April 2021 Archives

Many people are uncertain as to what closing costs are.

Basically, they relate to the costs of doing the transaction. There are people who work on getting your loan through the process of approval and funding, and those people have got to be paid. Anytime you're talking about a fee for a service that needs to be performed in order to get a loan done, that's a closing cost. This includes even origination, which is normally quoted in points, as the fee that the loan provider takes for getting the loan done. Not all loans have origination fees in points, but I'd say that in excess of 95 percent of all sub-prime loans and at least two thirds of all A paper loans nationally do. Of course, all loans have origination fees of some sort - the people putting your loan together and getting it funded are not working for free. It can be paid via Yield Spread, secondary market premium, or a couple other ways that don't result in an apparent cost to you, but you are paying for origination somehow. Nobody does loans for free.

Every loan has closing costs. They are a fact of life. You can choose to accept a higher rate on your loan such that the lender will agree to pay your closing costs, but that is not the same thing as not having them. Indeed, you should be very wary of someone quoting you significantly lower closing costs that anyone else.

When you are talking about closing costs, the vast majority of all loan providers used to pretend that so-called "third party" fees such as title, escrow, attorney fees in the states that use attorneys, appraisal, and notary fees do not exist. That has mostlychanged with the requirements of the new 2010 Good Faith Estimate. Although there are still holes in the rules, most of the games lenders play have changed towards misquoting the tradeoff between rate and cost.and then act all surprised when you complain about these extra fees that weren't on your beginning paperwork. Until the new rules came into effect (and it still happens because as I said there are loopholes in the new rules) people told me before they sign up for a loan that my fees seem high, compared to what someone else is telling them. The difference, of course, is that I'm telling them about all the third party fees upfront and the other folks they are talking to are doing their best to pretend those fees don't exist. They not only exist, but you're going to pay them as a part of any loan. Who would you rather do business with, someone who pretends it's going to cost you half as much as it will, or someone who tells you the real cost right at the start?

Now the critical difference between recurring and nonrecurring closing costs in that nonrecurring happen once, to do your loan, and then they are done. Recurring closing costs are those things that happen every month, like interest, property taxes, insurance, and the impounds for doing them, if applicable. Mello-Roos and homeowners association dues also fall within the definition of recurring, but those items I just named are pretty much the full extent of the recurring closing costs. Pretty much everything else is nonrecurring. For example, you only need one appraisal, one notary fee, one escrow, and one title insurance policy per loan.

One thing that is often counted as a closing cost that should not be are discount points, which instead of being a charge for a service are a charge by the bank to buy you a lower rate than you would otherwise get. They are completely avoidable, and therefore not a true closing cost, not to mention that they're not a good investment even if you're paying them on your own behalf. There is always a trade-off between low rate and low cost. The lender will sell you a lower rate if you pay for it, but they won't give it to you free. Also, the new rules treat Yield Spread as a cost rather than what it is in reality: an offset to fees that causes the consumer to spend less money, making direct lender loans appear better than they are in comparison to Yield Spread.

The importance of the distinction between recurring and nonrecurring closing costs is mostly in purchase situations. If there is an allowance from the seller for closing costs, the wording for this on the purchase contract can be critical. Nonrecurring closing costs are far more limited than recurring, and just the impound account can add thousands of dollars to what you, as the seller, end up paying if you agree to recurring closing costs. It's up to you how bad you want to sell the property, but a buyer who needs you to pay recurring closing costs is likely not a very qualified buyer, and their loan is pretty likely to experience snags. I counsel my sellers to insist on substantial deposits and sharply limited escrow periods in such cases, and if the buyer is allowed discount points as part of what you're willing to pay, count on the fact that they are going to use the entire allowance you give them. If the buyer has a choice of allowing you to keep some of that money or buying themselves a lower rate, which also means lower payments, what do you think they're going to do?

Caveat Emptor (and Vendor)

Original here

One reason to check your referral logs every day: Sometimes you can find great material for an article. I got one about the three day right of rescission.

The three day right of rescission is a feature (or bug, depending upon your situation) with every refinance on a home that is a primary residence. The reason it exists is that loan documentation is massive, and confusing to the non-professional, sometimes intentionally so on the part of the lender. Some will throw massive documents at you so fast at closing that you never do figure out what's really important, delaying those documents until you show signs of just wanting to get it over with. Furthermore, until you see the final documents at signing, there is literally no way to prove that what your prospective loan provider quoted you on the Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement (California) or Good Faith Estimate (the other 49 states) is actually what they intend to deliver. There's a lot of paperwork that can be put under your nose to make it look like that's what I intend to deliver, but until you have the final loan documents sitting in front of you, none of it means anything. Just because they give you those wonderful forms like a Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement or Good Faith Estimate or Truth-In-Lending Advisory or anything else does not mean that is what they intend to deliver. The only document that is required to be an accurate accounting of the loan and all the money that goes into and comes out is the HUD-1, and that comes at the end of the process, and you get it at the same time as you sign the note.

I have said it before, but there are three documents you need to concentrate on at loan closing. Everything else is in support of those. They are the Trust Deed or Mortgage, the Note, and the aforementioned HUD-1. An unscrupulous lender certainly can slip stuff past you on other forms, but most won't bother. These three forms will tell you about 99.9 percent of the shady dealings. Some lenders and brokers will actually train their loan officers in how to distract you from the numbers on these three documents.

Once you have signed all of the requisite paperwork to finalize your loan (the stuff you sign in front of a notary at the theoretical end of the process), there is potentially a waiting period that begins. Purchases have no federal right of rescission, nor do refinances of rental or investment property, but if it's your primary residence and you are refinancing, you have three business days to call it off. Note that some states may broaden the right of rescission, and some may even lengthen it, but they can't lessen what the federal government requires.

As an aside, just because you have signed "final" documents does not necessarily mean your loan will fund. There are both "prior to docs" conditions as well as "prior to funding" conditions. The former means they must be satisfied before your final loan documents are generated, the latter means they must be satisfied as a condition of funding the loan. I want to emphasize that there will always be "prior to funding" conditions, but they should be routine things that make sense to do at that time, in that they cannot realistically be done any sooner. Many lenders, however, are moving "prior to docs" conditions to "prior to funding." This has always been prevalent for so-called "hard money" loans, but recently sub-prime lenders in particular have been emulating their example. The reasoning for doing this is simple. Once you've signed documents, you are bound to them unless you exercise right of rescission. Once right of rescission expires, you are bound to them period, until they either fund the loan or give up on the possibility of funding it. I strongly advise you to ask for a copy of outstanding conditions on your loan commitment before you sign.

Assuming that there is a right of rescission applicable, once you have signed final documents, the clock starts ticking. The day you sign documents doesn't count. Sundays and Holidays don't count. It is possible that Saturdays don't count, depending upon the law in your state. Here in California, Saturdays count unless they are holidays. It is three business days. So let's say that you sign final documents with a notary on a Monday of a normal five day week. Tuesday, Wednesday, the Thursday all go by while you have still got your right of rescission. Thursday midnight the right of rescission expires, and the loan can fund on Friday. Note that no lender can or will fund a loan during your right of rescission period, and every so often an otherwise excellent loan officer will have you sign loan documents before some other conditions are finished so that the right of rescission will expire in timely fashion to fund your loan before your rate lock expires. Remember that if the rate is not locked, the rate is not real, but all locks have expirations.

Applicable rights of rescission cannot be waived, cannot be shortened, and cannot be circumvented. Ever. There literally is no provision to do so in the law. This is both intentional and, in my opinion, correct. Kind of defeats the purpose of having it, which is to give you a couple days to consult with third party professionals before it's final, if it can be waived, because you can bet millions to milliamps that the sharks you are trying to protect folks from would have the folks sign such a document if it existed.

Now, just because the right of rescission has expired and the loan can be funded does not mean that it will be funded, much less on that day. For starters, good escrow officers will not request funding upon a Friday because the client will end up paying interest on both loans over the weekend for no good purpose. Once they request funding, the lender has up to two business days to provide it, and then the escrow officer has two business days to get everybody their money.

Also, remember those "prior to funding" conditions I spoke about a couple of paragraphs ago? If there's something substantive, it usually should have been taken care of prior to signing docs, leaving procedural stuff for prior to funding. But sometimes it can be in your interest to move them, if it means your loan is more likely to fund within the lock period, so you don't have to pay for lock extensions. On the other hand, there has been a movement towards making as many conditions prior to funding as possible, simply because once you have signed final documents you are more tightly bound to that lender.

In summary, if a right of rescission is applicable, start counting with the next business day after you sign final loan documents. After three business days, the right of rescission has expired and the loan can fund. Assuming a normal five day week, and that Saturday counts, as it does in every state I've worked in:

Caveat Emptor

Original here

Mortgage - Questions you must ask every provider about every loan when you are shopping. Permission is hereby granted to print this out and use it for non-commercial purposes so long as no alterations are made and copyright is preserved.

(Disclaimer: This list is trying to be as exhaustive as possible, but is likely missing some important questions. If you have one that I missed, send it to me: dm at )

Is there a prepayment penalty?

If so, for how long and under what terms?

What is the interest rate?

What is the amortization period?

Is there any possibility that the note will be due in full before the amortization pays it off? (Vaguely equivalent to "is there a balloon?" but a broader question)

Is the payment interest only, or principal and interest?

(if interest only) how long is it interest only, and what happens afterward?

Is there any possibility of negative amortization (the balance increasing) if I make the minimum payment? (See my post on the Negative Amortization Loan)

Is the nominal rate different from the real rate of interest I would be charged?

How long is the rate fixed for?

(If fixed for less than the full period of the loan) What is the rate based upon when it adjusts, what is the margin, and how often does it adjust?

What is the industry standard name for this loan type?

Is the rate you are quoting me based upon full documentation, stated income, NINA or EZ Doc? (Note: At this update everything but full documentation is essentially gone, but the others are likely to make a comeback eventually)

(If full or EZ doc) Assuming I have other monthly payments of $X (where $X is your other monthly payments), how much monthly income do I have to document in order to qualify? (If this is more than you make, Warning!)

How many points TOTAL will I have to pay to get that rate?

How many points of origination will I be charged?

How many discount points will I have to pay?

What are the closing costs I will have to pay?

(because they are allowed to omit third party costs from all estimates and totals, you must add the answers to the next three questions to the previous question unless the provider specifically includes them)

How much will the appraisal fee be?

How much will total title charges be?

How much will the escrow fee be?

Who will my title company be?

Who will my escrow company be?
(If escrow company is not owned by title company, i.e. same name, be prepared for unknown additional title charges).

How much, total, will I be expected to pay out of my pocket?

How much, total, will be added to my mortgage balance?

With everything added to my mortgage balance, what will my payment be?

How long of a rate lock is included with this quote?

What do you need in order to lock this loan?

I used to tell people to ask for a rate and cost guarantee up front. Unfortunately, due to changes in lender policy that are now universal, it has become cost prohibitive to lock a loan upon application. If a loan is locked but not funded, the lender will add additional cost to future loans from a loan officer. Note that this doesn't hit the consumers whose loans don't fund personally, but if your loan officer is the kind to disregard the hit, they will have been hit with bumps in their cost structure, costs that they will go out of business over if not passed on to you. Better loan officers have now replaced this with a set margin for their company and an ongoing discussion as to when to lock.

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After you have finished talking to this person, go check out the numbers. If you have a calculator that can handle mortgage calculations, use it. If you're able to do the calculations yourself, even better. Otherwise, do a web search for payment calculators or mortgage calculators or amortization calculators, and try out a couple of different ones (because some web calculators on lenders sites are programmed to lie!). This is math - there is only one right answer! The numbers should come out the same except for rounding errors! If the difference is more than five dollars in any case, that's a red flag! (You should also make certain the reason for the difference is not operator error. For instance, automobile payment calculators assume a different first payment than mortgage calculators, but student loan calculators should be compatible with mortgages.)

Original here

Got this search:
"should I get a buyer's agent if I've already found a house"

The answer is almost certainly yes, but I am going to examine both the pros and cons. Full disclosure: This is most of what I do for a living.

The con is fairly simple. If the seller isn't paying a buyer's agent, they may be willing to sell more cheaply. Then again, they may not. One of the reasons people sell For Sale By Owner is that they're a little too greedy. Even if they have a seller's agent, their listing contract may call for them to keep the buyer's agent's commission if the selling agent sells the property without a buyer's agent involved, and this may cause them to be willing to sell more cheaply. They are under no obligation to do so, however - and without someone who knows the market on your side, the difference in price and terms of the agreement you could get with a buyer's agent is almost certainly more than this difference.

Many think the buyer's agent's job is to say, "Here is the living room." That's like saying the president's job is to look impressive. Sure, most presidents do look impressive and I do say "here is the living room," where it's applicable and something causes me to think my buyer may not have figured it out for themselves. Nor is it about looking in the MLS and my connections to find my buyer a property they like. It's not even about making showing appointments with listing agents and occupants.

My real job as a buyer's agent is to find you the best property for your needs under your constraints and get you the best possible bargain on it while making certain that the seller and their agent aren't hiding anything.

Many folks call the seller's agents and use them as their agent. This is what is known as a mistake. That seller's agent has a listing agreement telling them and the seller what the responsibilities of the agent are to the seller. They may or may not sign a representation agreement with the buyer. If they don't sign one, all of their explicit legal responsibilities are to the seller. They are working for the seller, not for you, and they have a contractual obligation to sell that property at the highest possible price as well as financial motivation in that their commission will be larger. The buyer's interests do not enter into it. Perhaps they do an excellent job of representing your interests anyway, but the odds are against it. Their legal responsibilities are essentially limited to "don't tell any lies and don't practice law without a license." While I was working for the FAA, we found out about an agent who had made a real good living for a while as a seller's agent and how he had done it: By telling everybody he showed a house in the area to that the airport was going to close. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, that airport land was dedicated solely to aviation usages by an Act of Congress, and if the county had wanted to close the airport (they didn't; they were making enough money to pay for every airport in the county there, and socking up a huge fund if they ever figured out something else aviation related to spend it on), they would have had to have paid back tens of billions of dollars to the federal government. We got a call from one of his victims one busy Saturday, who asked, "When is this airport scheduled to close?" We advised him that any proposed closure was news to us, and explained the preceding to the gentleman.

Even if the seller's agent does sign a representation agreement with you, in approximately thirty percent of transactions (from my experience) a situation arises where the best interests of the buyer and the best interests of the seller collide, in addition to the unavoidable issue of their interest are diametrically opposed on price. When this happens, no matter what they do, an agent representing both sides is stuck on the horns of a dilemma. If they do A for the seller, they are violating the best interests of the buyer. If they do B for the buyer, they are violating the best interests of the seller. Here's a hint as to which way they are going to jump in the event of conflicting interests: If they violate the seller's interests, they don't have a transaction at all. If you don't buy, they can always sell it to someone else, but if they lose the listing agreement, they are completely out in the cold.

Before I even point a property out to you, or if you find it surf the internet and ask, "What do you think?" I am evaluating the property for fitness, suitability, affordability, how it stacks up to other properties on offer, how many other properties are on offer, and what the details of the property likely mean in the way of potential problem issues. Just a for minor example, a property built in 1975 has to be concerned about both lead-based paint and asbestos; a property built in 1990 still has those worries but to a far lesser extent, as most building stocks with those concerns were long gone, and a property built in 2005 is more likely built over Jimmy Hoffa's final resting place than a repository for asbestos and lead based paint (it could happen, but the odds are long against it). I am not an inspector or a tester, but I can and do alert my clients to safety and environmental issues, potential repair bills, and all sorts of other items before we've made an initial offer. "Best thing you could do with this building is 'accidentally' run a bulldozer through it," is something I told a client in a few weeks ago, in the context of telling him the value, if any, was the land less the cost of demolition and haul-away. Initially built almost 100 years ago and haphazardly added to as well as obviously not in compliance with code, my client would have been facing the possibility of the county condemning the building as unsafe, and quite frankly, I didn't think anyone would insure it outside FAIR requirements. You're not likely to get that kind of talk from a seller's agent. Instead you get words like "charming," "funky!" and the ever popular phrase "needs a little TLC!". If you have a buyer's agent, the sucker they're looking for shouldn't be you. You might decide you want the property anyway, but you'll be aware of the issues going in to negotiations. Most importantly, if the sellers aren't going to be reasonable, you have someone who should be willing to tell you when to walk away. A listing agent cannot do that.

When it comes to the offer, a seller's agent is looking to get the highest possible price. Period. They don't care if you could buy a better property for less elsewhere, their responsibility to the seller and desire for a larger paycheck are in perfect alignment. A buyer's agent is responsible to you, and whereas buyer's agents get paid based upon the sales price, same as the seller's agents, they at least have a legal responsibility to do their best for you. If there are any complaints, a seller's agent can take refuge in the fact that it is their primary duty to get the best possible terms (i.e. highest possible price) for the property. The buyer's agent has no such shelter. Which would you rather have as your representative?

Buyer's Agents do not usually cost you, the buyer, any extra money. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I've never run into one. Both the Exclusive and Nonexclusive Buyer's Agent Agreements used by California Association of Realtors state, in the absence of additional agreement, that any commissions paid out of the "cooperating brokers" amount on the MLS count against the buyer's obligation to the representing agent. This is typically agreed to be two percent in California, and I don't know the last time I saw a residential MLS listing offering less than that to the buyer's agent. The way the transaction is structured is that the selling agent gets the entire commission, but agrees via the listing contract and MLS to share a certain portion with the buyer's agent, if the buyer has one. Good buyer's agents typically beat the price down significantly more than two percent, especially in the current market. I am equipped to do value battle with that seller's agent in ways that members of the general public are not, and whereas it's true they don't have to negotiate with my clients, they've got to sell the property to someone. It's not like the real estate fairy is magically going to convert this property to cash.

If there's something you should know about a property, the buyer's agent makes certain the question gets asked and the answer disclosed to you. This eliminates a lot of potential surprises down the road.

Finally the agent knows how to respond to unexpected or unusual situations. They should know how to deal with little niggling details that aren't quite cookie-cutter. None of these issues are common individually, but when you look at the entire transaction, most real estate sales have at least one such issue. Many of these look minor or even insignificant to those who don't understand the implications, but can amount to tens of thousands of dollars in repair, or even things that make property not suitable for the purpose people want to buy it for. At least 80% of the people who tell me how well they did without an agent also tell me something that informs any working agent that in reality they got taken - and that's without me so much as seeing the property or even the listing page.

In short, buyer's agents are the professional on your side, they typically do not cost you any additional money, they usually save you a significant chunk on negotiations, and if you have one, you're more likely to find out about potential problems with the property before you buy.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

There are several possible options to deal with this issue, depending upon the exact situation. Keep in mind that the only difference between married spouses and unmarried partners is that unmarried partners have to fill out their own mortgage application forms, while married spouses can fill out one joint form.

For A paper, both spouses must qualify, credit score-wise. If one spouse's credit is not up to the level that lender wants (and Fannie or Freddie require) they will be unable to qualify together. The way around this is a quitclaim to the spouse who has a good credit score as sole and separate property. The catch is that then the good credit score spouse has to qualify for the loan on their own. If the other spouse is the one that makes all the money, if the good score spouse is in a profession where the needed income isn't believable for stated income (stated income is essentially gone as of this update; this was a legitimate use for stated income although the risks should be discussed), or a whole list of other possible reasons, you may have to go sub-prime, which is also essentially gone. You will not be able to qualify for the same level of property you could with two documentable incomes.

