyway (See my article on "What to Beware in Third Party Services).

What I am trying to do here is give you the insider's appreciation for what goes on (although not the professional's specialized knowledge. It may not be "rocket science", but to pretend you can pick up everything a working professional learns and gets exposed to every day by reading a few articles would be false, and of no service to you, the multi-billion dollar "self help" press notwithstanding). With this information, you can debunk the worst of the nonsense that you are told and get a better bargain for yourself no matter who your real estate agents and loan providers and financial planners and whatnot are. I am writing about knowledge that you need to have to understand the system, and I'm not pulling any punches about what goes on, anywhere in the transaction. I'm trying to show you limitations and blind spots in the information you may receive, and show you strategies that put you in a stronger position. Most of the articles I have written thus far pertain to real estate and mortgages, but I've written a few articles pertaining to finance as well (RULE: The best time to buy is when there is metaphorical blood in the streets of the financial world).

If you're the sort of person who prefers to go on in an "ignorance is bliss" state of mind, the education may be disturbing. Indeed, many people seem determined to go about their real estate (and other) transactions in this state of mind. They resist when I attempt to educate them in the realities of the market, figuratively in the same vein as people who put their hands over their ears and say "la-la-la! I am not listening! la-la-la! I am not listening!" It's like they want to get conned, or at least not having to think about it is worth more to them than the money they're being taken for. Since the money they're being taken for can easily go into five figures whether it's a purchase or a refinance, and can be six figures for a purchase or sale, I find this difficult to believe. If you're making that much, you shouldn't need a loan, for one thing, let alone be concerned about minimum down payment. Nor would you be concerned about affordable housing and getting the best deal possible for your money. You would be so wealthy, and your time so valuable, that it would make economic sense to buy the first property that met your needs - and you'd be buying properties in the unique custom home range ($2 million dollars or so around here).

Nobody does loans for free. Nobody does real estate for free (nobody does financial planning for free, legal advice for free, etcetera). "Free" is likely to be the most expensive service of all (This is different from at such a rate that yield spread pays all costs, or the custom that sellers pay the costs of both agents - but the only source for those funds is the money the buyer brings to the table). If something about a loan, a real estate deal, or some aspect of financial planning seems "too good to be true," that should set alarm bells ringing right there. If the payment or interest rate on a prospective loan is nothing like what everyone else is talking about, they are looking to pull a con job on you.

If you're of the school that forewarned is forearmed, what you're reading here should give you the information you need to guard yourself against the deceits in the system. I've done lists of "red flags," warning signs not to do business there, "Questions to ask" that you can print out and take with you, "Salesgoodspeakian to English Translations," debunking of pat phrases used to mislead you and what they really mean. I've given you strategies that, if adhered to, give you more leverage right down the line. I've gone through what real closing costs are, what points are, and warned you of the dangers of shopping for loans or real estate by what they tell you the payment will be. Most importantly, I've shown you how to keep control of your transaction by being aware at the start of the process what the likely bumps are going to be.

Not everyone in the business does everything I've warned you against. There are ethical providers out there; people like myself who will walk away from business or tell clients the pitfalls if something is not in the client's best interest. You can find us if you look, but we can't help you if you close your ears to the things you don't want to hear. Nor are those who practice otherwise necessarily evil, and there is an entire range of practice from best to worst. Real Estate, financial planning, and many other fields are set up such that someone new in the business learns from somebody experienced. In many cases, they've been told "This is the way things are," and they just don't know any better. The person who taught them didn't know any better. It is my aim to ensure that people "know better." The change is not going to come from within the industry - the system is set up for the practitioner's best advantage, and any one agent or loan provider unwilling to toe the industry line is at a competitive disadvantage, and their business is likely to fail. It's kind of the tragedy of the commons: their own individual behavior shows them nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by full truthful disclosure, and where there are people who do it anyway, we are comparatively few. Therefore, the change must come from outside the industry. So by being knowledgeable consumers and helping yourselves, you provide impetus for practitioners to reform their practices for everyone. It may take a long time, and it may never be complete, but if it's never started I can guarantee that things will not get any better.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

This has been a noticeable phenomenon for quite a while in San Diego. I've been loath to talk about it because I didn't want to be giving fraudsters ideas. Most lenders have now put into place safeguards against this measure. As always, they do not distinguish between guilty and innocent, but the lender is the one risking their money. Keep in mind Real Estate loans are not about the "benefit of the doubt", they are about proving to the bank that they are likely to get their money repaid with interest.

The basic event is this: People have decided to relinquish their current property to the lender. It's not worth as much as the loan is for, so they see only a gain to be had there with current law declaring the income from forgiven debts non-taxable. Perhaps they couldn't afford their new payments after the teaser expired. Perhaps they could; they just don't understand what they are doing to their credit and the fact that the market is going to come back - sooner than they probably think. Perhaps it's a non-recourse loan and they see only the fact that they owe more than the property is currently worth.

But these people don't want to be homeless, and they do understand that after they have gone through foreclosure, not only are lenders going to be highly resistant to lending to them, but landlords are going to be reluctant to rent to them. So they hit upon what they think is a brilliant plan: Buy a new house before allowing the old one to go into foreclosure. After all, the degradation to credit hasn't happened yet! However, this is still fraud. These people have an actual plan to allow a property to be foreclosed upon, and a reasonable person would know that lenders would consider that in deciding whether to grant credit.

Unfortunately, there has been enough of this going on that lenders are no longer willing to let it go unchecked and unchallenged, so they are looking for evidence that new buyers of primary residences and second homes do not plan to "buy and bail". Since this was originally written, there have been stronger requirements put into place: First, there has to be significant equity in the current property. Fannie and Freddie both require 30% equity in the existing property in order to lend on a new one. They also want to see either the ability to make both payments without any rental income or a verifiable job change to a new commuting area, and the need to relocate (i.e. nothing in the same commuting area). There are portfolio lenders out there who will waive the 30% equity requirement, but they are very careful about the circumstances and even more careful if the move is within the same commuting area.

Meeting these basic conditions is not a "get out of underwriting free" card in the current paranoid environment. There are other checks being made upon the process, checks I am not going to discuss beyond saying that the transaction has to pass a "smell test." Being someone who doesn't like seeing bad real estate loans made for a plethora of reasons, I welcome the return of the smell test. I've seen the aftermath of too many transactions that smelled worse that week old fish in dumpster on a hot day. You may think you're a "a special case," but every single one of those folks out there facing foreclosure or having gone through it already also thought that they were "a special case" then, and the ones trying this fraud think so again now.

These new restrictions have hurt, and will continue to hurt, legitimate investors and purchasers by making it more difficult to qualify for the loans. It is nonetheless a fact of life brought upon us by the market. Furthermore, 20% down is pretty much an absolute minimum for buying investment property currently currently. Furthermore, even the lenders that were accepting loans for both a primary residence and a second home in the same commuting area have now stopped that practice. It was silly to start with, and it has only gotten worse of late, but people who want to avoid the constraints and requirements of investment property loans were eager for it. I just don't understand why lenders were willing to accommodate them. Either the charges and higher equity and qualification standards were necessary, or they were not. If they were necessary, why were the lenders bypassing them? If not, why did they exist in the first place?

I can understand people who don't want to be homeless. However, while "Buy and Bail" may not always be obvious before the fact, but it is afterwards, and the lenders are starting to take notice of foreclosures against other companies, and they are even writing in clauses that make their loan callable, by which I mean they can demand you pay that loan off in full, giving you 7 to 30 days to make the actual payment. Once again, this sort of clause is going to disadvantage people who have had the property a while and be intending no harm who do hit hard times: Job loss, disability, etcetera. Nevertheless, "Buy and Bail" is fraud, and the lenders are entitled to take whatever measures they think reasonable to insure that they don't lose their money to a suddenly unacceptable credit risk, as well as to return a reasonable return on that money. It may seem like cruelty to you, but I'd like to see some of the folks pulling it sentenced to an enforced residency in a government institution wearing funny pajamas, because games like this destabilize the mortgage market for everyone, and every time somebody pulls a game like this, the lender's reaction hurts many others who should be able to qualify for a loan and are now unable to do so, further screwing up the home loan market for 300 million Americans.

After this was originally published, I got a question from Realtor Ricki Widlak who doesn't understand how people pull this, in that they're going to have another home loan on their credit report. The answer is that they claim they are going to be receiving $X in rent per month. They fake up a lease contract, usually between themselves and a family member or close friend. The added number of dollars per month from this entirely fictional contract makes it appear as if they qualify. However, because the lease is not real, they don't. Ergo, the qualify without rental income restriction.

He ends with this question: "How do people "walk away"? Who walks away from anything in this information age anyway? I just don't get it. These people are "leaving behind" their soc numbers, right?".

The answer to all of these questions is that lenders have no difficulty in identifying this phenomenon in retrospect - these people aren't getting away with anything, and some of the lenders are starting to follow the criminal prosecution route. But identifying the perpetrators in retrospect does not assist the lenders in not making bad loans in the first place, which is the situation the lenders want. So they raise the bar for qualification for everybody in order to weed out these bad apples. Yes, people who would otherwise qualify are getting turned down for loans. However, the lenders are not a court of law, where we'd rather a dozen guilty people go free than one innocent one be punished. In fact, the lenders have precisely the opposite view, especially in the current environment: They'd rather turn down a dozen or more good loans than accept one bad loan, and they are now writing their lending criteria accordingly.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

A seller carryback is when the seller agrees to "carry back" at least part of the purchase price themselves. In other words, instead of getting the full sales price of the property (less outstanding liens), the seller accepts a certain amount of the purchase price in the form of a promissory note from the buyer. This note is usually secured by the property, making it a "purchase money" loan for purposes of determining recourse, which means there usually isn't recourse on the buyer, at least in California. Furthermore, the seller's trust deed is usually in second or third position, behind the primary loan and possibly a secondary loan.

The reason behind doing this is that some buyers cannot qualify for a sufficient loan, or have credit sufficiently bad that no lender is willing to loan them the necessary percentage of the value, considering the down payment they have (usually zero). But sometimes, every last potential buyer is heavily sought after, and some sellers are willing to do whatever it takes to make the transaction happen. Particularly as being willing and able to do a seller carryback is one tool for being able to get full price or more from a buyer who needs one.

As an example, let's consider someone with a 560 credit score and less than 5% down payment in the current lending environment. They can't get an FHA loan, they can't go A paper and there is no true subprime. A portfolio lender might consider a 70% loan at most. These folks might be able to get 70% financing full documentation, and even that is iffy. But all they've got is less than 5. If the seller wants to do business with them, it takes a carryback to make the deal happen. If the buyer needs a carryback, he's got to be willing to meet the seller's terms for making it happen. This gives the seller who is willing and able to do a carryback access to potential buyers that sellers who are unwilling or unable to do so do not have. Furthermore, it gives those sellers who are willing and able to carryback part of the purchase price leverage in negotiations to get a higher price than they otherwise would have. Not every seller has the option of a carryback. Matter of fact, right now relatively few have that ability. With the loss of equity current homeowners have gone through and the need they have to use what equity they may have as down payment on another residence, sellers who can do carrybacks are scarce.

Lest there be any doubt, a carryback is not something you keep secret. You don't need to shout it from the rooftops, but at a minimum, all of the lenders involved have to be notified in writing as to what's going on, and have to accept it, also in writing. There are some lenders who will not permit them at all, even though their loan takes priority. There are other lenders who will accept them but impose conditions. They are all going to want to see a loan repayment schedule, and include that in debt to income ratio calculations. It may be possible, in theory, for a "silent second" type carryback to be approved, but the lender wants to see something that seller is getting in return for extending financing, and most such loans will not meet the underwriter's "smell test," particularly not in the current loan environment, which has gone within a from being far too permissive a few years ago to completely paranoid today, as the lenders scramble to avoid consequences of years of bad decision-making, after they are already suffering from them. Trying to game the system in this environment in order to get a higher debt to income ratio through the system is highly likely to be interpreted as fraud.

I've mentioned that sellers' trust deeds will be occupying second or even third position, which means that in the event of default the loans occupying higher positions are paid in full, before there is one penny paid to the sellers for their subordinate loan. It therefore behooves sellers to be extraordinarily careful about extending financing, as if the people were able to qualify for the full amount of financing they need with regular lenders, chances are that they would have done so. Furthermore, not having a down payment, or only a clearly insignificant one is not a sign of sterling financial discipline. Furthermore, if the holders of the higher priority trust deeds foreclose, your deed will be wiped out by the action of the trustee's sale. Concrete example: Let's say that a $500,000 purchase is financed 80/10/10: 80% ($400,000) on a first trust deed, 10% ($50,000) on a conventional second trust deed, and 10% ($50,000) on a seller carryback. The buyer discovers that they're in over their head, and even if prices don't recede the property only nets $450,000 at auction. Less the costs of the trustee's sale, that first trust deed gets all of their money (or at least most) the second trust deed might get some of theirs, but there is no way that seller carryback going to see a penny of that money. Even if prices go back to ballooning like they were several years ago and the property is now worth $700,000 after two years, they might not see any of their money unless you go to the trustee's sale armed with cash to defend their interests - just like any other holder of a junior trust deed.

Servicing can be a real issue as well. Do you know the proper way to service that loan in the state you are operating in without missing any i-dottings or t-crossings? If not, you could lose most or possibly even all of your rights under the loan contract. Professional servicing organizations exist, but they 1) cost money that cuts into your margin, and 2) make mistakes anyway, which you are responsible for. Not too long ago I fought and won a battle with an out of state servicing company that was violating California law. If I had wanted to, I could have sued both them and the holder of the note as well as making criminal complaint. Servicing requirements are deadly serious.

With all that said, many sellers right now are in a situation where a carryback means, "Hey, I might get the money, where if I didn't, I definitely wouldn't." If this describes your situation, a carryback might be something you should consider.

Lest you not understand, most sellers want cash, not a loan. It's very hard to use a loan, particularly a private loan of dubious quality, to assist you in buying your next property. You can't just spend a promissory note like you can cash. There are loan buying services out there, but most of the time the amount you get will be heavily discounted, particularly if you cannot document a history of on-time payments and you are in a bad credit situation. It is this fact which sellers who are able to offer carryback financing leverage use in order to get better deals.

There are those out there who like carryback financing. Most often, they are real estate sharks. What they are hoping is that they will get their twelve percent for a couple of years, during which time value will go up, and when they turn around and foreclose, having not only been paid their above market interest but also having leveraged that loan into renewed ownership of the property at an appreciated price. Another one of their tactics to use the existence of the carryback as leverage to get a price significantly above market for the property from desperate buyers who can't get anything else, and as soon as the buyer has made the payments for a few months, sell the note. However, the note buyers have caught on to that little trick, and in the current environment of decreasing or stagnant prices (flat locally), they are balking at paying full price or anything like it for those notes.

And that's where I'll stop, lest I inadvertently release more scams into the wild. Suffice it to say that there is sufficient potential for abuse in the practice of carrybacks that lenders have become very sensitized to the possibilities, and have taken what they feel are appropriate steps to limit their potential for losses due to the abuses that have taken place in the past.

Caveat Emptor

Original Article here

For a long time, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a policy that they would not fund investment property (non-owner occupied) beyond 10 loans for a given investor. Although it did impact a certain number of investors, for most folks that rule just never came into play. They have now reduced that limit to 4 loans, which is putting an awful lot more investors in the position of needing a portfolio loan.

Portfolio loans are loans where the lenders originate the loan with the intention of holding it themselves. In recent years, this has been a very limited niche, and even those A paper loans written with the full intention on the part of the lender to hold it themselves were often underwritten to Fannie and Freddie standards, so that they could sell such a loan. Not that there were very many of those.

Portfolio loans largely went away because the tradeoff between rate and costs is much higher than the standard securitizable loans. In plain English, the rates are higher. When the lender originates a loan and sells it on Wall Street, it gets an immediate return of 2.5 to 4 percent on its money. Not as much as holding a six percent loan for the year, but they can turn right around and use the money to sell another loan. Lenders don't have any trouble getting four to six loan sales on the same money per year, some manage eight or better, and twelve is possible, if unlikely. Therefore, they make anywhere from 10% to maybe 25% per year by selling the loan repeatedly, as opposed to about six percent for holding it. Which of those do you think the average lender sees as more attractive, particularly if they also retain servicing rights and make money that way without risking any of their own?

So if the lender is not going to be able to sell the loan, but rather have its money tied up until you decide to sell or refinance the property, then they're going to want something more akin to the 10% or better return they get on their money by originating and selling the loans. Portfolio loans have a higher rate for the same cost; albeit a much smaller difference than when I first wrote this article. Some people will tell me they don't want their loan sold. I ask why, and they tell me about the hassles and ending up with an unknown company. I explain that the contract is the contract, and the only differences if your loan is sold are the name on the check and the address on the envelope (or, if you pay online, the routing number you use). For those that still come back with "I don't want my loan sold," I then say, "Well, then it sounds like what you want is a portfolio loan. The interest rate will be higher, meaning your payments will be X dollars per month higher, and your cost of interest will be higher." Them's the facts. Some lenders will lie about it to get clients to sign up for their loan, but that doesn't change the facts. They can deliver a portfolio loan, or they can deliver a regular loan where the lender is still going to sell that loan. Which would you rather have, an honest discussion of alternatives or someone who chose one alternative without consulting you? Because the loan they deliver will be one or the other, and whether it's the choice you would have made is mostly a matter of luck.

To be completely honest, even portfolio loans can be sold. However, not being designed with standard loan packages in mind, it's harder. Selling portfolio loans is a harder thing than what Fannie and Freddie do, as the ways in which portfolio loans are underwritten is not written to some broad industry standard. Selling portfolio loans is more common now than it was a couple of years ago, but the same lender generally retains servicing. Not every lender offers portfolio loans, as they are a different thing entirely to the corporate finance people than the standardized loans Fannie and Freddie require.

But for those that do, they allow that lender to make the underwriting decision by whether they are comfortable making such a loan, rather than whether or not it meets standardized criteria for Wall Street. This can enable those lenders who do offer portfolio lending to be able to make a certain specific loan, where a lender with its eyes fixed solely on Wall Street does not have the option of saying "Yes."

