tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2007-08-27://3 2010-09-05T14:33:48Z "What you need to know about mortgages and real estate. And more." Movable Type Publishing Platform 4.0 tag:gockel.hmdnsgroup.com,2007:/~searchli//3.2861 2010-09-05T14:00:00Z 2010-09-05T14:33:48Z

Every so often I get questions about loan cosigners. The main borrowers do not qualify on their own, so they get someone - most often mom and dad - to cosign. Cosigners are a different thing, or so I understand,...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ trade-off between rate and costs of the loan, and perhaps making the loan require a larger down payment. This does assume they won't live there, but usually if they were going to live there, they would have been on the loan in the first place. Pitfall number two: The cosigners are overextended also. Sure, they make $10,000 per month, but they have payments of $5000 per month already. There's nothing left over where the bank sees them as having enough money left over to help you out. They may, in fact, have money to spare, particularly if they make a lot of money, but according to the standard ratios, they do not. You can't have the cosigners be stated income or NINA if the main borrowers are full documentation. If you have to downgrade to stated income in order to qualify, that is going to cost a lot of money through higher rate/cost trade-off, not to mention requiring a larger down payment in most circumstances, going to a higher cost portfolio lender, whether you're in a line of work that's eligible for stated income under current guideline, and the threat of stated income being legally abolished. Obviously, better that you qualify for a lesser loan than that you don't qualify at all, but you don't want to downgrade if you don't have to. Pitfall number three: This one hits the cosigners. They are agreeing to be responsible for your payments in the event you don't make them. Suppose they want to borrow money for something else. Especially if it's a large amount of money, as real estate payments tend to be. It really cramps their ability to qualify for other things. This works the other way, also. People come to me for real estate loans who have agreed to be cosigners for a car loan are responsible for the $400 per month for that loan. Many times, this means they don't qualify for the real estate loan. So we have to prove to their prospective lenders that the "true" borrowers are making the payments. This is usually not difficult, but if the cosigners wrote the check for the payment anytime in the last six months to a year, it can be problematic. Pitfall number four: This also hits the cosigners rather than the main borrowers. Suppose a payment gets made late. It impacts the credit of the cosigners as well as the "real" borrowers. It doesn't matter if you're the "real" borrower or the cosigner, it hurts your credit just as much and for just as long. If you cosign, you want some kind of proof that payment is being made on time, every month. You shouldn't cosign if you don't have the resources to make that payment pretty much indefinitely. Furthermore, should the cosigners decide to cut their losses, it can take months before the monthly hits to the credit stop. If the "real" borrowers don't want to liquidate, the cosigners may have to go to court to get out of it, and the only people who are happy there are the lawyers. Now suppose the loan being applied for has a Debt to Income Ratio maximum of forty five percent, and the cosigners make $10,000 per month, but they have expenses of $4300. This will mean that they only have $200 per month to contribute towards qualifying for the new loan. If the "real" borrowers weren't fairly close to qualifying without them, they aren't going to qualify with them. If they have expenses of $4600 per month, they have nothing to contribute to the loan qualification. In such cases, the work of asking them to cosign is wasted. Caveat Emptor Original here]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2009://3.4594 2010-09-04T14:00:00Z 2010-09-04T16:42:24Z

An e-mail I got from a single mother I spent two months working with before she found a special low income program for a property she wouldn't have been able to afford through me. The first paragraph is her addition...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/
Dan - This is an FYI. I really wouldn't recommend this program for any of your other clients, or if you do get them involved that you warn them that things stand a good chance of not going as promised. Judging by what is happening to me, I doubt that you ever received your commission from these people. -----Original Message----- Good Morning DELETED, My name is DELETED and I've purchased a condo at DELETED. My close date was supposed to be June 28th. On June 28th I went to DELETED Title and signed off on all the final paperwork and had my bank wire them over $7,000.00. My first scheduled move-in date was on Friday, June 29th. I had to cancel (the move - DM) because it wasn't recorded yet. On Saturday, June 30th I drove over to the DELETED Sales office (my phone and internet has been shut off and transferred) and spoke with DELETED. My next scheduled move-in date was Monday, July 2nd from noon - 4 pm. I asked him if I had to change my plans again and he said "No - because you were supposed to close on the 28th of June and I can go online and see that you have wired your money and completed your paperwork I am going to make an exception and give you your key and let you move in on Monday." Early Monday morning (we) started bringing all of our boxes and furniture downstairs. At 9 am I rented a U-haul. At 11:30 I went over to the Sales office for my key. I had scheduled someone to pickup and deliver the appliances I purchased for 12:30 pm. (The person who had promised the move in) was "in a meeting" and nobody seemed to know anything about my key. By 1 pm I was quite upset because I still had no answers and only 3 hours left to accomplish my move in. DELETED sent someone down to try and make things right. I don't think a sobbing woman in their office was very good for business. They went over to the Uhaul place and had the truck reserved until Friday of this week and bought a lock for it. They told me that they would pay my rent and that I could get reimbursed for food if I kept the receipts. Hopefully they will really do this. (it occurred to me later that they also promised me a key and broke that promise) DELETED is calling DELETED (Title officer) twice a day for a status update and what they keep telling me is that the paperwork from the City has not yet been received. Can you tell me if there is a reason for this and when I might expect this paperwork to be completed? I'm in a bit of a panic now (to put it mildly) because I need to be out of the apartment so they can clean and paint it over the weekend. I have so little information, I don't know whether to put my things in storage, board my pets and get a hotel for my son and myself. This is also very stressful because most of my money is tied up in the condo and I'm bleeding what little money I have left....sleeping in an apartment on my couch and hoping that the truck on the street in front of my complex doesn't get ticketed or worse yet robbed. Hauling everything back up two flights of stairs was pretty much out of the question (For health reasons - DM). I feel absolutely miserable. It would be quite ironic to wind up homeless after all this. If you can shed any light on what is going on, or help me plan what to do next I would appreciate it. I'm really in the dark here. My phone and internet are at the new place. I had been taking vacation time to move in, but I don't see the point now, so I'm back at work trying not to worry. This is, unfortunately, not an atypical experience. Public program means you're on a bureaucratic schedule. It's not that bureaucrat's money that's getting spent. They don't get paid any different whether your loan funds and you get your property today, next week, or never. Furthermore, it has been my experience that companies with the ability to use restricted provider public programs are often looking to boost their profit margin, and because the competition is restricted, they can often get it. That's one of the reason that FHA (among others) is looking to reduce their annual audit requirements, so that the small brokerages and those with thinner profit margins might be willing to sign up and endure the hassles. I've seen loan firms charge two extra points and over half a percent higher rate because the competition was mostly eliminated, and what was left was other high margin places. Special programs nobody else has are a license to print money, particularly if access to those programs is restricted by the government. The fewer providers who can do it, the less competition there is, and usually, the higher the mark up they want in order to for the privilege of being one of the lucky selected beneficiaries. This is not to say that all public housing programs are difficult, or delayed, or costly. There are individual providers who provide just as good a product at just as good a price. However, the statistics seem to be a much higher than usual incidence of delays, costly extras, and just plain gouging going on due to restricted competition. This is also not to say in any way, shape, or form that public programs aren't worth it. The lady could never have afforded this unit, part of an income restricted program, without a municipal government stepping up to the line on her behalf. Those with a knowledge of economics may realize that this means the other units were made more expensive due to this, likely pricing out other potential buyers so that this particular person could have a better unit. Robbing Peter (and Penny and Porgy and Poppy and pretty much everyone else) to pay Paul and the bureaucrats helping Paul, but that's a matter of housing policy supported by the voters, and my choice is to help Paul or not to help Paul. Peter, etcetera have already been robbed and they're not getting the money back. The bureaucrats will be paid exactly the same whether I help Paul or not. The only question will be exactly who gets this benefit, and I think that under the circumstances I might as well help Paul get them. And if Paul doesn't take it, somebody else will. From the perspective of a given individual's available options, such programs definitely assist people in affording housing superior to what they could otherwise afford. However, you need to realize that there are likely to be delays and unexpected extras in a program like this. One of the requirements of many of these programs is a certain maximum amount of total assets - but if that's all you can have and you have to use some of them for down payment and closing costs, this can mean you're cutting it really tight as far as other expenses go. Indeed, on this scale, paying for an extra few weeks rent at your old place can be a real hardship - but that's the cold hard fact of what happens quite often. If you put in your thirty days notice to the landlord, you're stuck when escrow doesn't close on time. If you don't put in your thirty days to the landlord, you're stuck paying rent for the extra month, costing (in this case) a minimum of about 15% of her total liquid assets, never mind what was left over after what she put in her down payment. There is no universal guide to this situation, and what works in some situations may be totally inappropriate in others. One of the best things is an elected ally in the bureaucrat's chain of command. Another is the willingness of a family member to step in with a gift or extend an interest free loan if you require it, because pretty much all of these first time buyer programs have income and asset limits, and if your cash falls short, everything you paid is pretty much wasted. You won't get the property, and you're unlikely to get that money back. Anytime the government - city, county, state or federal - limits the providers who can work with a given program, they create a pricing differential between that program and the general market, as well as creating a situation where those providers have an assured income from people who don't have any other choice. Given this, the incentive to provide good competent quality work at a competitive price is pretty much absent, leading to situations such as this poor lady's. These programs all keep a list of their special participants, but sometimes there are ways for others to participate. It never hurts to ask, and it may very well prevent situations like this one. Caveat Emptor (literally!) Original article here]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2009://3.4588 2010-09-03T14:00:00Z 2010-09-03T13:47:19Z