For sub-prime, the spouse who makes more money is the one that will be used as the determination, so as long as the second spouse is in the same vague general ballpark, score-wise, you can still use both incomes to qualify. If one spouse makes slightly more money but the other spouse has a much higher credit score, it was usually necessary to do the stated income with the spouse who has the better score as the sole borrower. You can't do this if one spouse is a doctor and the other works fast food, but you can if they're both in the same industry, or in industries where the incomes are roughly comparable, so long as the job titles and employment history don't render the claim unbelievable. The classic example of this working is both spouses in sales, paid on commission. In some instances, a quitclaim can still be the way to go. However, note that with the current state of the market, it is necessary to stay within what the spouse with the usable income can afford on their own. Note that there are still risks that need to be discussed, most notably to the spouse with the better credit score, but it could be done when this article was originally written because stated income was available. It will probably come back at some point, but it's anyone's guess as to when.

Note that if you do a quitclaim, the property doesn't have to stay quitclaimed. As soon as the loan funds and records, you can quitclaim it back to husband and wife as joint tenants with rights of survivorship, or whatever you want. Quite a few spouses are understandably reluctant to give up all ownership interest, but it's a temporary measure; it doesn't have to stay that way. As soon as the loan funds and records, you get the spouse who qualified for the loan to quitclaim it back to husband and wife, or the trust, or however they want the vesting to be. The better escrow officers I work with will usually have the quitclaim back made up and sent out for signatures without even being asked (I found this out one time when my clients didn't want it quitclaimed back, and called me when they got the form in the mail. I just told them to shred it, and called the escrow office to tell them thanks but not to bother).

Caveat Emptor

Original here

With a lot of people running around like Chicken Little screaming about the sky falling, a lot of folks who would like to buy property due to the much-lowered prices are wondering if there is any way they can qualify for the loan. There are lots of people out there over-exaggerating the difficulty of getting a loan. Well, we do have some events in the market that make it harder, but despite the Chicken Littles, the answer to the question is "probably yes." There are some exceptions, and some caveats for those who do, but most people actually can qualify for loans to buy property.

The big caveat is that it may not be a huge beautiful home straight out of the showplace magazine in the best area of town. With the death of stated income and no ratio loans, you have to limit yourself to what you can document the ability to make the payments for. The ultimate sin of stated income was that it allowed unscrupulous real estate agents and lenders to sell people properties which there was no way they were going to be able to afford in the long term. There will be legitimate borrowers hurt, and hurt badly, by its demise, but the aggregate damage done by recurring abuse of stated income was far greater than the damage that will be done by its demise. I would like to be able to do stated income, but I can't think of any way to prevent its abuse, and so far, neither has anyone else. Yeah, I may think I'm a good guy, but everyone thinks (or claims) they're the Good Guys, including those who most emphatically are not. Stated income has been so abused in the last few years that I cannot bring myself to excessively mourn its passing despite the damage said passing will do.

The worst fall out of stated income abuse is all of the foreclosures, but right behind that is the death of the idea in the minds of most of the public that maybe someone who makes minimum wage thirty hours a week might have to settle for a property that might not be as big, as beautiful, and as desirable as the person who makes ten times the national median. If you want to make these folks able to afford the same property, there are only two ways to do it: make all properties equally unattractive, or give the government the power to decide who gets the good stuff, which merely substitutes one privileged group (those with special influence over the government - i.e. the point of a gun) for the current privileged group, who at least earned their money via transactions freely entered into where the other person must have seen some benefit. The guy making minimum wage realistically has two choices: Figure out a way to start earning the same money as the guy making ten times national median, or learn to accept that he can't afford quite as expensive a property, and instead of making with the Green Eyed Monster, be happy with what he can afford. There are ways to improve your property, and improve what you can afford, and I love helping those who will put forth the effort, but it's considerably more involved than waving some metaphorical magic wand. For those who think the prices are going to come down further, not going to happen. You can sit in denial while they do so, or you can take advantage before it gets worse. If you're willing to work towards your goals, I've written before about the best and quickest way to actually afford something you can't afford right now

Okay, enough with the economics lesson. You're here because you want to know if you'll qualify for a loan now, and probably how much you can qualify for. There are basically three loan programs in the first tier for consideration for most borrowers: conventional A paper, FHA, and VA. I'm going to cover each major criterion: loan to value ratio, credit score, debt to income ratio, in order for each in successive paragraphs, followed by an affordability table.

Conventional

Conventional A paper is the most tightened of the programs, and still more people can qualify than not, even with the tightened qualification standards. Here's the skinny in the current market: Most conventional loan programs want no more than a 90% loan to value ratio, but 95% has become more available of late as mortgage insurance companies return to that market. Turning that around, that means you need a 5-10% down payment for conventional conforming loans. Nonconforming (above your area's limit) has significantly larger down payment requirements. There are ways to get down payments in most circumstances if you want to, but the era of being able to in any wise pretend that real estate is somehow immune from real world consequences - like agents and loan officers who told people "Nothing down! Just sign on the dotted line and walk away if it doesn't work out!" are over - and this is one casualty of the meltdown that nobody with any sanity will mourn. Real estate is a wonderful investment, properly done, but those jokers weren't doing it right. In order to be doing it correctly, you have to plan ahead for what happens next, and have a plan to deal with it.

Where A paper lenders were accepting credit scores as low as 620, now they are pretty much wanting to see credit scores of 700 or at least 680, at least for loan to value ratios above 80%. It's not difficult to improve credit score into that range if you will try, but it can take a few months. Your choice: You can make the effort and get it done, or you can miss the best buying opportunity we are likely to see in at least the next ten to fifteen years. Or, you can somehow come up with a higher down payment. Your choice. Lenders have the money; they are entitled to set terms for lending it out. You don't want to meet those terms, you can wait until you have enough to pay cash - and paying all cash for real estate isn't nearly such a good investment.

Conventional loans still want to see the exact same 45% debt to income ratio they always have. There is room for some slop at high credit scores or with certain kinds of income, but if you plan for 45% in the first place, you're still within the loan guidelines they will accept. The way to figure this is easy: take 45 percent of your gross pay. Not what actually hits your account - but what your employer actually pays out. From this number, Subtract your ongoing debt service. That's the maximum you can qualify for. If you want to keep it to less, that's actually a good thing in my opinion, but the general issue is that most folks want to buy a more expensive property than they can really afford. Hence, the stated income debacle, among other problems. The number of people who can stay strong and within a budget when they're being shown much more beautiful properties "for not very much more on the payment" is relatively small. One reason I keep telling people to shop by purchase price, not payment. If it's outside of your budget, it might as well be on the moon for all of the good it will do you.

This 45% of gross income minus ongoing debt service has to cover all of the ongoing expenses of owning a property. Principal and Interest on the loan, monthly pro-rated property taxes, and homeowner's insurance. If they are present, it also has to pay homeowner's association, temporary assessments such as Mello-Roos, and any other regular recurring expense of owning that property. For instance, assuming a 10% down payment, 6% principal and interest fully amortized loan (high at this update), California default property taxes, and $100 per month for homeowner's insurance, plus 1% PMI for 90% financing (If they promise there won't be PMI for single loan at 90%, they are lying unless it's VA), here's a table of how much you need to make to afford it (assuming $200/month of other debt):

FHA

FHA loans are a federally insured loan program that anyone can theoretically get. FHA loans allow an initial loan to value ratio of 96.5%, so you only need 3.5% for a down payment. On the minus side, they charge a 1.75% funding fee, and PMI-equivalent of either half a percent annualized for loan to value ratios below 95%, or 0.55% annualized for loan to value ratios of 95% or greater. The upshot is that they are not free, but you can borrow up to 98.25% of the purchase price of the property (providing the appraisal supports that value). This is the lowest down payment of any generally available loan currently available.

The enabling regulations for FHA loans still do not require any minimum credit scores, which is all well and good, but the lenders have instituted a requirement for credit scores that vary from 580 to 640 in order for them to be willing to participate. They who have the gold make the rules, and they've had what are euphemistically called "adverse results" with lower scores. You may have read about that. The good news is that it's even easier to improve your credit score to this level than it is to improve to the scores conventional loans require.

Maximum allowable debt to income ratio for FHA loans starts lower, at 43%, but the FHA is willing to issue a waiver up to about 49% pretty easily if you will still have some significant money you can access after the down payment (6 months PITI reserves), or in other words, if the down payment does not represent every penny you have in the world. Nonetheless, if you start and plan for 43% and limit yourself to that, you are better off than if you try to go over. According to what people are most often trying to do with FHA, here is a table of what you can afford with 3.5% down payment, assuming 1.25% (California) property taxes, and the same $100 per month insurance as the previous example, and a base loan rate of 6.25%, as FHA rates are usually but not always slightly higher than conventional. Note that the slightly higher monthly costs are a result of the higher amount borrowed - the cost of money is actually slightly lower under the assumptions given. Once again, I'm assuming $200 per month of other debt; FHA is a lot less forgiving about front end ratio than conventional.

VA

The VA loan is a benefit earned by those those who have served in the armed forces. I don't know what the minimum service requirement is, but I do know that they allow a maximum loan to value ratio of 103%. A veteran literally does not have to come up with a down payment. Not only that, but they can include up to 3% of the purchase price into the loan on top of the purchase price. Not one other (non-scam) program I am aware of has ever loaned over 100% of value of the property, and this one is still doing it. Unlike the FHA, the VA only charges a funding fee of half of one percent, and no financing insurance. Furthermore, the funding fee is waived for those with 10% or more service disability. I certainly wouldn't serve in the armed forces just to be eligible for a VA loan, but it is a nice thing that veterans earn for all that they have gone through.

Credit score is as the FHA: none required in the regulations, but the lenders want to see the same basic minimums (580 to 640), and for the same reasons. Once again, credit scores are not fixed and immutable and they can be improved as well as hurt by events. Just because you suffer a blow to your credit does not mean you cannot counter-act it with by making an effort to improve it.

Debt to income ratio is the same as the FHA at 43%, with the same waivers possible for higher. Given the way most folks use VA loans, I am going to use an example of loans for 103% of purchase price, at 6.25% (for the same reasons as FHA), with, once again $200 per month of other debt service assumed. Once again, the reason it is as close as it is to the others here is due to higher loan balances under these assumptions. If you compute the same situation for all three loans, the person with VA eligibility will pay less than either of the others until the loan to value ratio is below 80%, when the conventional loan will be best. Keep in mind that in this case, the VA loan balance is about 14% higher than the conventional, yet the cost of housing is very comparable, and the VA has by far the lowest down payment requirement ($0).

Now there are other programs that make it easier to afford real estate, or to come up with the down payment. The Mortgage Credit Certificate and your locally based first time buyer program are a way to increase affordability and possibly come up with a down payment without saving it yourself. The drawbacks to these programs is that their budgets tend to be very limited, and what there is evaporates quickly when they do get an allocation of funds. The three basic loan types are there 365 days per year, and I've never heard of them being unwilling or unable to lend to a buyer who met their qualifications. Providing you meet them, you can get a loan, and therefore, you can buy real estate if this market strikes you, as it does me, as significantly underpriced, given the scarcity and ability of people to pay. Or as Warren Buffet says, "The time to buy is when there is blood in the streets." This principle is no different for real estate than it is for stocks or whole companies. If you can afford to buy with a good sustainable loan, you will be very happy that you did in a very few years.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

I was approached by these folks a while ago via email.

I attempted to get them to write up the experience themselves but I wanted to write something about this before I completely forgot about it. This whole exchange is indicative of games loan providers play in order to make money.

I'm going to sketch this out chronological to the extent possible. What happened was Mr. and Ms. A got a postcard in the mail quoting low payments for their loan amount. They thought it looked great, and called the loan provider. The loan provider talked about these great payments on a loan that looked fairly real, and quoted an APR of 6.18. He told them that this was a great loan, and compared it to a 5/1 ARM in such a way that that was what they thought they were getting. No worries, because they were going to be transferred by his company in two to three years.

They asked my opinion about another item having to do with the loan, and something about what they said sounded funky to me.

Well, i believe what I'm getting is called a 5/1 ARM. Each month i have the 4 options of minimum payment, interest only payment, 30 yr payment, or 15 yr payment. (payments respectively would be either $A, $B, $C, or $D)

The minimum payment stays the same for every 12 months, then increases by about $90 each subsequent yr. I know minimum is not ideal, but i live in an area with high appreciation, and because of the ridiculous value of property in the area, & the school system in this county, it continues to appreciate regardless of trends elsewhere.

I'm told the loan comes standard with 3 yr prepay. I can pay the points I mentioned to make it a 1 yr, but it doesn't affect my interest rate coming down. That's at about 6.18%

Well, the part about property appreciating regardless of trends elsewhere is just plain wishful thinking. There is nowhere that is insulated from economic conditions. Nonetheless, it's not what we're talking about here. Does this loan sound like something else that I keep writing about?

Here's what I sent back:

That particular loan is actually a Negative amortization loan. I explain those here (same link as last paragraph - ed).

They are not wholly without redeeming qualities, but they are something to be done with a trembling hand and much looking over your shoulder. At the current rate, expect $725 to get added to your balance the first month - and rates are rising, so this is likely to accelerate, and your underlying rate is completely variable on a month to month basis. Even if they don't rise and you make the minimum payments, you will owe approximately $X after two years - an increase of $18,620 in your balance! Will it be an issue if you owe $18,600 more when you go to sell it? I think it likely that the answer is yes, but it's your call.

A 5/1 is something entirely different. It is a "A Paper" Thirty year loan with the interest rate fixed for the first five years, then adjusting once per year based upon LIBOR, not COFI or MTA. As A paper, there is not an embedded pre-payment penalty. Right now, in California, I have them at about 6.25 no cost no points no prepay, or 6.5 interest only, and truly fixed for five years.

Furthermore, there was another issue with the loan quote:

If I do the math, the first payment gives a principal balance of $X+2000, the second payment gives a principal balance of $X, The third gets $X+500 and the fourth $X+1300. If these are the numbers your loan provider gave you, which of these numbers is correct? Any of them? Unless you're paying the 1.5 points out of pocket, your loan provider should give you a quote which adds them to the amount you are borrowing. Did they do this, or did they pretend it was going away by magic?

They responded:

(sic)
oooh. sounding scary. So i left them a mssg asking which it was, a negative amortization loan, or a 5/1 ARM. I also asked for more info as I was sent spreadsheet which is missing some info. I am fwding the spreadsheet if you don't mind the attachment.

Well the loan provider had named the spreadsheet "2005_Pay_Option_Work_Sheet.xls" Pay Option is one of those "friendly sounding" names for a negative amortization loan. Well, I knew before what kind of scum bucket this loan provider was before I opened it, but doing so was confirmation, good enough to convict in court except that what he did isn't illegal, only immoral and unethical. Yep, it had all of the characteristics of a negative amortization loan as prepared by the worst kind of financial predator. Three or four payment options, including minimum, interest only, and 30 year amortized? Check. Prepayment penalty if you made any other payments (The so-called "one extra dollar" prepayment penalty I talk about here, which is not necessarily characteristic of negative amortization loans but certainly seems to occur there more than anywhere else). Check. Yearly minimum payment increases of about 7.5 of base minimum payment%? Check. Complete lack of disclosure that if you make the minimum payment your balance increases by hundreds of dollars per month? Check. About a 5 percentage point absolute spread between nominal rate and APR? Check. Complete failure to disclose that the "teaser" payment is based upon a "nominal" (in name only) rate of 1%? Check. Failure to disclose that the real rate was month to month variable from day one? Check. Failure to disclose that the index it was based on had risen in recent months and that unless said index went back down, the real rate would be rising? Check. Failure to include real and known closing costs in your loan quote? Check. That last is kind of minor as compared to everything else, but I'd be upset in a major way if it was the only thing wrong he did.

I sent Ms. A an email which said, in part:

"Option ARM" is a common, friendly sounding name for what is still a negative amortization loan. Everything about this loan, from the fact that it has a "payment cap" which is unrelated to a rate cap, screams negative amortization loan.

The 5/1 is a different loan provided for comparison, as the sheet tells you, and is a better loan for almost all purposes, as the second column of the comparison tells you. A 3/1 might have a slightly lower rate, or it might not. Ditto any of the 2 or three year subprime variants.

Intro period is telling you the period the competing is fixed rate for.

MTA loans are based upon a moving average of the treasury rate over the last twelve months. Since they've been going up, your real rate is likely to increase as some older and lower rates drop out of the computation in upcoming months.

Pay attention to the two footnotes on the payment options. "deferred interest" is characteristic of negative amortization.

(Name redacted for publication). They are not the only such company, but the translation into real english of their name must be "watch out for our piranha"

These loans are very commonly pushed because most people "buy" loans based upon payment, making them very easy loans to sell because unless you understand the drawbacks, you will think this is the greatest loan since sliced bread. These are up to forty percent of all new loans in the last year in some areas (including here), and are likely to contribute to a crash in housing values soon.

There are sharks and wolves out there, as this illustrates. Why people who would never buy a toaster oven without checking at least two vendors will sign up for a mortgage without shopping around is beyond me, but people do it. This is a trap that can be very hard to avoid unless you know what's going on, but if you talk to a few loan officers, and and go back and forth, chances become much better that you'll be saved by one of Jaws' competitors telling you what's really going on. Other, competing loan providers deal with this stuff every day. After a very short time, we get to the point where we can recognize it in our sleep. But we can't alert you to these kind of issues if you don't give us the chance.

Luckily, these folks gave me the chance.

They were in another state, and so I didn't get any business out of my good deed, but that's okay. I got this article. And now, you folks can read about it, and be forewarned.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

So what else is available, besides the thirty year fixed rate loan?

There are many kinds of loan out there. Here's a quick overview:

A Paper

In addition to the thirty year fixed, there are several other varieties of fixed rate loan available, and several that are not. Commonly available are five year fixed, ten year fixed, fifteen year fixed, twenty year fixed, and twenty-five, and although forty was making a comeback, I don't know anybody that's offering it now.

I tend to avoid them all with my clients, except for the thirty year fixed. You can always pay more if you have more money that month, but you cannot pay less, and the pure numbers actually say that you should not pay your loan off faster. The shorter the term, the lower the interest rate should be, as not only are they guaranteeing the rate will not change for a lesser period, but the shorter the term, the more principal you are paying every month and the less risky the loan is. Nonetheless, they are also harder to qualify for because the minimum payment is higher. Shorter term loans also take less advantage of leverage, although this is always a two-edged sword.

For instance, if you have $2000 per month payment that you qualify for, then at 6.5 percent interest rate, here are the loan amounts you qualify for:

Thirty year fixed rate loans also come in interest only loans, usually for five years interest only, but some lenders have ten year interest only available, after which it amortizes over the remaining twenty-five or twenty years - which of course means higher payments when it does amortize. Most people have refinanced by then, though.

A paper loans also come in Balloon Loans, with thirty year amortization, where you make payments "as if" if were a thirty year fixed rate loan, but they are due in full after five or seven years (a few ten year balloons exist, and fifteen year balloons are almost exclusively Home Equity Loans). The shorter the balloon period, the lower the rate should be.

A paper loans also come in hybrid ARMs, with thirty year amortization and payoff term, but shorter fixed period. Unlike Balloons, you are welcome to keep them the full thirty years if you want to, but most folks want to refinance or sell before the adjustment begins. One, three, five, seven and ten years are commonly available fixed terms. Once they begin adjusting, they are based upon an underlying index plus a set margin above that, and the vast majority of A paper hybrids adjust once per year, and all the loans from a given lender will, once they adjust, adjust to the same rate no matter what you bought the start rate down to. For A paper, the base index is usually the one year LIBOR (until recently, the treasury rate was also available as a basis). COFI, COSI, and MTA are Alt-A negative amortization loans, not A paper, and all three varieties of negative amortization loan are the same stuff from different outhouses. There are probably a hundred times more negative amortization loans than there should be, because they were so easy for those in search of a quick commission check to sell by the payment when you slap a friendly sounding label like "Pick a pay" on them.