There are a fair number of loan niches that have always been portfolio loans. Many commercial loans, and loans for investors with over ten properties, to name two. Traditional "non-conforming" loans are not one of them, however. Just because Fannie and Freddie couldn't buy them doesn't mean nobody would. In fact, because they were underwritten to Fannie and Freddie standards in all matters except loan amount meant they were sought after, especially as opposed to subprime loans. But just because portfolio loans are not underwritten for Wall Street doesn't mean that the lenders can ignore Federal Reserve regulations, for instance the one about "Must be able to repay the loan from a source other than additional borrowing against the property". For that, you have to go hard money.

Final point: Because the interest rate for portfolio loans is higher, and therefore the cost of borrowing the money, there are going to be a lot of properties that would be a good investment for someone able to qualify under Fannie and Freddie's rules, where they would not be a good investment for someone who needs a portfolio loan. This is likely to constrain prices from rising to a small degree, and force rents to rise to a somewhat higher degree. If your landlord can't make it work on the basis of the rent you're paying, they have two real choices: Raise your rent or sell the property. Nor is the second alternative any kind of relief. If that landlord couldn't make it work, why would you think the next one can? That's assuming the purchaser doesn't plan to live in it themselves from day one. I have an inflexible rule with tenants where my clients don't want to keep them: They must be out before close of escrow. I suspect most buyer's agents are the same way. One of the fall-outs from the bursting of the real estate bubble that most people don't realize yet is that the economic factors which kept rent increases low for the last decade or more are all gone now. Furthermore, if someone is looking to buy an investment property, the cash flow is going to have to work from day one. If it won't, they're not going to buy it, and it will never become a rental property in the first place. On a $300,000 loan, a portfolio loan instead of a securitizable one means a difference of over $500 per month in the cash flow requirement, which translates to rent increases, and not just from the big landlords with portfolio loans.

Portfolio lending is set for a comeback. With Wall Street becoming ever pickier about the loans it wants to fund, and mortgage insurers restricting what they will insure, a strong lender with good reserves can make a lot of money in this environment by lending to selected borrowers with good credit and plenty of income, that "originate and sell" lenders cannot touch, because Wall Street isn't interested under current standards.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

There's no question which I'd rather have.

It has been traditional for a client to write a check to their broker's escrow account. Sometimes the check is actually deposited, but usually it's just held. It has recently become become a game with certain listing agents to ask for a copy of that check with the offer. I don't know why. It's not like it means anything beyond that the clients have a checking account.

Asking for a copy of the check doesn't do my listing clients any good. That check may not be good, and you don't have it anyway, nor is it even in escrow most of the time. In fact, even if it's written to the appropriate escrow company, sometimes they don't cash it for weeks. Furthermore, since you haven't agreed upon an escrow holder yet, it's kind of ridiculous to be writing a check when you don't know who's going to be holding it. All of which means that asking for a copy of the check doesn't mean a damned thing.

From a broker's viewpoint, the number one way brokers get in trouble is escrow account paperwork. Stupid, minor little piddly crap on the scale of the transactions we handle, whose entire purpose is seeing that client funds are separated completely from broker funds, but problems are caused by the fact that broker funds have to be used to pay the costs of such an account and therefore incredibly dumb little minor inadvertent stuff can cause a brokerage to lose their license. I'd like to see more unethical agents and brokers get charged with violations on other things that really make a difference to their clients, but that's no reason for witch hunts on the escrow account so long as the client's money goes in and out properly. Nonetheless, since brokerage escrow accounts are a witch hunt mentality on the part of the Department of Real Estate, I don't want custody of client funds if it can at all be avoided, and I see no reason to ask other agents do do something I wouldn't want to, and that doesn't benefit my clients anyway.

What I do want is evidence that the buyer does, in fact, have the money for the deposit. That's it's sitting there in a bank account, ready to write the check. That when they do write the check, the escrow holder will be able to cash it and get the funds into the account for this transaction without delay. I can make acceptance of the offer contingent upon the receipt of good funds by escrow, but why would I want to open escrow if the funds might not exist in the first place?

The first step is verification that the money is, in fact, there - and believably there. I cannot require account numbers, but I can require redacted account statements, or verification of deposit. If we're going to obsess about the deposit money, I'm at least going to obsess about things that mean something to my client, like whether the money is there and available, not whether the prospective buyer is willing to write a check that may or may not have the funds to make it good.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

This is easy. Much easier than effectively shopping for a loan or a listing agent. So easy that a congresscritter can do it. So easy that congressional leadership can do it.

The only thing possibly moderately difficult to understand is that finding a good Buyer's Agent takes place in two steps, not one.

The first thing to do is figure out your situation. What do you want in a property, and what is your budget? I've written several articles to help you determine your budget, but the one piece of data they are missing, because they have to be, is what the rates that are available to you are. Unless you're sure that you fall into the topmost category - great credit score, no late payments or anything, and you're looking to buy something well beneath what you can prove that you can afford, you can only find this out by having good conversations with several loan officers. Rate advertisements are teasers, aimed at getting you to call, useless in reality. I have never seen an advertisement for a loan that 1) actually existed, and 2) that I would consider signing up for, even if I could get paid for it.

Then, make a list of agents you might like to work with. This can certainly include Uncle Bob, your neighbor, or your poker buddy, but you want more than one agent on the list. My experience is that agents at the big chains are (in the aggregate) not up to the standards of the ones working at independent brokerages, but your mileage may vary. Also, I am a Realtor, but that's for reasons completely unrelated to competence or ethics. I'll believe that Realtors are superior to non-Realtors when the boards of Realtors start handing out penalties for non-compliance with the alleged code of ethics that mean something. Ditto all of those little "designations" that have been cooked up to parallel the ones financial planners get. Unlike many financial planning designations, some of which are graduate degrees of one value or another, these are marketing efforts cooked up to fool a gullible public for sitting through a couple days worth of lecture. The qualifications for the real estate designations are laughable in the context of ChFC (Chartered Financial Consultant) and other financial planning designations that require five to ten graduate level college courses to attain.

Then, have a good conversation with those agents. The first thing you should ask, on the phone, is whether they require an Exclusive Buyer's Agent Agreement, or whether they will accept a Non-exclusive Buyer's Agent Agreement. If they require an exclusive agreement, that should be the end of the conversation, and cross their name off of your list. If you sign an exclusive agreement, you are locking your business up with that agent. You are putting yourself in their hands completely. The only reason that you should even consider an exclusive agreement is if you are asking for something special that costs money - for instance, expedited foreclosure lists (The free lists are a waste of time, because they're already flooded before you get them. The subjects of the free lists have said, "no" to literally hundreds of others before you even got the free list, so unless you've got something very special in the way of an offer, you are wasting your time.)

There is absolutely no good reason not to sign a standard Non-Exclusive Buyer's Agreement. You risk nothing by signing. You lose nothing by signing. You can have any number of them in effect, and as long as you don't sign any exclusive agreements, you're fine. All you do is assure the person whose services you use that if they find and help you purchase the property you like, then they will get paid. The only reason not to sign such an agreement is if you're looking to stiff a good agent who finds you the property you like, so that you can use a discounter on the transaction, and that's shooting yourself in the foot. The money you get back is unlikely to be as much as the difference the good agent will make in negotiations, or the trouble the good agent will save you.

One more thing any buyer's agreement you sign should have: An explicit release if they are the listing agent for the property you decide to put an offer on. It is a very bad idea for buyers to accept a dual agent, because the agent has a responsibility to the sellers, but nearly so deep of one to you. They're on the other side. I wouldn't pick a quarterback that played for the opposition at the same time, and neither should you. Tell them to pick a side and stay on it, and as they already have a listing agreement, they've already chosen the other side. It's great for them and for the sellers that they've sold the property, but their desire to get paid double does not outweigh your right to representation with responsibility to you and no conflicts with other duties.

Tell them what you want in a property, where you would like to live, and what your budget is. Then ask them if it's a realistic, and see what they say. If they say yes, that's great, but wait until you hear it more than once before you celebrate. Many agents will tell you yes, figuring that it's easier to raise your budget than lower your expectations, especially once you have seen this beautiful property that they "just happen" to know someone who can get the loan for. Nor is this a straight yes/no question. They might tell you an unqualified yes, as desirable properties possessing those characteristics you want are available in that area below your budget. They might tell you that such properties are available, but that they are scarce and you must be prepared to act expeditiously when you find one. They might tell you that you're going to need a fixer to get those characteristics, or that you're likely to need to compromise some of them. Or they might tell you that what you want is sufficiently beyond your budget that an alternative approach is probably called for.

Now, whatever the first agent tells you, don't swallow it whole. Get some evidence. If they show you literature for brand new beautiful properties just being sold out that are less than your budget right where you want to live, that's evidence. If they execute an MLS search and the only things that pop up in your budget are out of area properties being cross-marketed, that's evidence. The worse the news they tell you, the more likely it is to be true. Sales persons do not like to be bearers of bad tidings, especially before their commission is paid. But if they're willing to give you evidence that your expectations need to be adjusted downward, that is evidence that this is probably someone who takes their fiduciary duty seriously, and that is an agent you probably want to work with. By comparison, the agent who fills your head with happy thoughts is one to avoid, as millions of people have discovered the hard way in the last few years after they went through foreclosure on properties that they shouldn't have bought in the first place.

Notice that I said an agent you want to work with, not the agent. There's a reason for this. Remember that non-exclusive agreement you signed? Remember that I told you it's fine to sign more than one? Here's the good thing about signing more than one: Now you have multiple agents looking for that special property that will make you happy. You won't pay any more for this than for one agent, because they are all competing for your business and the same commission check. This is the stage at which the agents are actually competing for your business, by looking for the property you want. You don't have to decide who gets paid up front. You wait until one of them brings you what you want. Furthermore, the agents will self-select or disqualify themselves to a large extent.

Let's say you signed seven non-exclusive agreements. One is Teresa Top Producer, who slams clients into the first property that's even a rough fit. She'll take you shopping one day, try hard to sell you every property, and get upset if you don't make an offer on the first day. By "try hard to sell" I don't mean anything so crass as the hard sell. What happens is she talks up everything she mentions, very little if any compare and contrast, and whatever she does, no calling your attention to defects or undesirable items. In fact, she'll do her best to distract you or get you to ignore them. For savvy, patient, intelligent buyers, Teresa is not a good fit as an agent, and you're going to realize it after one or two properties. And here's another great thing about the non-exclusive agreement: You just stop working with her, and she's out of the picture!

The second person you sign an agreement with is Martin MLS. Martin does an MLS search, and wants you to go around with him to every property on that list. He sets up an automatic notification to you of every property that fits some basic criteria that gets listed, and he wants to go check out every one with you. Lest you not have figured it out while reading the last two sentences, Martin's approach is basically throw a lot of mud at the wall and hope that if he throws enough, a little bit will stick. Martin may or may not have any real idea of the spread and breadth of your market, and he may or may not be able to recognize a real bargain when it bites him, but he probably has a good idea of the general state of the market. You'll get the same idea pretty quickly by working with Martin, after you see fifteen or twenty properties that seem pretty much to run into one another - except for the ones that are drastically over-priced. You get the idea that working with Martin is not an effective use of your time, and soon, you stop, at which point Martin's out of the picture.

The third person you sign up with is Benny Bump. Benny's got his own unique way of making transactions happen. Actually, it's not at all unique. It's common enough to have a general slang term among Realtors. What Benny does is take you to three or four properties that look like war zones, comparatively speaking. These are not desirable properties on the scale you're using. They fall well short of desirable on one scale or another, and usually on several scales. Then, just as you are despairing of ever finding something you like, Benny Bumps you by showing you this absolutely gorgeous property in perfect condition. "Yes!" you happily cry, having quite predictably come to the conclusion that You Want This One, and you'll do Whatever It Takes to get it. You may or may not notice right away that the price is way above the budget you stated to Benny, and he's counting on you not caring when he whispers that he knows how to get the loan, or knows someone who can. The vast majority of people who meet Benny will fall for "The Bump", and most of the ones who don't fall for it will not realize what a vicious, unethical trick it is. You, being that one in a hundred or so who is smart enough to realize what happens next to Benny's former clients, inform Benny that his services are no longer desired.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. You should demand to know the asking price of every single property before you agree to view it, and if the agent can not explain why that property might be obtained within the budget they agreed to work with, that is an offense not only worthy of firing them, but one for which financial prudence demands firing them. You can't fire someone who you've signed an exclusive agreement with except by waiting out the agreed upon period. You can fire someone whom you have signed a non-exclusive agreement at any time by Just. Not. Working. With. Them.

The fourth person you signed with is Rhonda Rebater. Rhonda is a discount agent sits in her office, and waits for you to bring her the property you like to her for negotiations. She'll usually also expect you to meet the appraiser, meet the inspector, etcetera, nor will she shop services for effective value. Quite often, Rhonda has her hand out to these people behind your back. Not necessarily for a lot of money in any one place, but her whole approach to the business is based upon volume. And she does quite a lot of volume, because people who think in terms of cash in their pocket (that rebate of some portion of the buyer's broker's commission that Rhonda gives them back) are her legitimate prey, and they flock to her in droves, like politicians to campaign contributions. If you're savvy enough in the business that the value provided by a good agent is negligible, why don't you get licensed and earn yourself the entire buyer's broker commission? Because Rhonda has little real market knowledge, she's a weak negotiator on your behalf, and because her business model is predicated upon high volume, she's an awful guardian of your interests as the transaction goes along. So Rhonda may not be precisely out, but she's not likely to go out and find you a real value.

The fifth agreement you signed is with the team of Gary and Gladys Gladhand. Gary and Gladys get their business from social groupings. Gary has a bowling team and a softball team and he's a soccer coach and Gladys is PTA president and girl scout troop leader and organizer of the party circuit. And, of course, their ads are all over the place. "Mr. and Mrs. East Side" on the East Side and "Mr. and Ms. West Side" on the West. Together, their objective is to know enough people, and make certain all of these people know that they are Realtors, that they are always getting referrals from these folk because "of course" they'll use Gladys and Gary, and walk-ins from those stupid enough to believe their advertising. You may have come to them as Uncle Gary and Aunt Gladys, because normally Gary and Gladys don't allow non-exclusive agreements, and they will almost certainly balk at the no dual agency release, even from a relative. Their whole business approach is predicated upon not competing for your business, and locking out the competition so that they don't have to compete by making it a social obligation to do business with them. In point of fact, Gary and Gladys may be decent or good listing agents, but are extremely unlikely to be strong buyer's agents, because all of this schmoozing takes a lot of time that could more productively - from potential buyers' point of view - be spent obtaining market knowledge and finding bargains. Their approach is reasonable on the surface: You want a house and their listing wants to sell a house for too much money and they want to get paid both halves of that commission, so there just isn't any reason not to make everybody happy, is there? But a good buyer's agent is going to be the one that looks at every single property, whether they listed it themselves or not, with a cold, rational, logical mind and clear eyes for comparative value. I don't list many, but I rarely show one of my listings to one of my buyer's clients, because my listings are priced to the market and the situation. This means that while they're not over-priced, they're not the greatest bargains in the market, either. I only need to price low enough to attract people foolish enough to sign an exclusive agreement with one of these problem agents, not to attract a cold, steely-eyed buyer's specialist. Gary and Gladys are going to show you all of their own listings (except the ones that are obviously unsuitable) first, then, all of the listings with other agents in their office that might interest you, and then they are going to start acting an awful lot like Martin MLS: Throw enough mud at the wall, eventually some of it might stick. Are any of these tactics likely to generate a superior value from a buyer's point of view? Not on Planet Earth.

Now, you got really lucky, and beat the odds. Out of the seven you signed up with, you've actually got two agents that are going to do their job by going out and looking for the best values in your current market by actually looking at them and comparing them to each other, from the standpoint of your needs and your desires and your budget. The ratio of these agents in the real world is much lower than that. If you don't have at least a couple agents left on your list when you're done vetting, go out and find more. You can sign any number of non-exclusive agreements, at any time.

When good agents show you a property, they show it to you with context in mind. They're willing to say bad things about every property, not just the ones they don't want to sell you, even though they should only be showing you superior values. They're going to compare and contrast virtues and defects. Lest I be unclear, it is precisely for these virtues that you have been vetting your candidate agents. You can only see real evidence as to whether they are present or absent in action, not during the interview process. Knowing enough to sign a non-exclusive agreement gets you the ability to find the defects in the five agents who didn't do what you wanted, and you didn't need to commit yourself to any of them before you observe them under fire. Instead, you know enough to understand that there is no real need to commit to anyone until you make an offer.

Now, which one of these two of three good agents gets paid? That depends upon which one of them does a better job of finding you the property you want. Best trade-off of those things you want in a property versus price. Of course, you won't be sure exactly what price you can get it for until you go through the negotiations. And it is possible that one of the others really does have something good, if not nearly so likely. In my experience, Martin MLS will eventually get the job done, if you have enough patience or he gets lucky. Rhonda Rebater will be there if you get frustrated enough to take matters into your own hands. And it is possible that Gary and Gladys Gladhand have something you like, but it is unlikely to be a superior value. Teresa Top-Producer and Benny Bump are deadly poison, as far as buyers are concerned, and once you discover this hidden attribute, you should give thanks that nothing you saw with them was attractive to you. But none of these others has gone out and physically looked at all those properties, which gives those two good buyer's agents you did find an unbeatable amount of market knowledge, which they can then turn around and use to your benefit in negotiations. When they can tell you what the bad points in a property are as compared to the other stuff, you have evidence that they can explain it to the agent on the other side of the transaction. Except for those owners who just won't listen to reason because they want their property to be worth more than it is and they are not going to entertain evidence to the contrary, this evidence is powerful stuff, and can make a huge difference on the price you end up paying, even on a property that is legitimately an above average value to start with.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

There are actually several distinct marketplaces consumers can obtain their funds from, and several types of providers. John the wealthy highly salaried person with great credit and a substantial down payment should not and usually does not obtain his mortgage from the same funds providers as his twin brother Jim, the self-employed, always-broke person with terrible credit and no down payment. They may deal with the same employee at the same business, but the funds and parameters for using those funds, are entirely different.