An email: Hi Dan, I was reading your article on "should you pay off your mortgage faster?" (DM: link here DELETED It'll be a fresh 30 year loan and I'm 44 years old so this discussion has interest, I...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ Hi Dan, I was reading your article on "should you pay off your mortgage faster?" (DM: link here DELETED It'll be a fresh 30 year loan and I'm 44 years old so this discussion has interest, I don't really want to be making a mortgage payment at 74 ;). I must be really dense but A: I don't get it and B: the table looks like it has an error in it to me. Start with B: first - the investment column can't possible be correct. The assumption is you save or pre-pay $100 per month and invest at 8%. The amount for year 1 is $1,353.29, if you saved $100 per month at the end of a year you'd have $1,200 in principal + $100 * 12 months @ 8% + $200 * 11 months @ 8% + $300 * 10 months @ 8% etc. Even if you socked away the whole $1,200 on day 1 you'd only have $1,296 and have to pay taxes on $96. What I don't get is this - by prepaying $100 on my mortgage I get a guaranteed return of 6% or 6.5%, whatever the mortgage rate is. I do not ever have to pay interest on that piece of principal again, it keeps on giving. Yes my payment stays the same but the amount going to principal increases by the amount of interest I am not paying due to the previous principal payment. Now, the valid comparison to that is a risk free investment alternative no? I've got savings accounts currently yielding 4.5%, 5.3% and 5.4% APY, you might find 6% - might and it probably is an intro rate. Let's be generous and assume I can get the same rate of return on the savings as I pay on the mortgage and put that at 6%. If I pay $1,200 extra in principal on day 1 of the year I don't pay $72 in interest and can't deduct it. If instead I put $1,200 in a savings account on day 1 I earn that $72 in interest. It is a wash, The tax issue is a red herring since not paying the principal gives me a $72 interest deduction but the equal investment return is added to income so (72) + 72 = 0 Could it work out if you put the investment dollars at risk? Sure, but that is a gamble and an apples to oranges comparison. I have different mental pots of money. Pot 1 is investment dollars for retirement, 10% or so of income goes to a tax deferred account invested at various risk levels and doesn't get touched - ever. Until I retire at least! Pot #2 home equity + the carrying cost on the mortgage which is the 25% or so of income that pays the PITI on the house. Pot #3 is liquid reserves, currently about a years worth of #2's income requirements. My goal is absolutely to eliminate the P&I part of PITI over time. With enough in pot #3 I'll be plowing as much as possible into principle reduction over the next few years once we get moved in and clear the costs associated with a new house such as drapes and furniture. I make a pretty decent salary but who knows how long that will last? As long as the job is secure I'll keep the current mortgage and pre-pay as much as possible. If a few years down the road I felt a little vulnerable to layoff or whatever I'd seriously consider refinancing the then smaller principle balance for a smaller required monthly nut and keep making the higher payments as long as the income stayed intact. Alternatively I may need to do that in 10 years anyway when my kid goes to College. What we are currently paying in private tuition from current income + available cash flow might be a bit short, or we may be ok - depends on where he goes. I'm a College administrator so if he goes here he gets a 100% tuition waiver, 50% at other state schools. And I did look at saving for College in one of the tax deferred accounts, we don't qualify for all the juicy ones based on family AGI. We could do a 529 but I've made the personal choice that we're better off driving the retirement savings and paying off the mortgage rather than killing ourselves to give the kid a free ride . I like a guaranteed 6.5% return. With any luck the house will get worth more over time as well making the return even better. I played leverage to the max in 1999 when I bought a townhouse for 78K by assuming a mortgage, I just sold it 2 months ago and cleared $112K cash in my pocket, principle balance was 64K so 14K of the 112K was return of my principle payments. That was great but now we're in a little better position financially and I'd like to preserve it over time. I've owed huge piles of money to CC companies and auto loans in the past - don't ever want to go there again! One other thought. Despite the current turmoil in the market houses do tend to be worth more over time. Probably not as good as the stock market if the time horizon is long enough but they do go up. In my case 60% of the asset value is borrowed so there is a leverage factor on the return. Here is the thought - under current tax rules that return is tax free where as the stock market return is not. It's all about risk tolerance I guess. Upon examination, I think you're probably right, although I have assumed "a start of the month/year" program where the question was academic until you actually had some money to put to one place or the other; i.e. an initial $100 today and $100 every month, so a year from today you've got $1300 without interest. Kind of like the old problem where if you've got an eighty one foot wall and beams every nine feet, you need ten beams to have a real structure. One to start (at the zero point), and then another one every nine feet. The pots of money idea is a good one, but most people shouldn't be limited themselves to theoretically risk free investments, especially once you've got your reserves. 1) They're not risk free 2) The big certainty if you don't take any risk is that you will make less than someone who did. Kind of like being chased by headhunters, and having a choice to sit there and be killed an eaten immediately or jump off a cliff into a river with crocodiles. Sure, the crocodiles might get you, or you might hit the rocks when you land and you might even drown. But if you do nothing, you're going in the stew-pot for certain. Question: How do you think the bank or insurance company can afford to pay a return on the money? It doesn't come out of some hyperspatial vortex! They take this money and invest it in basically the same places you would. The difference is: They take the risk, they get the reward. This reward is plenty to pay their employee salaries, all the expenses of operating, plus your little pittance, and have plenty left over for the stockholders. If their results are adverse, what's going to happen to your money? Question: If you never refinance, how hard do you think it's going to be to make a $1500 payment in thirty years? Assuming a 3.5% rate of inflation, about like paying $530 per month now. Shouldn't be difficult at all. If you do refinance, you are making a conscious choice that the other loan is, in total, a better deal for you. Sure you might not have a lot of income after retirement. My point is that with time and diversification, the assets you would accumulate from alternative investments will be more able to pay your loan out of interest than any money you saved. Question: If you can't make the low payment, what will your equity situation be like? Once again, this is assuming you never refinance, but 29 years out, you'll owe roughly $15,000, and assuming average 5% appreciation, the property will be worth about 4.3 times as much. Even if you never paid a penny of principal down, that's well over a million in equity. This gives you options such as selling (take the money and run), a RAM (take the money and stay - which I generally advise against), a move "down market", etcetera. Stop thinking of money as something that pays the rent and other expenses, and start thinking in terms of what it can do. Furthermore, it's not a risk free 6.5%. For most people, it's more like an effective margin of 4.7% or less. I'm not advising anyone to go out and strip equity without a very strong reason to do so so and a clear eye on potential consequences, but which after tax return sounds better to you: 4.7% or 7.2%? I agree with the NASD rule that prohibits member firms from accepting borrowed money for investments, but I have to admit that it does work, at least for the "average over time" numbers in theory. The 7.2% assumes investment income is all ordinary income, fully taxed every year. In point of fact, at least some is likely to be capital gains and some is likely to be deferred. The downside is that any investment return is purely speculative and you could lose your principal. You don't ever gamble with money you can't afford to lose, no matter what the long term odds. Nor do you put it all on the same bet, no matter how you split it up. On the other hand, the biggest risk is not taking any. Instead of paying off your mortgage, diversifying your money amongst a sufficient number of stock and bond investments is so likely to leave you with so much more in total net assets over the next twenty years that the expected exceptions are a statistical non-event. Caveat Emptor Original article here]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2009://3.4586 2010-09-02T14:00:00Z 2010-09-02T13:51:47Z

Hi, my name is DELETED, I need help. I bought a house (a few months ago) because my boyfriend persuaded me to. This was supposed to be a real estate investment between us. I put the house in my...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ Hi, my name is DELETED, I need help. I bought a house (a few months ago) because my boyfriend persuaded me to. This was supposed to be a real estate investment between us. I put the house in my name and i was supposed to get $9000 and he was gonna keep the rest to do the repairs. I never received my money and he never did the repairs on the house and we ended up breaking up (about a week later). I started getting suspicious, (a few days ago) I found out that the appraiser lied on the appraisal. He lied and changed the square footage of one of the comparable houses to make around the same square footage of my house showing that it sold for the same price I brought my house. There is more to make me think he lied. I found out that the mortgage person, the seller, my ex and the appraiser all know each other I think it was a set up. I have a lawyer, but what can happened after the loan is already in my name. This house is not worth what I bought it for he appraised it around $50,000 more. Will the mortgage company have to buy the house back because they are supposed to check it. When I looked up the appraisal company that he had on the appraisal, it doesn't even exist. Please give me some advise, will I be stuck with this house? Based upon this information, I'd say you were most likely the victim of a scam. They over-inflated the value of the house, took the extra money, and left you owing everything the house was worth and more. Talk to your lawyer. It sounds like you've probably got a good case for a civil suit, and can make criminal complaints as well for fraud and conspiracy. However, you have title to the house and a Note that says, "I agree to pay..." and a Trust Deed securing said Note. Just because you are the victim of a scam does not relieve you of your obligations under said Note and Deed of Trust. Not living up to those obligations is one of the best ways I know to make a bad situation worse. It's going to take a while - probably years - before you recover anything of what you've been taken for, if you ever get it. The wheels of justice grind slowly, and require a lot of lubrication in the form of money. Just because you're the victim doesn't change the process. It's conceivable that your lawyer may even advise you to let it go, if in their judgment you're unlikely to recover enough to make it worth your while. Before we get into the main issue, let me cover a special red flag that was ignored. When you are buying a house, you are not going to get cash back - not with the approval of the lender. As I went over in Real Estate Sellers Giving A Buyer Cash Back, concealing something material from the lender is fraud, in and of itself. Lots of people get talked into cutting corners in their transaction or doing without an agent because "agents don't really do anything." However, there are so many scams out there that any time you cut corners you risk getting taken for the full amount of the transaction. Lots of folks discount the possibility - until it happens to them. And it does happen. Real estate is the largest dollar value most folks ever get involved in, and scamming a little extra is likely to be major money in and of itself. A certain percentage of all transactions have issues - and when someone tries to talk you into short-circuiting your protections, that's pretty much a red flag that this is one of those transactions to beware. Not falling victim is worth a lot more than those protections cost you. As a buyer's agent, my goal is to make at least a ten percent difference in the quality of property, the price, or some combination. That's in addition to preventing things like what happened to you. Having an agent gives you someone responsible to you. Someone you can sue if something goes wrong, so they have incentive to guard your interests. Someone with insurance (deep pockets!) and a license and a broker supervisor who should have monitored the situation. Not to mention who should be able to prevent the situation happening in the first place. Can you stop collusion between the appraiser, the loan officer, and the seller? No. Stopping collusion is difficult, as anyone who has ever studied accounting can tell you. A lot of the curriculum goes into the subject of controls, and separating functions so that it's only with multiple people cooperating that assets get embezzled. But with an agent who knows your market on your side and bound to you, it's a lot less likely they'll get away with it. How likely would you have been to buy the property for the price you did if an agent had said, "I can get you a better property for the same money" (or something like it for less)? Kind of likely to short-circuit the entire scam, eh? Caveat Emptor Original article here]]> tag:gockel.hmdnsgroup.com,2007:/~searchli//3.2853 2010-09-01T14:00:00Z 2010-09-01T13:56:52Z