Finally, there are some few A paper that are true ARMS, or so close that they might as well be. Month to month loans, adjust every three month loans, and adjust every six month loans. Their adjustments are usually on the same basis as hybrid ARMs, and they have thirty year amortizations. Some are even available in interest only for a specified initial period.

Sub-prime

Sub-prime loans come in more flavors. The most common are hybrids fixed for two years, the next most for three. Both come in thirty and forty year amortization periods, as well as interest only. Interest only usually carries a higher rate for the fixed period, because they are riskier loans from the lender's point of view, but the payment is lower. These are usually called 2/28, 2/38, 3/27 and 3/37 loans, for the fixed period and the remaining term thereafter. Interest only variants are all 2/28 or 3/27, and when they begin adjusting they begin amortizing, which can make a sudden sizable difference in payments. Some sub-prime lenders also offer 5/25 and 7/23 programs, including interest only variants. Once they adjust, all of these loans adjust every six months, which is one way to usually tell if you have a sub-prime or A paper hybrid ARMs, as the latter almost always adjust once per year, although a few lenders also have A paper hybrids that adjust at six month intervals.

Sub-prime loans also have thirty, forty and even fifty year fixed rate loans, with some thirty year fixed rates (only) having an interest only option, usually carrying a quarter of a point higher interest and an interest only period of five years. Be aware that a large percentage of these products are actually thirty year loans with a balloon payment at the end, but as often as people refinance, such a balloon isn't relevant for most people. Nonetheless, the rate spread between sub-prime hybrid and sub-prime fixed is usually larger than the spread between A paper hybrid and A paper fixed. Where you might get the A paper thirty year fixed for one percent above the rate of a 5/1 ARM, the difference between a 3/27 and a 30 year fixed is usually closer to two percent (this is by recent standards. When I bought my first property years ago, I was offered a choice between 5.75 percent 5/1 and 11 percent 30 year fixed)

I tend to like the 5/1 ARM for myself and my A paper clients. It saves a lot in interest (usually more than a full percent over a thirty year fixed), and you've got five years where nothing can change, which is a longer period than most folks go without refinancing. The 5/1 is usually only about an eighth percent or so more expensive, interest wise, than the 3/1 while being a quarter percent or so cheaper than a 7/1. For the sub-prime clients, I tend to prefer the 2/28 if I think they'll be A paper at the end of two years, the 5/25 if not and if I can find it (3/27 if I can't). Of course, if you really want to pay the higher rates for a long term fixed rate loan, I may believe you're wasting money (in normal markets - not now), but it's your money to waste, and you're the one making the payments.

Two final types worth covering are the HELOC ("he-lock"), or Home Equity Line Of Credit, and HEL ("heal"), or Home Equity Loan. They are usually used as Second Trust Deeds, the second loan on a property. A HELOC is a variable rate interest loan, usually prime plus a margin, and there is often an interest only period. It is a line of credit, and so long as you stay within your credit limit, the initial underwriting covers it. Nobody does fixed rate HELOCs; what they do when you "fix the rate" is fix that part of it you've already taken out and lower the maximum available credit. HELOCs have two phases, a draw period, when you can take more out (up to the approved limit), and a repayment period, when you're repaying what you took. Most folks end up selling or refinancing, however. Home Equity Loans are one time, fixed rate loans. I've seen all sorts, but the most common is a 30 year amortization with a 15 year balloon, although the twenty year fixed is almost as common. You need to refinance, sell, or pay the loan off prior to the end of fifteen years, lest the lender call the note.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

I keep reading stuff on the internet advising people who are upside down to just walk away if they are a upside down on their mortgage. This has got to be right up there with the worst financial advice I have ever heard.

Here's the thinking: You owe more than the property is worth, and the loan is non-recourse. So the thinking goes that if you just stop making payments and walk away from the property, you're essentially paying yourself the difference.

Not so.

First off, debt forgiveness is taxable income. You borrow $500,000 for a home, that's exactly the same as the lender handing you $500,000. If they only get $400,000 back when the home sells, that's $100,000 of taxable income to you. While it is true that there is currently a temporary federal amendment to the tax code still on the books at this point in time, it will expire, and your state may not have such an amendment. The lenders really don't like this as it encourages people to lose them money, and contrary to campaign propaganda, it isn't the Republicans who have been dancing to the tune of the lender's lobby.

Second, your credit is going to take a hit that is going to last up to ten years. Not seven, not two. From Form 1003, the federally required loan application. Every single real estate loan through a regulated lender must use this form. Some of the "Thirteen Deadly Questions" on page four of the form:

a. Are there any outstanding judgments against you?

b. Have you been declared bankrupt within the past 7 years?

c. Have you had property foreclosed upon, or given title or given deed in lieu thereof within the last seven years?

...

e. Have you been obligated on any loan resulted in foreclosure, transfer of title in lieu of foreclosure, or judgment?

f. Are you presently delinquent or in default on any federal debt or any other loan, mortgage, financial obligation bond or loan guarantee?

Look at question e again. There is no time limit. You will be answering that question "Yes" for the rest of your life. How do you think "I quit making payments because the value of the house decreased" is going to wash as an explanation to an underwriter? If you want your loan approved, even forty years from now, I strongly suggest you have done everything you possibly could to make good on the debt. Judgments typically last ten years, as does the notation, "Settled account." You are going to have a period of two years where lenders can't touch you, even if they want to, it can be ten years before they're willing to take a chance, and you're going to be sweating the fall-out to question e for the rest of your life, because that is cause for extra underwriter scrutiny, and a lender being unwilling to approve even minor variations forever.

Here's something lots of folks aren't considering: It's true that purchase money loans are non-recourse in California and many other states. That's a good thing, as far as it goes. But there are limitations upon that. One of the limitations is fraud. here's the legal definition of fraud:

All multifarious means which human ingenuity can devise, and which are resorted to by one individual to get an advantage over another by false suggestions or suppression of the truth. It includes all surprises, tricks, cunning or dissembling, and any unfair way which another is cheated.

Did you "shade the truth" on your loan application? Lots of folks did. This is a big problem, and one reason why I have always hated stated income loans. Just because the lender doesn't hit it today when the property sells, doesn't mean it goes away. The lender has a minimum of three years to file a suit. They may file a suit even on comparatively small amounts of several tens of thousands of dollars, hoping that you don't show up in court. If you don't show up, the default judgment is entered against you, and that is very hard to overturn. If you lied on your loan application, that turns even a non-recourse loan into a recourse loan. They can go after savings, retirement assets, pension plans, attach your paycheck, you name it. Even if they don't want the rigamarole themselves, they can sell the rights to collect, or even put them out to law firms looking for a bounty on whatever they can get out of you.

Furthermore, if there's some reason to do so, they can pass the paperwork on for criminal investigation. Fraud carries criminal penalties, and it's the government footing all the bills of pressing the case.

Now here is another reason why you shouldn't walk away: If you do so, you are taking all of these consequences and bringing them into the here and now of concrete consequence of actions that have already been taken. But the real estate market is cyclical. Just keep making your payments, and it will come back. Maybe there are some exceptions to this, but I'm not aware of any.

Let's look at a personal experience I had with my first property. Bought for $90,000 in 1990, value peaked at $106,000 the next year, then crashed to $63,000. I didn't buy "zero down" like probably the majority in the recent price run-up, but the principle is the same. Some people thought they should walk away. Having lived through four previous cycles locally, I just kept on keeping on with the payments. By 1996, the property was worth more than I paid again, and not too long after, people who had just kept on keeping on with their payments were in a position to sell for a huge profit.

Had I sold while the property market was down in the nineties, I would have suffered most if not all of these consequences. By just making the payments, I effectively let time fix the market for me.

By making those payments, all you're doing is sitting on a temporary loss on paper, as opposed to turning it into a hard loss with real world consequences. The paper loss has precisely zero importance - unless you sell while the market is down. The only times the value of the property is important is when you refinance, and when you sell. It doesn't matter what the value is at other times - unless you make it matter by choosing to sell. If you've got a sustainable loan, keep making the payments, and in two years or five, you'll be in a position for make money again when you sell. What's hurting the real estate markets badly is excess supply and low demand, caused by people who have no choice but to sell, and fewer buyers than usual. What happens when these conditions go back to a more normal market? That's right, the prices go back right where they were - if not higher.

Furthermore, if you get out by selling short or through foreclosure, it's not like you're going to be able to jump back into something else any time soon. Absolute minimum two years, as above, and perhaps much longer than that. You jump out of an upside-down mortgage, and you're going to be sitting out the absolute sweetest time to be in the market - right when it starts to recover. You sell or allow foreclosure, and you turn that theoretical paper loss of $100,000 into a real concrete loss of $100,000. That's permanent, and you're out of the market until lenders are willing to take another chance on you, which could be never. But, if you stay in the property, when it starts gaining value again, you're still in the market. I know lots of people that turned $30,000, $50,000, $100,000 or more of temporary paper losses into profits several times the size, simply by holding on and allowing the market time to recover. Profit or loss on an investment is measured solely by price at acquisition versus price at disposition. If you buy for $500,000 and sell for $300,000, it makes precisely zero difference that it was worth $700,000 at some point in the middle. Similarly, if you buy for $300,000 and sell for $500,000, the fact that the property was worthless at some point between is irrelevant to the fact that you still made a $200,000 profit.

If you have an unsustainable loan, there are options to deal with the problem. Refinance if you can. If you can't, call your lender and see what you can work out, or try a loan modification. For their part, lenders are trying to keep the problem from getting worse than it has to be, and every time someone takes a loss because they couldn't hang on, the lenders take the exact same loss if not worse. There are limits to what they are willing to do, but I am amazed at some of the deals they really have accepted because they believe it is better than what will happen if they don't. Which situation would you rather be in: able to hold on and eagerly awaiting the market comeback that's going to happen, and will benefit those than hang on, or stuck with a bad situation permanently because you couldn't stand the thought of being upside-down on paper?

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

This is a reprint from an older article that talks about a very important distinction between an agent doing well for themselves versus doing well for their clients. It originally ran in August 2005.

Every day I pass by another real estate office where the agent has a big banner outside "I SOLD 101 HOMES IN 2004!"

This is what is called a production metric, and this one sounds fairly impressive at first glance, right? However, all that says is that they sold 101 homes, and cashed 101 commission checks, meaning their bottom line had a very good year. It doesn't make much difference to their paycheck whether the property sold quickly and for a good price. If it takes an extra six months to sell, all that does is push the paycheck into next year. More importantly, if it sells for only 90% of what they could have gotten, they still get 90% of that paycheck, as opposed to nothing. Makes one heck of a difference to the client, as that 10% could be most of their equity - the check they're counting on to help them buy their next property - or even all of it.

The question I want to ask is how good the price was for the seller. Anybody can sell homes quickly by pricing them 10% under the market. Last year's market was a hot seller's market. In some neighborhoods, a monkey could have sold it for $20,000 over the asking price.

Is there a generally available "did you sell it for a good price?" metric? Not really. The best I can come up with for a listing agent is whether the appraiser has difficulty getting value to support the sales price so the loan can fund. If the appraisal comes in less than the sale price, the loan will be based off of the appraised value, rather than sale value, and so whereas this is always a difficult situation to be in, that your sale in in this situation says that your agent really did get you a good price. It's comparatively rare, and with the buyer's market we have now, practically non-existent (at the update, it's common but for a completely different reason). But if the appraisal comes in close to the sales price, that says something good about the price. If the spread is appraisal forty percent higher than purchase price (like one property I recently represented the buyers on), not so much - but it does imply your buyer's agent did a heck of a job. Unfortunately for the sellers, the buyers aren't going to tell the sellers about the appraisal unless the value is lower than the agreed upon purchase price.

Production metrics of this nature are easy to game. When I worked in the financial planning business, the metric used was GDC - Gross Dealer Compensation. How much your firm got paid because of your work. Problem was, it always has two components: how much business you really brought in, and how much turnover there is in your clients accounts. I know people who work at the "no load" fund houses, also. That's their metric as well.

It's a good metric to have. Firms that don't get paid enough, don't stay in business. But, as a consumer, it's not precisely the sort of metric you want your financial planner to be judged on, and neither of these components measures anything important to you. Actually, I take that back. If there's a high ratio of turnover in the client account, it's always bad. There's always the temptation to call an existing client and sell them the "hot new investment" than it is to generate new business. If I was shopping for a planner, I'd look for a low ratio of Gross Dealer Compensation to total assets under management.

Matter of fact, there really isn't a metric in the investment world to measure how good an investment person is on any objective scale. What I'd really like to know is something like the return on investment of their lowest 25 percent of clients and highest 25 percent of clients, and compare that with market averages and each other. This would tell me things like "How much (of any gain or loss) is the environment of the market, and how much is them?" and "Are they giving consistent advice?" (Low spread = yes, high spread = no). And not one firm I'm aware of computes this information. Not to pull any punches, what they are all set up to reward is sales ability, not investment genius.

The same goes for real estate. Everybody is focused upon volume, when what's really important to the client is "How good a job did you do with the ones you got?" Not only does using the "volume of business" metric and pretending it's important help the established firms build a moat around their business, it distracts potential clients from what's really important: How good of a deal they are likely to get as individuals. There are any number of production metrics in real estate, but none the nature of "Did Agent A's selling clients get the best price?", or on the purchase side "Did Agent B's buyer clients pay no more than they needed to?"

Nonetheless, here are a couple of other ideas. If everything I sell is bought by real estate agents acting for themselves, it's not a good sign. The average real estate agent is buying property because the price is below market. They think they can re-sell for a profit, and it's usually not a little one. They're probably not interested in the property that doesn't have immediate equity built in.

If everything I sell is back on the market within a few months for a higher price, that's also not a good sign. That also means it was probably priced below the market.

The agent I talked about at the beginning of this article? I picked up a flyer listing about a third of those sales (thirty-two). Then I went to Multiple Listing Service and did a little search. Over half (18) were back on the market within 6 months for much higher prices. Almost forty percent (12) of total number of new owners identified themselves as being owned by licensed real estate agents on the listing. Seven have been subsequently resold for at least a 10% profit, closing within three months of the original sale, even in what became a softening market. Only three are still active. The rest have sold, all at a significant profit, even in what became a much softer market at the time.

So now tell me, does this agent's claim of "101 houses sold" seem like something that should make you want to do business with them?

Didn't think so.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

Figures don't lie, but liars sure to figure - and filter, and slant, and just about anything else you can think of.

Someone sent me a link to this article in the Wall Street Journal of all places. It purports to analyze foreclosure data and comes up with a radically different answer than anyone else because of how they manipulate - and in my opinion, mischaracterize - the data.

All too often I get emails like this one

Greetings Dan,

My name is DELETED, I work for a company named DELETED based DELETED. We help businesses with a variety of online marketing functions. Thank you for taking the time to read this email.

I came across your blog and thought that it would be complimentary to one of our client sites within the mortgage and real estate sector. I wanted to inquire to see if you would be open to linking to my client, who is a well known entity within the mortgage and real estate industry.

We are looking to sponsor a blog post on your site that would concern something related to the mortgage industry and be informative in nature. We would be happy to provide monetary compensation, as well as unique mortgage/real estate content that you can use on your website. Or, if you prefer, you can write the post.

We do require that a link to our client be contained within the text of the post. The link would not be explicit, but rather an on-topic term embedded within the text that would link to our client's website. Again, the content would be provided by either you or myself as I have an extensive background in the mortgage sector.

If it's not obvious to you by now, I don't do these kind of posts, but many website owners see absolutely nothing wrong with it. I accept advertising - I just don't permit it to be perceived as anything but paid advertising, Other websites see no problem with accepting advertising disguised as analysis. Guess which approach provides more revenue, both to the advertiser and the medium they're paying.

"Shilling" as it is called, has roots going back at least a century, to hucksters who would pay someone to slip into the crowd and help them generate sales by pretending to be an ordinary member of that crowd. Given the nature of humanity, it probably goes back to Og the Caveman paying Ug the Caveman three dead rabbits to pretend that Og's hunting spears really would do a better job of killing everything from saber-tooth tigers to the tribal bully. It works better - and Ug gets more money - if Ug is known as a mighty hunter or a maker of hunting spears in his own right.

It is not, however, disinterested analysis. It is a sales pitch disguised as disinterested analysis. It dismays me that people don't understand that the internet has no filters on this practice, indeed, no quality controls of any sort more advanced than the owner of a particular website chooses to install. Every so often, I get a series of reminders that many people aren't nearly as skeptical as they should be.

A very few websites are like Consumer Reports, and accept no advertising of any kind, even paying full retail price for all the products they test. You can tell them (or at least it might be one of them) because it costs money to get their full unexpurgated reports. Others are at the other end of the spectrum, and will sell anything for a price while pretending to be disinterested analysts. I try to be more towards the Consumer Reports end of the spectrum - I accept but don't pursue advertising, I do not permit it to be perceived as anything other than advertising (and therefore, I don't get much of it), and any personal motivations I may have to shade the results of my analysis are right out there where everyone can see them. I also try to put numbers out where you can grab a calculator or spreadsheet and determine if I'm telling the truth and making valid calculations for yourself. It is for the reader to decide how successful and credible I am at my goal, which is educating consumers to the point where they can make intelligent well reasoned choices grounded in fact, while in the process generating enough personal clients who like the way I think to feed myself and my family at my chosen profession.

A shill has nothing in common with Consumer Reports, and nothing in common with my goals, beyond the desire to successfully make a living. Even Consumer Reports staff have a goal of feeding their families, although Consumer Reports is itself non-profit. If nobody was willing to pay for their tests, however, they couldn't keep their doors open very long. If nobody is willing to pay for my expertise and analysis, I have to find something else to do. What the internet shill is selling, however, is eyeballs and the illusion of credibility, not disinterested analysis.

I should also mention that whereas Consumer Reports' expertise is broad, it is not deep. I think they really do the best they are equipped for, but I have read the best they have to offer on the subject of real estate and mortgages. I read it it before I bought my first property, and recently went back when trimming my library (and as far as I can tell, they haven't improved their offerings on the subject since my first reading). The best I can say about it now is the same as then: occasionally mildly informative. If I had relied upon that rather than being able to fall back on a fair body of knowledge I already had, I would likely have done significantly less well than I did, which still had significant shortcomings. When it comes to real estate and loans, they just don't have the time or ability to educate themselves about the minimum necessary range of subjects to the necessary depth. These concepts of limits of knowledge apply to me, and to every other website and author out there. Sometimes we're just out of our depth or beyond our competence - and we may not always realize it. This is one reason why I don't write short articles, especially not when I'm straying outside the core subjects where I believe I've built some expertise and credibility of knowledge to an informed observer - I believe it's incumbent upon me to put the full argument out there, including assumptions, background, etcetera - so the reader can make an informed judgement as to whether or not I've got a real point. The reader can still kneejerk, but they're harming only themselves if the argument is valid. They can also argue the other way or some alternative viewpoint - that's the whole point of enabling comments, which I don't censor except for profanity and obvious spam - although I should note that you only have the evidence of what comments I have allowed, supported by my word for that.