In order to make sense later on, I've first got to acquaint you with two concepts: yield spread and pre-payment penalty. The yield spread is what the lender pays the person or company who does the paperwork for your loan in order to give them an incentive to choose that lender, loan type, and rate, as well as any of several other reasons. The yield spread is based upon the rate of the loan, the type of the loan, and other factors as well

Yield Spread is explicitly associated with the premium (amount over face value) that the actual lender will receive when they sell the loan. I find it entirely and intentionally misleading that the government now requires brokers to treat yield spread as a cost and added to other costs of the loan while not requiring that direct lenders disclose this secondary market premium at all. The new 2010 Good Faith Estimate adds Yield Spread as a cost when under the new rules it is an offset, lowering the cost of the loan to the consumer. This has the effect of making broker originated loans appear more expensive than they are, while allowing direct lender loans to continue to hide this method in which they get compensated on basically every loan.

Prepayment penalty is a penalty you agree to pay if you sell your home or refinance before a certain period of time has passed. If there is a prepayment penalty, Industry standard is six months interest, with some lenders making this 80 percent of six months interest. Usually (not always) they will let you pay a certain amount over the normal, agreed upon principal per year without triggering the penalty, but if you sell or refinance out of their loan, the penalty is always triggered for the duration of the penalty. Some lenders will actually phase it out in stages, although this is not common.

Lest it be not plain to you, a prepayment penalty is a thing to avoid if you reasonably can. Let's say you get transferred and need to sell the house in six months, and that you have a $200,000 loan at 6%. That's six thousand dollars less that you will receive from the sale of your home, not to mention that the average person refinances every two years, which is typically the shortest pre-payment penalty. If you need to refinance within two years, that's six thousand dollars of your equity gone for no good purpose. Mind you, if you need the loan, and it gets you the loan, so be it. It's still a thing to avoid.

The top of the food chain from the point of view of consumers are the so-called A paper lenders. This market is controlled by the two federally chartered giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lenders who participate in these markets lend in full accordance with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rules, because they want to be able to sell the loan to them. In many cases, they actually do sell them seamlessly by retaining the servicing rights, and the consumer never knows they have done it. In others, they retain the loans entire, and in still others, they sell them off entire. They do this for many reasons, but mostly to raise cash so they can do more loans. In any case, the only difference it should make to you, the consumer, is where to address the check and who to make it out to. Unlike the other markets, if the secondary market pays a premium in this market it does not automatically mean that there will be a pre-payment penalty. Although they will pay a higher yield spread if the loan officer sticks the client with a pre-payment penalty (and the longer the prepayment penalty is, the more they will pay). WARNING! Many loan officers will not tell you about it unless asked ("Why bring up a reason not to choose your loan?" is a direct quote I've heard any number of times) and some will flat out lie even if you ask. This is not ethical, but they know they can almost certainly get away with it. There really is no reason why an A paper loan should have a prepayment penalty, except that a loan officer wanted to get paid more. The new rules make this more difficult, but it is still happening, mostly because consumers aren't very careful. ALWAYS be careful about pre-payment penalties; they are an excellent way for lenders to sock you with thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in extra revenue that will end up coming out of your wallet.

It is not difficult to qualify for an A paper loan. As long as you're not taking equity out of the home, they can go through with credit scores as low as 620 for a full documentation loan, although there are caveats. Despite what you read in Internet pop-ups, according to National Mortgage Reporting a 620 credit score is 100 points below the national average. So even someone with modestly below average credit can still qualify for an A paper loan. There are minimum equity requirements, however. Also, it until recently it didn't matter if you were King Midas who had never failed to pay a bill immediately in full or someone who barely staggered over the line into qualification by the computer models put out by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That has now changed with risk based pricing, such that credit score and equity picture can cause you to be assessed a differential, but the differential is a lot better than going sub-prime or Alt A. There is nothing better than A paper.

The next market below A paper is called A minus. The rates are a little bit higher, and there are prepayment penalties anytime the lender pays a yield spread. A minus is still a program associated with Fannie and Freddie for the "almost but not quite" people, although the window of qualification has become a lot narrower of late.

Then comes the so-called Alt A, which are typically loans for fairly unusual circumstances. At this update, Alt A really isn't available due to Wall Street being more nervous than a cat at a rocking chair convention, but I'm going to leave the rest of what I originally wrote untouched because it will come back: The credit scores here go down to about 580, although there is less standardization. The worst, most dangerous, absolutely awful loan in the world comes from the "Alt A" world. There are all kinds of friendly sounding names for it, like "Option ARM", "pick a pay", and such things, but they are all negative amortization loans at their heart - you end up owing more than you borrow. They sound benign: "pick your monthly payment!" But in fact most people choose the minimum monthly payment which capitalizes and then amortizes more money into your loan every month. Every single one I've ever heard about carries a prepayment penalty. Once upon a time, I saw ads for these abominations every day all over the internet. If anybody quotes you a mortgage rate below 3%, or a payment that seems too low to be true, I will bet you millions to milliamps they are trying to sell you one of these abominations. There are still loan providers out there that do nothing but these - they're easy to sell to unsuspecting victims because the minimum payment is so small, and most people shop for a home loan based upon payment. There really isn't space here to go over everything that's wrong with them (or where they may be appropriate), but except in certain special circumstances, RUN AWAY! And do not do business with that person! They have just proven themselves unworthy of your business. Fortunately, the Negative Amortization loan has now had regulatory controls placed on it, and lenders have figured out that these loans aren't as good for their bottom line as they thought, due to a high default rate that was as predictable as falling objects hitting something.

(Every so often, a representative from a new lender walks into my office. I'm always glad to talk to them so long as they answer my questions in a straightforward way, but I have one inflexible rule. As I just said, it doesn't happen much any more, but if the first thing they talked about was a Negative Amortization loan - no matter the happy sounding name they call it by, I throw them out and do not allow them to return. I think it indicative of the state of things in the Negative Amortization world that the one time I had a client who would actually benefit from this thing, and I took the time to tell him exactly where all of the traps I knew about were, give him strategies to turn it to maximum benefit, and he agreed that he wanted to do it - not one of the five companies I tried would actually approve the loan despite him meeting all of the written loan guidelines.)

The final niche that comes from regular lenders is called sub-prime. Until recently, in the world of sub prime lending you could do a lot of things that higher rungs on the ladder will not allow you to do. As in A minus or Alt A, anytime the lender pays a yield spread there will be a pre-payment penalty, and I think I've run across exactly one sub prime loan that didn't have a prepayment penalty in my whole time as a loan officer. However, the people who subsidize sub prime lenders just didn't have a whole lot of choice. That has now changed. Unless you've got a very high down payment or amount of equity, subprime is being about as strict as A paper with qualification standards. However, if you don't qualify for a better market, this is typically the only way you're actually getting a home loan, be it because of low credit, low equity, or what have you. The rates are high, but it's that or nothing. Sub prime loans are very lucrative - the average lender or broker specializing in them usually makes about 5 points - 5 percent of the loan amount - on each and every loan. I've had people thank me so profusely I was almost embarrassed when I got them a loan on something more closely resembling a typical margin from higher niches. The lines between A minus, Alt A, and sub prime are blurring more and more as time goes on. When I first wrote this, it was to the point now where if someone said they did sub prime, that usually meant Alt A and A minus as well - it's just a matter of where on the spectrum a given client sat. Nowadays, what that same provider is looking for is an A paper borrower who doesn't realize they are A paper, or whom they can make think is not an A paper prospect.

The final niche is Hard Money. These are not typical lenders, in fact, they have almost nothing in common with traditional lenders. They are agents for individual investors, sometimes even loaning you their own personal money. The rates for this start an absolute rock bottom of about 13 percent, and go up from there. Typically there will be a front-end charge of about 5 percent of the loan amount, and a prepayment penalty of about 7%. These are loans for people with sub 500 credit scores, people with homes that have been damaged in some way and must make repairs before a regular lender will touch the property, and so on and so forth. The equity requirements are large - 75 percent of the value of the home based upon a conservative appraisal is about the highest a hard money lender would ever go, and all of the ones I'm aware of now have an absolute limit of 65%. Lenders in markets higher up the chain are in the business of making loans, and are likely to cut you as much slack as practical if you have some difficulty making payments, as they are not in the business of foreclosures. A hard money lender has no such constraint. They will foreclose on your home immediately and without a second thought. One way or another, they will get their money back and then some. WARNING! It is common practice on the part of hard money lenders to have you sign the Note and Deed of Trust "conditional" upon them finding an investor. The person signing the documents thinks the loan is done, and that their situation (usually a time critical one) is resolved, and everything is all roses now, but it isn't. They may still want you to pay for multiple appraisals, jump through multitudinous hoops, and still not give you the loan in the end. This is just their way of binding you to them so that you don't or can't go elsewhere. Not that this is completely unknown in the higher niches (in fact, some lenders market their services to real estate agents and brokers based upon this practice - people who are true loan officers learn that this is not a good idea), but it's not common, as it is here.

There are three main types of places to go to get a loan. The first is a regular lender. The second is what I call a "packaging house", although in practical terms it is very similar to a regular lender. The third is a broker or correspondent. Each has their advantages and disadvantages.

A regular lender is what you think of when you think of a bank. Most of the big names are regular lenders. They typically have their own offices, often mingled with other banking functions. They have their own funds, wherever they've gotten them from, and they have executives and such that put together their own loan programs, complete with criteria for approving or not approving a given loan. These people do loans with at least the possibility of keeping them in mind, and some do keep every loan they do, while others sell almost every loan. The good news is that they'll typically be slightly more willing to make exceptions around the edges (whether or not the loan is a good one for you!). The bad news, from the consumer point of view, is that they consider you a captive from the moment you walk in the door. Even if they know of another lender with better pricing or a program that suits your needs better, they're still going to keep you "in-house". And their loan pricing is such that it's going to pay for all of the salaries and benefits for all of the people in the office, and the beautiful office itself and all of its contents.

A "packaging house" is like a regular lender except that they do their loans with the explicit intention of selling off every single one, either immediately or a few months down the line. Practical difference to consumer: there's a 100% chance you're going to end up making payments to someone else. In other words, no big deal. Packaging houses are lending their own money - they are not brokers. The difference is that a traditional lender is at least set up for long term servicing - the packaging house is not. Some sell immediately, some wait for one payment (better price in the secondary market), some wait three payments, as this gets them an even better price when they sell the loan. This is nothing to fear. The original lender recently sold my own home loan. The only difference is that now I write the check to company B instead of company A, and mail it to place X instead of place Y. California has stronger consumer mortgage protection laws than the federal government, but there are laws in place nationwide for the consumer's protection that avoid payments being unjustly marked late because your mortgage was sold.

A broker is not lending their own money, but is being paid instead to put the loan together and get it to the point where it is funded, at which point they are out of the picture. A packaging house could, in theory, decide to keep a particular loan - there is no legal impediment. They just don't do it. A broker doesn't have this option - it's not their money being loaned, but instead that of a regular lender or a packaging house. On the down side, a broker has somewhat less leverage to get underwriters to make exceptions to the rules (although the difference is academic for those outside this narrow range). There is also a lot of variation on quality. You'll find the very best loan officers in the country working as loan brokers - and the very worst, as well. On the up side, a broker always has at least the ability to get you a lower price than the other alternatives, although they may not have the willingness. Correspondents are a cross between brokers and packaging houses that function almost entirely like brokers. They've got multiple providers like brokers - but the company also has a line of credit they use to fund your loan so they receive the secondary market premium rather than merely whatever yield spread there may be. They're still putting your loan through a particular lender's underwriting and funding program, but they fact that they initially fund your loan themselves allows them to act more like a direct lender.

The first reason for this is that a good broker shops many different lenders to find the program that's priced best for you. This is less important but still very noticeable at the A paper level (A paper had pretty standardized rules) then it is for borrowers whose situations (either through credit, or through needing to do something A paper doesn't support) need to go to markets lower down on the totem pole. A traditional lender or packaging house puts you in the program they have that they feel is the best fit - they won't go outside the company. A broker may shop fifty lenders or more to find the one program at the one lender that fits you best. Second, I (as a broker) get better pricing from the lenders, either regular or packaging house, than their own loan officers. Why? Partially because they're not paying my support expenses - office rent, furnishings, support staff salaries, etcetera. Mostly because it's my customer, and I can and will take my customer elsewhere if they don't give me the best possible deal. As a broker, I am never held captive by any single lender, and they know it, and they know I know it, where once a member of the public walks into their office, they consider you "captive" business, whereas at any point in the process, I can take my paperwork back from the lender and take you to someone else. Used to be, I usually didn't even need you to fill out anything new. That has now changed with the new Home Valuation Code of Conduct which means appraisals are no longer portable (What? You thought it was for consumers?).

Still, I do have the option of moving the loan, so they give me better pricing than they give you, and they don't play games because I've got more business every week that they want, whereas they're not going to see you again for a couple years, if ever. The upshot is: every week when I do the family shopping, I hit three or four supermarkets all competing for my business within a mile and a half from my home. Because of this competition, I can save pretty good money buying the things that each market has good sales on, and if the quality at one market isn't so hot on some sale merchandise, I will get a pretty good price at one of the others. Mortgage brokers work on the same principle. I do the running around and quality check for you, and because this is what I do for a living, I can spot the bad stuff a lot easier than you can. When I do my grocery shopping, I always make a point of checking what the banks in the supermarkets are offering on their mortgage deals, and I always smile because I'm always getting somebody a better price on the same loan from that same lender.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

There are all sorts of reasons why escrow falls through, but they fall into three main categories. They can best be described as failures of qualification, failures of the property itself, and failures of execution.

Before I get into the main subject matter of the article, I need to define a contingency period. This is a period built into the beginning of the escrow process when one party or the other can walk away without consequences or penalty, usually for a specific reason. For instance, the default on the standard forms here in California is that all offers to purchase are contingent upon the loan for seventeen calendar days after acceptance. If the loan is turned down on the sixteenth day and the buyer notifies the seller that they want out immediately, the seller should allow the deposit to be returned by escrow. If it happened on the nineteenth day, the buyer should be aware that their deposit is likely forfeit. A contingency, just like anything else, is something negotiated as part of the purchase contract. If it's in the contract, you have one. If it's not, you don't, although some states may give buyers certain contingency rights as a matter of law.

Failure of the buyer to qualify for financing is by far the most common reason for escrow failure. This means that something goes astray with the buyer's quest to acquire necessary financing. They cannot qualify for the loan, they do not qualify within the escrow period under the contract, they allow their loan officer to spin all kinds of fairy tales about what the market is doing or likely to be doing when the plain fact of the matter is that the loan officer just can't do the loan on the terms they indicated when the poor unsuspecting consumer signed up. Maybe it existed at one time, or maybe they just hoped it would. In any case, it wasn't locked in and it certainly doesn't exist now, so rather than pay the difference out of their commission, the loan officer delays and hopes for the market or a miracle to save them. Or they told the consumer about a loan they thought they might be able to qualify them for, only to find out they don't, and they're stalling, hoping a better alternative will open up. Due to changes in lending law and practices, it's now taking a minimum of 45 days for loans, but when I originally wrote this, if a loan officer couldn't get the loan done in thirty days, I'd have bet money they couldn't do it on the terms stated in the initial documents.

Sometimes it does happen that consumers don't qualify for the loans due to real problems that just don't come up until the file is in underwriting. Since this can cause you to lose your deposit, it's a good idea to ask your loan officer about any potential problems before you make an offer. You know your personal financial situation but you probably don't know what all of the potential disqualifying issues for a lender. The loan officer should know what the issues are that may cause lenders to have difficulty approving your loan, but they don't know your history and situation unless you tell them. Many things that underwriting will catch do not necessarily show up on a loan application or credit report, so if you have an unpaid collection, monthly expenses that might not show up, a lien, a dispute in progress, any issues with your source of income, or anything else in your background that you have any questions about whether it could impact your loan, it's a good idea to ask right upfront, before you get into the process. Sometimes these issues mean that you flat out do not qualify, sometimes they mean that instead of 90 percent or more financing, you only qualify for 70 percent. Unless you have that extra 20 percent of the purchase price lying around somewhere, the transaction isn't going to fly, and the sooner you find out, the better. A loan officer who can't show you a loan commitment with conditions you can meet before the end of the contingency period is not your friend.

The second category of reasons escrow fails are failures of the property. Some defect is disclosed by the inspection process that the owner does not want to correct or is unable to correct, and the buyer decides that the property is not for them under the circumstances. Mold, termite damage, seepage, damage to the foundation, and all of the other usual suspects fall into this category. Title issues are here also, although they usually become unsolvable when they impact the loan. If the seller can't deliver clear title, the title company won't insure it, the lender won't lend the money, and any rational buyer should want to walk away. Why do you want to give someone money when they are likely not legally entitled to sell you the property?

For defects with the property, providing it was discovered within the contingency period, it's up to the seller to convince the buyer they should still be interested. After the contingency period is over, things are more complicated as there is the possible forfeiture of the deposit to weigh. Good agents that you want to recommend to your friends get out and get the inspections done right away to avoid this issue. Agents that are looking to line their own pocket wait until the contingency period is over before doing so, as this gives the buyer more incentive to stay in the transaction. Let's say you've got a $5000 deposit on the line and seventeen days to remove contingencies, as is the default here in California. Would you rather your agent got an inspector out within a couple of days, or waited three weeks? Keep in mind that you're going to pay the inspector, but that's money you're going to spend regardless. The first possibility means that you find out about potential defects while you can still recover your deposit, while the second possibility means the seller can likely keep that deposit. I know which situation I'd rather be in.

Failures of execution are likely to be because someone messed up. The seller didn't do this. The buyer didn't do that. One agent or the other dropped the ball. The escrow officer didn't do their job. Loan officer failures would be here if loans weren't a whole category on their own. This category covers all the little details in the purchase contract, each of which has to be met before the escrow officer can close the transaction. These failures may or may not be actionable, in the sense of you being able to hold them responsible for their failure. Many times, the escrow officer is used as a whipping post for the failures of other parties, but some escrow officers do screw up big time. Sometimes it takes an outside expert to dissect things dispassionately in order to figure out what went wrong where and whose fault it was, but outside experts cost money, so most of the time everybody just fades into the sunset pointing fingers at each other, unless there's some pretty significant cash involved. The transaction is dead and it's not coming back. Unless there's a good possibility of recovering enough money to make it worthwhile, let it go.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

About once a week, I get an email from a client or prospect asking about a property they found on a site not sourced from MLS. These properties are pretty universally non-existent, at least as far as being for sale for the advertised price.