(Note: This article is a reprint of one of the earliest articles I wrote, from a time when rates were higher. The principles, however, are quite valid - and even reinforced by the fact that rates now are much lower)...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ accurate estimate. That depends upon the loan officer and the provider they work for. Again, the relationship between this form at the beginning when you apply for the loan and the loan that is actually delivered with the final documents can be extremely tenuous, even with the new rules that went into effect at the beginning of 2010.. The APR in the very first box is the result of an attempt by Congress to compress what is fundamentally at least a two-dimensional number into one linear measurement. It is intended to help give you a direct, one number measurement of the effective interest rate, given the expenses. But, in order to this it has to make some assumptions. The first of these is that you're never going to sell the property, or at least not until after the period of the loan. Back in the early 1970s with stable secure jobs for a large portion of the populace not only in government but in private industry as well, and people living their whole lives in their first house, this was a reasonable assumption. No longer. The median time for ownership duration is about nine and a half years. The second of those is that you're not going to refinance. This also was not an unreasonable assumption back in the early 1970's. Our habits as a society have changed since then. The fact is that the median age of mortgages (half older, half younger) is currently under 3 years. Only something like 4 percent of all mortgages are older than 5 years. I'll have other implications of these facts later, in other essays. But by making this assumption, that you're never going to sell and never going to refinance (despite already having done so several times) and just make that minimum payment every month for thirty years, it allows the illusion that you're going to spread those costs out over thirty years, when the appropriate time frame is much shorter. This is a dangerous illusion. To give a specific example, because it means that, when measured by APR, a 5.5% loan with closing costs plus two points looks like a better loan than a 6 % loan with closing costs but no points. In fact, it is quite likely that the 6% loan is a better idea, and a 6.5% loan where the lender pays your all of your closing costs for you may be better yet. Let's go through the calculation involved. Let's give the more expensive loan at a lower rate the benefit of every doubt. Assume they're both thirty-year fixed rate loans, so you'll actually keep getting benefits as long as you keep the loan. Assume the base loan we're looking at is $270,000, the same figure I've used elsewhere. This can be either an existing loan, or a purchase where you need $270,000 beyond your down payment to cover purchase price and costs of buying. As we computed in looking at the Good Faith Estimate, the closing costs of doing this loan are somewhere in the neighborhood of $3400 or so. But "third party" costs, such as escrow and title, are excluded from APR calculation, so we're going to deduct about half of that, or $1700, from them when we calculate APR. I'm also going to assume that you actually pay all of your "prepaid" and "reserve" items out of pocket, which keeps things simple. Your actual loan amount in the case of the 5.5% loan with two points is $278,980, and your monthly payment is $1584.02. Your actual loan amount in the case of the 6% loan is $273,400, and your monthly payment $1639.17. The third loan has a payment of $1706.58 on a balance of $270,000 even. The APRs (a complex calculation) work out to 5.742, 6.059, and 6.500 percent, respectively. Looks like the first is a better bargain, right? Your actual interest expense the first month is $1278.66 the first month for the first loan, $1367.00 for the second. This is a difference of $88.34, and this number is actually going to increase for the first several years of the loan. The rest of the money is a principal payment. Equity. Money you don't owe anymore. The principal paid the first month on the first loan is $305.36; on the second is $272.17, a difference of 33.19 the first month in the first loans favor. For the third loan $1462.50 represents interest and only $244.08 is principal. This is really looking like you make the right choice with 5.5%, correct? But let's look at two years from now - about the age of the median mortgage. I'm going to use the loan in the middle as baseline.

Loan Interest paid Principal paid Remaining balance Diff in interest paid: Diff in balance: Net $ to you

Loan 1 $30,288.21 $7,728.21 $271,251.79 $-2130.05 $+4773.36 $-2643.31

Loan 2 $32,418.26 $6,921.84 $266,478.16 $0 $0 $0

Loan 3 $34,720.18 $6,237.83 $263,762.17 $2301.92 $-2715.99 $+414.07

Loan 1 has paid $2130.05 less in interest, and $806.37 more in principal than Loan 2. Looks great, right? But they also paid $5580 more for the loan, or which $4773.36 remains on their balance. Remember, fifty percent of the people have sold or refinanced at this point. When you sell or refinance, The Benefits Stop. But the cost is sunk. You paid it in full two years ago. And at this point if you sell this home, you will actually get $4773.36 less in your pocket than in if you had taken the 6% loan. This is somewhat compensated for by the fact that you spent $2130.05 less in interest expense. But you're still $2643.31 down as compared to the 6%, and there's no way around that. Meanwhile, the 6% loan itself lags the 6.5% loan by $414.07 at this point in time. And if you refinance, it gets even worse. You're now paying interest on the $4773.36 in higher balance for the rest of the time you're got your home. Let's say the rate is 5% now because you got an even better deal. This means $238.67 per year, $19.89 per month extra that you're going to pay for as long as you have that loan, all for benefits that you don't get anymore and never paid for their costs in the first place. This is truly the gift that keeps on giving, isn't it? To the lenders. Now let's look 5 years out, when over 95% of the people will have sold or refinanced.

Loan Interest paid Principal paid Remaining balance Diff in balance: Net $ to you