And that's precisely my point - you have only the word of the author of any particular article you may find anywhere on the internet. It may be good, it may not. I try damned hard to make my analysis accurate and truthful and admit its assumptions, limitations, and exceptions. Sometimes I even discuss counter-arguments when I can or believe they are particularly important. But with the best intentions in the world, I can make mistakes. It is you the reader who have to make the final determination, in your own mind, as to how reliable what I say is and how useful it is to you. That takes evaluating evidence, and cross-checking with other sources and testing any points of disagreement with known facts to determine how well I have done and which of us is correct - if any of us is. If you were only buying a toaster, I doubt it would be worth the effort. But when you're talking about real-estate, mortgage, or the amounts involved in any kind of serious financial planning, the effort is damned well worth the payoff.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

I went out looking at properties for clients. From the showing attitudes I got, you'd think it was still 2003 and sellers were lords of the earth, not in a buyer's market where competition for buyers is fierce. One wanted two hours notice. Another wanted four. Two others another wanted twenty-four. Another was "make appointment," and one was even "property shown with accepted offer," which added a little humor to my day - but caused me to un-check it from my list of properties to view, and this won't change until that does or the asking price goes so low that my clients can't help but get a deal. Can you say, "Pig in a poke?" I'm pretty certain that's not the message the owners wanted to send, and their listing agent should have explained it to them. You want me to recommend my clients buy something sight unseen, it had better be priced for the worst case scenario. Sixty to seventy percent of comparable properties is about the most I might consider.

Ladies and gentlemen, when I'm scouting properties I want to go now. I have the time now, the properties are on the active list now, which means they are hoping to attract buyers now. If I print a list of fifteen properties to scout, that's because there's something that drew me to them now - not yesterday, not tomorrow. I go scouting where and when I have a need - a buyer's desire - and time. Sometimes this happens on not much notice. Always, there's the possibility the property gets withdrawn, expired, canceled, or goes pending between now and tomorrow. The kinds of properties I'm looking for are susceptible to all of these. I used to try printing out my lists day before - and it wasted so much of my time that I stopped. My time is valuable - I've only got 24 hours per day, same as everyone else. You want my attention in the form of eyeballs and footprints checking out your property, you'll make it easy for me to do so. Do not give me any wasted breath about virtual tours - what I'm looking for usually isn't there. What I'm looking to avoid certainly isn't there despite it being in the property. I hope I don't have to explain to anyone reading this about photographic manipulation or a listing agent's descriptions of the property. There is no even vaguely acceptable substitute for physically looking at the property. My buyers are hiring me because they trust my judgment, and they want me to weed out the turkeys before they waste their valuable time. There is nothing so precious to my business as the time my buyers give me to show them good stuff. I have learned the hard way to go out and inspect the property myself before I take my buyers.

So when I can make the time, out I go. I choose them now, and I go now. If I leave the office at noon and have to be back at 3 pm and the optimum route puts me past your place at 1 pm, you're not getting four hour notice. If you require 4 hour notice, I'm not dropping by. I may hit your neighborhood again next week or the week after, but if in the meantime I've found my buyers have found something they like, then they're not in the market any longer and I'm not looking for them - not to mention I've still got the conflicts between the constraints you imposed and my own. One thing I guarantee you is that when a buyer wants to make an offer, it takes a spectacular bargain and a rare agent to say, "But you haven't seen this other one yet," and I'm not going to say it if I haven't seen your property myself, because by saying it, I am risking my credibility to zero beneficial effect should it turn out to not be so spectacular. Furthermore, when you're looking for half a dozen buyers, you have zero time to waste. It takes literally every second I can find, make, beg, borrow, or steal to find good appropriate properties for that many at once.

Whether you realize it or not, showing restrictions are part of the whole attractiveness of the property, and they hurt your sales price. Every time they cause someone like me to bypass your property, they cost you money in terms of a delayed sale and missing potential buyers. If prospective listing agents do not explain this to you, toss them out. I strongly suggest my listing clients relocate anything so valuable that they're worried about it to someplace where people looking at your property can't get to - Mom's, storage, a safe, any place you consider safe. Anything else that might wander off will cost less than making your house less accessible. With modern lock boxes, a record is made of which agents were in the property, and we're pretty damned careful about our good name - with buyers or without.

If you're so nervous that you're going to have to hover in the background, your property is a lost cause. Been there, done that. I refuse to deal with aggressive sellers or listing agents while I'm discussing a property's virtues and faults with my clients. There is nothing to be gained for either one of us. I don't have a responsibility to either the listing agent or the seller, even though the seller is paying me. I'm not going to be quiet, I'm not going to agree with you, and if I have to wait until later to discuss your property, you can bet I'm going to include overly aggressive sellers among the downsides to this property. It might give me reason to counsel my buyers to do a low ball desperation check. It won't enhance the value of your property in either my eyes or that of my clients.

This is just as much the case for the do it yourself buyer, the "phone the listing agent now" buyer, and any other sort of buyer or person with the attention of prospective buyers. Most folks act now because they want to go now, and if your property is not available to view now, they will go view other properties now. If they find one they like, you missed out. If they don't view your property, they're not going to make a good offer. Every missed opportunity is a potential buyer you're wasting, and right now, good qualified buyers are scarce, at least in my neck of the woods. It doesn't take many missed buyers to make a failed listing, and if it happens, you did it to yourself. People aren't looking for a reason to buy your property - they're looking for reasons not to buy your property and "They wouldn't let me see it" is one of the best by any rational measure.

By making your property unavailable, you are raising the cost of doing business with you higher than the model match down the street with an asking price $10,000 higher. The hoops someone has to jump through to view your property are as much a part of the asking price as the dollar value you put on the listing. Restrictive viewing can cut your traffic and prospects more than adding $20,000 to the list price. Sometimes $40,000, and it can be six figures at the higher end of the market, but I'm aiming this at the average seller. So ask yourself if requiring 4 hour notice is worth that much money to you.

It's not easy to have your home always ready, I know. It's a real pain to always be on guard, never leave something out of place, never leave dishes in the drain or a full trash can in sight. If you've got a pet, particularly a dog, it's difficult to keep them cleaned up after and confined to the appropriate area every time you leave the house. May The Force Be With You if you've got children, because you're going to have to be a superhero to make it work. But even if your home isn't perfect, better that potential buyers see it in an imperfect state than that they don't see it at all. Agents like me learn to look past transient stuff like toys on the floor, and to help their buyers do so as well. If the buyers see it imperfect, it's possible they'll make an offer anyway. If it's likely to be a less attractive offer, it's still an offer, and you can choose to accept it, negotiate, or blow it off. Advantage: yours. If they don't see it at all, you're not getting an offer, or at least not any kind of offer worth considering unless you're desperate.

Sales is a game of inches, if not millimeters or microns. Particularly big ticket items like real estate. Sometimes sales are won or lost over incredibly trivial differences - and viewing restrictions are not a trivial difference. It's like the difference between a fourteen foot wall and an open door. Many people can't get over fourteen foot walls at all, others think it's too much effort, and still others see no reason why any effort they do make will be rewarded. So you want to present an open door to all potential buyers. Every little increase in the barriers you put in their way will cause a certain percentage of prospective buyers to not want to bother - and you'll never know if that's the one that would have made the best and highest offer for your property.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

In talking about loan modification, I have said it is not a panacea. Let's look at why not, and situations where it just flat out is not going to work.

Loan modification is a strategy for the lender to mitigate their loss, not a "be kind to borrowers" holiday. The lender has to make out better by agreeing to the loan modification than anything else they could do. This means if they can get all of their money by foreclosing, but won't get all of their money via a loan modification, then they will foreclose. The first rule of getting a loan to pay for a property is that the lender always gets every penny of their money first. If they hadn't loaned it to you, you wouldn't have the property in the first place!

The obvious situation where a loan modification is not appropriate is where you have the ability to refinance in a more normal fashion. If you have the ability to refinance into something more sustainable, I'd suggest doing so without delay. The fact that you don't want to or may be hoping for something better is unimportant. What you're trying to do is keep your property, and not kill your credit-worthiness. If you are able to refinance, get it done.

The second situation is if you have 20% or more equity. In such cases, the lender is going to tell you to sell or refinance the property if you can't make the payments. Never mind that the market is down and it's a rotten time to sell, if the sale of the property will clearly net the lender their money, they are probably not going to agree to a loan modification. Plus, if you do sell, you come away with some cash. If you decide not to sell despite the lender's advice, they will foreclose. They're still going to get their money - which is what you agreed to when you took out the loan - before you get a penny, and you're still not going to have the house. I've written before about what happens to equity under foreclosureThe fact that you don't want to is basically irrelevant. Here's the situation: You owe them their money. You agreed to pay it back in order to get custody of their money and buy the house. They want it; They have shareholders to whom they have a fiduciary duty to get the best return on their money.

The third situation is if you have no income, or a clearly insufficient income to ever pay the loan back. If you're unemployed, there's not an income there to make the payments with. If you were a million dollar per year stockbroker, but now you're a minimum wage employee, you're not going to keep your million dollar property. You are asking them to modify the loan to help both you and the lender. But if the debt to income ratio is not going to work at any reasonable rate of interest, why should they modify your loan if there is no ability to make the modified payments? If all you can afford is 0% interest for the forseeable future, it's only going to get worse from here on out. They might as well bite the bullet and foreclose, because modifying the loan isn't going to do them any good. You''re still going to need to be foreclosed upon.

The fourth situation is new debts - particularly voluntary ones. Some folks see themselves headed off the edge and charge up a storm on all their credit cards, and take out loans for cars, furniture, etcetera. They figure that bankrupt for an additional $100,000 isn't any worse. They're wrong, by the way. If you only have one debt you can't pay, but four credit cards all with zero balances and you go to bankruptcy, you only included 20 percent of your lines of credit in the bankruptcy, and that hurts your credit a lot less than including those four cards and five more tradelines. The person who goes bankrupt with only one bad line of credit while keeping several good ones will probably still have open lines of credit, to boot, and therefore the means of re-establishing payment history. The zero balance credit cards will likely move you to a higher interest rate and more unfavorable terms if you declare bankruptcy, but they will quite likely want you to remain their customer. After all, they got every penny they were due from you!

But if you just took out another $20,000 in debt, that is, in the lender's eyes, evidence of irresponsibility. You already can't make your debt payments, and you go out and get some more? In cases like this, they're not very forgiving of the behavior. Why should they modify their loan when to their eyes you are simply likely to go out and get yourself further into debt?

Loan modification is a possible way out when you cannot refinance, there is no equity, and you have an income and have been behaving responsibly. You just got caught by circumstances beyond your control. If any of these do not apply, you shouldn't expect your lender to agree to bail you out by modifying the loan, when there is clearly no incentive from their point of view in doing so, and they're just going to lose more money if they do. They're not being mean when they refuse to modify a loan. They are simply facing the facts of the way that they lose the least amount of money.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

I keep talking with people who don't understand that a higher interest rate on a refinance can result in a lower payment even though the cost of money goes up. In fact, they don't understand why refinancing tends to lower the payment at all.

Before I go any further, I need to reiterate my standard warning that you should Never Choose A Loan (or a House) Based Upon Payment. There are all kinds of games lenders and loan officers can play to manipulate your apparent payment.

Now, as to why refinancing tends to lower the payment: It's actually very simple: Because you are extending the period of the loan. You're spreading the repayment of the principal over an entirely new thirty year period starting today, and going out thirty years from now, instead of thirty years from whenever you originally started.

Let's say you took out a home loan five years ago for $300,000 at 6% on a thirty year fixed rate basis. Your payment has been $1798.66, and assuming you've just been going along and making minimum payments, you have paid your principal down to $279,163. Even adding $3500 in closing costs into your loan balance, if you refinance again at exactly the same rate, your payment will drop to $1611.72. If you divide the cost by the payment savings, it looks like you break even in less than two years!

However, that isn't a valid calculation. What you're doing is taking a loan with a remaining period of 25 years, adding $3500, and swapping it for a brand new 30 year loan, serving no purpose except to extend the period for which you have borrowed the money by 5 years. Your monthly cost of interest actually goes up, because you owe $3500 more on the new loan at the same rate, not to mention that $3500 is real money you paid to get the loan done for no real benefit! Your total of remaining payments goes up by over $40,000! Even if you keep making the same payments ($1798.66), you have added nine months to your loan! This also leaves aside all kinds of games that can be played with payment in the short term.

Never choose a loan based upon payment. If you will remember this one rule, you will save yourself from more than fifty percent of the traps out there. Loan officers and real estate agents and everything else tend to sell by payment. You do need to be able to afford the payment, and I mean not just now but what it's going to go to in five years. With that said, however, remember the fact that payment can be extended out practically indefinitely. Used to be with credit cards taking 26 years to pay off by minimum payments, you could be paying off a restaurant meal 25 years after the crop it was processed into fertilizer for was harvested, costing you five to ten times the original cost of the meal. The same principle applies for real estate loans. Unless it's a cash out loan, or a higher interest rate, you're likely to cut the payment just based upon the fact that you are extending the term.

I have also said this before, but just because they quote you a lower payment to get you to sign up for the loan doesn't mean it'll be that low when you actually go to sign documents. In a case like this, it is very possible for them to conveniently "forget" to tell you about prepaid interest, impound accounts, third party and junk fees, and origination points, all of which will add to the balance on your loan and have the effect of raising the payment reflected upon the final documents. So you sign up expecting your payment to drop by $180 plus, and at final signing, you've paid $10,000 more than they told you about and you are only lowering your payment by $80, but it's all done and it would be wasted effort if you don't sign these final documents, so you do - blissfully unaware that you have actually done something worse than wasting that $13,000 you added to your balance to get your loan done. This is real money, despite the fact that it didn't come out of your checkbook - you've just added $13,000 to what you owe, removing $13,000 in real money to what you have. In fact, you've just added about $75,000 to the actual costs of paying off your property! And the loan company got paid to talk you into this!

If you're not sure if you should refinance, one of the questions to ask yourself is "What would happen if I keep making the same payments as now? Would I be done sooner, or would it take longer?" It's hardly a foolproof question, but taking a financial calculator to closing, and plugging the new balance and interest rate reflected on the new loan documents together with your old payment, and seeing whether it results in a quicker payoff, is certainly one good check upon the ability of slick operators to sell you a bill of goods. This doesn't work for cash out or consolidation loan refinances, obviously, but for "rate/term", where the attraction is is simply a lower payment or lower interest rate, it's certainly one question worthy of asking. An answer that's less than your current total doesn't mean it's a smart loan to be doing, but a longer payoff is a pretty universal indicator that it's not.

Refinancing to lower your rate can certainly be a major benefit to you, as I've said before, but you need to crank the numbers to see if it actually helps your situation, as opposed to stretching out your loan term to make it seem like your costs have gone down, when in fact they have done no such thing. With thousands and tens of thousands of dollars on the line, it might even be smart to pay a disinterested expert to run the calculations. Let's say you pay $200 for an hour of their time, which saves you from making that $75,000 mistake I describe above. The downside is you wrote a check for $200. The upside is that you don't end up writing checks for $75,000 more than you needed to. If you understand finance yourself, the computations aren't difficult, and that $40 financial calculator will save you as often as you ask it questions, although you might have to feed it a $2 battery occasionally. If you aren't certain how to do the calculations, or what calculations you need to do, by all means give your accountant a call.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

It is nice to have a tool that I can use to keep people in their homes, rather than going through foreclosure or short sales, and killing your credit and ability to qualify for a home loan for a minimum of two years. That is the Loan Modification Program. It's very little comfort when turning someone away because there is nothing I can do to tell myself, "I didn't do it to them. I was trying to talk people out of it before it became a problem." Loan Modification gives me a tool with a pretty decent success rate (sixty to ninety percent, depending upon the lender). It's not a panacea, it doesn't work miracles, and it doesn't work for everyone. It also costs money. With that said, it's a much lower cost than a short sale or foreclosure, and it will work for more people than probably any other measure to prevent those results in people on a course for them.

A Loan Modification program is a modification to an existing loan. Because the lender is already on the hook for major losses, it's a lot easier to get pushed through than a new loan. If you are upside-down on your mortgage, it is a way to get your loan changed into something you can make the payments on without the lenders agreeing to write down the value of the principal, which just isn't happening for the most part. Loan to Value Ratio just isn't an issue. The idea is to reach a Debt to Income Ratio that enables you to make and stay current on your payments in the future. Most lenders are modifying loans for a debt to income ("front end") ratio in the low thirties - while some are modifying for a "back end" ratio in the high thirties. The idea is that this enables you to be current on the loan and stay in the property, while it turns the loan into a performing asset for the lender, preventing them from losing more money than they have to.

Lots of folks want the principal of the loan written down. The problems with this are two-fold. First, it becomes an immediate loss for that lender - a hard loss. They were owed $400,000, and now they are only owed $300,000. That's $100,000 in company equity gone. Second, it provides an opportunity for current owners to make a profit on money that was previously owed to that lender. If the person is able to sell for $350,000 (whether immediately or years later), they still make $50,000 less the expense of selling the property, while the lender is just out in the cold for that extra money. You get them to give you money so you make a profit? Lenders don't like that math. The chances of them agreeing to do a principal reduction are very slim. The figure quoted was 1.6% of mortgage modifications that actually happen include some sort of principal reduction - one in sixty - and those typically include issues like death or disability of the main breadwinner. Do you want to spend the $3000 to $7000 modification costs for a one in sixty chance, or do you want to do it correctly with an approach that is about 60% or higher (depending upon your lender) likely to work?

What lenders are often willing to do is modify the loan in such a way as to reduce the interest rate, or payments owed, in some fashion. This doesn't magically give you money, but it does make the dire consequences of owing too much money bearable. It is far better in most cases for your long term financial health than walking away or going through foreclosure. If you owe $400,000 at 8%, reducing that interest rate to 6% will make as much difference to affordability as reducing your principal by $75,000 and starting the loan over combined. Not to mention that every successful loan modification is a relief from delinquency. You start over on the newly modified loan completely up to date on your payments.

Here is the lender's situation: They are on the hook for the value of the loan. If you go through a short sale, they lose money - about a fifth of the value of the loan on average. This is an immediate charge against the company's book value. For properties that go through foreclosure, the percentage loss is about doubled, in aggregate. Nationally, foreclosures cost lenders $47,000 to $61,000 per property, in addition to the lowered value from being a foreclosure. If they agree to modify your loan, it's a hit against future income, but it is not a direct hit on the book value of the company, and it turns a non-performing asset into a performing asset as soon as you've made a payment or two - much quicker than foreclosure. Finally, it gives them at least a glimmer of hope down the road of recovering all of their money - a very good hope, in my opinion, as the market will recover in time - and keeps them from losing more money than they have to now. It also, not coincidentally, locks you into keeping the loan with them for the foreseeable future, because nobody else is going to refinance an upside-down loan.

This is nothing short of a financial lifesaver: Let us compare the situation now with the situation in the early nineties. I bought my first property for $90,000 in 1990. It peaked in value at about $110,000, then slid straight down to $63,000 in 1994. I was upside down for a little while. But I didn't sell, and I didn't walk away. Had I done so, I would have lost $27,000 plus the costs of selling - turned a theoretical loss on paper into a concrete loss with major real world consequences. Instead, having a sustainable loan with payments I could make, I kept making those payments. By 1996, I was in the black again. Had I short sold, I would have locked in that loss, and my name would have been mud with lenders and I would not have gotten another loan after the short sale. Basically, by just keeping on making the payments, I kept from locking in a 30% or more loss, and turned it into over a 100% gain when the market recovered. Which situation would you rather be in: Ruin your financial future when you don't have to, or keep making the payments even though you may temporarily be upside down so you can eventually make a big profit? The property I had was the one I was tied to. I could have walked away, locked in that 30% plus loss, and been unable to get another loan for a minimum of two years, and have my credit cause me to be stuck with horrible loans for ten years (which would have cost me more than $27,000, if I could have gotten loans), or I could stick with the obligations I agreed to when I signed on the dotted line for that loan, have patience, and be rewarded when the market turned back up to the tune of better than 100% profit.