MLS listings have to pass some very important tests. Other agents, and for that matter, regular clients have got to be able to verify that they exist. What is it being offered for, what are the showing instructions. Agents who put properties in MLS without having listing agreements are subject to pretty severe sanctions when it is discovered. Fines, Loss of MLS access, possibly even regulatory action if it's severe enough.

That's not the case with the rest of the websites, the ones that get their listings from somewhere other than MLS. I'm not going to name names, but it's pretty easy to discover whether a site is sourced in MLS or not. I will say that client gateways and emails and IDX sites (such as agent websites that say "search MLS!" and realtor.com) are sourced on MLS. Sites sourced on MLS will still have puffery, but the property exists, is for sale for the listed asking price, and the hard numbers will generally be as correct as possible.

If the site does not source its listings from MLS, then agents can write up any property they want. In the past month or six weeks, I've had clients ask about

• properties that were already sold - escrow closed before the ad was written
• properties that aren't on the market and haven't been for years
• properties allegedly priced at sale prices from over ten years ago
• one property that doesn't exist anymore because it was torn down for new development

What is going on is that agents are writing up false listings for the express purpose of trolling for clients. Getting people to call so that they can maybe pick up a new client. This is very subject to the "talking a bigger better deal" phenomenon, because the person that talks the biggest best deals gets the most calls.

But here's the catch: These bigger better deals don't exist. What happens when you find out that deal doesn't exist? When you discover that an agent dishonestly claims to have a property for sale that they don't in order to get your business. Does that sound like the kind of agent you want? Of course, if you've already signed an exclusive agreement by then, you're stuck. Yet another reason to prefer the non-exclusive agency contract, where you can fire that agent by simply not working with them any more.

I have also seen the actual listing agent writing up ads on third party sites for far less than the list price of the property - a violation of fiduciary duty if ever there was one. This isn't a buyer's agent saying "I think I can get it for $X" This is a listing agent essentially repricing the property without consultation with the client. Nor can they have it both ways. If they believe that is a correct pricing of the property, why haven't they persuaded the owner of that, so the listing is priced correctly in MLS?

It is to be admitted that every once in a while - maybe one in a hundred - the property in question is a "For Sale By Owner" that hasn't figured out how to put their property on MLS through some discount service, or is too cheap to spend sixty or a hundred dollars to do so. Neither one of these is a recommendation for the property. If they're too greedy to spend that small an amount of money that will get the property sold better and faster than everything else, that doesn't bode well for their negotiating stance. On a $200,000 loan at six percent, $100 is three days interest, and that's a tiny loan around here. If the property gets sold three days faster by alerting the agents (and all of their clients with automatic feeds) to its existence, that owner is ahead. And if they can't figure this out, or don't care, how likely are they to negotiate in good faith?

On MLS, there are checks. The property is linked to public records. Other agents who know the area can challenge it. Not to mention the fact that the price listed must be the current asking price per the listing agreement. There are penalties for claiming something that is objectively untrue. There is a limit to the puffery due to these facts. Third party sites, not so much.

I suppose I should mention that it's not the MLS name that's important, nor ownership by Realtors. It's the fact that there are mechanisms for verification and challenge built into the website - mechanisms that are easily invoked, and once used, are actually followed up upon quickly with bogus entries being promptly removed or corrected and penalties applied for having put them there. I can send a complaint to my local MLS in about thirty seconds, the bogus information will be gone within 24 hours (usually within 30 minutes if it's during their business day), and the broker who put it there is likely to have some adverse consequences. Those are the important reasons MLS can be accorded some measure of respect.

All of this is quite aside from the fact that Dual Agency is a recipe for disaster, but at least a third of the buyers out there don't know this, because that's about the ratio of buyers that use the listing agent, according to Association of Realtor figures.

But the key feature of the third party sites for these ads is that they are not checked by anyone. The only way to find out if they're BS is by calling - and that's what the agent wants you to do. If they can convert one call in twenty to a client by writing an ad for a nonexistent listing on a third party site, they are way ahead of the game. The other nineteen weren't going to be their clients anyway, and one client with a $150,000 purchase - tiny around here - can put anywhere from $4500 to $9000 in their pocket. But do you really want to work with an agent who got your business by telling a lie?

I wouldn't.

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Original article here

We read Searchlight Crusade every day and consider your essays a priceless education in avoiding the major pitfalls in the home-buying process. On behalf of all of us consumers, thank you so much for your hard work!

Please comment on any pitfalls in selecting a property to purchase that is on a community water system. How do we find out how many homes share the resource, how often the water is tested and what the results mean, the GPM rate and whether it's sufficient for usage without any rationing, etc. We've had a long-time driller tell us NEVER to share a well, but this is a community system, not a single well. Unless the system uses only a single well...?

To be honest, there aren't a lot of properties around here still on a well. The water table has gotten too low in the populated areas to make it work. Most of the properties that are on wells are isolated and in rural or quasi-rural settings.

First a little background for folks who may not understand anything about wells. You have to be aware of the well parameters, of which there are three that are most important: "How deep has it been drilled?", "How big is the holding tank?" and "How fast does the pump replenish it?" These aren't the only issues to pay attention to, but they're the ones that are guaranteed to bite you if you don't pay attention. Wells do silt up over time and may need to be re-drilled. Pipes and pumping mechanisms corrode, get old and break down. And water quality is sometimes a very big issue - for instance if the tank at the town filling station springs a leak, and it may even be caused by something nobody knows about. I knew a gas station owner who got fingered by the EPA for a leak and spent 4 years and over $100,000 digging it out, diluting the underground flume he couldn't get to, and everything else anyone could think of before someone discovered an old forgotten military tank left over from WWII that was the real cause of the whole thing. (No, he didn't get any of his expenses back). Not to mention the water may just taste bad. It happens.

Finally, I should also mention that most of the properties I know of that are on wells use septic waste disposal systems. It may be revolting if you think about it, but in some areas you won't have any choice if you're going to live there. People have been doing fine with these systems for quite a while and it's quite safe - but you need to be careful that both systems are completely up to snuff and separated by the appropriate buffers. I'm no expert on what those are, but be certain to check with someone who is an expert before you buy. This can also make it very questionable as to whether you're going to be able to do any expansions you may desire in a legal and safe fashion. Septic systems are only rated for so much, and if you want to add additions, you may need to expand them - if the soil will absorb the extra, and if there's room. Sometimes the soil won't, and there may not be the necessary expansion room even if the soil will take it.

Now, getting to your specific question: Do you know how many wells we're talking about, and what the communal capacities are? Ask yourself how much water you're likely to use, and multiply that by the number of folks on the system. Ask if there are any agricultural or industrial users on the system, and how much water they use. Add in a finagle factor for bumps in demand - for instance, if a main pipe or holding tank springs a leak, one of your neighbors hosts a family reunion with a fleet of RVs, etcetera. If one of the users is agricultural and it's a dry growing season, they're going to put a lot of demand on the system. I haven't encountered it personally, but given that southern California used to be the citrus capital of the world, I've heard older relatives tell me about water wars between citrus growers and between citrus growers and everyone else. It still happens today, even though most agriculture has now left the area.

Now, let me ask what feeds your water supply? What's the source of the water? Is it just rainfall, or is there some permanent stream nearby that feeds it? How is the water table holding up under current and projected demand? Is it holding steady or dropping? Go ask some people that have lived there for a while about dry years and whether they have water worries. Ask about whether there has been more demand placed upon the water available in the past few years. Ladies and gentlemen, my father told me stories about the San Diego River filling Mission Valley from side to side, so there wasn't any way across that didn't involve boats. I remember floods that completely filled the underground garage at Mission Valley Center, right up to the ceiling. In the last thirty years, however, there has been too much demand placed upon the water table for it to flood like that.

My point is this: water tables don't replenish themselves. There has to be water coming in to replace what is used. If there isn't enough coming in to replace what's going out, there's going to be a problem. Eventually, everybody is going to be out of water if this is the case. The only question is when. Do you want to buy into a situation like that? They can drill deeper and all the other stuff; it only delays the day of reckoning and makes it worse. This was one of the root causes of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s - everyone had kept putting increasing demand upon the aquifer that underlay an area basically several states in size, drilling ever more deeply to be able to water their crops one more year. A tragedy of the commons if ever there was one.

Which segues into another issue: All it takes is a small proportion of nitwits to exhaust the community water source. I've heard that your area is dry - perhaps not as dry as some of southern California, but that it doesn't get a lot of rain due to being in the rain shadow of some high mountains. If a few of your neighbors want to simulate a rain forest, it can leave everyone else without enough water. Exactly how many it takes depends upon the system and how much extra capacity it theoretically has. Even if everything is hunky dory now, all it takes is one water hog buying a property that's served by the system to possibly create problems. So let me ask you what the provisions are for limiting the water of abusers of the system? If you have to get law enforcement involved and go to court for years, where is the community going to get the money? Can you afford your share? Not to mention you would probably like to know where you're going to get water in the meantime. And what happens if the community water authority is run by control freaks? You don't necessarily have to do anything wrong to incur their wrath. Sometimes, all it takes is changing something they're used to, and even though it doesn't impact water use adversely, they'll try and use the water authority as a means of getting back at you (I suppose I should thank Larry Niven for introducing me to the concept of hydraulic despotism at a relatively early age). How big is the community water system? The bigger it is, the more nitwits it takes to drain the system, but the smaller it is, the more likely everybody is to make a good faith effort to get along and the less likely it is that some people see it as a lever for power over others. The issues aren't at all unlike those encountered by common interest developments in the cities, except that it's water rather than parking, recreational access, or loud parties that make it difficult for everyone else to live their lives, and a board that's more interested in its own power than in harmonious administration of common resources for the benefit of all. Unfortunately, these are all depressingly common occurrences.

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Original article here

My article Debunking the Money Merge Account Scam has been getting a lot of attention and a large amount of hate mail lately. The scamsters that sell these things love to send me hate mail for exposing the fact that their particular emperor has no clothes.

Here is the bottom line: The only benefit these programs actually get is about two weeks temporary reduction of principal per month, based upon your take-home pay. On a $200,000 mortgage at 6 percent, that is worth roughly $4.41 per month under ideal conditions. It will pay the mortgage off approximately three and a half months early. On a $400,000 mortgage at 7%, it's worth about $11.41 per month under optimum conditions, and will pay off your mortgage a little over five months early.

They programs do not give you the right to make extra payments, and they don't save you the money that those extra payments saves on your mortgage. Anyone who doesn't have a "first dollar" prepayment penalty can do that, any time they want, for free, and if you do have such a penalty, Mortgage Accelerators and Money Merge accounts will not prevent that penalty for being levied.

What they do is charge you anywhere from $2000 to $6000 as a sign up fee for these programs, and most of them require a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) as well, increasing the cost of interest of whatever money is in them. Quite a few of them also require a monthly fee that varies from $1 up to about $8. I have yet to find one of these where the numbers say that the gain is not more than offset by the fees.

Suppose instead, you spend the sign up fee on a one-time pay-down of your mortgage. Instead of paying $2000 to $6000 for this program that gets you a few bucks per month, you spend that money on a one time pay-down of your mortgage. I have yet to find a scenario where that doesn't pay off your mortgage earlier, and have a lower balance the entire time it is in effect, so that if you do refinance or sell as most people do, you're ahead of the game the whole way.

The people selling these scams love to pull the ad hominem. They accuse me of not liking the program because people on this program won't want to refinance, and there's usually something in their accusation about how I cannot sell the program. Both of these claims are nonsense. I have idiots begging me to sell these things on a regular basis, and I could sign up with any one of them and make money. I have not done so, because these programs will not deliver, and my entire method of doing business is predicated upon doing the right thing for the client, so they are motivated not only to come back to me themselves, but also to send me anyone they care about. Furthermore, people on these programs refinance almost as often as anyone else. The difference in the numbers these programs make is a lot less than saving an eighth of a percent off the actual interest rate, and I can prove it. If I have a refinance that saves them money starting the day it happens, they're going to sign up just the same as anyone else.

The only effective selling tool these con artists have to sell these programs is the appearance of free money. They assume that the money for extra payments comes out of some hyperspatial vortex. They do generate a few dollars per month in interest savings through temporary payment reductions, but as I covered above, you're better off using the sign-up fee to pay the balance of your mortgage down. Any extra payments that do get made don't come out of a hyperspatial vortex - they come out of your checking account, which comes from your paycheck. Such money for extra payments is then not available for other things, whether it's a vacation, a new car, an alternative investment, or just blowing the money down at Joe's Bar. The extra money is the same, and you have the exact same right to use it to pay your mortgage down faster with or without one of these programs. If you have it extra to pay down your mortgage, you can do so regardless of whether or not you have paid the sign-up fee for one of these scams. If you don't have the extra money, then obviously it's not going to get paid to your mortgage, is it?

In fact, one of the things these folks never mention is that the entire question of whether to pay off your mortgage faster is an open one, subject to a lot of variables, and the numbers in most cases argue that you should not. If you can make more with an alternate investment than you save by paying your mortgage down, the default answer is going to be that you should go with that alternate investment. Since average return over time of bonds and stocks and other possible investments is considerably higher than the six percent interest of your average mortgage, with federal and state deductions for mortgage interest paid lowering the effective cost of the mortgage further, it's silly to pay down your mortgage faster unless there are other factors. A mortgage accelerator may actually lock you into that when there are better, smarter, more profitable alternatives available. Finally, even though paying your mortgage down may be the alternative best in line with your current situation and plan for your life, paying any kind of sign up fee or monthly maintenance for such a program is a waste of money when you have the perfect right to make those payments on your own, for free, at any time you choose. Any fee you are thinking about paying for one of these things is a waste of money. You are better off putting that fee towards a one time direct pay-down of your mortgage.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

One of the things I have to deal with on a continuing basis is people calling me because they like something they saw on one of my websites, but they have no intention of doing business with me.

Most common is would be buyers calling me, "Just tell me the address of that Hot Bargain Property." That's not how it works, as I explain in literally every one of those posts. It isn't luck I find those properties. It's dedication and skill. I spend a lot of time looking, not just in MLS, but in public records and physically going out and looking at them. I've spent a lot of time learning what to look for and how to look for it in all three places. Maybe, if I had personal need of their professional services, I might consider a barter - mine for theirs. But in point of fact, I suspect a large percentage of the calls I get of being lazy agents (A receptionist answering the phone in the background saying the name of a certain major chain is a dead giveaway).

There is a reason these properties are of interest. I'm going out and finding properties that are noteworthy bargains. If it could be done by any random person with MLS access, anybody who could type realtor.com could do it. I can do it, in large part, because I make a habit of doing it and most others won't. It is work. If George digs a ditch, you don't pay Charlie. You pay George. Same principal here. The reason I'm worth more than the discounter, in terms of what I find, how well I negotiate, and everything else, is a function of all of the work I do that helps me find good properties, spot problems, know the micro-markets I work in, understand what is critical and what is not. If you find the property yourself without any help from me, yes I'll discount my services for negotiation and facilitation because you're not getting the largest part of the value I provide, and I'm not risking the largest source of agent lawsuits. Otherwise, I am providing more value to you than the discounter and am therefore worth more pay. And I'm providing it, not that discounter. I'm not going to give out the locations of the special bargains I find to anyone not willing to work with me. Like I said, George digs a ditch for you, you pay George, not Charlie. You want to pay Charlie, get Charlie to dig the ditch. But in this case, he not only can't, he won't try.

Borrowers will call about my Real Loans for Real People. They want to know what lender that's with. Well, I hate to break it to you, but the loan I have is the loan I have. Credit Unions, National Megabank, etecetera may use the phrase "cut out the middleman" to try to get you to avoid brokers, but that's not the way it works. Even if I gave you the name of the lender, very few of them give their captive loan officers rates as low as brokers get from their wholesale division. Why? Because they're not paying my overhead, and my clients aren't captive to them. They regard their clients as captive because comparatively few people shop loans effectively. They go to big name lenders, who have no more programs than other lenders, and comparatively little imagination. They may or may not have the most appropriate loan program for a given client. Usually not. Big lenders mostly compete on the basis of name recognition and consumer comfort. A broker may be a middleman, but we function more like discount outlets. And the specific stuff I get is for my clients. If you want it, you've got to be one of them. If you weren't interested, you wouldn't have called.

What I'm trying to get at is this: Trying to cut out the person who provides the value you're interested in is counter-productive. Even if I told you what lender a particular loan was with, rates change at least every day, and it's unlikely they will offer as good a deal through their dedicated loan officers, even if they are the right fit for your loan. Trying to cut out the person whose market knowledge and work enabled them to recognize a bargain means that even if you know what property it is, you're in a weaker position on negotiations. Net result, you get some money back, but you also paid a higher price than you needed to in order to get it. The latter is almost certainly more than the former - probably several times more. Once again, if you want George to dig a ditch for you, or if you want George's ditch, pay George, not Charlie. You'll come out better, even if George wants a few bucks more than Charlie. If Charlie's ditch was something you wanted, you wouldn't have needed to get George involved. Chances are, even if you buy Charlie's ditch, you're going to want George to fix it, so the money you paid Charlie is wasted. Actually, it's worse than that, because in real estate, once something is screwed up, there are no shortcuts to fixing it. Once a real estate transaction is done, unwinding it or fixing it becomes far more expensive and difficult than doing it right in the first place.

Caveat Emptor

Original Article here

There are actually several different kinds of listing agreements. They get their names from the rights conferred when you sign the contract. The vast majority of agreements concluded are either Exclusive Right to Sell or Exclusive Agency.

Exclusive Right To Sell means that no matter who buys the property, that agent will get the listing commission. There is an intelligent reason why most listings are Exclusive Right to Sell: If I can spend all that money and time doing the work to sell your property, and then you can not pay me for it even though I'm successful, well, let's just say I'm not going to be so enthusiastic about spending that money and that time if the prospective buyer can then go straight to the seller and I get nothing for my efforts. Some agents won't accept other kinds of listings. Other agents will only do so on a flat, up front fee basis, as opposed to deferring their fee unless and until the property actually sells. If you want a good agent to devote their full energy to selling your property, this is the kind of listing contract for you. If there is one particular person you think might buy direct from you, the owner, that can be handled via an Exclusive Right with Exception, which designates one of more persons who are exceptions to having to pay the agent, but even that is a marginal idea. Yes, it might save you a commission. But it will definitely create some doubt in the agent's mind, and less willingness to spend what they might really need to in order to get a sale made. Better to get a solid yes - or no - from that person who is an exception ahead of time. If they really want the property, they won't have any problem committing saying they want it when you ask them. And you can't sell to more than one person, right? So you shouldn't be wondering about somebody you found when you contact an agent. And before you condemn agents for acting like this, ask yourself how hard you would work at your job in order to maybe get paid, or maybe not, even if the job is successfully completed.