Loan 1 $74,007.65 $21,033.41 $257,946.59 $+3535.98 $+1817.25

Loan 2 $79,360.88 $18,989.39 $254,410.61 $0 $0

Loan 3 $85,144.66 $17,250.36 $252,749.63 $-1660.98 $-4122.80

At this point for loan 1, you have saved $5353.23 in interest and paid down $2044.02 more in principal, right? Yes, but you paid $5580 more for the first loan than you would have for the second, and you still owe $3535.98 of this difference. If you sell, you will get $3535.98 less to put in your pocket, although that will be more than balanced out by the interest you saved. Net profit to you of choosing the first loan: $1817.25, neglecting tax treatment. Boy did you make the right choice, right? But remember that over ninety five percent of everyone who made the same choice you did never made it to this point. Furthermore, if you're like most people and you intend to buy some other property where the transaction includes a loan, that loan will have a starting balance $3535.98 higher to start with than if you'd chosen loan number 2 in the first place. Assume you got a great rate on your new home: 5% even. This means you're now paying $176.80 per year in interest that you wouldn't be paying if you'd simply chosen Loan 2 in the first place. Assuming you intend to own property for the rest of your life, in a little over ten years your gain is gone. On the other hand, you are doing safely doing better with loan 2 than 3 at this point. The difference in interest you've paid has more than made up for the difference in starting balance. Whether you refinance or sell, it's going to be difficult to make up $4122.80 with the interest based upon $1660.98. Assuming 5%, this is $83.05 per year it amounts to 50 years to recover. Loan 3 shows up pretty well against loan 1, though. $5196.96 difference in balance times 5% per year is $259.85. Divide the $1479.49 by this number and get that in 5.69 additional years, your benefits from loan 1 as opposed to loan 3 will be gone. Now, if you get a great deal and refinance instead of selling, that extra $3535.98 that you still owe on that mortgage is still there, and will be for as long as you own that home. Assume you got a really great deal of 5%. This means $176.80 per year of extra interest expense - just from the fact that your balance is higher because of sunk costs to pay for benefits that have stopped. Assume you keep your home another five years, so altogether you've had it ten years since the initial loan. This has cut your gain to $933.25. This happens all the time. It is not uncommon for me to talk with people who bought their homes in the 1970s, have refinanced ten or twelve times, and now owe more than ten times their original purchase price, a good portion of which is directly attributable to unrecovered closing costs of the refinances. Here's the point: closing costs and points stick around, sometimes a long time after the benefits you got from them are gone, and people refinance or more often than most people admit. The only loan that can be ahead from day one is the true zero cost loan. Everything else will pay for itself eventually, and more than pay for itself if you hang onto it long enough, but you're sinking a significant amount of money in the bet upfront, money which is going to be around in your balance a long time. Furthermore, people don't hang onto these loans as long as they think they will, and very few people hang onto them long enough to see profits from high closing cost loans. Finally, the rate at which a zero cost loan can be done varies from day to day, and by quite a lot over time. Let's say six months from now I can do a 6% loan no cost. It costs you zero, and now if you're loan 3, you've got the same loan at a lower balance than the guy who chose the 6% loan 2 above, whom I can't necessarily help with those better rates. Then three years down the line, rates really drop, and I can do 5.5% for no cost. A call to both loan 2 and loan 3 nets borrowers who are eager to cut their rate for zero cost, but I still may not have anything that helps 1 in the sense of being worth the cost of doing it. Now loan 1, loan 2, and loan 3 all have the same rate, but loan 3 owes the least amount of money, therefore has the lowest payment, and has the most equity in their home. Here's another dirty little not very secret, but rarely publicly acknowledged, fact: People don't always refinance into a lower rate when they refinance. If you've been a homeowner 15 years or so, chances are reasonable that you've done it - possibly more than once. Don't worry, I'm not going to pillory you in public over it, but if you won't admit it to yourself then there's not a lot that can be done for you. People have various reasons for refinancing into higher rates, some of them reasonable, some of them relating to necessity, and some quite frivolous. But you'd be amazed at how often people looking to refinance expect me to believe stories that numbers show to be obvious fiction about how often they've refinanced a property. This is math, and if the numbers tell me you've been making payments on this loan for two years when you tell me five, I'll bet millions to milliamps that if I go check the public records that are maintained on every piece of real property in the country I'll find that Trust Deed recorded two years ago. Now, it's okay to tell some lies of certain kinds to your loan officer, and assuming that any prepayment penalty has expired, this is probably one of them. No harm, no foul. What a typical loan officer cares about is getting paid, and if you're withholding or correct information doesn't make a difference to that, there's been no harm done. A good loan officer will add, "Putting the client into a better position" to that first, paramount concern, and if the information you withheld would have resulted in a different answer to this question, you have only yourself to blame. (Looking for altruists in business is both pointless and hazardous to your financial health. Businesspersons donate huge amounts of time and money and energy to charities or other works for the public good. But we're at work to Make Money. I am very good at what I do and getting better because I want to Make More Money, and mistakes do the opposite of Make More Money). But you need to be completely honest with that wonderful person you see in the mirror every day who follows you around twenty-four hours every day, shares in all of your triumphs and joys, and has to deal with all of your mistakes for the rest of your life. Otherwise you're going to waste a lot of money on mortgages making the same mistakes over and over again. Getting back to the actual Truth-In-Lending form, finance charge assumes you keep the loan the full term, as I have explained. Amount financed is subject to the same limitations as the Good Faith Estimate, and in fact assumes that the Good Faith Estimate is honest and accurate. So is the Finance charge. Neither of these, nor the Total of Payments, which is simply the sum of these two, is any more valid than the Good Faith Estimate this form is based upon. Do NOT use the Truth-In-Lending or APR as a way to compare loans, numbers-wise. Many people do precisely this because it's such a simple looking, apparently easy to understand form. But if it's based upon a Good Faith Estimate that's not accurate, it means nothing. Zip. Nada. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Nope, the minimal information provided by this form is in the details that start about halfway down. Demand Feature: If checked, this means the lender can require that you repay the loan in full, with a certain number of days (usually 30) notice. It can also mean there's a balloon on the loan. Variable Rate Feature: if checked, this means that at some point, if you keep the loan long enough, become a variable rate loan. I've seen loans that went as long as ten years before a variable rate kicked in, or it can be right away. It all depends upon the loan you agree to. Credit Life and Credit Disability are two products that I would generally recommend against unless it's the only life or disability insurance you can get. Some states do not permit them to be a requirement of the loan - and in those cases where the lender would otherwise require one or both, you won't get the loan as a result. (On the other hand, without these state prohibitions, many lenders would require them much more often, costing consumers in the aggregate billions. Just like everything else in mortgages, it's a tradeoff with winners and losers no matter what you choose.) Both of these products typically pay any benefits directly to the lender, when you want them to come to you or your family. Buying your own life insurance or disability insurance is typically a much better idea. Property and Flood Insurance The lender can and will require you to maintain proper insurance on the property as a condition of your loan. In California, they cannot require this be for the full amount of the loan, but they can and will require you to maintain coverage for the amount of full replacement costs - what it would take to rebuild your property as it is from the ground up. Many lenders delegate the responsibility for making sure this is done on their behalf to big administrative operations that cover the whole country, and they are ignorant of individual state law even for such major states as California. Be polite, but firm, when they tell you they are looking for coverage in the full amount of the loan. Flood insurance is a separate policy that can also be required if the property is on a flood map. The lender can either demand your loan in full immediately or purchase insurance on your behalf and force you to pay the bill if you fail to show them continuing proof of adequate coverage. SECURITY: The first box should be checked for purchases, the second for refinances. In rare cases I do see somebody taking out a loan on a home that is free and clear to get a better rate than they would on a new property they're buying, because they'll get a better rate that way. In this case, the second box should be checked. Filing Fees are for filing the papers with the county recorder, and should be the same as listed on the Good Faith Estimate Late Charge basically discloses what your penalty for any late payments will be. It is expressed as a percentage of your normal monthly payment. Prepayment penalty: Should tell you honestly whether there will be a prepayment penalty on the loan, but often doesn't. Says nothing about the duration of it. Forget the second line. All of the costs to get you the loan are sunk and nonrefundable from the time you sign the papers. All of the interest that you pay as it is due is gone forever. You'll never see it again. They earned it. They're not going to give it back. I've never heard of a loan where in the initial contract the borrower was promised a rebate of part of those costs if they paid off early. Banks did make a lot of offers to discount loans if you paid them off in the late seventies and early eighties, but these were offers made at a later time, long after loan papers were signed, by the banks because they were losing their shirts buying money at 14% or so when it was already loaned several years earlier to customers at 6%. It wasn't a part of the contract in the first place. Assumption: This means that if you sell the property, the buyer can keep your loan in effect. The VA loan is the only one out there that is generally assumable by the buyer if you sell, but there are some other loans that are assumable as well. It's not usually a good idea to let a buyer assume the loan, but there may be no alternative. The reason: You can still be liable for these if you do allow them to be assumed. Then there's a line where there are two final square boxes to check, where "* means an estimate" and "all dates and numerical disclosures except the late payment disclosures are estimates. Expect the second box to be checked. It's all based upon the Good Faith Estimate. If they're stretching the truth there, the numbers here are going to be similarly distorted. And if it's not checked, that's "an inadvertent oversight" and unlikely to be prosecuted. Which is as it should be - unless there's a pattern of it, which is the case with all too many loan providers. Caveat Emptor Original here Another relevant article: The Difference Between Note Rate (APY) and APR]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2010://3.5002 2010-08-31T14:00:00Z 2010-08-31T13:49:57Z

I hear it and read it all the time - advice that says to pre-emptively reject the possibility of paying points. People that talk to me about loan rates that tell me they will not consider any loan that...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ Nobody does loans for free. The interest you are paying does not go to the bank who does your loan. It goes to the actual investor who furnishes the money. And here's the fallacy that completely guts the advice: What has become the most common system of loan origination, where the originator is separate from the investor, has become the most common system because it is cheaper for the consumers. Despite Congress' recent attempt to eliminate brokers as competition for big lenders, brokers are still far cheaper. Once upon a time, all residential mortgages were done by lenders who intended to hold them for the life of the loan. There was no origination. There was no discount. The Rate was The Rate, and they would give you whatever rate they were offering everybody else that week - if you qualified - as they wanted to make a certain comparatively high margin on the money. If you didn't qualify for The Rate, there were alternatives but none of them was advantageous. In any case, The Rate wasn't that great, but there weren't many alternatives at all, and all the banks charged about the same Rate, and there was pretty much always a prepayment penalty of some sort because they had to be certain they'd make enough money via interest to pay their employees for doing the loan. This started changing a very long time ago, with the advent of Fannie Mae (and its younger sibling, Freddie Mac). Nonetheless, the two GSEs didn't work in a way that made their role obvious to the consumer until about thirty to forty years ago. The fact that they bought mortgages, allowing lenders to loan what was essentially the same money over and over again meant that rates went down, but also as part of the same phenomenon that lenders were no longer making money from the interest rate of holding those mortgages. The upshot was that consumers now had a choice: In order to get the cheaper rates made possible by the GSEs, they had a choice: They could pay origination, or they could accept a higher rate, such that the lender who did their loan received either a bond premium or yield spread premium, which amounts to a different piece of the same thing. The advice not to pay points for a mortgage actually dates from this period, as holdouts equivalent to today's portfolio lenders came up with what was an advertising slogan that made it look like dealing with agency lenders was actually costing you more, when in reality agency lenders were saving consumers money over the longer term, albeit with slightly higher upfront costs. But when it's saving you as much as two percent per year over the portfolio lenders of yesteryear (who began charging points themselves because they could), it doesn't take long to see that paying a point of origination, or one percent of loan amount upfront in order to get a rate two percent lower with the agency lender was a much better deal than the alternative. Once started, the advice to not pay points took on a life of its own. After all, what's not to like about not paying for something? But origination points pays for a real service, and if it saves you money in your particular context, then it is worth paying. But if you reject in blanket fashion the possibility of paying points, then you never consider the very real possibility that it might save you money. Nor, in the modern world, is not paying origination a real possibility. I can make my money in the form of points, I can make it via an explicit dollar figure charge that amounts to the same figure, or I can jack up the rate and make the money when the secondary loan market pays me more than the face value of the bond because the interest rate is above that of similar mortgages. Note that there is no option that says "your lender doesn't make money for doing your loan." If your lender doesn't make money, they don't stay in business. I don't do free loans. Nobody does free loans. If I'm not going to make money anyway, I'd prefer to stay home and play with the dog and teach the girls about TANSTAFL, because plainly there are an awful lot of naive children somehow getting through the educational system without absorbing this critical concept. Pretty much everyone else in the loan industry needs to make a living also. Refuse to pay origination, and you're back in the old days of portfolio lenders - with a rate two percent or so above the agency lenders for the same loans. Points actually come in two forms. As well as origination, there is discount. Origination is going to be paid on every loan. It can come from a figure in points you are being charged that amount to a certain number of dollars, it can come from an explicit number of dollars you are being charged (that amounts to the same number of dollars as the points do), or it can come from jacking the rate up so as to receive yield spread (which must be disclosed) or a secondary market bond premium (which does not). It literally does not matter to me how I make my money - it's still the same number of dollars - but it is going to be made or neither I nor anyone else is going to do your loan. Some companies charge more origination than others, but if they can deliver a loan that is likely to save you money overall, that higher origination is worth paying. Don't lose sight of the forest because you're obsessed with one particular tree, and origination is not the only way that loan providers make money. Not too long ago, I had someone bring me a HUD-1 form where the lender hid eight thousand dollars of profit in plain sight where the borrower couldn't recognize it, in addition to the $1500 they claimed was all they were making via origination. Nor do all forms of origination have to be disclosed. Direct lenders and correspondent brokers do not have to disclose what they make when they sell the loan to the final investor and so advice telling you not to pay points or not to pay origination allows them the ability to cut out other loan providers, at least with the gullible, which is most of the public. Evaluate the loan in terms of the bottom line to you. I happen to think it's both fair and a good idea to charge origination in terms of points. When I set the rate and cost of your loan, I'm risking more for a bigger loan - and working harder, too. If I make a mistake in pricing the loan, I have to pay a figure in points in order to make it good. If your credit score suffers a sudden drop, the difference isn't a flat fee - it's a charge in points. If you don't get me information I need promptly, or the lenders are just so snowed under that we need to extend the rate lock, that's a charge in points. The bigger the loan, the more work it is to get it accepted by the investor. Conforming loans are, by and large, the easiest - but that's not to say they're easy with the current paranoid lending environment. Super conforming gets tougher. Non-conforming loan amounts these days are like pulling teeth without anesthesia and it gets worse from there. The points charge for origination may go down in steps for larger loans, but for everyone in the industry, you're going to find that the bigger the loan, they larger the number of absolute dollars the lender needs to make it worth their while. They can hide it, lie about it, or risk scaring children of legal age away by honestly disclosing it, but I promise you that you are going to pay it in the final analysis. Discount is an explicit charge for getting a lowered rate. This figure is always expressed in points. I can translate it into dollars for you, but the actual charge is a certain percentage of the final loan amount. Paying discount is pretty much optional, and the answer to the question of whether you should (and how much) changes with the type of loan, your situation, how long you're planning or likely to keep a particular loan, and the tradeoffs between rate and cost available at any given point in time. Discount points can be thought of as negative yield spread or bond premium, and yield spread or bond premium can be thought of as negative discount points. You cannot have discount points on a loan with yield spread or one where the loan officer says they will make what they need to on the secondary market. What you are paying in such cases is origination, not discount. In neither case is cutting points out of a loan a matter of negotiating skill. Cutting points down is a matter of effectively shopping your loan and asking the right questions of prospective loan providers and nailing them down as to exactly what they are really offering and paying attention to the answers. You're probably not going to see huge differences of three points for the same rate or a full percent lower on the same loan for the same cost unless you're comparing yourself to someone who doesn't shop their loan effectively, but saving half a point on a $400,000 loan at the same rate is $2000, and saving an eighth of a percent for the same cost is $500 per year for as long as you keep the loan. I don't know about you, but that's more than enough to motivate me to spend the necessary time and effort to shop for a better loan. In any case, evaluate loans in terms of the bottom line to you, not by how much the provider makes or has to disclose that they make. How much it's going to be in points and closing costs to get the loan done in the first place, versus what it is going to cost you in interest charges every month. They're not going to yield a single unequivocal answer, but rather breakeven points, or "How long do I have to keep this loan in order to get back my initial investment via lowered monthly cost of interest?" When you're refinancing, a zero cost loan is the only thing that can be ahead from day one, but even an ardent fan of zero cost loans like myself is finding them hard to justify in the current market, because the rate cost tradeoff is so shallow on that part of the tradeoff curve. In plain English, when you break even on increased costs in six or eight months due to lowered cost of interest, it's very hard for me not to recommend you pay those slightly higher costs, knowing that the median time people keep loans is about 28 months, and they'll get their money back four times over in that period, and keep getting it back all over again every six or eight months they keep the loan. By the way, if someone won't guarantee their costs, how are you going to get those figures that gives you the answer of which loan is most likely best for you? The lender knows, or should know, what they can really deliver. You don't, except for what they tell you. If you're not going to follow this model, you're in the same position as the woman who goes to the singles bar looking for Mr. Right. What she's going to find is Mr. Right Now, the sleaze ball who says anything to get her into bed with him and leaves her feeling dumped on and used. The parallels are exact. Nothing wrong with it if all you're looking for is a quick roll in the hay - but I've never heard of anybody who went loan shopping with the intention of getting screwed. If you don't nail them down with a written guarantee, loan providers can and will lie, omit charges that you are going to pay, and just flat out pull promises out of their backside in order to get you to sign up for a loan. The new RESPA rules only a little more difficult to lie, and it you don't sign up for their loan in the first place, there is no way they're going to get paid for doing that loan. What I hope you take away from this article is simple: The idea that it may be to your benefit to pay points on a loan, and rejecting the possibility only encourages prospective loan providers to lie about what loan they are really going to deliver. Instead, nail them down as to exactly what they're willing to offer, whether they're willing to guarantee it, and what the limitations upon that guarantee are. Once you have this information, you have the information necessary to decide whether paying points is in your best interest - because it might very well be. Caveat Emptor Original article here]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2010://3.5001 2010-08-30T14:00:00Z 2010-08-30T13:52:06Z