Now add being unable to make the payments to the situation I was in back then. That is the situation that lots of folks are in today. They not only cannot refinance, they can't make their current payments, either. Without something like loan modification, their situation is like Comet Schumaker-Levy 9, locked into a collision course with Jupiter, and nothing short of a miracle will break them off that course for disaster. You can use search engines to pull up some pretty spectacular images of what happened there.

Which of those situations would you rather be in? This market we are in now is a market in which the people who do the right thing (keep the property until the market recovers, instead of throwing it away because they happen to be upside-down on paper) will be rewarded when the market has worked through the immediate problems.

Funny how karma works sometimes.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

I got a phone call from some out of state relatives looking to buy their first home. They want to buy a lender-owned property, but the only loan they have the down payment for is FHA. FHA has a few requirements that other loans don't about property functionality. It has to do with what they see as reasonable protection both for them and for people they lend to. One of those requirements is that if there is an air conditioner, it must work. It doesn't have to be able to actually cool the house, but it must function. The one in the property my relatives are interested in doesn't. Not only does it not work, it's been torn apart in order to sell the copper wiring inside. There is a loan that the FHA does that is aimed at this situation, called a 203k, but the sellers - a bank - are insisting upon a 21 day escrow. In blunt terms: Not Gonna Happen. I used to be able to reliably fund purchase money loans in less than 3 weeks. Dodd-Frank, however, has added at least 3 weeks to that, and government type loans take even longer.

Their alleged agent has made a suggestion: Pay to fix the air conditioner themselves, prior to purchase, so they can do a regular FHA loan. I have a suggestion for her, but it's not family friendly.

I do have to admit, it might work. But that's not the way to bet. Let's say they pay to fix the air conditioner, and escrow falls apart for any other reason. That money is simply gone. No realistic recourse is possible. If the equity was there to support recourse, the equity would be there to support the owner fixing it themselves. That's what should happen.

Escrows are falling apart these days for all kinds of nonsensical reasons, none of which agents or loan officers can prevent. Most of them have to do with underwriter paranoia on the loan. Because Wall Street has been so thoroughly burned by bad mortgage loans they are inserting extra requirements into loan underwriting. Furthermore, loan underwriters have become the lender's internal whipping boys so they have become extremely reluctant to pass anything that might strike them as a little bit out of the ordinary. Problem is, almost everyone has something out of the ordinary going on with their finances. It's the way things are. Net result: lots of loans denied for no reason the loan officer could have predicted.

Perhaps the inspection reveals more things wrong with the property. The seller obviously doesn't have the money to fix them, so the buyer has a choice between walking away - leaving their repair money behind - or accepting further defects and repair bills.

Perhaps something in the disclosures is a reason why the buyers decide they don't want the property. Maybe someone died there. Maybe someone was killed there. Maybe something related to religion pops up. Again, they're out any repair money they spend.

Things that need fixing on a property are the owner's problem - period. They are responsible for bringing the property into the condition required - not the buyers. If the sellers cannot or will not do this, that property is not one these buyers should consider. Similarly, if the buyers need a loan where the sellers are demanding things that preclude that loan, that particular property might as well be 100 times the price and located on the moon - it's not going to happen.

If there's a necessary repair that the buyers are willing to accept the property without the sellers making that repair - and their lender has no problems with it - that's perfectly fine, so long as everyone knows about it, it's fully disclosed and agreed to, etcetera. I have never seen a situation where such a needed repair didn't impact the price by more than the cost of the needed repair, but that's what negotiations are for. The bottom line is: Buyers should never spend money to repair a problem that belongs to someone else.

(Just to be clear, once you actually own the property, please make all the repairs it needs. But not until the Grant Deed records and you actually own it)

Caveat Emptor

One of the things I'm seeing more of in MLS listings and developer advertising, among other places, is the phrase "$X in closing cost credit (or "$X in free builder upgrades" given for using preferred lender"

Sounds like a bargain, right? Just use their lender and you get this multi-thousand dollar credit. After all, "All Mortgage Money Comes From The Same Place!" Free money, right?

Well possibly, but not very likely. What most companies are looking to do with this advertising is give people a reason not to shop around. They hope that because most people think that "All Mortgage Money Comes From The Same Place", the average customer will just stay there to apply for a loan. Many builders and conversion companies will throw roadblocks in your way if you try to use another lender. They cannot legally require you to use their loan company (at least not in California), but they can make it exceedingly difficult to go elsewhere. I've been told by builder's representatives on two occasions that I was wasting my time with a loan, because "If they don't use our lender, they won't get the property!" despite already having a signed purchase agreement. Roadblocks take all sorts of turns. They won't let the appraiser in. They won't cooperate with requests for information, without which the other loan is going nowhere. And so on and so forth.

The builders wouldn't give those incentives to use their lender, or throw roadblocks in your way when they're trying to sell you a property, if they weren't making more money with the loan. Quite often, they're making more money on the loan than they are from the sale. Put you into a loan half a percent above market, stick a three year prepayment penalty on it, and voila, anywhere from a 6 percent premium to perhaps 10 percent. To give you a comparison, around here an average brokerage makes 2.5 to 3 percent from a transaction, and industry average loan compensation is just over two percent. But the average consumer is distracted by these "free" upgrades or closing costs that they don't realize how badly they've been raked over the coals. If I can get you that $400,000 loan half a percent cheaper and with no prepayment penalty, I'm saving you $2000 per year for certain, and very likely about $12,000 on the prepayment penalty.

Furthermore, on some of the builder's loans I've analyzed, they're getting you a rate that would carry a point and a half retail rebate, even without the prepayment penalty. This means on a $400,000 loan at that rate, the lender would be paying you a $6000 incentive to do that loan, more than covering normal closing costs and a broker's normal margin. Have no fear, that builder is doing quite well for having loaned you that money. But that's okay, because it was "free", right?

What can an average person do about this sort of thing? As I've said before, builders often throw roadblocks in the way of outside lenders, and there's not a lot that you or anyone else can do about this fact.

The thing to keep in mind is to shop your loan, and to choose your loan based upon the bottom line to you. There is always a tradeoff between rate and cost, but the provider who can get you the loan a quarter percent cheaper for the same cost or at the same rate for $2000 less cost is the one you want.

Many people want brand new homes if they can get them. Given the realities about Mello-Roos and how prevalent homeowner's associations are in more recent developments, I'm not certain I understand this. It's one thing to deal with Mrs. Grundy when you're all cheek by jowl in a condominium high rise. It quite another thing to deal with her complaints because you left your garage door open ten minutes longer than the rules say, you want to paint your detached home a couple shades darker or lighter than everyone else, or whatever's got her dander up today.

I do have a trick or two up my sleeve for when I'm a buyer's agent in new developments. It's my job to outmanouever the selling agents the builder has on staff (who tend to be heavy hitting salesfolk). But they are dependent on some things that change from transaction to transaction, so I can't really describe them in any kind of universal terms. Writing an offer contingent upon an outside loan is good but has its limits. Builders who throw roadblocks have that one wired; they wait for the contingency to expire at which point they've either got your deposit or your loan business as you are so desperate not to lose your deposit you'll do almost anything, particularly since most folks don't understand how much that loan is really likely to cost them. But if you want the property, you can be forced to give in to these demands, which on a $500,000 property effectively add anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000, and possibly more, to the purchase price - an addition that most new development buyers would do well to consider in their computations of whether to buy in that development at all.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

Every once in a while, a listing agent will get an offer in where the Buyer's Agent did their research, got lucky, or both, and the offer indicates that the buyer is aware of one or more problems that really do exist in a property.

Contrary to most people's immediate reaction, this is a good thing, as I am very happy to explain to my listing clients. It means they know about it and are want to buy the property anyway. Not only can you build a serious case that this means there is no contingency period applying to that particular defect, it means that these buyers are willing to deal with the defect. As opposed to the buyers who discover the problem during escrow, there's a much higher chance of that transaction going through, and going through at the contracted price.

Matter of fact, a good listing agent will disclose that problem in the listing itself.

Why in the world would you do something so stupid, you scream? It's really very simple. Pretty much every problem is going to be discovered even if you don't disclose it, and selling a property has a major component of managing buyer expectations. They come to the property expecting a beautiful turn-key property, and when they actually lay eyes upon the thing, it's got this problem. Kind of like picking up what you think is a gold nugget, and finding out it's really donkey droppings. The predictable reaction is revulsion. This is one reason why there may be a lot of showings, but no offers.

You're going to have to price the property for the fault, of course. But if you don't do that, it's not going to sell. Prospective buyers are looking for reasons not to buy your property. Whether they look at it as overpriced or priced correctly but with a fault they don't want, they're not going to put an offer in. No offer, no purchase contract, no sale. It's that simple.

Suppose, as with a property I looked at yesterday, it's not an obvious problem. This thing had been made seductively attractive on the surface, but it was really a cash-sucking vampire property ready to pounce upon an unsuspecting buyer. If you do get an offer where they don't understand and you do get an offer and negotiate a contract, what happens? I'll tell you what happens. Their inspector tells them about the problem. Okay, so they've committed maybe $400 for the inspection, so there's some buy-in, but now they find out about this problem that you should have told them about that's going to cost something in the five figures (possibly six) to deal with. You've just been caught leading them down the primrose path. What's your level of credibility? My experience is that the average buyer is just going to bail out at that point. If they are willing to re-open negotiations, the prognosis is not good for a new agreement. Net result? You've taken the property off the market for a couple days to a couple weeks, and anybody else who may have been interested has crossed it off their list. Furthermore, when it returns to the market, it shows as having been listed that much longer ago, making it less attractive to new buyers coming into the market.

What if it actually gets through escrow and the purchase is consummated without the buyer finding out? That's the worst situation of all, because now the courts are going to get involved when the buyer does find out. Otto von Bismarck said that people who like treaties and sausage shouldn't see them made, but if he had ever been involved in a twenty-first century US lawsuit, that would have been first on his list. You're probably going to pay your lawyer more than whatever extra profit you made, and you're going to end up paying their lawyer plus damages as well. Plus, you might very well be ordered to buy the property back. No. Thank. You.

Now, suppose you disclose the problem, and price the property accordingly. You might not get Mr. and Ms. Yuppie looking for the perfect little place for them - but you can quite likely get Mr. and Ms. Yuppie looking for an investment opportunity. You've obviously decided that fixing the problem is not something you're willing to deal with, for whatever reason, but perhaps they are. You have decided you want it sold, and here's the opportunity for that. They know about the problem, and they're interested anyway. It's a matter of managing expectations. Remember up above, where I talked about revulsion? But if your prospective buyer is expecting the problem and prepared to deal with it, they're much more likely to make an offer when they visit. No, you're not going to sell for the same price as the showplace up the block. But you wouldn't sell to that buyer anyway, and trying to do so is one of the biggest wastes of time and money that would-be sellers of real estate talk themselves into.

So an offer where the prospective buyers indicate that they are already aware of an existing problem is not an offer to be blown off. It's a serious offer from interested parties. It is a lot more likely to get the property sold, and it pretty well vaccinates you against later lawsuits on the issue. You can waste your time trying to find and sell to the Suckers of the Century, or you can decide to accept that the property is what it is, and sell to someone who understands the situation from the outset. You're a lot more likely to end up better off in the end result from the latter - because even the Suckers of the Century can get themselves a good lawyer and sue you when they do discover the problem. They are on the hook for several hundred thousand dollars. They're not just going to blow it off and say, "Oh, well," and when they do get that lawyer, they're going to get a lot more out of you than the difference between what you got, and what you could have had without trying to pretend the issue doesn't exist..

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

I have in the past told people to ignore APR. APR should not be used to compare between loans. Not only is it a one dimensional number used to measure what is fundamentally a two-dimensional trade-off between rate and costs, but it is computed based upon you keeping the loan for the entire period - no refinancing, no selling the property, not even paying off the loan earlier. Basically, nobody does this. Why pay attention to a number that doesn't tell the entire picture, and wouldn't apply to you even if it did?

But there is something that the difference between the putative APR and note rate can tell you: How big the costs of the loan are. Don't read too much into this. As I may have mentioned a time or two, at loan sign up, these are only the rate and fees that they are admitting to. The APR is subject to every bit of low-balling that the Good Faith Estimate (or Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement in California) is. Furthermore, be advised that prospective loan providers are permitted a lie, I mean an error, of a full eighth of a percent for fixed rate loans, twice that for ARMs. So be aware that unless you are careful to nail down prospective loan providers by asking all the right questions and requiring a quote guarantee, what you get won't be any more accurate than political spin.

Where this is primarily useful is in reading advertisements. Not that mortgage rate advertisements are a good place to be looking for loans, but people will persist no matter how much I warn them against it.

APR does not include all costs. Federal Reserve Regulation Z allows mortgage providers to exclude third party costs from the calculation. This includes escrow, title, and appraisal costs at a minimum, as well as notary and processing costs, if they are performed by outside providers. I'm going to assume a 6% thirty year fixed rate loan. For such a loan processed "in house" for $400 would have an APR of 6.056, while the same loan where the $600 processing was "contracted out" instead would have an APR of 6.044. Note that you pay $200 more for the loan with the lower APR! You therefore need to know what's included and excluded when comparing APRs. For the same reason, a loan where there's a difference of $1000 in fees due to one loan's title company, escrow company, or appraiser padding their pockets while those associated with the other loan don't, will not show up under APR calculations. If other factors are the same, the expensive loan will have precisely the same APR as the cheap one.

With all that said, let's look at a thirty year fixed rate loan, starting from a $300,000 balance, with $1500 of closing costs included per regulation Z, first, with all closing costs included, then paying all costs but no points (par), then with one point, then two points. These are rates that were really the best available when I wrote this, but seem very high now.

Note that a loan with two full points is pretty expensive. It costs almost $9400 in actual costs, never mind impounds or prepaid interest that you may also be adding to your balance and paying interest on. Nonetheless, it boosts APR over note rate by less than 1/4 of a percent, and that the actual APR keeps going down even though the costs are skyrocketing. This means that for people who shop by APR, loan providers will advertise a loan with even more points. Even though you'll never recover the costs of those points, if all you look at is APR, the lower rate looks better.

Now let's hold everything else constant, but pretend that you have a choice between refinancing a $300,000 balance on a 6% thirty year fixed rate loan with all costs paid, where you pay the costs but no points (par), with one point, and with two points. This is never going to actually happen - the cost differentials you will shop between will not be that broad. If there's that much difference between the loans you're being offered, something is wrong. It could any of a number of things - I can't tell exactly what without a lot more information. This much variance should never happen - I'm doing this solely for illustrative purposes, so you can see how costs influence APR. There is always that tradeoff between rate and costs, and they are more likely to discover physics that repeals gravity than economics that repeals this relationship.

With that said, here's the comparison.

Now keep in mind, that every number here in this article is as correct as I can make it. This is, once again, to illustrate how various factors influence APR, not to illustrate the games that can be played with APR.

What other factors influence APR?

The size of the loan makes a difference. A $100,000 loan with $1500 of included costs (per Reg Z) at a note rate of 6% has an APR of 6.142, while a $400,000 loan with the same costs has an APR of 6.035. Note that this is a pretty low-cost loan, but it makes a real difference to comparatively small loan amounts. The difference ordinary costs make for smaller loans is one reason why folks with smaller loan balances should focus far more on cost than rate. Given that most people don't keep their loans longer than about three years, it can be very difficult to recover increased initial costs of doing the loan via lowered interest costs.

The basic note rate also influences how much the same cost influences APR. A $300,000 loan with $1500 in non-excludable costs (under reg Z) at 9% has an APR of 9.056, a difference of (actually) 556 basis points higher, while the 6% loan with the same costs has an APR of 6.046, an actual difference of only 463 basis points. Lower note rate means that the same costs influence APR less.

The term of the loan makes a huge difference. If that same thirty year fixed rate loan at 6% in the previous paragraph was a 15 year loan, it would have an APR 6.078. Not only can this mean that at shorter loan terms, a lower cost loan with a higher note rate can actually have a higher APR, if further illustrates how counter-productive paying attention to APR is. When the APR is computed as if you allocated those costs over the term of the loan, and most people sell the property or refinance in three years or less, the proper term to compute spreading those costs over is two or three years, not thirty. If cutting that period in half, from 30 years to 15, almost doubles the APR spread, what do you think cutting the period still further does? I'll tell you: If you only keep that same loan three years, the effective APR is 6.333 - and this is a very inexpensive loan. That two point loan from the first example at 5.875 that gets you the low payment has an effective APR of 7.549 if you refinance it after three years! Not only that, but you're going to be paying for it in the form of higher interest costs on a higher balance for as long as you have a home loan, and probably quite a while thereafter. By comparison, let me call your attention to that true zero cost loan at 6.75% from the same example, which has an APR of 6.750, no matter what period it is computed over. If you're going to refinance or sell in three years, which of these loans do you think it makes more sense to choose?

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

Continued from Part I

Interview lots of agents. Once again, my experience is that the agents at small independent brokerages tend to be sharper than the ones at large chains, but that's only true in the aggregate, and the large chains do have lots of suckers wandering into their offices, which translates to captive audiences they can direct your way. You may be more likely to get a quick "lay down" sale with large chain, but if you don't, the agents who work the independents will almost always serve your interests better. I know that I speak most strongly against Dual Agency, but that's from a buyer's point of view. If the buyer is dumb enough to go in unrepresented, as someone using a dual agent is, as a seller that is no skin off your nose. Matter of fact, it's likely to be less skin off your nose. On the other hand, many agents push unqualified buyers on their listing clients precisely because they will get both halves of the commission if it actually closes. Me, I'd want to remove that incentive if I were a seller. Put it into the contract that they agree to do this listing for a flat percentage contingent upon successful close, and if the buyer is unrepresented, you the owner keep the buyer's agent commission, or all except half a percent, reasonable considering the extra work they will do (You don't want them shooing away a sucker, either). This also removes the incentive such agents have to discourage viewings by people they don't represent, sit on offers represented by other agents or not pass them on, or all sorts of other games that get played because they want both halves of the commission. So if they won't agree to work for the listing commission only, I'd advise you to cross them off your list. I'll admit this is guilt by association, but there is no way of telling that any one listing agent won't play any of the games that discourages other agents from bringing their clients to your property, which you want to get sold, and for the best possible price, not a lower price or weaker purchase offer to the one who causes your agent to be paid double if it actually closes.

You want an agent who knows where the buyers are, and where the good buyers are. About 70% of people searching for a home start their searches on the internet, but these are not necessarily the best buyers. The ones who look in the internet are looking numbers. The ones who start by driving around your neighborhood want to live in your neighborhood. The ones who start with the monthly shill magazine are usually somewhere in between. The ones who start with the Sunday paper are vary over the spectrum from absolute sucker to moderately savvy, while clumping at the ends of it. And the ones with buyer's agents vary also, depending upon the attitude of that buyer's agent. Some of them (grin) are absolutely the most dedicated to getting the best bang for the buck there is to be had, while other agents' devotion seems to be primarily towards obtaining a large commission check soon. I actually know a couple traps for encouraging the latter sort, but pardon me if I don't share them. Some things a guy's just gotta keep to himself. It's my job!