Exclusive Agency means that you won't pay agent commission if you sell it yourself, but you will pay if they, or some other agent, brings you the buyer. Any agent with a buyer is presumed to have been procured through the listing agent's marketing efforts. Nonetheless, this does allow for random people to knock on your door and buy the property direct from you - despite the fact that the listing agent's efforts were what alerted them to the existence of the property. Since most agents have been burned on this one or know someone who has, few agents want to accept this style of agency without requiring you to at least pay for their efforts, and they are mostly not the top-notch ones. But if you really want to exercise the escape clause in having to pay the agent, count on being on your own through the negotiations and escrow process. A very large proportion of prospective buyers who will go around your agent to negotiate with you directly are sharks, unqualified buyers unable to buy, or possess some other characteristic that's going to cost you a large amount of money, time and frustration. Real estate sharks like being able to cut an agent out of the transaction, because if you negotiate a direct sale, your agent is certainly going to pack up the tent and leave, which then leaves the shark a clear field with nobody who knows how to deal effectively with that shark.

Limited Service listings are popular with discounters, but they typically do not work on the basis of commission delayed and contingent upon a successful sale. They want their money up front. Cash, check, or, sometimes, charge. Furthermore, the reason they are called limited service listings is because they are not fulfilling all of the services that real estate agents are normally expected to fulfill, and their responsibility to you is also much lower. Might be a good thing to do if you're a former real estate agent who knows how to do it, but the average client doesn't know how much they don't know. The pitch is "save money!" but that's not how it usually works out. When the agent on the other side is a discounter, a good buyer's agent knows that their client is going to end up very happy - especially once it's been on the market a while. The same thing applies when a good listing agent gets someone represented by a commission rebate buyer's agent. In both cases, the difference in sales price is likely to be several times the commission difference. One more thing I should mention: A lot of both types make their living by shifting their work onto the full service agent that they presume is going to be on the other side of the transaction. What happens if there is no such full service agent - in other words, if the other side is using a limited service discounter also? The work needs to get done, and neither agent is going to do it. You're going to do it yourself or pay a lawyer - and paying a lawyer to avoid paying a real estate agent full commission is like spending a dollar to save a few pennies.

Open Listings are listings where there is no single agent that has a right to get paid. Of course, no one has the responsibility to act on the owner's behalf, either. Not to market the property, not to make certain you get the best deal possible, and not to represent your best interests in other ways. Therefore, most agents and discount listing services usually want a flat fee in advance for open listings. It may be small or relatively small, but it's cash upfront. There may or may not be a listed payment to buyer's agents in open listings, and therein lies the horns of a dilemma. You don't list a buyer's agent commission and buyer's agents avoid you because there is nothing in it for all of their hard work. You list a low one, and they're still going to take their buyer's elsewhere. You list a good one, and they'll bring their buyers all right - while working on their buyer's behalf to get them a better deal. Kind of like an arms race, except it's not life or freedom at stake, only money. Still, you just invited a bigger, better equipped army than yours into the fight, on the other side.

Probate is a special purpose listing when the property is being controlled by the estate of someone who died. Probate listings almost always go to full service agents because the probate judges are looking to get the best deal possible. Furthermore, the probate attorneys and executors aren't going to do the work, and the deceased definitely isn't going to do the work. There are often debts and there are almost always tax bills, and there are always heirs looking to get the most money possible. Probate is a real pain to deal with, and it takes forever, because the courts are involved. Nor are they necessarily great deals. Quite often, the court or the heirs have set a minimum bid that's more than the property is worth, because they evaluated the property on the basis of the prices when the owner shuffled off the mortal coil, or without subtractions for things like bad maintenance or bad condition. They're only hurting themselves when they do so. There's one not too far from my office where I had a client it would have been perfect for - except that the minimum bid is at least $40,000 more than the property was worth on the market. It had been on the market for a good long while before I found it, and it's still on the market today, more than six months later. If they'd priced it $20,000 lower, it probably would have sold within a month of going on the market. By the time I found it, prices were diverging by $40,000. Now, it's more than that.

I'm the sort of agent who believes in competition, and an exclusive right to sell kills competition once it has been signed. Nonetheless, there are enough countervailing reasons why it is in your interest to sign an exclusive right to sell. I may not like it, but you can have agents compete before you sign a listing agreement. Your house is a half million dollar investment around here. You probably want to interview at least as many agents as you would visit stores when you're looking for major appliances, before you trust anyone to handle that kind of investment. The difference in likely results is a lot more than the entire cost of a refrigerator.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

I have a landlord, that is always harassing me every 2 weeks, for the past 2 years, on the upkeep of the property, and wants to have inspections. Also want me to mail them all their mail. Most of which is Bank stuff. I am fed up, and thinking they are under a Owner Occupied Loan. Is there a way I could find out? And who do I complain to, if I decide to?

It is a misconception to think that just because someone moves out, they can no longer have an owner occupied loan.

In fact, the typical owner occupancy agreement that is required in order to get owner occupied financing is only a twelve month occupancy. When I buy or refinance today, I agree to live in it for twelve months in order to get those rates. After I have met that requirement, I can move out, rent it out, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. That loan contract is in effect, I have lived up to all of my obligations as far as owner occupancy, and I can keep that loan as long as I maintain my end of the other parts of the contract. It is fraud to claim I'm living there, or intend to live there, for those twelve months if I do not actually live there, but once I've met that twelve month occupancy requirement I can go live in Timbuktu so long as I get my loan payments in on time, properly insure and maintain the property, pay taxes in a timely fashion, etcetera.

It is possible, as I discovered once upon a time, that if you have an owner occupied loan with lender A, that same lender may refuse to give you another owner occupied loan on a different property. In this case, it was refinance the loan on the other property, or accept a second home loan on property A. But notice how, even then, the lender did not force them to refinance despite the fact that they hadn't lived in the other property for years. They just offered the owner the choice of accepting a slightly less favorable loan (Second home financing, still much better than investment property) or refinancing the existing owner occupied into another occupancy type. Or, being brokers, we could submit the package to another lender. There are circumstances where each of these three possibilities may be the best choice. The lenders do not share this data between each other; indeed, my understanding is that they cannot legally do so. It was only applying for a second owner occupied loan from the same lender that brought this on, and not every lender even does this much. If thirty year fixed rate loans are the only type you ever apply for, it is theoretically possible to legitimately have a new owner occupied loan starting each and every time you have met the minimum time for owner occupancy for the previous lender. In extreme cases, it might be possible to get upwards of twenty owner occupied loans all in force at the same time, while having honored your contractual requirements for each and every one.

The minimum owner occupancy requirement can be different. One year is by far the most common, but there is no reason that I am aware of why it cannot be longer, if that is what is specified in the contract. However, I do not know of any lenders that requires you to refinance or requires you to pay a surcharge if you move out once you have met the required period of owner occupancy specified in your Note.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

I find it fascinating the number of people who will claim that because no college degree is required to become a real estate agent, that agents can't possibly be worth any significant amount of money.

The reason no college degree is required is because no college curriculum can teach what a good agent needs to know.

Oh, there are license preparatory schools in abundance. They'll teach you what you need to know to pass the licensing exam. You do need to know that stuff to practice real estate, but doing a good job on real estate is a lot harder than answering multiple choice questions on a government exam. You have to understand how it all fits together. No school in the world teaches that. Real estate law and practice is an extremely complex profession, and every situation, every real estate transaction, is different because no two properties are the same, no two sellers are the same and no two buyers are the same. There are common recurring elements, but there is not one line of the standard eight page purchase contract (in California) that there isn't occasional reason to change via negotiation, and there isn't a school going that teaches what those exceptions are.

Popular media loves to gloss over what agents do. People see the media depiction and think they can do it. Ladies and gentlemen, the reason the media glosses over it is because it's boring detail work, and most of the dramatic interactions take place between pieces of paper. When's the last time you saw a legal thriller that spent a proportional amount of time on all the boring background work that goes on? Same principle. I was an air traffic controller for twelve years and I have yet to see a single media program get that right, and ATC is considerably more interesting to the outsider. People are not on the edge of their seats to see if form WPA or the addendum controls in this instance, the way they are when there's two 747s on a collision course and Jack Bauer (24) has to save the day - but the real estate agent has to know, and if they don't know, they have to find out without anyone giving them the answer. It's not exciting to watch the agent visit the comparables to compare features and condition and figure out what a good offer or a good price is. It might be good drama to watch a good listing agent talk a potential client into listing for the right price as opposed to their fevered dreams of avarice, but few media writers are that good - and even fewer have a clue that this is a good thing to be doing. It's definitely not drama the way a good agent closes with prospective buyers, the best way being to show them they've already convinced themselves that they want it.

Most people also don't have the critical skill necessary for an agent - the skill of betting their paycheck on weeks or months of work that may or may not move to a successful conclusion. If the transaction doesn't close, we get nothing. How many doctors you know work on that basis? Lawyers? Even the ones that work on contingency want their expenses paid, and that includes office staff, and they're not likely to take contingency cases without a very large prospective payoff. Nobody but real estate agents bet weeks to months of their time for such a small payoff. The whole mindset is completely foreign to educational faculty. Grant application papers, yes - but they're getting a regular salary while they write those. The fact that you've got to go out and get hired at least a couple times per month in order to survive is also completely outside their frame of reference, as well as most other members of modern society. For academics, even if they're turned down for a grant, they've still got money coming in. Even if they get refused tenure, they only need to get hired again once to have a new regular paycheck rolling in.

Most importantly, real estate markets are both hyperlocal and changeable. I've written a series that's eight or nine articles long about the neighborhoods of La Mesa, a city of about 60,000 people, and I have at least as many more to write. Those markets are different today than they were three months ago, and three months from now, they'll be different again. The only way you can keep track of what's going on in those markets out there is by being out there in those markets and living those changes. You can't do it from the inside of a college classroom, grading papers, and agents can't get this information from a college professor because that college professor doesn't know. That property that sold last week for $487,000 - what condition was it in? What amenities did it have? How big was it, really? Were those floors good hardwood or cheap pergo? This property right here that meets these client's criteria - What are the competing properties, and where does this one shine by comparison, and what are the problems with it? (There are always problems with every property). What were the recent sales really like? You don't know unless you were there. Old listings on MLS don't give you a good idea. It takes a good agent maybe two weeks to learn not to trust MLS claims, MLS pictures, or MLS video. A bad agent might learn, they just don't act like they've learned. It's a very rare consumer who doesn't take MLS as gospel.

This segues in to the war of information. Listing reports are, in a very real sense, a battlefield of information. You can only learn by experience what is and is not important, what had damned well better be correct versus what's in there for purposes of puffery, what's important and real, what's useless and unimportant, and what's in between. What, you didn't realize that sellers and listing agents want to present the property in the best possible light? Ladies and Gentlemen, they're practicing informational warfare with the goal of making this house seem like the bargain of the century. Lest you think I'm getting all holier than thou, I do this too, when I list a property. It's my contractual fiduciary duty to sell my listings for the highest possible price on the best possible terms in the least amount of time, and it is my job to tell the property's story in such a way as convinces someone to buy it on those terms. And roughly a third of all buyers use the listing agents as their buyer's agent, which is the single decision most likely to prove disastrous in real estate. Scary, when you think about it. Do schools teach how to fight that informational war? Maybe the military educational establishment does, but nobody else, and they don't show how the principles apply to real estate, and even the marketers who've learned a good informational offense are sometimes stumped as to providing any defense whatsoever. Furthermore, an inappropriate or overly aggressive response to the situation can sink you worse than doing nothing at all. Did you learn all that in college? Me neither - and I took marketing. I had to learn how to handle the informational war by doing it.

Admittedly, a lot of agents don't know, either, and won't make the effort to learn, which is why I'll back a newbie with the right attitude and a brand new license over someone with thirty years experience and the wrong attitude any day of the week. Nothing says "bozo!" like the agent who brags about thirty-seven years of experience and acts like a deer in the headlights when he's presented with facts he'd rather pretend don't exist. But the point is this: the good agent didn't pick it up in school, and the rotten agent thinks they already know everything there is to know because they've got the license and one or two of those meaningless NAR designators designed to gull the public as you sit through 18 hours of class to put initials after their name. I just did six hours calling around and reading today and yesterday on a subject I researched and wrote about two years ago, and learned some things I didn't know. The final answer wasn't what my clients wanted, but I'd rather find out now, before we've made the offer than after we're in the middle of a transaction and my clients are out appraisal and inspection money and their deposit is at risk. I know for a fact that the answers to my research weren't in any NAR class, or anywhere else in any educational curriculum. Real estate is one of those fields where you've got to be prepared to learn as you go, but unless you've got the background of detailed knowledge of the field, quite often you run into a landmine you never knew was there, simply because you weren't looking for it. Someone a little more complacent than I am would never have questioned the obvious answer, which turned out to be wrong (It had to do with a municipal first time buyer program). My client is still questioning it, it's so counter-intuitive to a layperson, and I don't blame her. But there are huge and obvious traps that claim large numbers of victims. For example: the roughly one-third of all buyers who don't have a buyer's agent at all, using the listing agent to facilitate the transaction.

It's very hard to dodge landmines you're not looking for, and once the explosion happens, the damage is done. To be fair, even the best agent hits a landmine sometimes. But I'd rather be avoiding the mines in the first place than doing damage control afterward, and the odds of doing that are better if you've got someone on your side who knows what to look for, and is in the habit of questioning every irregular feature of the landscape they can before you drive over it, and who recognizes what an irregular feature is, because it's the hazard that you don't understand is a hazard that gets you. I say this regularly because it bears repeating at every opportunity: with the dollar amounts at stake in real estate, there are a large number of people out there who regularly and easily make multiple tens of thousands of dollars extra because the people on the other side of the transaction weren't careful enough.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

With the down payment presenting the largest difficulty for most people want to buy right now, I am covering every base I can think of as a place to get a down payment. I have covered VA Loans, FHA loans which require a relatively small down payment, and Municipal first time buyer programs, some of which can take the place of a down payment. There are also seller carrybacks and lease with option to buy. There's also the traditional "Save it over time", and in some circumstances, you can also borrow from your retirement accounts or even take a withdrawal. You can even Sell Some Stuff. But there is at least one more entry to the pantheon.

Most people don't think of it, but a personal loan is one of the ways to get a down payment quickly. It has some notable drawbacks, but it can be done. Being unsecured, the interest rate is higher than real estate loans, and the repayment period is shorter, meaning higher payments.

A personal loan is a loan not secured by real property. Because it is not secured by real property, all the lender really cares about is the payments and whether you can qualify for their loan by underwriting guidelines including the payments for such a loan. Personal loans include car loans and student loans and just about every other type of installment debt out there, as well as personal lines of credit and even credit cards. Not all of these are a possibility for the subject at hand, which is rapidly acquiring a real estate down payment. CREDIT CARD CASH ADVANCES ARE RIGHT OUT!. But the possibility exists of borrowing enough to get a down payment with a personal loan.

This possibility includes both institutional loans from a bank or credit union, and "good in-law" loans from family members. Negotiate a loan contract, sign it, and be certain to disclose it to your mortgage lender on your mortgage application so that they know you're not trying to pull a fast one. The reason why mortgage lenders are obsessed with sourcing and seasoning of funds is because they don't want an undisclosed loan, which might mean that you cannot really afford the all of payments you're going to be making. But a fully disclosed personal loan is just like any other open credit. It has a repayment schedule, maturity date, etcetera. The mortgage lender looks at the situation, including the loan that got the down payment, according to lending guidelines, and if it appears you have the income to make those payments, they will approve the loan.

The major and irrefutable drawback to getting a personal loan for the down payment is that it impacts debt to income ratio. You have to account for the fact that you owe this money, and you are obligated to make those payments, and therefore, you cannot afford as big a real estate loan as you otherwise could. Since most people try to stretch their budget further than they should anyway, this can be a deal-killer. It can force you to buy a less expensive property than the one you have your heart set upon, or even than the property you could otherwise afford, at least by debt to income ratio. Of course, if you don't have a down payment, you can't buy the property of your dreams either. But if you buy a property, especially while the market is down, leverage can mean you will be able to buy the property of your dreams much sooner and much easier, or in plain words, buying the less expensive property is smart if that's what you can afford now.

If you've got more than enough income but no down payment, that's the situation where getting a personal loan for a down payment is a serious possibility. Say you're a doctor who just spent the last two years paying off your student loans ahead of schedule. You've got a great income, but you spent everything on getting rid of that debt, and as a consequence, you don't have much for the down payment, right when it will do you the most good.

It is possible, for some people who have a large down payment but are nonetheless getting a loan from somewhere (most likely a close relative), for the loan to be a subordinate real estate loan. This happens mostly when Mom and Dad are rich and doing estate planning. They loan Princess (their daughter) and her Darling Husband some money to make it easier to buy, often planning to forgive the debt in accordance with federal gift guidelines. Note that the thing controlling it here is that lenders have guidelines that set maximum comprehensive loan to value ratio (CLTV), or the ratio of all loans secured by the property to the value of the property. Even though they may be in first position, lenders may not be willing to loan when there's another loan behind theirs on the property if the CLTV is higher than underwriting guidelines allow. It is necessary to make certain that the lender you apply with will permit any other contemplated loans. And even though Mom and Dad may be intending to forgive Princess' loan in accordance with gifting schedules, Princess and Darling Husband still need to have an official repayment schedule on the loan and those putative payments must be taken into account on the debt to income ratio.