On a forum I frequent, someone posted this advice for prospective property purchasers: At closing, at the title office or bank, when signing the title, contract for sale or any transfer instrument (use a single obliterating line) mark out the...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ On a forum I frequent, someone posted this advice for prospective property purchasers: At closing, at the title office or bank, when signing the title, contract for sale or any transfer instrument (use a single obliterating line) mark out the word "tenant" and write above it "landlord" or "buyer". Better yet, require a free simple title to transfer ownership without the buyer identified as a "tenant". I do not understand this "advice" and am turning to you for clarification. Thanks! I only work in California, but the only times the word "tenant" should appear on a title transfer deed is if it's a leasehold, or to describe the manner in which two or more grantees hold title amongst themselves. It is possible that someone might contend that a title granted as "tenant" was a leasehold or rental interest of some nature. I can't see it working in the face of a purchase contract, though, unless there's a whole lot of scamming going on, and everybody involved would basically lose their license and their livelihood, and be liable to the purchaser for what they should have gotten, and didn't. Be advised, however, that I'm not a lawyer, so consult one. With that said, however, such words shouldn't appear unless there's a reason for it. Here in California, the deeds typically read "(A) grants (B) (type of title or interest) in (legal description of property). It doesn't say seller, buyer, or anything else. It simply transfers title from one group of holders holder to another. There can be commonality between the first group and the second - say a parent granting the property from themselves to themselves and their child. Spouses usually automatically join title by action of law, but it can be beneficial to have them officially on title of record in some cases. They can also be used to remove a particular party to the deed, by omitting them from the list of parties the property is being granted to, as in from W, X, Y and Z to W, X and Z. There are two kinds of transfer deeds most people will see: A Grant Deed conveys any interest in the property, including interests that may accrue due to operation of law at a later time. A Quitclaim Deed conveys only what interests you many currently have. An actual purchase should use a Grant Deed, transfers within a given family most often use Quitclaims. There are others: Warranty Deeds and Special Warranty Deeds, the latter being mostly used in lender owned property. Both are insurable, marketable title, but there are differences and if you need to know, consult a licensed attorney. Sometimes people acquire title through court judgment, and the title being granted is as strong as anything else, if subject to appeal. The holder or holders can be lots of different things. It can be a corporation, husband and wife, a single individual, a trust, an estate, a partnership, etcetera, or even a combination. It also includes how the grantees are going to hold title: joint tenants, tenants in common, common property, etcetera. Each of these has legal implications, and those implications change from state to state. Consult a lawyer in your state for more. Joint tenants, also known as joint tenants with rights of survivorship (i.e. survivor gets the entire share of title), is the most common way for married couples to hold property, but there are many others. There can be layers of this - say a husband and wife hold their share of title as joint tenants, but they are only part owners in a tenancy in common. Any time there are two or more owners, the title deed has to say how they are going to hold title between them. Each of the possibilities has legal meanings and consequences. Single property owners can be and usually are described as "a single man/woman", "an unmarried man/woman" (not the same thing as single!), "a married man/woman as his/her sole and separate property" and many other things, but the word "tenant" does not appear in any of the possibilities I am aware of. Each of these implies things about the state of title as they hold it, but a full description is beyond the scope of this article and changes from state to state. Consult your attorney for details. The interest being granted can be one of several things or a combination of interests. A "fee" is a piece of actual land. An "easement" is the right to use a particular piece of land in a particular way, but without the rights of ownership. The most common easement is access. The owner of parcel A gives the owner of parcel B the right to travel over a specified part of parcel A in order to get to their own parcel, or for other purposes. Utility easements are part and parcel of this, and the parcel owner granting an easement is giving up rights to do things with their property that conflict with that easement - for instance, building a garage or granny flat over the gas line. If conflict happens, the property owner is required to do what is necessary to give the easement owner their rights. Quite often, easements run with the ownership of a given property, in which case the title being granted is a fee and one or more easements. A leasehold is a time interest - for a specified period of time. Think of it as a rental interest to get the idea. Finally, there is a condominium interest, in which someone holds title to a share of an underlying property, which interest cannot be partitioned off, and usually comes with some rights of exclusive use to a portion of that property. In plain English, you own a defined share of the entire thing, and exclusive rights to your condominium unit, your assigned parking space, and anything else that may have gone with a particular unit under the Condominium Plan, but you have no rights to split yourself off from the common ownership interest. Just because you live in detached housing does not mean you don't live in property that is legally a Condominium. It irritates me no end to read "title being conveyed" in MLS being "fee simple" and then find below read that are homeowners association dues on the property. These two things never go together. If there are association dues on the property, it isn't a fee simple. Whether the person signing a title transfer deed had a right to grant the ownership interest conveyed (or all of the ownership interest conveyed) is a different story. I can grant my interest in a property on the moon to anyone else, but if I don't have any interest in the property granted it is meaningless - a wasted piece of paper. This is the strongest of many reasons for title insurance. People granting interests that they may not own or control happens all the time. Usually, it is to clear up a cloud on title, but fraud is a real and significant factor, and sometimes people legitimately may believe that they are (or were) the owner, but it turns out they weren't due to some unforseeable factor. If someone sells you a property they don't own, and you don't have title insurance, you are out the money, still owe the money on any mortgage you may have taken out, and you don't own the property. Here is a not too untypical example: Owner A dies, and sibling apparently inherits. Sibling sells property to someone, who eventually sells it to you. But Owner A had a long forgotten marriage that was never dissolved, and that spouse had a child. Child discovers undissolved marriage, checks to see what property may have been left by Owner A, finds your property. Child sues for title and wins, as they've got the law on their side. It can happen to you, no matter your current situation. Fifteen or so years ago, an heir of Alonzo Horton (who laid out what is now downtown San Diego well over a century ago) got several million dollars out of an interest in land it turned out he had inherited but lots of people had been using the entire intervening time. Words in title grants can be important. Unless I was buying a leasehold, I probably wouldn't accept a title deed granted to a "tenant" (unless it was "joint tenants" or "tenants in common" with any co-purchasers in the property), and I'd decline to pay the money until the seller furnished a correct deed. Why should I, when they haven't lived up to their end of the bargain? Why allow them to create a potential can of worms when you don't have to? Lenders, for their part, have also wisely instituted requirements to make the title deeds they are lending money upon conform to certain requirements before they will consummate the loan. They are in the business of making loans that are going to be repaid, not of repossessing property where the owners didn't, but they're not going to tolerate needless clouds on their title if they do need to take over the property. Bottom line: Be careful about wording on the title deed. Word order and even the presence or absence of commas can be important. If at all in doubt, consult your own lawyer. Caveat Emptor Original article here]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2010://3.5000 2010-08-29T14:00:00Z 2010-08-29T13:55:10Z