One of the things you want to use to interview agents is how to stage your property - what to do in order to make it show better. In general, you want it to be uncluttered, have nothing in it you can't live without on a daily basis (if you're living there), and nice clean walkways and lines of sight. All of this makes it feel bigger. Some agents will tell you they hire professional stagers, while others will want to wait until after the listing contract is signed. First off, you're not going to hire the stager if you don't hire the agent. Second, what you're looking for is some evidence they really know what they're doing. It costs me nothing to walk through a property and tell you how to make it more appealing to buyer's and their agents, and it demonstrates product knowledge to someone who has no real evidence whether I'm the best Realtor ever or the most recent product of Shake and Bake Real Estate School. Before a good agent will do that, however, they're going to ask about your budget in time and money for staging. If your budget is less than a stager costs, it does no good to say they'll hire a stager unless they also pay the stager, in which case you're liable to be reimbursing them if the listing fails.

You don't want the agent who pussyfoots around and flatters you - you want the one who tells the bald truth. This is not about flattering your ego - it's about your wallet. If your ego is more important to you than that kind of money, you're looking for the wrong professional - you want a sycophant. Your search for a listing agent is not just a fact check - it's an effort check and, most importantly, an attitude check. Trying to market a property as something it's not is a guaranteed recipe for failure.

You want to interview an agent for what they're going to do about publicizing your property. Most searches start on the internet, but putting them in MLS automatically or semi-automatically puts them in most of the biggest property sites, including IDX, which is the thing most members of the general public mean when they say MLS. The major difference is that IDX doesn't have information that the general public doesn't need to know, like showing instructions. Many of the larger, national houses for sale sites are based upon local IDXs. There are exceptions. I have a rule here about not mentioning specific providers, so I won't. Over seventy percent of all house hunting searches start on the internet, so even the smaller providers can be worthwhile, but it has to be some website people make a habit of visiting that site for that reason in order to predictably do you good. Agent and Agency websites are not likely a source of good traffic. My websites get way more traffic and have much higher SEO than most, and I got not one contact from my website on my last listing, because that's not why people visit my sites. I did get traffic from the other places I advertised, of course. What I'm saying is that websites under the control of any given agent or agency are not likely to be where people go. I've got an IDX link on my site - but people don't use it that much. Even if it's Major Chain Real Estate, web searchers don't want to make a habit of going there, preferring some place "more comprehensive" or "more neutral." Individual websites such as 1234mainstreet.com are a joke for selling a property. Unless they are already looking for your specific property - in which case they'll find it easily anyway - they're not going to find a "Selling my house" website. You're just not going to get very high on more general search terms unless you're darned lucky, or control another high page rank site or two. This is not to say "don't bother." This is simply to say that individual agent, agency, or "selling my house" websites are not something to pin any significant amount of hope on. If I thought 1234mainstreet.com was worth such hopes and likely to sell the property, it'd make a listing agent's job much easier. You might get lucky - but that's not a bet that's likely to pay off. Kind of like buying a lottery ticket. Someone always gets lucky, but for every lucky schmoe who wins the grand prize, there are forty million poor dumb schmoes out there with worthless paper. The odds for smaller websites selling your property aren't that bad - but they're not great, either. For example: When I originally wrote this, I had had one worthy property on my agent radar for eight months in case I found a buyer for it, and it took me most of that time to find out it had a website. Does that website seem like something you want to invest all your hopes in? Didn't think so.

You also want to make sure your agent hits all the relevant dead tree publications. They may not be as powerful as they once were, but paper media is still important, and the buyers from there are often buyers you'd rather have, as opposed to internet junkies. Whatever the prospective agent says they intend to do, insist that it be incorporated into the listing contract if you choose them. You are betting a large amount of money upon their competence, whether you realize it or not. All the agent has at stake is a potential paycheck. You have your biggest investment on the line.

One of the reasons why you want to interview multiple agents is pricing advice. Some agents have no clue where the market really is. They'll be happy to take the listing at any vaguely reasonable price you want, or even above. But we know what happens if you overprice a property - it sits unsold. This costs money. Others will tell you it's not worth as much as it is, so they have an easier sale, but you end up short-changed. Others will take the listing at any price you say, but start arguing you to reduce it way earlier than they should. What you want is evidence. You want strong solid examples of recent sales in your market and what's out there available right now - the properties you are competing against for the available buyers. You want someone who is going to compare your property to those with a cold calculating eye. You don't want to be high on the asking price, but you don't want to be low, either. Preferably this someone will be an agent who has actually seen and been in at least some of those other properties before they sold. Compare and contrast. I know it's a lot to ask, but try to step aside from pride of ownership and approach it from a buyer's perspective. Unless you're some kind of a celebrity, the fact that it's yours means nothing to the prospective buyer. They're looking for something they see as a bargain, not for a way to give you an extra $20,000 of their hard-earned money.

The critical point I'm trying to make is that pricing is not easy, and the pricing discussion should be cause for some real give and take. Pricing discussions without evidence, without serious examination of the property and comparables, and pricing discussions that don't end up with as many good arguments for going lower as for going higher are likely to result in bad pricing decisions. Maybe a couple of agents get hot under the collar. Maybe you do, maybe more than once. So long as it is for the right reasons, this is a good thing. The agent who argues persuasively, even passionately, and with evidence, for setting a different listing price is likely to be a much better agent than one who accepts a listing for whatever price you want. The agent who's too high and mighty to justify their reasoning should be informed that their services are not desired, and in your snootiest English butler accent. Don't choose the agent who promises or agrees to the highest listing price. That's called "buying a listing," and it's a recipe for disaster. Pricing is part science, but part art as well, and it doesn't have to be perfect for an optimum result - just close. What you're looking for here is not only product knowledge, but attitude. The one who cites the most evidence and argues with you the hardest may be the very best agent to list with, even if they are thousands or tens of thousands below the listing price recommendations you get from other agents. Then again, they may not. It depends upon who displays the most evidence, the most knowledge on the state of your market, and the right attitude. The agent who tells you your property is worth a little less is not your enemy. They may just be lazy, but if they can provide evidence for their contention, that's not the way to bet. They may be your very best friend in the entire world. If the market won't pay a higher price for your property, they are saving you the expense of having the property sit unsold - thousands of dollars per month - and when it does sell, it will reliably be for less than you could have gotten by pricing it correctly in the first place . When is the last time one of your friends saved you that kind of money, at the risk of not getting a paycheck? And they are risking their paycheck. Because out of every ten price discussions, at least six people in your shoes won't want to hear it and won't consider hiring them. Takes no small amount of professionalism to tell you the truth that will make a lot of people not want to hire them, don't you think?

You do want to ask about is whether an agent shows their own listings to their buyer prospects, and why or why not. I'm not talking about the people who call out of the blue about your listing, I'm talking about people they have an existing buyer broker agreement with. I would actually prefer a "no" answer, were I looking for a listing agent, but the reasoning on why is more important than the actual answer. My answer is that I don't unless the sellers are so desperate that they want to price that low. Most of my listings do not, the way things are, need to be priced to attract buyer's agents like me. Therefore, I'll freely admit - to contracted buyer clients - that there are better bargains out there. I don't ever want to let my listings get that desperate that they need to attract my buyers. My job is to sell it for the best possible price as soon as possible, and if it gets to the point where my clients are desperate, I haven't done either half of that job. If all listing agents had this attitude, it'd make life a lot more challenging for buyer's agents. Nor is it my job to be fair to prospective buyers when I'm listing - unless I've already got a contractual obligation towards them. If a prospective listing agent is willing to hose people they have a buyer's agreement with, that's not a good sign for how they're going to behave towards you. But absent that exception, my job as a listing agent is to get the property sold for the best price in the shortest time. I have a listing contract that spells out my responsibility to that owner - and listing contracts conquer all, as far as agent loyalties go. I can refer even my contracted buyers to someone else for negotiations, releasing both of us from obligation, if they're sure they want to put an offer in. I cannot do that for the people I have a listing contract with. Whether you are buying or selling, you should know that the seller has a right to expect the listing agent's absolute loyalty within the confines of the law. They can't lie about the property. They have to tell the truth as they know it. Beyond the reservations set down in the law, their job is to get the most money out of the quickest sale. Period. Anything else translates as a way to hose your listing clients.

No matter how good any one agent sounds, no matter how much pressure they put on you to get you to sign the listing contract right now, don't do it. There's nobody that much better than the competitors. Take your time and make your decision when there's not anybody pushing you. Unless you have a short deadline to sell, you'll come out better. If you do have a short deadline, you might want to be more intensive and more concentrated in your search, but cutting down on the number of agents interviewed is not a good response to the situation. It's even likely to be counter-productive. Don't let the agent's urgency to get the listing infect you or stampede you. Until you hire them, that agent has no reason to hurry. Their motive for building urgency is to stampede you into listing with them. Rhinos stampede. So unless you're a large blundering near-sighted herbivore with small sycophantic hangers-on, don't let yourself be stampeded.

One technique some listing agents will likely try to seduce you into is the short term listing. Sixty days with an agent to see what kind of traffic they drag in, sixty days for that agent to demonstrate exactly how well they look after your interests. Takes all the pressure out of choosing an agent, right? You can always change to someone else, right?

Wrong. Wasting the first days in the time on market counter will most likely hurt your sales price significantly. The agents in the area with any kind of a clue are going to know that you've been through 4 agents in the last eight months. There are also complications in when a given buyer may have been introduced to the property, so which agent is entitled to the commission becomes a bone of contention. Most contracts give the agent the commission for ninety days after their listing expired, if they provided the introduction. Meanwhile, you've got someone else who now has an exclusive right to sell. It's bad business for someone to insist upon a commission they haven't earned, but I am continually reminded how many bad businesspersons are out there. If you've got to do a short term listing, insist upon some short hold over period of no more than seven days, and don't list it again until that period has expired. It may be overcautious, but it could save you being in the middle of a nasty court fight.

Furthermore, the short term listing is a tactic that's completely unsuitable for people with a limited time in which to sell. Every time you change the listing agency, the promotion is essentially starting over from scratch.

Finally and most importantly, most people suffer inertia. They'll renew that listing contract whether or not the agent has actually done enough to earn their business. Agents know this; that's why they propose the short term listing. It's a trap into which most people are only too happy to fall - the trap of not making a decision, or making it on the cheap, under the guise of postponing the day of reckoning. Most folks are better off getting into all of the issues right up front, and making the difficult choices. If you're really looking hard in the first place, with an eye towards committing yourself, you still may not make absolutely the best choice. But the idea of putting a property on the market is that you want it to sell, and quickly. The best time to sell a property is right when it hits the market, not on the third short-term listing five months down the line. Take the time, and make the hard choice of the agent you're going to be with before you list. You can change later, and the hard choice will be better than the choice which really isn't a choice, as short term listings are. Why? Because before you commit yourself, you're going to know that agent is at least competent.

Let me go over some of the common agents you might meet.

Our old friend Martin MLS figures putting a sign in the yard and the listing in MLS is enough. Most of the searches come off the internet, right? He's right as far as he goes, but that's not how to obtain the buyers who are interested in the property because it's where it is or because of something it has. That's the way you find the buyers who want the lowest price. Furthermore, if listing it on MLS was all there was to it, there would be no reason to pay your agent more than $100 or so. Martin's a rotten agent. I know, because when I first got into the business I used to be Martin. Briefly. I know better now.

Tina Teaser uses her listings to make contact with buyers. That's what she really wants. She'll tease you with showings while talking up other properties when you're not there. Unfortunately for you, when your property goes into escrow she doesn't have any other means of attracting buyers, so she doesn't want your property to actually sell. Showings are good, but then she has a whole stable of properties she wants to show them, rather than losing her opening wedge with the buyers who really furnish her income. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to spot Tina. Only a very careful examination of her attitude when you're vetting agents, or watching her in action. If you get dozens of lookers and no offers, something is likely to be wrong. That something could be that you're overpriced, or it could be Tina.

You may remember our old friends Gary and Gladys Gladhand, who get their business by making it seem like a social obligation to give them your listing. Repeat after me: "I don't owe anyone my listing." Now repeat it over and over again until you can look into Gary or Gladys' eyes and demand, "What are you going to do for me?" With that said, Gary and Gladys can be very effective listing agents if they pass all of the attitude tests. That social pressure approach works wonders on most people. Just remember that Gary and Gladys get their pool of suckers from the same social pool you swim in, and aren't always smart enough not to poop where they eat. Most buyers aren't savvy enough to realize what Gary and Gladys did or tried to do - but it only takes one who is. You also need to be concerned about them turning into Sherrie Shark or Tina Teaser.

Billy Buy is remarkably amiable about the list price. Whatever you want to ask, he's certain he can get it. Owners see dollar signs, and sign on the dotted line. For about the first two weeks of the listing contract, you may wonder what he's actually doing. Then he walks in and starts pressuring you to drop the price, after wasting your period of highest interest. Billy's worse than a rotten agent. He's a menace, because after he's "bought" your listing with false dreams of avarice, you're going to have to drop lower than the price you should have set in the first place, in order to attract the same kind of traffic and interest you should have had in the first place - if Billy knows how to attract them, which is highly doubtful. Most Billys make most of their sales after they've gotten the owners to drop price below market. Only way to spot Billy is to have that hard talk about pricing. You may not Identify the agent as Billy, but you'll figure out you're wasting your time with him.

Sherrie Shark is a variation on Billy. She's okay with you setting the price too high, because once you get desperate enough, she or someone she knows will make a low ball offer and turn a flipper's profit on your property. Sherrie regards any offers that do come in for what the property is worth to be poaching on her turf - she earned this payoff fair and square by her lights. Fortunately for her, she can dismiss them as "low balls" - right up to the day she thinks you're desperate enough and springs her trap, Sherrie is also the Agent Most Likely To Pretend Offers Never Happened. Offers come in and go directly from the fax machine to the trash can - if they get printed out in the first place. This happens with just about every agent who wants both halves of the commission, but with Sherrie, it's an automatic reflex. The only way to spot Sherrie is to have all those pricing discussions I mentioned earlier. By the way, you should never sell to your listing agent, or anyone else at their brokerage. They're not a disinterested party. I know of places that advertise they'll buy your property if it doesn't sell. Once you know about agents like Sherrie, you should realize the nature of that trap. If an ethical agent wants to make an offer, they'll refuse the listing in the first place, or wait until you're listed with someone else. If you really want Sherrie's kind of low ball offer, I can bring in any number of people and save you the time and money in between listing with Sherrie and the springing of her trap, and they are even happy to pay my agency commission, so you come out ahead in every way.

Donnie Discounter may actually be the way to go in a voracious seller's market like we had several years ago. Sign in the yard, listing in MLS, and presto! It sells quick and for less commission than you would have paid. Of course, if your property is curb-appeal challenged, or if the market isn't a strong seller's market, Donnie is worse than useless, he'll be a waste of your time of highest interest. Nor will he be a strong advocate on your behalf. He doesn't really understand your market. He's just turning numbers in the computer. He isn't going to help you stage, he isn't going to do much to set your property apart, and he's definitely dependent upon internet based bargain shoppers to get his listings sold. Chances of you getting the highest practical number of dollars in your pocket: Not good. If a property sells for $510,000 full commission, you end up with more money in your pocket than if it sells for $500,000 through Donnie, and chances are that the difference will be more than ten percent, as opposed to the measly two percent he saves. Strong buyer's specialists love Donnie. He makes their buyer clients so happy because he doesn't have the time to properly represent the sellers!

Sometime during this process, somebody may recommend you just sell it yourself. Possible, I must admit. Some people do a creditable job, if they prepare enough. But not likely. Most people have a deadline that's too short, and won't spend the effort required. They don't have time to prepare and they'll try to shortcut the process, in which case they either sit on the market unsold, or make some buyer's agent very happy. Listing property is a job, and it does take work and skill and knowledge. I'm learning more with every property. I figure I'll have it completely wired in about a hundred years or so. The vast majority of "For Sale By Owners" have no idea how much they don't know.

Fannie Friendly isn't particularly hard to spot. She just makes you feel like you're her special friend, and that you'll be essentially kicking a puppy if you tell her know. All she is saying is give guilt a chance. Not really much different than Gary and Gladys Gladhand, except buyers are rarely guilted into buying a property. You've got what is likely to be your biggest asset on the line. Forget guilt, and forget Fannie.

There is something to be said for considering a buyer's specialist to list your property. Actually, there's a good deal to be said. They know the market, they know the competition, they know how buyers think, they know what is attractive and what isn't because they spend weeks to months with each set of buyers hearing about it. They know what causes buyers to say "ooooh" and what causes them to say, "EEEEEW!" Buyer's specialists may not be the absolute strongest listing agents, but the good ones are up there. When I'm done discussing staging and price, that owner knows precisely what niche their property would occupy in the market, what their competition is, and what they need to do to sell their property. They may choose not to believe it, but that only hurts themselves.

As a closing thought, when you are listing a property, time is not your friend. Even if you have a good long time in which to sell, all of the agents and most of the buyers in the area are going to know that property has been on the market forever. The longer it takes to sell, the worse the price. The whole notion of "let's just see if we can get a higher price" is the most common way home owners talk themselves into getting less money than they could, and taking longer to sell, with all of the costs associated with both. If you approach it with the firm idea that you are dealing with one of the biggest investments of your life, and ask the hard questions and take the time to hash out the hard details in the first place, chances are you will end up much happier. Don't allow emotion into the decision, don't allow ego in, don't allow friendship or love or anything else beside what is likely to have the best results for you color your decision. Odds are that you will end up much happier. If you're looking for a guarantee, I can't give it to you. One of the things agents learn is that weird stuff happens. But this is certainly the way the dice will fall the vast majority of the time. Bet on one die, anything from one to six is equally likely. Bet on two dice, and the most likely results are right around seven, as anyone who's been to Las Vegas knows. This is like betting on ten throws of those two dice, where they could theoretically add up to anything between 20 and 120, but the odds cluster very sharply around seventy, and anything more than a few numbers away from that is very unlikely indeed.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

This is the final article in this series, and the most difficult. The reason is very simple: Unlike shopping for buyer's agents or shopping for loans, you have to make a binding choice - it is in your best interest to make a binding choice - before you obtain the result you want. With buyer's agents or loan officers, you can judge by actual results - the bargain properties they show you and the loan they actually deliver when the trust deed and Note are all ready to go. Shopping for an effective listing agent is always a leap of trust. It shouldn't be a huge leap into the unknown, but it's a lot easier to talk a good game than it is to deliver.

The important thought to remember as you read this article and shop for a listing agent is this: You might get what you pay for. You won't get what you don't pay for. Make certain you understand what the level of services provided are by a given agent before you sign on the dotted line, whether their fees are contingent upon a successful sale or are paid up front with no guarantees. I wouldn't sign on the dotted line without compensation being contingent upon a successful sale. If they're not confident enough of their abilities to bet their paycheck, I wouldn't bet on those abilities either. Of course, the contingency commission will be for a higher dollar amount, but ask yourself this: Suppose you got $10,000 for successfully completing a project at work, nothing for failing. Is your motivation to get it done, and get it done sooner, more or less than if you get a flat $5000 in advance whether you complete it successfully or not? Would you be willing to put in more effort? Spend more money? Be more aggressive? I assure you that real estate agents have basically the same motivational attitude as the rest of the world.