One more thing I should mention is that if you're going to do this, the personal loan needs to be in place before you apply for the real estate loan. Contract signed, funds dispersed, at least one payment made, preferably two or more, and preferably reported to the major agencies. Failure to do any of these is a potential failure point for the real estate loan. The only exception is if you're trying for a subordinate loan, and the lenders have been especially unforgiving of that lately. I've had people I did the primary loan with a private money second previously, unable to refinance even with the same lender. Yes, this means that if you can't get the real estate loan, you still have this loan which you didn't want. This whole idea of personal loans to get a real estate down payment is risky and has downsides. It is not something to try if you have a better alternative, and not without careful scrutiny of all the numbers beforehand, and even then it can fail. It is a risk.

I must emphasize this again: DO NOT TAKE A CASH ADVANCE ON YOUR CREDIT CARDS!. Unless you have credit limits in the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, your credit score will plummet, and you will be unable to qualify for the loan no matter how much income you have. I will bet a nickel that someone will email me saying that they "did what you said," and that now they cannot qualify for the loan because their credit score is in the toilet. If you write me with such an accusation, I will drag you down to the zoo, where I will arrange for the elephants to do a line dance on your sorry carcass, and the rhinos to use what is left as a target for both ends. Taking a personal loan for a real estate down payment is playing with fire. If you're going to do it, make certain to follow lender and loan officer instructions exactly and carefully. There are a number of other pitfalls, that may not be as bad as the credit card cash advance but will still sink your loan. Getting a personal loan for a mortgage down payment is the mortgage equivalent of a circus high-wire act - one wrong move and the whole thing is a disaster where people get crippled for life even if they aren't killed outright. Having the numbers be right for it is not a common occurrence. But if the numbers are right, and you and your loan officer are careful, it can work.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

Not too long ago, I started negotiating for a property. I did extensive research online, and and I and my clients visited several competing properties. We made an offer that was a little under 90% of the asking price, and I justified it in a cover letter with several direct comparisons. The property had potential - but my clients were going to have to really work at realizing any of that potential - and I don't mean just carpet and paint.

The owner's response? They did come down a little bit - about 2% of the asking price. But all they said was, "We want $X"

That's it. No, "But the kitchen is beautiful, it's 500 square feet more than those, the location prevents it from getting socked in by traffic noise." None of which was true, but are examples of the kinds of things they could have said.

Instead, just an ultimatum. I don't believe anyone can legitimately call that "negotiation", unless you want to include the sense that a flying creature with feathers that waddles on land, swims on water and goes "quack" can be labeled a Doberman Pinscher. It's still a duck, no matter what you call it, and that's still an ultimatum. If you look at diplomatic ultimatums, what spot do they occupy in the hierarchy? They're the last step before war. Similarly, in real estate, they're the last step before walking away. They should be a sign that negotiations have essentially failed. They're certainly not the way to start successful negotiations.

If you want more for the property, tell me why in the heck you think I should give it to you. What you want (more money) is irrelevant. It's counterbalanced by what I want - which is the exact opposite, to pay less money. Start a conversation for crying out loud - that's what I was trying to do. I didn't expect them to take my first offer, but my clients have the ability and interest to give them what they want - cash - for what they have: a property they no longer want. Even if my clients are getting a loan, it still amounts to cash for the sellers. That's what any offer is really saying - "We're interested in buying this property, if we can reach an appropriate agreement." The initial offer is your bona fides as to what sort of agreement you're willing to reach. I don't make first offers I expect to have accepted, but neither do I make hopeless low-balls unless it is just a shot in the dark and I don't care if it "poisons the well" of possible rapport. I do want a reasonable response, and I do everything I can to encourage such a response rather than an ultimatum.

Duelling ultimatums is kind of like throwing matter and anti-matter at each other. Often, there's an explosion, and even when there isn't, nobody is happy because the radiation when they combine poisons everything. If you do end up with a purchase contract, there's still no rapport, so anything that comes along later is likely to cause the whole thing to fall apart. Why in the nine billion names of god would anyone want to do that? You don't get any empathy, you don't get any respect, and you're very likely not to get a transaction, which means the buyer is unhappy, the seller is unhappy, and both agents are unhappy. Nobody is happy. It's nearly as certain as gravity. Why would you want to "negotiate" by dueling ultimatums when you know it's going to cause you and your client to end up unhappy?

I know how this happened. During the seller's markets, sellers had all the power. For a couple of years, there were dueling offers on almost every property on the market that was even vaguely reasonable in asking price. Listing agents got used to being able to dictate terms, and buyer's agents went along, in part because they could only hope to extract one or two things and going along with everything else was the only way to make it happen, and in part because the next time they made an offer to that listing agent, they didn't want it rejected out of hand. And it's taken three years of a buyer's market to start to get the message across that buyers are in command right now, buyers have needs of their own, and in the current environment if you don't give one buyer what they need in order to qualify or want in order to prefer your property to another, you may not get another buyer. You want to play hardball with this buyer, they're going to go down the street to the competing property, leaving you as the seller high and dry.

We're moving back to a more normal state of affairs now, but this doesn't mean sellers can play the autarch again. You have equity in a real estate property. You can't spend it at the grocery store, the gas station, or put it into your 401k. It's a real pain to swap it for another property, and if you're not willing to dive in and negotiate, you're not going to do well there either. You need the cash from a buyer - not necessarily this one, but how many do you think you're likely to get? There are almost always more properties for sale than there are people looking to buy them, and more coming onto the market every day. You can compete strongly enough to convince one buyer that they want your property instead of a competing one, or you are wasting your time. Effective negotiations are a large part of that competition.

A negotiation is first and foremost, a conversation. You ever had someone you got off on the wrong foot with, but then you had a conversation and found out they're a pretty swell person? Guess what? When you negotiate in good faith, both sides stop thinking of the other so much as "the enemy" and start to see each other in more human terms. This is good.

Negotiations are also an argument. A civilized refined argument. Many of us have forgotten how to have an argument that doesn't end up with lost tempers. You can find examples of this on both ends of the political spectrum - a sort of take-no-prisoners way of talking past each other - argument by slogan. Argument by putting the worst possible spin upon everything the opposition says or does (and conversely, the best on everything your side says or does) is worse than argument by slogan, as it shows actively bad intent, rather than just closed ears. Sometimes, one side is entirely in the right (or the wrong), but that's not the way it generally happens. Most times, there's evidence on both sides and some darker and lighter shades of gray involved, some justice and points on one side versus some justice and points on the other. In politics, the posturing is showmanship intended to woo third parties, but in real estate negotiations, the transaction is entirely dependent upon the two parties coming to an agreement both sides think makes them better off. Neither one can force the other to sign on the dotted line.

And what happens when you recognize the virtue of something the other side says? Yes, you give away something, but you get something as well. The other side takes a step back and says, "Wait a minute. This person is not just a member of the ravening horde, simply intent upon taking everything they can get." Yes, I'm trying to get everything for my client that I can, but if I try and get it by ultimatum, what happens when the other side is in a stronger position? If I try and get it at sword-point, what happens when the other side is better with sabers than I am? Even the very best lose at violence sometimes. This is why the idea of negotiations started - both sides end up better off and nobody ends up dead. The whole "defeat the vikings/huns/mongols" idea goes out the window when they start seeing you as human. Maybe when you say you see one of their points, maybe they come back and acknowledge some of your points as valid, and they give up something too. Guess what? The more both sides do this, the more likely the negotiation and transaction is to succeed.

Not everybody will negotiate in good faith. You always have the option of walking away from the negotiation table if they don't. I'm walking away less often these days than formerly, but it's still on the table. Knowing when is a matter of judgment and experience, and maybe training if you can find someone good enough, but you're not going to learn it all in one transaction. Sometimes walking away will knock some sense into the other side, most often when you've seen the virtue of some of what they're saying and they suddenly realize that in order to salvage this deal they want, they're going to have to get with the program. Sometimes, it doesn't. But in that case, there are other properties and other buyers out there that will be a better fit and give you a better bargain. If there isn't something better, then you shouldn't have walked away. It's as simple as that (Pssst: You can go back. Really. It's not easy, and you're likely to end up less well off than if you hadn't walked in the first place, but if it's still the best fit and the best bargain out there, you should).

So don't just trade ultimatums. Tell the other side why what you're asking for is necessary, reasonable, or both. Listen to what they say in response, acknowledge not only that you heard the response, but that you might even see the justice of some of it, if you can. They'll usually do the same. Give some ground where it is appropriate, and I am confident that your negotiations will come out better, as mine do, because we're not going back to a situation where one side dictates to the other any time soon. But you neither I nor anyone else can hold a conversation with the other side of a transaction if the other side is unwilling to hold it. If you are always willing, and always trying to start such a conversation, the odds of a successful negotiation increase dramatically.

My transaction? I think I've finally persuaded them to actually talk to me, rather than just trading ultimatums, both sides still have the ability to talk it over in private and think about it for a day or two. I was expecting an answer to my most recent proposal the day I originally wrote the article. We did eventually come to an agreement and consummate the transaction. Everybody ended up much happier than they would have had I not been able to talk them away from their ultimatum.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

This is a question that gets asked a lot.

Escrow is nothing more or less than a neutral third party that stands in the middle of a real estate transaction and makes certain all of the i's are dotted and t's are crossed. They make certain that all of the terms of the contract have been met, and then they make certain that everyone who is a party to the transaction gets what is coming to them via the contract. Given the complexity of a real estate transaction, you want this. In California, that's an eight page basic contract. Do you want to go through and verify that it's all done? Suppose there wasn't an escrow? Given a half million dollar transaction, do you think it might be possible that some people would try to arrange to be paid without handing over a good Grant Deed or clear title, or that they might try to pay with nonexistent funds? Escrow puts a stop to someone not giving what they agreed and still getting what they want.

Many times folks complain about the escrow company or escrow officer, when it's not escrow's fault and the problem lies elsewhere. The escrow company is obligated to make certain all of the terms of the contract have been followed, not just most of them. I've talked before about how if the contract is not accepted exactly as proposed in the most recent modification, you don't have a deal. There cannot be any points of disagreement, or you don't have a purchase contract. Similarly for escrow. Usually problems that the client sees are not the escrow officer's doing, but rather someone else's. Quite often, the person complaining is the person who caused the problem. The escrow officer can't do anything without mutual agreement. If the loan officer doesn't get the loan in a timely fashion, it's not the escrow officer's fault. If the agent doesn't meet the inspector or appraiser so they can get their work done in a timely fashion, it's not the escrow officer's fault. If you can't qualify for the loan, if you have to come up with more money, if you don't get as much money as you thought, it's not the escrow officer's fault. But in many cases, the escrow officer makes a convenient whipping boy for the sins of others.

This is not to say that it's never the escrow officer's fault that something goes wrong, but if one party or the other is not in compliance with the terms of the agreement, the only options the escrow officer has are to get an amended agreement or get them into compliance. Nonetheless, I have seen many transactions fall apart because the escrow officer was a bozo. The really good escrow officers are like chess masters - several moves ahead of the whole game, and when I find one, I want to use them all of the time. Unfortunately for buyer's agents, the seller often has the real control over where the escrow transaction goes, and when the seller's agent decides they want to use some bozo, that's probably where it's going. I can do all kinds of things that should move them, but the bottom line is they want to use their broker's pet escrow (who is more likely to be staffed by bozos than any other escrow company, as they've got captive clients), I as the buyer's agent cannot force them to go elsewhere. It's a violation of fiduciary duty for them as well as a RESPA violation, but if I complain to the appropriate agencies, what are the chances of my client getting this property they've decided that they want?

As the escrow process moves forward, the escrow officer collects documentation that the various requirements of the contract have been fulfilled. When they have all been fulfilled, the transaction is ready to close and record.

The loan is usually the last thing left hanging after everything else is done. There are a variety of reasons for this, most obvious of which is that the loan's conditions are likely to include everything else being done before the loan funds. Appraisal, grant deed, inspection, etcetera and ad nauseum. When the borrower meets underwriter's guidelines, they go and sign loan documents. Signing loan documents does not mean the loan will fund, and it is a major misapprehension to believe so. It is legitimate to move conditions from prior to docs to prior to funding if doing so serves some interest of the client, such as funding the loan before the rate lock expires. If they go to documents before the client's income and occupational status have been verified, that's an unethical lender looking to lock the client into their loan or none at all. Always demand a copy of outstanding conditions to fund the loan before you sign loan documents.

Once the loan documents are signed is when the real fun begins, because that's when the underwriter takes a step back and the funder steps to the forefront. The loan funder is an employee of the lender who fulfills much the same function as the escrow officer - make sure all of the conditions have been met before they release the money. The loan funder has responsibility only to the lender, though, not the borrower, not the seller, not anyone else. It's their job to ask such questions as when the homeowner's insurance got paid (and where is the proof?), has the final Verification of employment been done (assuming they aren't required to do it themselves), or work out a procedure whereby they get proof that all of this stuff is satisfied before the funds get released. If the loan officer has done their job correctly, the funder is working primarily with the escrow company. If I have to talk to the funder as a loan officer, that's usually a sign I should have worked a little harder earlier on, because my part should be done before the funder gets involved.

Once all of the conditions to fund the loan and close the transaction have been met, the escrow officer records the transaction. In point of fact, it's the title company who usually is set up to record the documents, something they will charge for. Until the transaction is recorded, the lender can pull the funds back. It's not the escrow officer's fault (in most cases) if they do this. It's because something about the borrower's situation changed, and now the lender is unhappy and unsatisfied with the level of risk of losing some or all of their money. Only rarely is it caused by a bozo of an escrow officer who doesn't understand what's going on, and tells the funder something that causes the lender to get nervous. Remember, the lenders are loaning a lot of money, and the list of reasons why lenders justifiably get nervous is fairly long, especially as a certain percentage of all mortgage applications are fraudulent.

Once the loan is funded and the transaction recorded, the escrow officer has some final stuff to do. Send out the checks to everyone who's getting one, complete with an accounting of the money. Make certain all charges relating to the transaction are paid, for which they will usually keep a small "pad" for last minute expenses, so that the buyer and seller are likely to see a small check a few days later after the escrow officer has made certain everything is paid to the penny. And so ends the transaction, and this article.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

This article was originally from April 2006 - anybody want to tell me I didn't call it? Of course, by that time it was like predicting a dropped anvil would fall but that was when the question was asked

From an email:

I've been enjoying your blog posts on mortgages. I've learned more from you about what to expect than I have from any other source, and I've gotten 10 mortgages in my life.

I was reading Larry William's website this week, and on there I saw one of his newsletters from last summer:

Larry Williams you may be familiar with, he's written many books on trading.

Anyways, the newsletter talks about buying 2nd mortgage notes as an investment. And that's something I haven't seen you write about.

With the softening of the housing market in many areas, and overextended borrowers, I suspect that the market for 2nd notes will be heating up over the next few months and years.

I'd appreciate hearing your views on the opportunities and pitfalls in this area.

Let us consider the efficiencies of the market. The Institutional lenders have economies of scale, underwriting guidelines, and a set checklist of procedures as to how to approve (or decline) loans. They have a system that makes them effective. They can do this because they have enough loans to make it cost-effective, and because of their experience, they know how to price their loans. From advertising to wholesaling to pricing to packaging and servicing, they are set up for efficient service. Lest people think I'm saying lenders are a better place to get loans than brokers, I am not. Quite the reverse is true. But the the vast majority of broker originated loans are with regulated institutional lenders.

What happens if you're not set up like that? The answer is you're either more highly priced than they are, or you're not as profitable. I've said more than once that without regulated institutional lenders, every loan would be a hard money loan. So in trying to originate loans, an individual is competing at a disadvantage. Where then, can they make a profit?

The answer is in the loans that the regulated lenders won't or can't touch. Now we need to ask ourselves why they can't or won't touch them. There are three common reasons. First is there is something wrong with the borrower. Second is that there's not enough equity. Third is that there is something wrong with the property.

Something wrong with the borrower has several subtypes. Credit Score too low, in bankruptcy, too many mortgage lates, no source of income to pay back the loan. Most of these can be gotten around in one degree or another unless they take place in combination with insufficient equity. Most single problems are surmountable by a good loan officer, providing you've got the equity required to convince the bank they won't lose their investment. You'll pay a higher rate or higher fees than you would without, but better that than no loan. It's when they take place in combination that problems arise which break the loan beyond the ability to rescue. And of course, if the property is not marketable in its current condition, no regulated lender will touch it.

What the first category reduces to is increased chance of default. The second category reduces to increased risk of losing money in case of default. The third category, something wrong with the property, reduces to you're going to get stuck fixing the property if they do default, which means sinking thousands to tens of thousands of dollars into it, above and beyond the amount of the trust deed. Furthermore, both the second and third categories are also at increased risk for default, even if the borrower has the wealth of Midas and the credit score to match.

So let's consider what happens when something goes wrong. The borrower doesn't make their payments, and it becomes a non-performing loan. You're not getting your money. If you need it every month, that's a problem. Do you know the proper procedure to foreclose without missing any i-dots or t-crossings? If you don't, your borrower can spin it out a long time. Actually, they can spin it out for a long time anyway. Well, that's what a loan servicer is for, but a loan servicer cuts into your margin, and they get their money every month regardless of whether or not you get paid. This means they're a monthly liability if the loan isn't performing. Furthermore, over half the time, some low-life attorney talks the people into filing bankruptcy to delay the inevitable. It's stupid, and it almost always ends up costing them still more money and making their final situation much worse, but they do it anyway - and now you have to start paying an attorney to have any hope of getting your money.

Suppose the property does go all the way to auction? You are second in line behind the holder of the first trust deed. They get every penny they are due before you get one penny. And if the first trust deed holder forecloses (or the government for property taxes), your trust deed is wiped out. The only way to defend against this is go to the auction with cash to defend your interest. And if the borrower isn't paying you, may I ask why you think they'll pay their property taxes or first trust deed? The answer is "they're probably not." They are going to lose the property anyway, so why make payments that don't prevent that?

(There are a lot of details in the foreclosure process. The stuff in the above paragraph should not be taken for anything more than a broad brush child's watercolor type painting of the process, as including those details would digress too far)

Now, suppose you're not originating the loan, you're just buying the right to receive payments, either on an individual loan or a package of loans, after the fact?