The most common mistake in real estate (and every other aspect of financial planning, for that matter) is to assume the situation now is going to continue indefinitely. In the stock market, people chase last year's returns. They "wait for...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ now is going to continue indefinitely. In the stock market, people chase last year's returns. They "wait for the market to bottom out". When things are going well, they assume that real estate is going to continue to gain twenty percent per year every year. This is pernicious. Otherwise rational people just assume that whatever is going on right now is going to continue, and it can be extremely difficult to talk them out of it, as I can tell you from personal experience, having lost an awful lot of income trying unsuccessfully to persuade people to limit themselves to what they could actually afford, and missed out on just as much by trying to move people off the sidelines now that we're ready for a recovery in San Diego. But "Past Performance Does Not Guarantee Future Results" is not just a legal disclaimer. It amounts to natural law, just as strong as gravity or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. People get caught up in mass psychology, doing things because everybody else is doing them. Mass psychology can move the market. In fact, the history of real estate is mass psychology moving the market. Masses of people believing that a property is worth $600,000, and therefore it is. They believe it's worth $600,000 today in part because they think it's going to be worth $650,000 tomorrow. Or $700,000, $800,000 do I hear $1,000,000? You get the idea. This works even more strongly on the downslide. People are afraid that if they invest $400,000 in the property today, it'll only be worth $350,000 tomorrow. They don't want to lose money, even if it's only a temporary theoretical loss on paper. They want to wait until the market "bottoms out". Newsflash: Real Estate isn't liquid like stocks and bonds, and should not be purchased (or sold) as if it were, with all of the false conclusions that one assumption leads you to. I'm now going to invoke one of the great and dirty non-secrets of investing: There is no predicting the top or the bottom. Why? Because it turns so strongly on mass psychology. Nobody can tell when mass psychology is going to change. Nobody can tell what it's going to grab onto, or completely ignore. Not Hollywood, not Madison Avenue, and certainly not your friendly neighborhood agent or loan officer. Mass psychology is the "noise" that disguises the true economic signal. There is a real economic signal. Most things really do have some kind of intrinsic value to them. This value is determined by function, by supply and demand, and by ability to pay, as well as lesser factors. Real estate is no different than most other stuff in this regard. Shares of corporations have a value strictly determined by the value of future earnings per share. $1 per year of future earnings may be more valuable in a low inflation environment than it is in a high inflation environment. Longer potential earnings streams are more valuable than short term ones - $1 per year per share from a well-run insurance company is more valuable than the same earnings from a company with one technological trick that currently leads the market. The noise often obscures the signal. A little history that leads to some useful concepts: Back in the first half of the second millennium, the assumption was that Earth was the center of the universe, and that planets (and the sun) traveled in circular orbits about Earth. This didn't fit the observed data (planets sometimes moved backwards against the celestial background), so astronomers postulated that planets moved in "epicycles", smaller circles about what was presumed to be the center path of their orbits, called the deferent. Before Copernicus and Keplerfinally brought the whole house of cards down, astronomers were postulating epicycles within epicycles within epicycles in an attempt to fit the observed data. Unlike planets, economic variables are moved by more than just one force. The fact that planets and artificial satellites are moved by precisely one known force is why we can plot their orbits so precisely. But economics is a lot more complicated, and so the astronomical concepts of epicycles and deferents have some value in understanding them. Let's even use those terms. It's far more complicated than this, but if you think of mass psychology as the epicycle moving about the deferent of the underlying value, you may begin to get a useful picture of what's going on. The epicycles can be very large and last for years, but markets always move about the deferent in the end. That's where the restorative economic forces trend - and the further away from the deferent things get carried by epicycles, the stronger those restorative economic forces are. Right near the deferent they're not very strong, but the further from the deferent that mass psychology and other epicycle creators move perception of value, the stronger the restorative forces get. Think of a a large ball the size of the US economy rolling down a broad shallow valley where the sides get progressively steeper. Things can happen to the ball to move it out of the exact bottom of the valley quite easily, but at the moment it moves off the deferent, forces start acting upon it to move it back to the deferent. Small, almost unnoticed forces that build up, and build up more the further you get from the deferent. Now what does all of this have to do with the price of tea in China, or more precisely, the price of real estate in your area? Everything. For over a decade, we had been pushing that ball up one side of the curve, as I detailed in Fear and Greed, or How Did The Housing Bubble Get So Big? (first published February 2006). We had mass psychology and political direction and the lenders competing for market share and profit with ever more aggressive loan products, and they all pushed the ball about as far off the deferent as it was possible to go. We had hundreds of millions of people pushing that ball just a little more uphill, assisted and wedged and leveraged and braced by all the machinery we could bring to bring to bear. We had it firmly in our minds that this was the "good" side of the valley, where we wanted the ball to be, and we wanted it as far up the "good" side of the valley as possible. We even started thinking of this so-called "good" side of the valley as the deferent, but the deferent pays no attention to what we think. Now let me ask you: When that 14 trillion dollars per year ball finally breaks loose and starts rolling down the hillside, building up momentum all the while as the restorative forces add more and more to that momentum all the way down, and keep adding more and more momentum (although the amounts being added get smaller) all the way to the center, do you think it's going to suddenly and magically stop right on the deferent? Not in this world or any other. It's got all the momentum that a 14 trillion dollar ball can build up, and guess what? It crosses right over that deferent like it wasn't even there and keeps on going. By this time it's got mass psychology behind it just as much as it ever did on the way up, pushing it ever harder as well. In an economic analog to the gravity assist (aka slingshot effect), it is very easy to push it much further to the "bad" side of the deferent than ever we had it to the "good" side, particularly as the government meddling intending to slow the ball's rolling is in fact making it worse and worse and worse and worse and worse, because the government is not paying attention to the Law of Unintended Consequences. What's the practical upshot? Well, other than the fact that any disturbance from the deferent distorts the markets and makes for future oscillations, and that anything we can do to the market generates just as many losers as winners, what is the practical upshot for individuals? Nobody can directly control the market actions of others, so how can we as individuals best deal with all of this? The way we deal with all of this is quite simple. First we have to get as true a picture of where the deferent really is as we possibly can, or at least where we are in relation to the deferent. What is the supply of housing like in your market, and how easy is it to add more? What is the demand for housing like in your market? Do people want to live there? Are we talking San Diego and Honolulu, or are we talking Detroit and Cleveland? Next, we have to ask "what is the ability to pay?" How much do people make relative to the basic necessities of living? How strong and how varied is the area economy? Is it a hub for multiple industries like San Diego and Boston, where if one industry tanks the market is likely to be supported by others, or is it a one industry (like Silicon Valley was twenty years ago) or one company town (like Seattle used to be)? At any one point in time, the value of a particular property is a function of the value of comparable properties around it. If model matches are selling for $300,000 right now, the property is likely to be worth about $300,000 right now. The only way to tell for sure, of course, is to put it on the market and see if anyone buys it for that. The trend is a function of supply and demand - how many properties are for sale right now and how many people want to buy them - as well as mass psychology. Finding the deferent precisely is incredibly tough, but finding which side of it we're on is usually much easier, if you will ignore mass psychology and what is happening right now and look at the underlying economic factors of a particular housing market. I performed such a study a while ago; a study I stand by the results of (if anything, more strongly today than then). The study assumed an underlying interest rate of six and a half percent as that was what was available for about one point then; rates are much lower than that today. Mass psychology - a temporary phenomenon of millions of Chicken Littles screaming that the sky is falling - is obscuring the underlying basics as much as it ever did on the way up. Add in that the party in power in the government is doing its dead level best to kill the economy, and things get depressing. But governments change and mass psychology does too. Obviously, the way to profit is different now than it was back when the market was going full gangbusters the other direction. Then, you could buy any damned property you like, pretend to fix it up a bit, and the rising tidal bore of the market would ensure you could make a profit. But the economics of relying upon flipping a property for quick profit are chancy; market sentiment can turn any time. Longer term investing gives less spectacular results but more certain ones. The deferent for real estate values does rise over time, with population and economic prosperity and the fact that the amount of land available in an area is fixed, and the trend seems to be tying up more and more of that land in reserves of one sort or another: Open space, limited development zones, historical landmarks, etcetera, not to mention legal terrorism relating to property that may not be within a given reserve but that someone wants to prevent the development of. All of this makes property more valuable as time goes by, population rises, and that same population becomes more affluent. If there are 100,000 properties in your area and 150,000 families, the price will be whatever the top 100,000 bidders are willing and able to pay. If the 100,000th buyer is willing and able to pay $200,000 for a property, that becomes the price. Now suppose there are suddenly twice as many prospective buyers. Does the price go up or down? For the mentally challenged, the answer is "up". It's still the top 100,000 bidders who get the properties - but there are now 300,000 competitors. Bidders are going to have to do more in order to be successful buyers - and the ones who aren't willing or able to do more will go without, just like any other good. But housing isn't like concierge service or spa visits - The alternative is not to do without, but rather to do with a lesser substitute for what we really want. Even if it's underneath a bridge or in their car, people have got to have a place to live. This tends to make for more inelasticity rather than less in the demand curve, or to put it in everyday English, if the price of housing goes up, people tend more strongly to do without other things instead of cutting back on housing. Most people don't have a need for a six bedroom 3000 square foot home no matter how badly they want it - but most people would agree that the minimum acceptable substitute for a family is somewhere between a 2 bedroom rented apartment and a three bedroom1200 square foot PUD, rather than the inside of a drainage culvert. The strongly supported conclusion of all of this is that there is a level that housing values will trend back towards, and that deferent (at least in San Diego) is well above current values. (Note to renters: The demand for rentals is increasing even more because of all the people who lost property and can't get a loan right now. The vacancy factor in San Diego is already a microscopic 2%. Nor can landlords skate on make-believe loans like so many of them were doing, planning to make money off a rising market. What do you think this is going to do to the rental price, particularly of non-apartment units? If you haven't shopped for a new rental lately, be prepared for a some sticker shock when you or your landlord terminate your current tenancy, and in the meantime be prepared for significantly increased rents as landlords discover they can get more) So how to you make a profit in this sort of situation? First, put any thought of a quick flip out of your mind. The odds against it are so long as to equate to "Not gonna happen", at least not profitably. This is an investor's market. You buy with the idea that you're going to hold the property a minimum number of years. I would advise three at a minimum, and plan for at least five. Make sure you've got a loan that you're going to be happy with that entire time. It's a lot more expensive to refinance investment property than it is your primary residence, and the constraints on doing so are far more telling. If you're putting enough down, a commercial loan becomes a real possibility, simply because the qualifications are easier right now and the rates are competitive. You need a positive cash flow out of the property - which means most likely you're looking a larger down payment rather than a smaller. Planning to rent the property out is always a winner. If you can get a positive cash flow out of renting it, the only viable economic model of ownership does not depend upon the location of your job in relation to the property. If you need to move hundreds of miles away and renting it out is not an option, you are at the mercy of the current market and whatever phase the mass psychology epicycle may be in. This is one thing that bit an awful lot of people in the last couple years. Just because renting it out is economically viable doesn't mean you can't choose to live in it yourself, but life throws curves. Having the ability to make your property into a viable rental is a pretty effective trump card for most risks of housing. Even if you can't live there because your new job is on the other side of the continent, someone will want to. Especially in San Diego. Make it habitable, bring the maintenance up to date and keep it that way, but with that said, I would hesitate about upgrading a rental before the actual time comes to sell it. Renters can't ruin your new remodel if you haven't done it yet. Granite countertops, maple cabinets and travertine floors still need to be taken care of. Furthermore, they do got old and less attractive looking. When you go to sell, you want them to be brand spanking new to sucker in buyers without a good agent, one of those bits of detail that sells a property that has already appreciated for a noteworthy premium. Upgrading isn't what makes the property more valuable; the market has already done that. Just like most long term investors, you really made your money when you bought - you're just waiting for the market to formalize what you know is going to happen. You've already made a profit by buying when prices were cheap - you're just not sure when the check for the profit is going to get here. Warren Buffett (among many others) has made pretty much every one of his billions of dollars the same way. There are precisely two times in the history of holding a property when the price counts: When you buy it and when you sell it. In between, the market value can be thirty-nine cents for all you care. If you don't sell it then, it's not important. If you know that market is going to revert to something higher in a few years, you know you've already made a profit, you're just waiting for the check to roll in. In the meantime, you're living in it (gaining the valuable benefit of shelter) or making a little money every month from the rental. People think they're going to outsmart all of this by waiting for the market to "bottom out" or turn around, just like they think buying property when the market is rising is a "can't miss" proposition, and for precisely the same same fallacious reason. First, nobody can predict exactly when the market will turn. Second, when it does turn, it takes a while for it sink in to the public consciousness. Mass psychology, remember - it takes a lot for things to penetrate. Third, when it does manage to get people's attention, it's because you've already missed the best window. The way you figure out that the market is going up is by missing the first ten or twenty or fifty percent of increase, if not more. Fourth, mass psychology is fickle. It's difficult turn the market back around short of what I've been calling the deferent point, but it can happen, has happened, and will happen again. Fifth, as I have said previously, what I've been calling the deferent can be very hard to discern exactly. Suppose the market is already past that by the time you wake up and smell the coffee? That's how bubbles happen, and how people get caught up in them and metaphorically lose their shirts. How many bubbles of one sort or another have we had in the last ten years? Betting on making money because of another bubble like the one we just had anytime soon strikes me as a bad bet such that everybody that makes it is likely to lose. So don't make it. But the psychology of "waiting for the bottom" encourages precisely this kind of thinking. You can always find a good investment if you've got the patience. But right now, properties that are going to make someone an awful lot of money when the market normalizes are so thick on the ground that you can't hardly avoid tripping on them. Furthermore, mortgage rates are near all time lows. The interest cost if you need a loan, or want one so that you can put leverage on your side, is even lower than the base cost in dollars. The time to make a bet that you're likely to win is when the odds are on your side - while the market is below long term trends. You know it's going to come back eventually, and as long as you can afford the property, you're just waiting for the check to arrive. Caveat Emptor Original article here]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2009://3.4574 2010-08-28T15:30:00Z 2010-08-28T16:09:15Z