Most people do not take sufficient account of the time critical factor: Nothing happens immediately in real estate. If you have ninety days to get the house sold, you've really only got about thirty days to get an accepted offer - due to regulatory requirements, loans take a minimum of about 45 days now, more likely 60 and loan officers without a serious dedication to getting it right in the first place may take 3 months or more! I used to be able to reliably get a loan done in under three weeks - not any longer. The quicker everything moves, the better off everyone is, but even in the most optimistic scenario, this means that if you need the property sold in ninety days, you need an accepted offer within thirty. If you need an accepted offer within thirty days, you need an initial offer you can negotiate within fifteen to twenty days. When I originally wrote this, I had just opened Escrow March 21 on a negotiation that started February 7th (all of my client's responses were same business day, but the other side wasn't nearly so punctual). Forty-two days is definitely on the marathon end of negotiations, but you do need to make allowances for the time it takes. Furthermore, all of your advertising (except MLS and internet) takes anywhere from three days to thirty to appear. So from the time you know you need to sell in 90 days, you may really only have fifteen to twenty days to entice an offer. Understand that. Many agents don't.

You need to have figured out what your time frame for selling is. If you need the transaction done in ninety days, we've already seen that you really have about twenty at most to attract a prospective buyer. If you have to sell in thirty days, you waited too long to list it. If you have to sell in sixty days, you've got maybe a week to get an offer. If it's rented with tenants and your cash flow is positive, you don't have a real deadline, but having tenants in a property you're trying to sell raises its own issues and you are unlikely to get anything like the price you would from a clean and vacant property. Otherwise, until the whole thing is finished, as in grant deed signed, loan funded, old loan paid off and you get your money and your Reconveyance, you are paying mortgage and property taxes, either insurance or homeowner's dues, and possibly several other monthly fees. To pick lower than typical numbers, on a property in California that you bought for $200,000 and has a loan for that same amount at 6%, that's roughly $1600 per month it's costing in money out of your checking account. Most folks can't add $1600 to their monthly cost of living for very long. A $400,000 property with a $400,000 loan would be roughly $3100. If it doesn't sell before your reserves run out, you've got yourself a real problem.

The absolute first thing people look at is price. If your asking price is more than people are willing to pay for a property of those characteristics in that neighborhood, the buyers and their agents are going to ignore you. In fact, your traffic will largely be governed by the relationship between your asking price and everyone else's, in conjunction with your days on market counter. Price it right in the first place, and you get lots of traffic your first days on the market. Wait until later, and you'll not only miss out on your time of highest interest, you'll have to price lower to attract the same level of interest. So if you've got a short deadline, I'd be careful to price under the market. What's a short deadline? That's determined by how long properties are taking to sell. If everything listed is pending within three days, you're likely to be okay as long as you don't overprice. If the average property is sitting for ninety days or more and you need to have it not just in escrow but sold in ninety, I'd offer it up below the comparables were I you. Once you know you need to sell, you're the one who knows how long you can manage to keep paying for the property. It needs to be sold before that time runs out.

Condition can mean a lot more than square footage or number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Sometimes the first thought in my head when I drive up or walk in the door is, "It may be larger, or it may have this or that where the competing property doesn't, but I like the other place more because it looks better cared for." I assure you that I'm not alone. Thinking "The buyer will be able to spend $20,000 fixing it and have a million dollar property," does not justify a $980,000 price tag in anyone's mind. Get that whole idea out of your head. If you want the money fixing it up is going to bring, do the work yourself. Price the property for its value and condition now. In other words, even if you're right, you have to spend the $20,000, and be the one to deal with the hassle of making it happen yourself, in order to get that $980,000 net. But it's hard to quantify condition. Even most agents don't look at enough properties to be certain. I'm out there looking at a minimum of twenty per week, which means I know what the ones that sold recently looked like, but if you're outside my normal stomping grounds it's going to take me at least two trips looking in your area to figure the optimum listing price. That's a cold hard truth. It's critical that your listing agent makes a habit of working in the neighborhood the property you want to sell is in. I see something listed with an agent outside the county or even a different part of the county, the odds are that agent has no clue what they should have listed it at. Such listings are what real estate sharks call an opportunity. In urban areas such as San Diego, even a few miles away can be bad news. I'm not certain which is worse: an agent thinking "La Jolla" when the property is in Santee or an agent thinking "Santee" when it's in La Jolla. The former will overprice the property, resulting in the property sitting unsold, and probably all kinds of unpleasant consequences, the most important of which is that the property won't sell until you're desperate, and for far less than you could have gotten if it had been correctly priced in the first place. The latter will under-price the property, resulting in less money than you could have gotten, and usually way less net. There aren't any rules of thumb you can follow - you just have to know the neighborhoods, and even though these neighborhoods are only fifteen miles apart, anyone who tells you they know both is lying. There's too much for one agent to know. I've lived here essentially my whole life, and it takes me two "fishing trips" to neighborhoods I've known my whole life in order to start really understanding enough about that neighborhood professionally that I can start spotting which properties are bargains and which are not. The markets change way too fast for anyone to keep track of too much area. I might believe someone could understand the entire Manhattan condo market. Doubt it, but I might, although I'd be more inclined to trust the agent who said they specialize in a smaller area. I wouldn't believe they could understand Brooklyn or the Bronx as well. Where population is less dense, which San Diego definitely is, I'd say about quarter million population, tops. Out in rural areas, probably less than a third of that. I'd want to see something that indicates your neighborhood or area is one the agent really makes a habit of working before you list with them. This is more important than just about anything else in a listing agent.

Your time of highest interest is right when your property hits MLS. The vast majority of buyers are out there looking at what hit MLS this week, or today, not what hit six weeks ago. The feelings I hear most buyers articulate is that the good stuff gets found quickly. This is something which is generally true - most of the good stuff does get found quickly - but is not universally true. Some of the good stuff slips through under the radar. Some stuff becomes a worthwhile bargain when the seller gets real on the asking price after their deadline to sell has already passed. It may be crazy, but I've heard people talking about blowing off properties that looked like great bargains because they saw that the "Days on Market" counter was too high for their tastes. So you want to keep this in mind. Your agent is required to put your property in as quickly as possible once they have the listing contract, unless you instruct them in writing not to. If your deadline to sell is not looming too quickly, it can be a good thing to delay the actual listing of the property on MLS while you prepare the property for market. This gives your agent time to get longer term advertising ready! You don't want the advertising to appear first, but the property gets stronger traffic if the "days on market" counter says 4 when the ads appear than it does at 45 when those potentially interested see the ad.

Open houses are worth doing, but not worth doing too often. I want to do one the weekend after a property hits MLS without fail, and before that I want the neighborhood to know there's going to be an open house. When the neighbors bring you a buyer, that's a good way to sell the property for more than the typical MLS searcher. The latter is looking for a bargain. The former wants to live in this neighborhood, and already has a connection to it. I may also do an open house aimed at brokers and agents that first week, during the week, and a caravan is a good idea also - which is another possible reason to delay the listing appearing on MLS if either takes more than a few days to arrange. On the other hand, if there's an open house every weekend at Joe's house, there's no urgency. Many agents do open houses to meet new buyer prospects - that's really why they want a listing. I used to space them about four weeks. Now, I usually don't consider a second open house until six weeks out (and my few listings generally are in escrow well before that), and it seems to work better for actually getting interested buyers for that property.

Broker caravans and broker open houses can help, but they require the agent be willing to actually share the commission with a buyer's agent. If they're not, you're wasting your time, and likely turning off prospective buyers as well. If you can do these the week it hits MLS, you're ahead of the game.

If you're getting the idea that agents shouldn't list more than one property per week, you're getting the right idea. When I first wrote this, one listing per week was likely too many to service well in the current market - because if they price it right, the average property was not going to sell in three days. In strong seller's markets where things do sell that quickly, yes, one listing per week is doable. In buyer's markets where things are sitting ninety days and more on average, you are begging to become neglected with a listing per week agent unless you're paying the highest prospective commission. If someone has more than four to six listings at any one time, I'd cross them off the my list, no matter the state of the market.

Continued in Part II

Original article here

I just got a google search where the question asked was "What if the mortgage is recorded in the wrong county?"

I've never actually seen this (and San Diego County, once upon a time, included what is now Riverside, Imperial and San Bernardino counties), but if it's the mortgage on your loan, no big deal. You should get a copy of the recorded trust deed, and the county recorder's stamp should tell you the county it was recorded in. You probably want to record it in your own county, as when the document is scanned in both recorder's stamps will appear, thus making it obvious that these two documents are one and the same. There may be better ways to deal with it. Since the error was (everywhere I've ever worked) your title company's, they should be willing to repair it to eliminate the cloud on your title. If and when you refinance this loan or sell the property, make sure that the Reconveyance is recorded in both counties, and references both recordings.

More dangerous is the issue of what if it's the previous owner's loan that was wrongly recorded. The previous owner is obviously no longer making payments on the property. The lender may or may not have been paid off properly; if they were there may not be any difficulties. It could just disappear into some metaphorical black hole of things that weren't done right and were never corrected, but just don't matter because everybody's happy and nobody does anything to rock the boat. However, unlike black holes in astronomy, things do come back out of these sorts of black holes.

However, if the previous lender was not paid off correctly, or if they were paid but something causes it to not process correctly, they've got a claim on your property, and because the usual title search that is done is county-based, it won't show up in a regular title search. Let's face it, property in County A usually stays right where it's always been, in County A, as county boundaries don't move very often. There is no reason except error for it to be recorded in County B. Therefore, the title company almost certainly would not catch it when they did a search for documents affecting the property in County A; it would be a rare and lucky title examiner who caught it. Furthermore, since it likely antedates all the current loans, such a lien would be senior to them, and need to be paid off in full before any of the more recent loans got a penny. This is one of the reasons why lenders require borrowers to pay for a lender's policy of title insurance.

In some states, they still don't use title insurance, merely attorneys examining the state of title. When the previous owner's lender sues you, you're going to have to turn around and sue that attorney who did your title examination for negligence, who is then going to have to turn around and sue whoever recorded the documents wrong. If it's a small attorney's office and they've since gone out of business, best of luck and let me know how it all turns out, but the sharks are going to be circling for years on this one, and the only sure winners are the lawyers.

In most states, however, the concept of title insurance has become de rigeur. Here in California, lenders don't lend the money without a valid policy of title insurance involved.

Let's stop here for a moment and clarify a few things. When we're talking about title insurance, there are, in general, two separate title insurance policies in effect. When you bought the property, you required the previous owner to buy you a policy of title insurance as an assurance that they were the actual owners. By and large, it can only be purchased at the same time you purchase your property. This policy remains in effect as long as you or your heirs own the property. The first Title Company, which became Commonwealth Land Title (now part of the Fidelity group), was started in 1876, and there are likely insured properties from the 19th century still covered. If you don't know who your title insurance company is, you should. Most places, the company and the order of title insurance are on the grant deed.

The other policy of title insurance is a lender's policy of title insurance. This insures your lender against loss on that particular loan due to title defects, and when the loan is paid off (either because the property is sold, refinanced, or that rare property where the people now own it free and clear), it's over and done with. Let's face it, most people are not going to continue to make payments if they lose the property. If you take out a new loan, your new lender will require a new policy of title insurance. You pay but they are the ones insured by the policy. It's a requirement imposed on everyone who wants to borrow money for real estate.

To get back to the situation, what happens when you order title insurance is that a searcher and/or an examiner go out and find all of the documents they can find that are relevant to the title of the property. These days, they typically perform an automated search, and sometimes documents are indexed and cross referenced incorrectly and therefore they do not show up when they should. Nonetheless, the title company takes this list of documents and tells you about known issues with the title, and then basically says "We will sell you a policy of title insurance that covers everything else." This document is variously known as a Preliminary Report, PR, or Commitment.

Now it shouldn't take a genius to figure out why you want a policy of title insurance. Around here, the average single family residence goes for somewhere on the high side of $500,000. You're committing a half million dollars of your money on the representation that Joe Blow owns the property and that if you give him half a million, he'll give you valid title. I would never consider buying property without an owner's policy of title insurance. Even with the best will in the world and my best friend whose family has owned it since the stone age, all kinds of issues really do crop up (Another agent in the office has a client right now who bought a property via an uninsured transfer - and there was an unrecorded tax lien. Ouch. Say bye-bye to your investment). The lenders are the same way. No lender's policy, no loan.

So what happens when this old mortgage document is uncovered? Well, that's one of the hundreds of thousands of reasons why you have that policy of title insurance. You go to your title company and say, "I have a claim." Since they missed that document in their search, they usually pay off the loan (there are other possibilities). After all, if they hadn't missed it, it would have been taken care of before the Joe Blow got paid for the property and split to the Bahamas.

None of this considers the possibility of fraud, among many other possibilities, but those are all beyond the scope of this article.

So when buying, insist that your seller provide you with a policy of title insurance. When selling, it really isn't out of line for your buyer to require it - it shows that you have a serious buyer. Some places may have the buyer purchasing his own policy, but most places that use title insurance, the seller pays for the owner's policy out of the proceeds. Of course, anytime there is a loan done on the property, the lender is going to require you pay for a lender's policy. If the quotes you are given do not include this, be certain to ask why.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

One of the things you get with every mortgage loan quote is an APR, or Annual Percentage Rate. There is even its own special form, the federal Truth-In-Lending (TILA) form, required at application for every loan.

This was mandated by congress back in the early 1970s as a way to give consumers some way to compare between competing loans of equal rate, and it is governed by Federal Reserve Regulation Z.

The problems with APR are threefold. First off, it is computed from numbers on the Good Faith Estimate (or Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement in California), which are often intentionally and legally under-stated. "Mis-underestimated," to use Former President Bush's famous phrase in an entirely different context where it is not a good thing. If the numbers on the Good Faith Estimate are incorrect, the computations that result in the APR will be similarly incorrect.

Here is a routine example, from an unfortunate soul I encountered awhile ago. They told him they were going to do his $230,000 loan for 3/8ths of a point and $1895, which works out to about $3400 total, APR was listed as 6.136 on a 6% loan when he signed up. But when the final documents were ready, the interest rate was 1/4 percent higher, the points were 2.25 points, and the closing costs were actually over $4000. Total cost: $9400 added to his mortgage, and the APR on final documents was 6.568 on a 6.25% loan. It stands out in my memory because I had been competing for his business. He came back to me during his three day right of rescission. Unfortunately, rates had moved up and by that point I couldn't do anything he liked better, so he rewarded the company who misquoted his loan (to use technical parlance, lied) by getting them paid. Unfortunately, you can't go backwards in time with what you learn at the end of the process. You need to be right the first time.

The second reason to ignore APR is that it is an attempt to compress what is fundamentally at least a two-dimensional number into a one dimensional number. Remember back in school when you learned graphing on a "number line" and then a Cartesian Plane? Which of them contains more information? The Cartesian Plane, of course. APR is an attempt to force a Cartesian Plane onto number line. In order to do it, you need to make some assumptions, and you still lose a lot of information.

The third, most important reason to ignore APR is that the assumptions that Congress and the Federal Reserve mandate were reasonably based on the reality of the 1960s, which has now changed. Back then, people bought homes they were going to live in for the rest of their lives, and re-financing was much less common. People are now living in homes about nine years on the average, and refinancing about every two to three years. But the regulation still reads that the costs of doing the loan, which are included in the APR calculation, are assumed to be spread out over the entire term of the loan, even with ARMs and hybrid ARMs, which almost nobody keeps after the initial fixed period. With the term of most loans being 30 years, and the average person refinancing about every two years, this computation makes absolutely no sense as it exists today. The costs of the loan should be spread over the period that the person getting the loan is likely to keep it, not the entire theoretical term of the loan.

Let us look at the earlier example in this light. Let's assume that the loan delivered to the unfortunate con victim above was a five year ARM, and compute APR as if he's going to keep it the full five years of the fixed period, rather than the thirty years he theoretically could keep it. The APR would have been listed as 7.067% on the final documents.

Let us go a step further and assume that instead of keeping his loan 5 full years, like less than 5 percent of the population, he keeps it for something close to the national median of two years, and compute APR based upon that. His final documents would have listed an APR of 8.293 percent.

To offer a better strategy: At the time, I could have done the loan at zero total cost to him - literally nothing. Zero added to his mortgage, he pays for the appraisal but is reimbursed when the loan funds - at 6.75%, APR 6.750 no matter how you compute. Yes, the payment is $17.75 per month higher than what he ended up with. But he wouldn't have added $9400 to his mortgage balance. Let's compare these two loans five years out, when 95 percent of the population has sold or refinanced and is no longer reaping the benefits of that payment that's lower by $17.75 per month. If he has the zero total cost loan I could have put him into his balance is $215,914.00, and he has paid $89,506 in payments. The loan he ended up with, he's going to owe $223,449, and he's paid $88,441 in payments. Okay, he's saved $17.75 per month, about $1065 total, in payments. But he owes $7535 more. If he sells the property and puts it all in a savings account, he would have been permanently ahead by $6470 if he initially chose the higher rate, higher payment, but lower cost loan. Not to mention that he would get $7535 extra all at once, as opposed to little dribbles of $17.75 per month that most people would never notice. If he buys another house, or if he keeps this home but refinances, he owes $7535 less with the zero cost loan. Let's say he gets a really great loan next time, with a thirty year fixed rate of 5%. That $17.75 per month he "saved" on his payment for five years is still going to cost him $376.75 per year, $31.40 per month for as long as he keeps the new loan. This is what comes from relying upon APR as a valid measurement of a loan.

This is not nitpicking. The so-called 2/28 and 2/38 were the most common subprime loans nationwide, when we had subprime. They are subprime hybrid ARMS with an initial two year fixed period. People get into them because they don't have the money for a down payment, or because they can't qualify for A paper. Considering that they're all straining to buy as much house as they possibly can get a loan for, this means they're in the subprime market. According to SANDICOR figures I saw a while back, something like 40% of all purchase money loans locally in the years from 2004 to 2007 being negative amortization loans which have no truly fixed period and are practically impossible to keep longer than five years with the best will in the world. Another thirty percent plus, according to SANDICOR, were interest only, so my estimate is that subprime lenders have at least eighty percent of the purchase money market locally, and probably fifty percent or more of the refinance market. With the vast majority of these loans being of the short-term variety as illustrated above, APR is worthless as a measure of a loan.

Caveat Emptor

P.S. Just as a parting shot, let us consider the above situation in the context of a fifteen year loan at 6.00 percent that, to be insanely generous to the $9400 closing cost loan, the gentleman will keep until he pays it off completely. APR for the $9400 closing cost loan: 6.779 percent. APR for the zero closing cost loan at 6.75% remains 6.750. That's not a typo, the loan with the higher rate has the lower APR, and this is common for fifteen year loans. Payment for the $9400 in closing costs loan: $2052.67. Payment for the loan with higher rate but zero closing costs: $2035.29. That's not a typo, either. The higher rate loan has a payment that's $17.38 per month lower, because you didn't add $9400 to the loan balance that you've got to pay back.

Original here

I got a search for "which states allow prepayment penalties". I'm not aware of any that don't. If you are, I'd like to know. Any such states should immediately be renamed "Denial".

I really hate prepayment penalties, for a large number of reasons. Nonetheless, to make them illegal would not be in the best interests of consumers.

I know this isn't popular. Economics isn't about popularity. It's about cold hard facts of human behavior. Pre-payment penalties are an incentive that get lenders (investors really) to do loans when otherwise, they wouldn't. Understand that making pre-payment penalties illegal means that the people trying their hardest to get a loan to buy a home to raise their family... can't.