Well, can I ask you which loans you think the lenders are selling? If you answered "The ones in greatest danger of default" you get a star for the day! The lenders will either sell them off individually, if there are people inclined to buy, or actually repackage them thusly. The ones that are still performing, and still going according to the original guidelines will go to other regulated institutional lenders in mass packages, but those lenders won't take these, or if they will, it'll bring the price of the entire package down by more than it's worth. So they separate out the dogs before they sell the package. So unless you're buying them as part of the original loan package, this is what's happening. Now mind you, there are always those who want the non-performing loans because they know how to deal with them, but they know to only buy the ones with enough equity to cover the loans in case they need to foreclose. Those who specialize also know what these loans are really worth, and they don't pay full value - usually not even in the same ballpark.

So the aftermarket loans that are available tend to be in danger of default and without sufficient equity to cover if it goes to auction. If you're looking to lose your money, you've just found a very good way. You can also trivially spend thousands of extra dollars trying to defend your interests.

The equity issue is going to assume increased importance as prices in some overheated areas subside. If the loan was underwritten and approved on the basis of a $500,000 appraisal, but now similar properties are only selling for $420,000 and the loans total $450,000, it doesn't need a genius to understand you're not in the best of positions. Even if it sells at auction for as much as comparables are going for, you're still down at least $30,000 plus the expenses of the sale.

Now, with that said, second trust deeds can, if the equity is there, put you in the catbird seat. Suppose there's an IRS lien junior to you? Our office dealt with a $700,000 property with a $1.6 million lien against it - junior to the $28,000 second we bought. Nobody else could touch that property. The owner just wanted out - he wasn't getting any money regardless of what happened. He stopped making payments, and our clients had to step in with thousands of dollars to keep the holder of the first happy. There ended up being a fair amount of money made, although it took some serious cash for a while, because our clients had to make the payments on the first loan as well as everything else. This is not for the weak of wallet. If buying the Note had taken all of their ready money, they would have been SOL.

There are also all of the standard diversification of investment concerns. If ninety percent of your money is tied up in this deed, that's a pretty serious risk to your overall financial health. No matter how many precautions you take, some do go sour.

In short, while there is a lot of potential for gain, it's some serious work to evaluate the situation, and usually some serious work and serious cash to make it work for you when it is right.

UPDATE: something I'm running into a lot right now: Lenders that sell the note but retain servicing rights. So when the note goes south, and my client wants to buy into a distressed situation, the servicers are rejecting offers without checking with the actual investor, because they could get sued (for misrepresentation and bad underwriting) if they accept less than they loaned. On the other hand, if the property sits on the market (thereby costing the investors even more money), they don't get sued because, hey, the asking price is enough to cover the note. Now there is a legal deadline involved with lender owned properties, and nobody is going to offer enough to bail them out. But it's kind of like the old joke: "A lot can happen in a year. I may die. The King may die. And perhaps the horse will sing." Corporations don't die. Even if it were an individual investor, someone's going to inherit the right to payments. I do not think this horse will sing - it probably won't even whinny. In other words, nobody is going to offer enough to bail the lender out of their fix. Near as I can figure, those controlling the corporations holding servicing rights are evidently hoping that by that time, they will have moved on to other jobs and can't be held liable as individuals.

One more reason to be very careful investing in trust deeds

Caveat Emptor

Original here

If you don't know the answer to this, don't be embarrassed. Lots of alleged professionals forgot the answers to these questions for several years, if indeed, they ever knew. It seems like quite a few still don't know the answer

Loan qualification standards measure whether or not you can afford a loan. By adhering to them, the lenders both lower the default rates and have some assurance the loans they make will be repaid, while borrowers avoid getting into situations where foreclosure is all but certain. Lest you misunderstand, this is a good thing for both the lenders and the borrowers. It isn't like the lenders want to stand there like the Black Knight shouting "None Shall Pass!" They want to loan money - that's how they make profit. But unless you live in a cave, you may have heard of some problems with defaulted home loans a while ago. You may have heard they're a major problem for both the lenders and the borrowers. Guess what? They are.

From the lender's standpoint, of course, the important thing is that they prevent loaning money to people who can't afford to repay the loan, but the other isn't a trivial concern. Even if they get every penny back when they foreclose (rare!), foreclosures are still bad business, with negative impacts on cash available to lend, regulatory scrutiny, and not least important, business reputation.

Going through foreclosure is no fun from a borrower standpoint either. I don't think I have ever seen or even heard of a situation where somebody ended up better off from having gone through foreclosure than they would have been if the lender had just denied the loan in the first place. So whether you like it or not, the lenders are doing you a favor to decline your loan when you're not qualified.

There are many loan qualification standards, but the two most important ones are debt to income ratio, often abbreviated DTI, and loan to value ratio, often abbreviated LTV. The first of these is much more important than the second, but both are part of every single loan.

Debt to Income ratio is a measurement of how well your monthly income covers your monthly payments. It is measured in the form of a percentage of your gross monthly pay, averaged over about the last two years. The permissible number can change somewhat depending upon credit score in some situations, and with enough in the way of assets in others, but the basic idea is you can afford to be paying out 43 to 45 percent of your monthly income in the form of fixed expenses - housing and consumer debt service. You can cancel cable TV or broadband internet, you can cancel your movie club or book of the month - but the items debt to income are concerned with are essentially fixed by your situation. You owe $X on student loans, and you're required to repay so many dollars per month. Your mortgage payment is this, your pro-rated property taxes are that, your homeowners insurance and car payments and credit cards are these others. There's no possibility of this money suddenly disappearing - you already owe it, and you are obligated to repay on thus and such a schedule.

Loan to value ratio is not a measure of whether you can afford the loan. It is a measurement of how likely the lender is to get its money back if you do default. With appraisal fraud and similar problems, it's not any kind of a magic bullet - but it is the best they have. When values are rising quickly and holding onto a property for six months generates a 10% profit, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the lenders are willing to take more risks with loan to value ratio than they are in the reverse situation. Many properties have lost value and even if the borrowers had kept up the payments before default, they would still owe more than the property is worth.

Lenders aren't going to refinance on good terms if you're "upside down" or even close to it. But being upside down is not a big problem so long as you have a sustainable loan situation and can afford your payments. You keep making those payments, eventually you are going to have equity again. You try to get another loan after default and foreclosure, and you'll find out in a hurry that lenders are not forgiving. Kind of like the Wild Bunch in a way - mess with one, you mess with them all. Lots of folks are thinking that the smart thing to do is walk away when you're upside down. Even if they do have a non-recourse loan, they're going to find out soon enough that wasn't so smart. Making the payments on a sustainable loan lowers the balance, and values are going to come back - sooner than a lot of people think. Put the two together, and as long as you can hold out until you have equity again, you're better off making those payments.

These standards do, and always have, arisen out of "cut and try". Experience really is the best teacher - unfortunately getting that experience has a habit of being kind of rough. Experience may also be what you get when you didn't get what you wanted - in this case, a satisfactorily paid loan - but the lenders have regulators after them, and those regulators are sensitive to political pressures, and sometimes regulators won't let lenders do something they really do want to do - like loan money with a level of qualifications regulators look askance at - because if the lender makes enough bad loans, even if they survive financially, the regulators may decide they're doing something they shouldn't, and shut the lender down for predatory lending practices. It takes a long time and a lot of evidence to persuade lenders and regulators and especially investors to relax standards, while a comparatively few bad experiences will have them toughening standards. Over-tightening lending standards has major bad effects upon everyone, including causing foreclosures that would not otherwise have happened, but it's hard to point to any specific victims and there's always idiots with a political axe to grind who will claim the people hurt by over-tightening standards were themselves victims of predatory practice. Right now, both lenders and regulators have been royally burned, and so they don't want to assume any risks they can avoid. This will likely change within a few years, but for now, that's the way it is. You can learn what you need in order to qualify and get your loan approved, or you can go without. Right now, most lenders are too paranoid to care that having their standards too tight means they lose profit, because they've been burned too much, and the money they have in their accounts is not at risk from having made bad loans. When they make between six and eight percent per year on a successful loan, out of which they have to pay taxes, employee wages, facilities costs and everything else, a one in 100 chance of losing the entire investment to a bad loan is unacceptable, and although the default rates on newer loans is practically zero, they're still working through the bad stuff made during the Era of Make Believe Loans.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

I keep getting search result hits for the string "fsbo horror." It's an amalgamation because I haven't done any postings on this specific subject.

Both buyers and sellers have problems relating to For Sale By Owner issues.

For sellers, the largest issue seems to be properly disclosing all relevant items to satisfy the liability issue. There are resources available, but the question is whether the you took proper advantage of them and made all the legally required disclosures on any issue with the property there may be. If you have an agent that fails to do this, you can sue them. If you are doing it yourself, the only one responsible is you. You are claiming to be capable of doing just as good a job as the professional, and if you didn't do it right, the buyer is going to come after you. You have all the legal liability.

Now I'm going to leave the marketing and pricing negotiating questions out of the equation, because with a For Sale By Owner most folks should understand that in return for not paying a professional to help you, you've got to do it yourself. What many For Sale By Owner folks seem to fail to understand, however, is that if you haven't met legal requirements, the real nightmare may be just beginning when the property sells.

Let's say it was something fairly innocuous, like seeping water from a slow leak you didn't know about. A couple years pass, and now there's mold or settling. Perhaps the foundation cracks as a result of settling. Bills are thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Your buyer goes back and finds that your water usage went up by fifteen percent in the six months before the sale. He sues, saying that even though you didn't know, you should have known based upon this evidence. Court cases are decided based upon evidence like this every day. A good lawyer paints you as maliciously selling the property as a result of this. Liability: Steep, to say the least.

Now, let's look at it from a buyer's prospective. You have a choice of two identical properties. In one, a seller is acting for themselves, in the other, they have an agent. The price may be a little cheaper on the for sale by owner one, or it may not - usually not. The most common reason people do for sale by owner is greed. But when I'm looking at a for sale by owner, the question that crosses my mind is "Are they rationally greedy, or are they just greedy?" Are they going to disclose everything wrong or that may be an issue with the property? At least here in California, the agent has pretty strong motivation to disclose if something is wrong that they know about. If they don't, they can lose their license, and even if they keep the license, they have potentially unlimited personal liability. If they did disclose, they're probably off the hook, and even if they aren't, their insurance will pay for the lawyers, the courts, and any liability. If there's one thing all long term agents get religion about, no matter their denomination, it's asking all of the disclosure questions.

This is not the case for many owners selling their own property. Some few are every bit as conscientious as any agent. A good proportion, however, are intentionally concealing something about the property. What's going to happen when it comes to light? If there's an agent, there's a license number, a brokerage who was responsible for them, and insurance. The latter two are deep pockets targets for your suit, and you can find them. Once that owner gets the check, you can find them unless they're dead, but they may not have any money. Even if they do have money, it may be locked up and inaccessible via Homestead or any number of other potential reasons.

One of the reasons that I, as a buyer's agent, am always leery of a for sale by owner property is that I have to figure that first off, there's a larger than normal chance that this property has something wrong that's not properly disclosed. I can spot most of those, but what happens if both I and the inspector miss it? We haven't been living in the house, and it's possible to hide most such issues. When that happens, my client is going to be unhappy. When my client is unhappy, they are going to sue. The first target is the seller, but if they're gone or broke, who's left for my erstwhile client come after? Me. So I have to figure that not only is there a larger chance of there being something wrong, I have to figure there is a larger chance of me being held responsible for something I took every step I legally could to avoid. For Sale By Owner properties usually have to be priced significantly under the market in order to persuade me that not only am I doing the right thing by my clients by showing them them this property, where my clients have to pay my buyer's agent fee out of their pockets rather than out of the selling agent's commission, but also that the heightened risk of future problems is worth more than the price differential to my clients. Unless the answer is a strong solid "yes" that I can document in court if I have to, I'm going to pass it by in favor of the agent-listed property next door or down the street. That's just the way things are.

Caveat Emptor (and Vendor)

Original here

The easy, general rule is that legitimate expenses all have easily understood explanations in plain english, they are all for specific services, and if they are performed by third parties, there are associated invoices or receipts that you can see.

Let's haul out the Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement (California) or Good Faith Estimate (elsewhere), and go right down them line by line. To be certain, it's the HUD 1 form that's really definitive, but you don't get that even in preliminary form until you're signing loan documents, and if it's not on the earlier form it shouldn't be on the HUD 1.

Origination is not a junk fee. It can be excessive, but it is a real fee to pay a real service. Relating to this is Yield Spread on the HUD 1, which is what the lender will pay the broker for a loan on given terms. Origination plus yield spread plus line 808 (Mortgage Broker Commission) is what the loan provider makes if they are a broker. If they're a lender, they make a lot more, and they can hide it more easily. Yield Spread and Origination and Broker's Commission are disclosed on the HUD 1, while the price for selling the loan on the secondary market is not disclosed anywhere, and if you're talking to a direct lender, they don't have to disclose Origination or Yield Spread because there may not be any; they can decide to be paid entirely off the premium the loan sells for in the secondary market - and then they tell you you're buying it down from there with discount points. This is why I keep telling people to shop for loans based upon the terms to you. If you evaluate it on the basis of loan provider's compensation, a broker who has to disclose compensation of $4000 is going to look like a worse bargain that the direct lender who does not apparently make anything but turns around and sells your loan for a $25,000 premium. In this example, the broker's loan is likely to be about a point and a half to two points cheaper to you, but if you evaluate it on the basis of who has to tell you how much they make, you lose.

This has gotten an order of magnitude worse as the new 2010 Good Faith Estimate treats Yield Spread (for brokers) as a cost and requires it be included in the computation of costs. It isn't a cost at all - it's now money that actually reduces your cost. But bankers used political contributions and connections to ram through a law requiring it to be quoted as if it were a cost, thereby making a direct lender loan appear more attractive than it is when compared to a broker originated loan by someone who doesn't understand this - which is to say the vast majority of the American population. Nor do direct lenders have to so much as disclose how much they are going to make selling the loan on the secondary market. The politicians have deliberately obscured actual cost to the consumer in favor of aiding one class of loan provider over another. I'm planning an article that directly compares the exact same loan done on a correspondent or direct lending basis versus a broker originated loan.

Loan Discount Fee is the fee you pay in order to get an interest rate lower than you would otherwise be offered. It is not junk, but you probably don't want to pay it, as most folks never recover the money they pay to get the lower rate via the lower payments and interest rate charges. Note that you are actually getting something for your money - lowered cost of interest over the life of the loan. It's just that it takes longer than most people realize to recover the money you spend upfront. I never pay discount points for anything except a 30 year fixed rate loan that I'm going to keep at least ten years.

Appraisal Fee is not junk. There is an appraiser who needs to get paid for doing the appraisal. Before this new form was adopted, many times this got marked PFC on the MLDS/GFE, to make it look like a given loan provider was cheaper than they were. Make no mistake, there's going to be a figure in the range of $400 associated with it eventually, but because it's performed by a third party, the loan provider could (and usually did) pretend it doesn't exist as part of the charges until you have to pay it.

Credit Report is not junk. It's not free to run credit, you know.

Lender's Inspection Fee is usually (not always) junk. You're paying the appraiser. If you're smart, you're paying a building inspector before you buy, and the lender often makes you do it even if you don't want to. Every once in a while, there's a home with a documented pest or structural problem that the owner wants to refinance, and that's where this comes in as non-junk.

Mortgage Broker Commission/Fee: Is all a part of how the broker gets paid. Around here the money made is usually expressed as origination and yield spread instead, but this could be part of what a broker gets paid. Origination plus Yield Spread plus this line is the total of what they get paid. If these are larger at closing than when you signed up, that's par for the course most places, unless they guaranteed their fees up front in writing. I do it. I know one other company that does it. Those who are members of Upfront Mortgage Brokers guarantee the total of the items that are their fees, but not the rest of the form. For anyone else, they can and most will change the numbers on these forms within very broad limits (and to illustrate with an example someone recently brought into my office, the difference between one quarter of a point and three points on a $450,000 loan is over $12,000).

Tax Service Fee is not junk, unfortunately.

Processing fee is not junk but it may be negotiable. When it's imposed by the lender, it's not. When it's imposed by the broker, it's to pay the loan processor, which may be negotiated sometimes. Often, some places pretend they're not charging it, while adding a larger margin to origination or discount. It is a real fee, however.

Underwriting fee is real. Lenders charge it to cover paying the underwriters.

Wire Transfer Fee is real, because it costs money to wire money. If you don't need it, don't get it.

Prepaid Interest (line 901) is definitely not junk. This is interest, exactly the same as you're going to pay every month of your loan.

Mortgage Insurance Premium is not junk but may be avoidable.

Hazard Insurance premiums are not junk, either. This money is to put a policy of homeowner's insurance (or renew an existing policy) on the property. Lenders having been burned a few times in the distant past, the insurance policy needs to be in effect from the exact instant they commit their money - half a microsecond later is not good enough for them.

County property taxes are not junk, either (darn!). If you buy during certain periods of the year (e.g. April through June in California), you'll need to reimburse your seller for property taxes they already paid.

VA Funding fee is charged by the VA on VA loans only. Not junk, but if it's not VA, it doesn't have this. As I remember, if you're 10% or more disabled this can get waived.

Reserves deposited with lender are not junk, either. They will be used to pay your fees as they become due. It isn't the lender who owes property taxes and homeowner's insurance. It's you. They're just holding the money.

Title charges: Settlement or Closing Escrow Fee is a real charge to pay the escrow company. Like Appraisal fee, this is often marked PFC, but something like $500 plus $1 per thousand dollars is common.

Document Preparation Fee is mostly real, and actually the lenders do most of it these days. When the title or escrow company need to do it, they will charge fairly steep rates (I've seen $200 for a single sheet document), but you are a captive audience unless you discuss it beforehand.

Notary Fee is to pay the Notary. It's real. It often fell into the PFC trap, previously discussed for Appraisals and Escrow, but you really do need certain documents notarized. Sometimes you can save some money by finding a less expensive notary, but this can bring up other issues, like getting everyone to the same place at the same time.

Title Insurance is real. If it's a purchase, there will actually be two policies of title insurance purchased, one for the new owner and one for the lender. This insures against unknown defects in the title of your property, and yes, title claims happen every day. Lenders won't lend without one. Title insurance is another one of those third party fees that got marked PFC so that less scrupulous loan officers could appear to be less expensive than their competition.

I'm going to mention subescrow fees here, even though they aren't preset onto the form, and are not only junk but also avoidable if your agent did their job. The title company charges them because they are usually asked to do work that is, properly speaking, the realm of the escrow company. But if you choose a title company and escrow firm with common ownership, they will likely be waived.