I am continually confirming that a large percentage of people can't handle negotiations like an adult. They focus in on garbage and ignore what's really important. I recently was going to deliver a loan that cost less, as well as...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ all they do is sell the loan. The reason for this is so they can talk to more prospects. The time of good sales folk is important, but some of these loan officers have no clue as to whether the loan is ultimately going to be approved. This is one of the reasons why people end up with different loans than they were originally told about. There was a reason why they weren't going to qualify for the loan on which the loan officer gave them a low quote, but the loan officer didn't know, and it's sure as gravity no one else is going to tell you between sign up and delivery, and at delivery, your choices are to sign these documents or don't. If you need that loan at that time, guess what? You are going to sign those loan documents and become part of the statistics. Not too long ago, I had some people call me through Upfront Mortgage Brokers (UMB). They had heard the UMB way was better, and it is better than most, but it requires you be able to deal with money like an adult. These people wanted a million and a half dollar loan with a low down payment. They had great credit and likely sufficient income, but they wanted an A paper loan with no pre-payment penalty. Now I can get zero down payment A paper loans with no pre-payment penalty no problem up to the conforming limit (currently $417,000), but above that, lenders start making it harder and harder, and there are three break points in most lender's rules between conforming loans and a million and a half. When I'm working under UMB rules, I have to negotiate every penny that my company is going to make up front, and I told these people that my company needed $5400 to make that loan worth our while. This was between three and four tenths of a point grand total, and that included credit and what the processor was going to make. But that sounded like "too much" to these people, who told me that they were going to the bank who "promised never to charge more than two points." When you do the numbers, they were telling me that $5400 was "too much" but $30,000 wasn't - not to mention the fact that I know this lender, and they'd have made another four percent on the secondary market with the loan they gave these people - $60,000 in addition to the 2 points they charged. It's to be admitted that the lender I was going to put them with likely would have made about 2.5 percent, or a little under $40,000, selling their loan on the secondary market, but these lowered margins roughly $45,000 total that I and my lender would have made versus $90,000 that the other lender would charge translate directly to less cost, a lower interest rate, or some combination of the two (there is ALWAYS a trade off between rate and cost in mortgages). Direct lenders can price your loan to make anything they want on the secondary market - and they don't have to tell you about a penny of it, unlike brokers. Indeed, the loan I quoted was better all around to the prospective client - but my compensation was disclosed and theirs wasn't, despite the fact that what we were going to make was chump change compared to everyone else. So this person, a highly paid professional who should have known better, went with the other provider. So despite the fact that working to UMB guidelines actually lets me quote and deliver loans with slightly better pricing than my usual way, I have discovered that it's mostly a waste of my time. The client is assuming pricing risk, all I get is a flat, pre-negotiated fee - but they know what that fee is, and it's not what most folks think of as "cheap." Never mind that it's a lot cheaper than the provider they ended up with, people seem to think that the $5400 they know about is somehow worse than the $30,000 they don't. The smart thing to do, of course, is judge that loan based upon the net terms to you. Type of loan, rate, total cost, and whether there's a prepayment penalty. I can get my commission paid out of yield spread or rolling it into your balance, same as anyone else. You don't have to write me a check just because I'm working for known compensation. In fact, since that known compensation is less, I can get you a lower rate, or pay some or all of the closing costs that you'd end up paying through another provider - sometimes even both. But just because I can't hide my compensation in your new loan amount and rate, or pretend that I wasn't paid somehow, doesn't mean the other loan is better than mine. Loans aren't free. If you don't understand how someone is getting paid, chances are they are making a lot more money than the loan officer who is willing to go over it. If this seems like too much work to you, take comfort in the fact that you're not wasting time scrutinizing the wrong thing. The intelligent way to compare competing loans by the terms to you: What type of loan is it? What is the rate? How much will it cost, grand total? Is there a prepayment penalty? Will they guarantee their quote, or are they just talking "bigger better deal" to get you to sign up? Ask specific questions, and don't settle for anything other than specific answers. The usual modus operandi is to hide loan costs in your new loan amount after pretending that there aren't any until you go to sign documents. Just because nobody wants to talk about it doesn't mean the answer is "zero." Just because you don't have specific numbers doesn't mean it's going to be better for you - in fact, the opposite is the way to bet. Nail them down before you sign that loan application. Caveat Emptor Original article here]]> tag:gockel.hmdnsgroup.com,2007:/~searchli//3.2849 2010-08-27T14:00:00Z 2010-08-27T13:40:35Z

Got a search for "mortgage closing documents do not sign changes." Unfortunately for this person, the documents you get at closing are what legal folks call a contract of adhesion. This means you can either accept it, sign, and adhere...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ adhesion. This means you can either accept it, sign, and adhere to all the terms as presented, or you can walk away. Basically your choice is to take it or leave it, in exactly the form presented. Now on those rare occasions someone actually has the intelligence and good sense to walk away from a situation where the terms have been changed, the prospective loan provider does have the option of offering you a better deal as incentive to do business with them. Like, say, the loan they originally talked about to get you to sign up with them. Mind you, they don't have to, and the costs of that other loan may mean that they would rather do no loan than that loan. Furthermore, they've got to re-draw the appropriate paperwork. Now I'm not a lawyer, but the way contracts of adhesion were explained to me is that if there is any legal ambiguity, it will be interpreted in your favor. This doesn't mean you can claim you thought it meant something different than the average person would understand; this means that if there is a legally ambiguous wording that could legitimately be interpreted two different ways, and you and your lender disagree as to the meaning, the courts will generally rule in your favor. Once again, the law is different from place to place and the courts have the final say; check with your lawyer. Now in the loan world, it is much more common than not to be offered a loan contract at final signing which differs in some material form from the loan terms that were described to you in the beginning. The loan provider will generally offer you a loan of the same type, and usually at the same rate, but most often the costs to get that rate will be significantly higher than were listed on the Good Faith Estimate or Mortgage Loan Disclosure Statement. Neither one of these forms is in any way, shape or form a legal commitment, nor are any of the other forms you get at the beginning of the loan process, such as the Truth In Lending Advisory. This has improved for consumers somewhat since the new rules for the 2010 Good Faith Estimate became effective, but there are companies out there who have the loopholes completely wired to let them pull a legal "bait and switch" like the worst of the bad old days. The only thing that means anything is the loan contract, or Note, that you are offered at the end of the process, together with the HUD-1 form, which is the only accounting of the loan required to be correct and complete. Now the difference between the initial teaser loan they talked about and loan contract they actually got approved is one of the reasons why the less than ethical providers out there often want a cash deposit for the loan, particularly if their rates are not particularly competitive and they know it. If they're nervous someone will come along behind them and offer you a better deal, they want a cash deposit so that they still get something if you pull out, and many folks obsess about the cash deposit to the point where I could offer them a deal that saves them several times the cash deposit, and they still wouldn't switch. This isn't to say not to pay the twenty dollars or whatever it costs them for the credit report, this is to say don't deposit the appraisal fee (several hundred dollars, which should be paid at point of service) or even part of a point "to be refunded if the loan funds within (a certain amount of time)". Chances are the loan isn't that great, particularly not the real loan they are really going to offer, and that's why they want to lock you in by having something to hold over you if you don't sign on the dotted line at the end of the process. Caveat Emptor
Original article here]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2009://3.4569 2010-08-26T14:00:00Z 2010-08-26T13:46:36Z