Let's examine one common situation. Let's consider a hypothetical couple, the Smiths, who don't have much of a down payment (or can just barely scrape it together), and have difficulty qualifying for the loan. They want to become owners rather than renters, and it is in their best interests to do so.

The cold hard fact of the matter is that nobody does loans for free. Real Estate loans are complex creatures, and they don't just magically appear out of some hyperspatial vortex upon demand. I may cut my usual margin if I'm the buyer's agent as well, but the reason I'm willing to do so is because I've found I'm going to do a large portion of the work anyway, have to ride herd on the loan officer, and stress out because it's a major part of the transaction that can really hurt my clients that is not only not under my control, but I cannot monitor with any degree of confidence I'm being told the truth. I keep telling folks that the MLDS or GFE don't mean anything if the lender doesn't want them to. They are not contracts, they are not loan commitments, they are not the Note or Deed of Trust, and they definitely aren't a funded loan. They are supposed to be a best guess estimate of your loan conditions, but with all the limitations and wiggle room built into them, the regulators might as well not have bothered. By themselves, they are worthless. None of the paper you get before you sign final loan documents means anything unless the loan officer wants it to. Unless the loan officer guarantees it in writing that says that someone other than you will eat any difference in rate and costs, what you have is a used piece of paper with some unimportant markings on it. If I, as a better more experienced loan officer than the vast majority of loan officers out there, cannot monitor what another loan officer is doing with any degree of confidence, do you want to bet that you can?

So we have some folks who can just barely stretch to do the loan. In order to buy them a little space on their payments, so that any bill that comes in isn't an absolute disaster they cannot afford, and also so I can get paid without it coming out of the money these people don't have, I talk to them about the situation and we all agree to put a two year pre-payment penalty on the loan. This buys them a lower rate with lower payments, without adding anything to their loan balance. They don't owe any more money, they get a lower rate, I get paid, and they didn't have to come up with money they don't have. Everybody wins, whereas without the prepayment penalty they would be paying anywhere from a quarter to half a point or more, and perhaps they couldn't qualify. No loan, no property, no start to the benefits of ownership. They certainly wouldn't have that $50 per month cushion that's likely to save their bacon from their first emergency. Leaving aside the issue that most folks want to buy more house than they can afford, that really stinks from the point of view of the people that those who would outlaw prepayment penalties altogether say they are trying to help, those who are trying to buy a home and just barely qualify.

Another common situation: Many folks have a long mortgage history, and they are comfortable in the knowledge that they will not refinance or sell within X number of years. They're willing to accept a pre-payment penalty in order to get the lower rate at a lower cost. They want that $X per month in their pocket, not the bank's, and they are willing to accept the risk that they may need to sell or refinance in return. After all, if they don't sell or refinance within the term of the penalty, it cost them nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada. For all intents and purposes, free money. I may advise against it, but it is their decision to make or not make that bet, not mine, not the bank's, not the legislature's, and definitely not some clueless bureaucrat's, let alone that of some activist who only understands that lenders make money from prepayment penalties, and not the benefits that real consumers can receive if they go into it with their eyes open.

Pre-payment penalties get abused. Badly abused. I know of places that think nothing of putting a three year pre-payment penalty on a loan with a two year fixed period. There is no way on this earth anyone can tell those folks truthfully what their payments will be like in the third year. I may be able to tell them what the lowest possible payment could be, but not the highest. I've seen five year prepayment penalties on two and three year fixed rate loans, and that situation is even worse. I've heard of ten year prepayment penalties on a three year fixed rate loan. I've seen even A paper lenders slide in long prepayment penalties on unsuspecting borrowers that mean they several extra points of profit when they sell the loan. So there are some real issues there.

With this in mind, there are some reforms I could really get behind. The first is making it illegal for a prepayment penalty to exceed the length of time that the actual interest rate is fixed. Regardless of what the contract says, once the real interest rate starts to adjust, no prepayment penalty can be charged (This would have meant no prepayment penalties on Option ARMS, among other things). The second is putting a prepayment penalty disclosure clause in large prominent type on every one of the standard forms, and making it mandatory that the loan provider indemnify the borrower if the final loan delivered does not conform to the initial pre-payment penalty disclosure. In other words, if I tell you there's no pre-payment penalty and there is one, I have to pay it for you. If I tell you there's a two year penalty, and it's a three year penalty, I have to pay it if you sell or refinance in the third year (in the first two years, it's your own lookout because you agreed to that from the beginning).

But to completely abolish the pre-payment payment penalty is not in the best interest of the consumers of any state. Show me a state that has abolished them completely, and I'll show you a state that has hurt its residents to no good purpose. Sometimes there is a good solution to a problem, as I believe I have demonstrated here. It's just not necessarily the first one that springs to mind.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

Sometimes spam makes writing an article all too easy.

Here is a piece of spam I got, probably because my email at work contains "realestate.com", with identifying information taken out. This goes to show that the financial ignorance of most mortgage providers is astounding.

Thank you for your interest in the DELETED Broker Program. Our program is designed to help you provide more value added service for your clients, increase your fee income and help you generate more loans. By simply providing a one page custom amortization and a completed one page enrollment form in your loan packages you will achieve a high enrollment ratio. By illustrating the three key benefits of the Bi-Weekly Payment Program for your clients, they will clearly see that your goal is to help them accomplish their financial goals sooner by saving thousands of dollars in interest, paying off their mortgages 5-10 years early and achieving a low effective interest rate. Please find enclosed an example of a custom calculator and our simple one page enrollment form.

Or the client can just make 13/12 of the regular payment, or make an extra payment once per year, and achieve the same result without any cost. This option without cost lets the customer choose to pay however much extra they can afford that month, or pay nothing extra if they're on a tight budget. As I computed in Prepayment Penalties and Biweekly Payment Schemes, the fact that you're making payments more often saves you almost nothing. It's the fact that you're making an extra mortgage payment per year that's saving you all that money.

Getting started is easy. All you have to do is pay a one time setup fee of $99. You will be provided with custom online tools and resources as well as training upon request. To sign up, just go to our online broker enrollment form and complete the required fields, shortly after you will receive an email with your broker code user name and password. Please be sure to save this email. Once you have these instructions you will be able to go to DELETED.com and access your custom calculator and other online resources.

So I (the provider) pay a sign up fee of $99 for an internet driven startup. Cha-ching!

The DELETED program is a great value at $395.00. You earn 300.00 on each enrollment, DELETED retains only 95.00. We also charge a $3.75 per debit fee (emphasis mine). Our customers truly appreciate our one-time only enrollment fee, if the client moves, refinances or the loan gets sold, X will simply take them off the system and put them back on with the new loan information. Most customers prefer to pay the enrollment fee and choose the 3 debit option, where we will take an additional 135.00, 130.00 and 130.00 over the first three debits to comprise our one-time fee. We pay commissions on the 15th of the month for all enrollments on the system the month prior. Once you receive your approved broker email you'll be able to start signing up clients immediately.

Now we get to the real meat of what's going on. For me doing the work of signing someone up on the internet, they get $95 to start with, while dangling out a $300 stroke to mortgage providers to betray their clients by getting them to pay for something they could do themselves, with more flexibility, for free.

Then, once this is started, they make $3.75 per transaction, every two weeks, for an automated process that costs them somewhere between $0.25 and $0.50. Great work if you can get it. Three guesses who gets stuck with all the problems if they screw up.

This is one more reason why you want to shop your mortgage around and get multiple opinions. Anybody wants you to pay anything for a biweekly payment program, that is a red flag not to do business with them. It is a good thing to do in some circumstances, but it's not worth paying any extra money for. Unless you've got a "first dollar" prepayment penalty, you can accomplish the same thing on your own, with more flexibility, and without paying a cent. And if you do have such a penalty, it'll cost more than making the extra payment will save.

Caveat Emptor

Original here

A while ago now, I spent several hours showing properties I had found to a couple of investors. One was a lender owned fixer, fairly priced at $440k. It needed carpet, paint, landscaping, and some facade work. The last comparable sale in the neighborhood was $575,000. There was also another lender owned property in a neighborhood where similar properties in good condition were going for $460,000 to $480,000. This one was also pretty fairly priced at $380k. The first one needed maybe $30 to $40k in work, the latter about $20k. It took me a lot of hours to find properties where there was a good profit to be made buying near or even at the asking price in this market. Not enough for these people. They had to put in offers for eighty thousand less. Needless to say, these offers were dead on arrival. Complete waste of my time.

The reason these properties were fairly priced was that the owners had taken a realistic look at the state of the market and the condition of the properties, and decided they wanted to sell the properties sooner, rather than spending months with their capital tied up only to reduce the price so they can sell later. They were justifiably upset at the low-ball offers, given that they had actually priced the properties correctly for their condition, a rare thing in this market. Even if these people now follow up with a reasonable offer, I have reason to believe that these wells have been poisoned. It's going to take something basically equal to the asking price from these people. They have marked themselves as being unable to be dealt with on a reasonable basis. Other folks might be able to start the negotiations lower, but not them. Maybe not me, either, despite the fact that I was just the agent, making it worse than a complete waste of my time, a likely destroyer of some of my most valuable information - the location of profitable properties.

Low-balls are not the way you acquire the property you've got your heart set on. Low-balls are not the way you acquire property that is already correctly or bargain priced. If it is already bargain priced, all you're going to do is deal yourself completely out of the picture, where you could have made a nice profit if you had offered something reasonably close. Low-balls are the way to acquire property where the owner is so desperate, they'll take anything and you can't hardly help but make a profit. Lest you be unclear on this fact, lender owned properties are not good targets for successful low-balls. That lender wants to get rid of the property, but they've always got money, and unless they're facing the regulatory deadline, that offer is going to be rejected 100 percent of the time. If they are facing a regulatory deadline, somebody internal will have already snapped it up.

If you're going to insist upon low-balling, the way I found those properties is not the way to do it. No need to invest time driving around inspecting the properties, or the effort of going into records. Just write an offer. Write lots of offers - no need to be picky. At that price, you'll make a profit if they accept, have no fear. But, if you're going to offer that far below market, you're going to have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find one that's desperate enough to turn into a prince, and most of the frogs are going to be mad. Real quick now: What's your first reaction to being told you're not worth what you think? "You're not a college graduate, you're a high school dropout!" It's more effective to write dozens of offers sight unseen, and give yourself a few days after acceptance for inspections if you're really worried about it. 99 out of 100 will just be angry and insulted, and that's all the further it will go. You're going to move on, because any possibility of a transaction is dead.

You can raise the hit rate, of course, and a good buyer's agent is invaluable for this. But the best targets for low-balling are not those who have priced the property reasonably, but rather those who have over-priced their property. Hit the people whose properties have been on the market for a long time because they're overpriced. Best is if they've expired off MLS at least once, and if they've changed listing agencies because there are a large proportion of agencies out there who will take even the most over-priced listing. Expired twice is better, more is ideal. Multiple drops in the asking price are also a good indicator of a good time to low ball. Of course, you've got to watch the market over time for that information, because even most MLS registries don't give you this information directly. There is no way around market knowledge, but the way to get a low-ball offer accepted is to be the first under the wire after the the owners realize they are desperate. There is no universal indicator of desperation, or everyone would be on them at the same time. If you're going to do this right, you have to have some things going for you that everyone doesn't - patience and persistence, and the ability to slave away on those offers. It takes as long as it takes, and likely candidates can and will be pulled out of the the available pool at any time. Even if they aren't, the owners can and will simply refuse your offer the vast majority of the time. If you get frustrated, you're doing it wrong. This isn't like being a used car dealer. The marks have an alleged professional on their side. If the listing agent were a real pro, they'd have persuaded them to price it right for the market and condition in the first place, and it would have sold before you got to it, but they're going to be good enough to recognize your desperation check when they see it. In order to consider accepting the offer or even seriously negotiating, the owners have got to have suddenly realized how desperate they are. That's the magic ingredient to getting a low-ball accepted. There is no magic way to telling when this has happened, or everybody would be doing it. Think of yourself as a telemarketer with a very low conversion ratio. You're metaphorically dialing a lot of numbers to get one sale, but when that one sale does hit, you've got one heck of a paycheck.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

My husband and I are completely debt free right now. However, we are wanting to buy a house in the future and I see that as quite probably requiring a loan.

What should I do to make sure that we don't get dinged for having no credit? (A problem my husband has had in the past — ended up needing his mother to cosign for him on an auto loan because he chose to go completely credit card less during college after discovering he could not handle them well)

Without open credit, you won't have a score at all. No score, no loan with any regulated lenders - hard money becomes your only option. It's as simple as that. I can get people with horrible credit loans on better terms than I can people with no credit.

In order to get a credit score, you need two open lines of credit. Three is better, because sometimes one will not be reported to one of the three major bureaus. Car loans count. Installment loans count. Those stupid "Pay no interest for twelve months" accounts count, although they really do hurt your credit. But the best thing to have is credit cards, because you usually only apply once and you can then keep them forever, giving you a long average duration of credit. Read my article on Credit Reports: What They Are and How They Work for what goes into a credit score.

What you do for this is go out and apply for two credit cards. Not store cards, unless you can't get regular credit cards. I've seen many times the rate of problems with store cards that I have with regular credit cards. They don't need to be big lines of credit - $500 to $1000 is more than plenty. I have found credit unions to be a good place to send my clients to for this purpose, as San Diego has several excellent large credit unions, at least one of which any resident of the county can join. They may not be absolutely the lowest rate, but they're usually pretty low. Furthermore, the rate doesn't matter if you don't carry a balance, which you shouldn't. More importantly, credit unions usually have fewer gotchas in the fine print, usually no annual fee, and they want their members who want them to have credit cards, so they're more inclined to give members the benefit of the doubt.

Once per month, use each credit card for something small that you would buy whether you had the credit card or not - you'd just pay cash otherwise. No larger than 10% of your total credit line on the card. I usually pay for a meal out at a cheap family restaurant (in the range of $40 or so for two adults and two kids). As soon as the bill gets there, write the check and pay it off. Costs you a stamp but it builds your credit. Or you can do online bill pay if you'd rather. I've heard too many horror stories and dealt with their aftermath too often for that to be attractive to me.

If your husband has trouble with cards, keep his copies of your cards in a safe place, and you be the one who goes out and uses them. He still gets the benefits if they're joint cards.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

That was a question I got. The answer is that it doesn't make a difference, but it used to be one more way you could be conned or cozened into buying a more expensive property than you could really afford. Until recent regulations that were long overdue took effect, lenders who work in markets that are less than A paper perform qualification calculations based upon the initial payment. Furthermore, I'm about 180 degrees from convinced that this was ever really helping anyone.

Here's how it works and why it works. Some lenders formerly performed their calculations as to whether or not a specific borrower qualifies based only upon the initial payment. Let's say the loan contemplated is an interest only 2/28 at a teaser rate of 6% that's going to jump to 8% in two years when it starts amortizing (even if the underlying index stays exactly where it is), and the loan amount contemplated is $250,000. This makes for an initial monthly payment of $1250. Because this fits within the guideline Debt to Income Ratio guidelines, usually 50% for sub-prime, they can qualify and get the loan approved. But in two years when the loan adjusts and starts to amortize, the payment jumps to $1866.90. This is not certain, but it's far from the worst case possible. It is what will happen if the financial indexes don't change, and so a good default guess, as nobody knows where the indexes will be in two years. If you know where the indexes will be in two years, please call me. With that knowledge and mine, we can make enough money for our grandchildren to retire on. Guaranteed. Because nobody else knows where the market will be in two years.

So the upshot is that even though the payment is predictably going to increase by essentially fifty percent (49.35) in two years, to a level this particular prospective borrower does not qualify for, this loan would likely be approved under sub-prime guidelines that were in effect when this article was originally written.

There were banking regulation changes made to change the qualification procedure, forcing all lenders, rather than only "A paper" ones, to perform their qualification computations based upon the fact that the payments on these loans are certain to increase. These regulations were long overdue in my honest opinion, but don't thank your congresscritter - they came from the Fed. Under previous guidelines, this loan would be approved. Actually, the directive that forces "A paper" to underwrite these loans based upon the higher payments formerly came from Fannie and Freddie pre-takeover, not the regulators, and this is also one reason why hybrid ARMS at a lower interest rate are actually harder to qualify for than fixed rate loans in the "A paper" world.

Nor is this 2/28 teaser loan what is generally meant by a "buydown", although it is one of the things the phrase has been misapplied to. A true buydown is a temporary reduction in rate on a fixed rate loan, purchased by means of discount points paid up front. As I explained in the linked article, these buydowns typically cost more than they are really worth to the client in terms of dollars. Indeed, they are most often used in conjunction with VA Loans, where because up to three percent of closing costs over and above purchase price can be rolled into the loan with no money out of the veteran's pockets, the typical borrower sees only the reduction in payments, not the costs, which are real and they did pay, albeit, due to an accounting trick, with money out of their future equity and not with money out of their savings. They're still going to owe that extra money, and be paying interest on it until they pay it back.

However, due to the fact that most people shop houses and loans based upon payment, the reduction in payments makes it look like they can afford a more expensive house than they should in fact buy. That temporary buydown is going to expire, certain as gravity, and the clients are going to end up making those higher payments. There is precisely zero uncertainty about it. If they can't afford them, the bad consequences will still happen, precisely as if the buydown had never been. All of the tricks of the past decade to defuse this were based upon falling interest rates and rapidly rising real estate values. Lest you not understand, these are never acceptable reasons for betting someone else's financial future, as so many agents and loan officers did. If you are a real estate and financial sophisticate who understands the risks, it is one thing to bet your own financial future. It is never acceptable to bet the future of someone else, particularly if they are not an expert, without a frank discussion of those risks and advising them to get the opinions of disinterested experts.

This whole idea of temporary buydowns is bad because it allows the less scrupulous real estate professionals to encourage buyers and borrowers to overextend themselves. Now that the general public has finally woken up to the downsides of negative amortization loans and stated income loans, these are one of the few remaining ways to make it appear as if people qualify for a more expensive property because of a higher dollar value loan, than they do in fact qualify for by objective consideration of the guidelines. This particular way of pushing the guidelines isn't as extreme as the previously mentioned ones, and doesn't push the bottom line on what they can make it look like people can afford by as much, but if these people could sell people based upon what they really qualify for, they wouldn't be playing these sorts of games with the numbers. It was also these people that the change in regulations was squarely aimed at.

Furthermore, if these folks could really afford the full payments on the loans being contemplated, there are better loans to be doing. Without that interest only rider on the 2/28, I could buy the interest rate down by at least a quarter of a percent on the same loan type. For that matter, I can quite likely get a thirty year fixed rate loan for that same borrower at a lower rate than the 2/28 will jump to in the default case of the underlying indexes going exactly nowhere. For the true temporary buydown, without my borrowers paying those three points of upfront cost, I could cut those borrowers real, permanent rate on that fixed rate loan by at least three quarters of a percent, probably more. Whether even that is worth doing is highly questionable, but at least it's an open question worthy of discussion with a possible case for "yes" that a reasonable person can defend with numbers, not a mathematically certain "no way!" Show me someone who uses buydowns for their clients habitually, and I'll show you a serial financial rapist.

In short, temporary buydowns don't really help anyone, except maybe the seller who can unload their house to someone who shouldn't be able to qualify. Not buyers or borrowers, who are encouraged to stretch beyond their means through their use. Not lenders, brokers, or agents, due to these problems that people were in denial about for a very long time coming home to roost, meaning that those who practice in this manner will very likely be subject to auditors and regulators in the near future, and quote probably lose their licenses. I think that's a good thing.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here