Government Recording and Transfer Charges are not junk. They are charged by the county, and they are not avoidable, nor should you want to. Recording fees and tax stamps (if applicable) are just part of the cost of doing business. Beware of one provider pretending it doesn't exist while another honestly discloses it.

Additional Settlement Charges. Pest Inspection is the only one on the form, and it is not junk. You want a pest inspection if you're buying the property. The lender can require it in some circumstances upon refinance.

Now, you'll notice that of the permanently etched items on the form, there's not a lot of junk, but everybody keeps talking about high junk fees. What are these, and where are they?

Well, most of the things that people talk about as junk fees aren't junk fees. These are fees like Appraisal fee, escrow, credit report, notary, etcetera. These are, incidentally, half or more of the closing costs for most loans. They may have been hidden from you on the initial form, but they're not junk. They are essential parts of the process, and if you don't see explicit dollar values associated with them, somebody is trying to lie about their fees by not telling you about all of them. It's not like you're going to somehow not pay them. They're just pretending you're not in order to get you to sign up with them.

This has diminished significantly this year with the advent of the 2010 Good Faith Estimate. The regulators may be intentionally deceiving consumers about the costs of broker loans versus the cost of direct lender loans, but they did one thing to the benefit of the consumer - if it's not on the Good Faith Estimate, there are now fewer circumstances where the lender is permitted to raise what they disclose, so there is less pretending a loan is going to be all but free and then socking people for $12,000 in closing costs.

Nonetheless things that really are junk fees are a real problem, but the reason they're not among those listed on the form is that the items listed on the form are mostly real. It's the extra stuff that gets written into the extra lines that you've got to watch out for. It was fine and legitimate for a loan officer to write "Total of lenders fees $995" or however much it was, although the new 2010 Good Faith Estimate no longer permits this. On the HUD 1, these should be broken out into separate charges, but this way the loan officer only has to remember one number. As long as they add up correctly, no harm and no foul, and it doesn't make any difference to you whether it's underwriting and document generation or spa visits for their senior management, it's part of doing business with that lender. What is probably not legitimate is to start writing all kinds of other fees. Miscellaneous fees. Packaging fees. Marketing fees. Legitimate Messenger fees should be something you know about because you need them at the time they happen. But the majority of messenger fees are the title/escrow company trying to get you to pay for daily courier runs that happen anyway. If you choose the right title/escrow combination, you should be able to avoid them in most cases.

It is also a common misconception that all junk fees are lenders junk fees. I don't impose junk fees on my clients, and I do my best to keep title and escrow from doing so. However, coming into situations other loan officers have left behind where it's best to simply go with what's already in place, title companies and escrow companies, in general, appear to impose about an equal amount in junk fees with most loan providers. This is also changing now with the new Good Faith Estimate which makes lenders and loan officers liable for the extra fees - as a result of which title and escrow companies who don't want to lose business are cleaning up their act. I have told more than one title and escrow representative that the first time I end up paying their extra fees out of my pocket will be the last dime their company sees from my clients. Multiply this by the number of loan officers in the country, and you can see that they've suddenly gotten a powerful incentive to treat broker clients, at least, honestly.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

(This is an updated reprint of an article written in February 2007. The Era of Make Believe Loans that made it easier to qualify people for inflated loan amounts ended abruptly a few days later, but the sort of thinking that set people up for later default is still with us)

Not very long ago, a woman who was impressed by my website called because she wanted to get pre-qualified for a loan. "Great!" I told her, and proceeded to ask about her income and her monthly obligations and everything else, and came up with a figure of about $220,000 that she could realistically afford. If you're familiar with San Diego, you know that that's a 1 bedroom condo, or maybe a small two bedroom in a not so wonderful area of town. Even with prices down now, it's definitely not a house. With a Mortgage Credit Certificate, it got to maybe $260,000. If she bought somewhere there was a Locally based first time buyer program also, that would add whatever the amount of the program was, but the only one with money actually available was a place she didn't want to live. If we went so far as to go interest only, we might have boosted the base loan amount as high as $300,000. Severe fixer houses might be had for $350,000 or so - and she had the literature for a brand new $700,000 development. She had her upgrades and drapery all picked out, too. So I tried to be gentle in pointing out that the property appeared to be a bit more than she could afford.

Was she grateful? Heck no! She then asked, "How am I supposed to afford a house with that?" She was spitting mad! She acted like I was personally standing there saying "None Shall Pass!" (about a minute and a half in). "Well, if you won't qualify me for a house, I'll go find someone who will!"

I'm sure she did find someone to tell her she could have a $700,000 loan if she wanted it. Put negative amortization together with Stated Income or NINA, and there are any number of people out there who will not only keep their mouths shut about the consequences to you, but aid and abet you in staying ignorant about those consequences - at least until they've got their $25,000 commission check. And you know, I can do that loan also, if you don't mind that real interest rate adds $100,000 to what you owe over the course of three years and the payment all of a sudden adjusts to over four times what you can afford, and you lose the property and your credit is ruined for at least ten years. Not to mention the fact that rarely do people allow the mortgage payment to go south on its own.

There is no conspiracy keeping you away from home ownership. There is no smoke filled back room deal setting the price of properties such as the one she wanted out of her reach. Lest you be unaware, here in Southern California, we haven't been building enough new housing for the people who want to live here since the late seventies. Those desirable properties are highly priced because they are scarce, and the prices are where they are because that's where the supply of such properties balances the number of people who want them badly enough to pay those prices. Notice that I did not say, "The number of people who can afford those prices." This is intentional. If you want them bad enough, there are lots of loans out there, and at the time, there were lenders eager to make them, such that you could have that dream house - for a while. But the way financing works is like the laws of physics. Specifically, like gravity. It's there, all the time, pulling away, and there is no analog to the ground that holds us up. Think of it as an very tall elevator shaft going both directions from where you start. This month's interest is gravity, pulling you down. What you're paying is like the upward thrust of a rocket, pushing you up. When you make an investment (and a property is an investment), you want to go up, but if pull down is more than thrust up, you start going down instead. Furthermore, we are talking in terms of acceleration, not just velocity. If down is more than up next month, too, you're now going down even faster. And so on and so forth.

But the elevator shaft is never infinite going down, and now ask yourself what happens when you're going down, at a speed you've been building up for months and months, and the elevator shaft ends? I've been watching old cartoons on TV sometimes, and I've noticed that they usually don't show Wile E. Coyote's impact any more, but what just happened to you makes the time he got caught under the anvil, the lit cannon, and the huge falling rock look like a love tap.

Real estate agents don't set prices. The market does that in accordance with supply and demand. In southern California, there's twenty million plus people demanding housing and not enough being built. You want to change this, take it up with politicians. All buyers agents can do is try and find the best bargain out there, while listing agents are trying to get the most possible money.

Your budget is your budget. You make what you make. You spend what you spend. Your savings is what you have saved plus what it has made. You can afford more for a home if you make more, spend less, save your money, and invest it effectively. If you don't do these things, you can't afford as much. Indeed, most people kill their budget voluntarily, by spending more than they need to. It isn't my opinion that matters, or anyone else's. All of these are cold hard numbers. You know what you make, you know what you spend. If you could do better, that's something for you and your family to work with. All a loan officer can do is work with the numbers as they are.

These numbers give the payments you can afford and your down payment. The rates are what they are. The variations in available rates are smaller than most people think. Actually, the largest difference in rates and their associated costs is how much the loan providers want to make for doing your loan (and whether they will admit it). Not the only difference, but the largest one. The second largest difference is in finding the loan program that is the best fit. When you put all of these factors together, if you come up with variations of more than half a percent for the same loan at the same cost, then I will bet money that either the higher quote wants to gouge you badly, the lower rate is not quoting something they can really deliver, or possibly both. The point is this: If someone working with real numbers says that you can afford $X, any pre-qualification or pre-approval you get that's more than about 5% different should set alarm bells ringing.

So now let's revisit Ms. Eyes Bigger Than Her Wallet. She thinks all she has to do is say "Abracadabra!" and the whole thing will work out. But the interest rate is what it is, which means the monthly cost to have that loan is fixed - if she didn't bump it up by wanting something she can't afford. That lender is run by some pretty smart people, who understand all of this extremely well. They have the assistance of some very sharp lawyers in writing those loan contracts. One thing I can absolutely guarantee is that if they don't get their money - all of their money - you will be even unhappier than they are. The upshot is that the vast majority of the people who think they're solving their problems with a wave of some magical wand and the phrase, "Abracadabra!" are in fact doing something Unforgivable to their own financial future, roughly equivalent to pointing that magic wand at their own finances and mangling the pronunciation to "Avada Kedavra"

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

This has always been a portion of the market, but right now, more and more people are emphasizing it, or at least the ones who are able.

Actual Rent to Own is rare these days, a sign that the market is being driven by sellers, selling to poorly advised buyers. I can't remember the last time I heard of one happening, because there is an actual ownership interest right away, and the buyer is entitled to a share of the money put into rent, whether or not the deal is actually consummated. On the other hand, Lease Option seems to be a common Idea of the Moment, because the prospective buyer basically gets nothing if they don't want to buy, or if they cannot qualify for the loan.

Just like any other purchase contract, everything about these is negotiable, but the basics are thus: Buyer and seller reach a purchase agreement, with the date of actual purchase delayed by some amount of time. In the meantime, the agreement is for for the buyer to rent the property, usually for an above market rent. Part of each payment gets set aside for the buyer's down payment if and when the option is exercised. The difference between Rent to Own and Lease with Option to Buy is that in Rent to Own, a part of each payment is actually due back to the buyer if they decide not to buy, whereas in Lease with Option to buy, that money is just gone if the option to buy is not exercised.

Why do this?

For the prospective buyer, it's a way to engage in forced savings for a down payment. If rent is $2000 per month, with $1000 being credited to the buyer and $1000 in rent, over a period of two years, you've got a $24,000 down payment, and this is treated exactly like any other down payment, except that the seller already has it, so you only have to come up with the purchase price less this down payment money. This is useful for people with rotten credit and/or poor savings habits, especially if credit is expected to improve within the time frame of the agreement. It's horridly inefficient, and I've never seen a residential situation where it wasn't better to buy outright, but if you have a problem qualifying for a loan or saving for a down payment, this is one way to go about dealing with that problem. With 100% financing currently dead except for VA loans and a few Municipal first time buyer programs that run out of money at warp speed every time they get a fresh allocation, this is one way for people to get their foot in the door of property.

For the seller, it's a way to create a captive purchaser. These buyers have rotten credit and/or zero dollars for a down payment. Nobody else can do business with these buyers, because the buyers will not qualify for the necessary loan. They have Hobson's Choice: This one or none at all. This creates bargaining power for the seller even in the strongest of Buyer's Markets, because most sellers in such markets do not have the ability or willingness to offer a Lease with Option to Buy. They're not as powerful as offering a Seller Carryback, but they definitely give sellers pricing power they would not otherwise have. You can get an above market rent and an above market price, to boot, and the prospective buyers are more motivated than your average tenant to take good care of the property.

So why isn't everybody doing them?

First of all, the reason the seller has the property on the market is because they want or need to sell now, not two years from now. With either rent to own or Lease with Option to Buy ("Lease Option"), they aren't getting any equity out of the property now to enable them to buy their next property. Furthermore, they've still got all of the expenses of owning that property. Finally, the reason that buyer can't buy anything else is because the most generous assessment of their financial skills possible is "Needs improvement." Bad credit does not, generally speaking, happen like a lightning strike out of a clear blue sky. It happens because they don't pay their bills on time. There are some exceptions - mostly people who had major unexpected medical expenses, but there are limits to how badly one account can hurt your credit. Chances are high that they'll be late with the rent - which is money you're counting on to pay your mortgage, your property taxes, your insurance, etcetera. It takes a certain financial solvency to be able to offer these. Not to mention that until the tenants exercise the option to buy, you still own that property, which means you've got all of the headaches and obligations of being a landlord, or you're going to have to pay someone else to take care of them. Repairs, maintenance, etcetera.

For buyers, the prospective pitfalls are even worse. First, you're paying above market rent and agreeing to a price that is usually significantly above the current market. It might be below market when you actually exercise the option, but right now, it's almost certainly a goodly premium over the price that you can get similar properties for - because they're offering something extra that most sellers are not willing or able to offer, and if you didn't need it, you wouldn't be willing to pay for it, right? If you don't exercise the option to buy, the extra rent money you fork out is basically gone. There has to be equity in the agreed upon sales price, and there has to continue to be actual equity. No lender in the known universe is going to approve a short payoff for a Rent to Own or Lease Option, no matter how ironclad your contract. If the current owners lose the property to foreclosure, you're basically SOL. And it wouldn't be the first time sellers pocket the rent while not paying the mortgage, or even taking a cash out refinance. I'm not certain what the law is on this point, but I don't see a way to keep the current owners from doing any of this if that is their intention. It's a good idea to record the option, but that doesn't mean anything if the lender forecloses or is owed more money than the strike price. You can sue, but suing broke people is throwing more money down a black hole from which you're not going to recover it. Finally, and here's the rub that kills a very large proportion of the prospective buyers who enter into these agreements: You're still going to have to qualify for a loan for the rest of the agreed upon purchase price ("strike price") before the option period expires. Usually the market goes up, but sometimes it does go down, and the appraisal is less than the purchase price. If you can't make up the necessary difference between the biggest loan you can get and the strike price, you're not going to be able to buy. For that matter, if interest rates go up significantly, you could find yourself unable to afford the payments on that loan. In fact, these two phenomenon usually go together. Rates go up, therefore payments and cost of interest on the same number of dollars rises. People in the aggregate cannot afford to pay as much for real estate as they could formerly, and therefore, prices fall. Basic economics.

There usually is a significant deposit made, as well. Not as much as a regular purchase contract, but just because there's a time delay involved doesn't mean the seller isn't going to demand a deposit they can keep (maybe), or rent to a tenant without a deposit. The rules on whether they can keep a tenant's Rent To Own or Lease/Option deposit are also somewhat different and more advantageous to the current owner than California's renter-landlord law generally is (Don't ask me for details - I'm not a lawyer. I'm mostly parroting what I've been told on this point).

The prospective seller is entitled to do all the due diligence than any normal prospective seller or landlord is, and ditto the prospective buyers/tenants. Personally, I would want that inspection contingency period to run the full duration of the option period, and there really isn't an effective loan contingency period, as the owners already have the prospective buyer's money, and most Lease Option contracts are pretty solid upon the point of not getting it back. This point is negotiable, but usually that money has already gone to pay mortgage, property taxes, etcetera. What did I just say about suing broke people?

Rent to Own real estate and Lease with Option to Buy real estate are always a risk for both parties. The tricks are myriad, at the very least. This is not something to try without a very sharp agent representing your interests, and as for dual agency in this situation, I have it on excellent authority that slow roasting yourself while basting with acid is less painful for prospective buyers. With that said, if the situation is right and both parties act in good faith, it can be a way to make both sides of such an agreement very happy, when otherwise they would both have been very unhappy because neither could get what they want. The seller gets an above market price, albeit delayed, and a much improved cash flow in the meantime. The buyers can buy property, where otherwise they would not be able to.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

People ask for referrals all the time, and many folks will stumble all over themselves to provide referrals. Some of the people referred really are excellent providers. Others are not so good, but the person providing the referral has an agenda of their own, and you have to be aware of the possibility. Never give anyone your business without shopping it around just because someone referred you to a certain provider.

In many cases, the reason why you are referred to Company X Realty or Company Y Loans has nothing to do with any allegations of them being an efficient, diligent, effective or inexpensive provider of those services. Number one on the list of reasons why people tell you about X Realty or Y Loans is because company X or company Y refers business back to them. This isn't illegal, but when you ask a real estate agent for a referral to a low cost mortgage provider and you get referred to one of the ones that's competing on the basis of consumer name recognition, you should realize that the mortgage providers with national advertising campaigns are not among the low cost providers. For analogous reasons, I usually advise people to stay away from the national realty chains, even if they're not local to me. But I digress. The point is that the person who refers you to this person is effectively getting paid by referring you to them. Not exactly a sterling reason to trust their motivations in making this referral.

Indeed, this is one of the ways that lenders in particular avoid competing on price. Ladies and gentlemen, so long as it is the same type loan on the same terms, a loan is a loan is a loan. The only real difference is the tradeoff between rate and cost, or, in other words, price. But lenders do not want to compete on price, because that means they don't make very much money. In fact, they want to avoid competing on price, and the captive audience from referral business is one prime example of how they do it. Joe Realtor sends Jane Lender business because Jane refers business right back to Joe Realtor, and because the client has been told that Jane Lender gives great loans at a great rate, the client doesn't shop loan providers like they might otherwise have done, leaving Jane a freer hand to charge a higher markup.

These are not the only reasons why referrals happen. For instance, here in San Diego, many real estate agents will refer to one particular loan officer because they know that loan officer won't tell the client any inconvenient truths, such as, "You cannot really afford this house." They refer to this loan officer because that loan officer will just keep their mouth shut about the buyer's ability to actually afford the loan and figure out some way to get it through so that agent gets paid. Never mind that it's an unsustainable loan. This sort of thing happens everywhere, but particularly in markets where there are affordability issues for the average person.

Finally, explicit kickbacks are illegal, and there are limits on how often Joe and Jane can buy each other dinner out or whatever arrangement they have to transfer wealth, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen sometimes. After all, there aren't any Department of Real Estate employees following Joe and Jane around 24 hours per day, so this kind of stuff gets hidden all the time. I've had more than one blatantly illegal offer of referrals for kickbacks since I've been in the business. Some of these folks are brazen. No, there's no percentage in turning them in, either. This is one of those situations the saying about, "No good deed goes unpunished," was invented for. One guy I knew who did turn someone in years ago told me about the thousands of dollars in legal fees he incurred, plus three years of investigation that shows up on your license inquiries as an unresolved complaint until it's over. No thank you. Sometimes, you have to content yourself with remaining apart from any illegalities, while warning people that this sort of thing does happen.

There's nothing wrong with asking for a referral. But that doesn't mean you should just blindly follow that recommendation. All too often, there's an agenda behind that referral. If the person making the referral pushes it too hard, let alone tries to make that referral a condition of their own work, the correct response is to fire them as well.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here