The vast majority of the population out there wants single family detached housing. The virtues and benefits of the single family residence have been extolled ad nauseum, and the drawbacks of the alternatives are the stuff of urban legend. Unfortunately,...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ wants single family detached housing. The virtues and benefits of the single family residence have been extolled ad nauseum, and the drawbacks of the alternatives are the stuff of urban legend. Unfortunately, in San Diego and many of the other densely populated urban areas of the country, the price of single family detached housing has gone beyond what the average person can easily afford. Even if they fall further from this point, in many areas, San Diego among them, the price of a single family residence isn't going to fall to what the average single worker can afford. The supply is too low, and the demand is too high. When you consider economic reality, the evidence is overwhelming that the real estate market in San Diego at least was beginning a very turnaround before the government spooked everyone, and even in other areas where prices still have further to fall, there's a limit to how far they're going to go. So for people earning average wages, the choice becomes purchasing one of those alternative forms of housing, saving until they can afford it, or being a renter for the rest of their life. I went over how little saving for a down payment helps most folks, and how a strategy of buying what you can afford now helps more and faster than saving for a down payment. One further option exists, of course: Move to a less expensive market, but that requires finding a job there. There's a reason that all of the highly demanded urban markets are in high demand: That's where the jobs are! Still, people will tell me they don't want to buy until and unless they can afford a single family detached house, with no association. That's fine if they're going about the process of saving. Most of them would be better off buying the lesser property and using the appreciation to leverage their savings, but it's okay to decide to take an alternative route to getting what you want. It's a free country. However, in my experience, it's really rather rare to find people who are actually putting the money aside. It's great if you want a house and are putting the money aside to make it happen. I just helped a couple that could afford a beautiful house in a great area because they both worked hard and saved something like five years of their combined earnings for a down payment, but they're the rare exception. I know a lot more people that have been planning to buy a house for twenty years and have nothing saved at all, than I do people like that couple. The cold hard fact of the matter is that if you're making fifteen or twenty dollars per hour, you can't afford the payments on such a single family detached house unless you've got a huge down payment. That's not likely to change unless we start being a whole lot friendlier to development, and in places like San Diego, there isn't room to do so even if we wanted to. There's too many people who want that sort of housing, and not enough land and not enough houses to go around. High demand, limited supply. Remember your first economics class. What does that do to price? People will tell me in one breath that they don't want to deal with home owner's associations, then turn around and tell me they'd rather continue dealing with landlords. Landlords have more power than HOAs, and are less subject to moderating influence. If you're an owner, you have a vote and a voice in the HOA, and you can even run for the board yourself. If you're renting and don't want to follow the rules, the landlord will evict you and find someone who will. They have all the power they need in a vacancy under 3%! There is always going to be a wider market further down the socio-economic pyramid. There are more folks making fifteen or twenty dollars per hour than forty. Even those making more have the option of buying cheaper housing, and there are those who do so, while those who attempt tricks to afford more house than they can afford regret it pretty universally. If you buy the property, you owe the money and are paying the interest. Tricks like negative amortization, that make it look like you can afford more property than you really can, will come back around to bite you, with so few exceptions as to be statistically a non-event. In California, townhomes and PUD developments are most often legally condominiums as far as title goes. It's just the physical set up that differs. Condominiums are multiply layered, stacked one on top of another all in the same building. Townhomes are typically only one unit high. They may be multiple floors and have shared walls, but no upstairs or downstairs neighbors. This improves the privacy situation, but it also increases the price, because land is what costs the most money, and there's only one unit on any given piece of land. PUDs are one further step up the line: They may be individual completely detached structures, but they share a common lot, so maintenance and such is usually shared, and you usually have to match the neighbor's decor. There may not be much space between units in a PUD, as I've said before, but there is usually some. All three usually have some sort of shared recreational facilities, as well, but not necessarily. This can be a very good thing. Lots of people who want a pool can't really afford the cost and the maintenance on their own, but spread it out between twenty or fifty or a hundred owners, and it becomes an entirely different issue. Lots of folks get used to the community facilities offered by an HOA that they couldn't afford on their own. There are ways to do each sort right and wrong. The sin most developers commit with PUDs and townhomes is trying so hard to cram as many as possible onto a given piece of land, that each unit has effectively no privacy. With pure straight condominiums, the main sin committed is failing to insulate each unit sufficiently from noise in the neighboring units. Doing it right isn't cheap, and cuts into the profit margin. This also happens with townhomes and some PUDs, but to a far lesser extent. A complex where the developer did it right will be a little more expensive per square foot, but will be a much better investment. Granite counters and travertine floors get old, get dirty, and eventually do need to be replaced. The fact that you and your significant other aren't entertaining the neighbors every time you get intimate, that you can have friends over without disturbing the neighbors, or even that you have a private little back yard to barbecue in, won't. If you're careful in your initial purchase, you can be happy and private in a condo, townhome, or PUD for many years. If you fall for a bad unit with nice surfaces now, you're going to suffer. If you pick a good unit, the way that leverage works will quite likely leave you very happy with your investment. If you pick a bad one, not so much. If you pick a good one and decide to stay, you'll likely find that your cost of housing becomes a low fraction of what rent would cost before too many years have passed. If you can't afford the payments on a more expensive property, it's not a good idea to buy it. But if you don't buy anything at all, the economic prognosis for lifelong renters isn't good. This means that if you can't afford the property you really want, it's still a good idea to buy something your family can live in. Condos, townhomes, and PUDs may not be as great as single family detached housing, but they're a long way better than renting, and you can use the leverage inherent in the way property values has worked for the last century or so to help you get where you really want to be more quickly and more easily. Even if you never move up, you have placed your costs of housing permanently under your own control, given yourself a voice and a vote in how things are run, and the odds are overwhelming that you'll end up in a much stronger economic position. Caveat Emptor Original article here]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2010://3.4999 2010-08-25T14:00:00Z 2010-08-25T13:51:53Z

Lots of properties have some kind of problem with them. Maybe you bought in full recognizance because of something else about the property, but probably not. Mostly it's directly a result of not spending the effort to find a good...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ not spending the effort to find a good buyer's agent. But whatever the cause, you're stuck with the property, and you've decided to sell it, but just like everyone else you want to get the best possible price. Welcome to Bigger Fool Real Estate. That property is your problem. You want it to become someone else's problem. I'm speaking now as a listing agent, responsible to get the best bargain for the sellers. Getting a good bargain for the buyers is not the listing agent's responsibility. I have to tell the truth, but my responsibility is to get the property sold on the best possible terms. If I was your buyer's agent, things would be different, but right now I am postulating that I am not. (I don't do dual agency. Ever.) I'm going to write about property with problems, but this is equally true of the property that doesn't have upgrades that competing properties do. People don't understand that upgrades get old, the same as the rest of the house, and they are attracted to them and will often pay outrageous prices for them. You need to discuss ways to effectively compete for buyers with your listing agent. A good agent is the difference between making it happen for you on favorable terms and not at all, but you've got to be willing and able to help with the necessary steps. The first thing is to know is that you're definitely going to have to disclose the issue, and where and when you have to disclose it. Plan for it. It's amazing how often handling the disclosure right can gloss right over what might otherwise be a deal killer. People won't spend the utterly trivial amount of effort to find the good buyer's agent who will save them because they don't understand it's important. This can work to your advantage. This is one of several reasons you need a sharp listing agent. If you've got an issue that might drive off buyers, you need more prospective buyers than otherwise, because you're going to lose a larger than normal percentage of them. As any buyer's agent knows, people aren't looking for a reason to buy your property, they are looking for a reason not to buy your property. Every property loses a percentage of prospective buyers, and even if they can't put their finger on why, properties with issues lose more prospective buyers. The way to even this out is an asking price just enough lower to draw extra interest. Most buyers are silly about low asking prices, and the more people who view your property, the more chances you have to get a buyer who doesn't care, or who thinks the lower asking price is enough compensation. If you don't price the property thusly, it'll sit on the market and you'll end up getting even less for it, if it sells at all. If you do price appropriately lower, a good percentage of the time you're even going to get two or more prospective buyers bidding the price back up. A good agent can advise you on this - what is enough to work and what's too much. It is not a matter of cut and try - you've got to get it right in the first place if want optimum results. In the situation we're talking about, you want and need lots of people looking at your property. Clean and declutter the property. Make it shine as much as you can otherwise. Visual appeal $ell$. The situation you're looking for is a buyer who doesn't realize the problem exists, and good visual appeal can distract them from reasons not to buy your property. Avoid turning people off when you don't have to. Equally important, make seeing the property as easy as you possibly can. This is always important, but in a situation like this, it's critical. Moving out is an especially good idea in this case, if you can afford to do so, particularly if you've got children or pets. Take good pictures for MLS and the advertising. People, particularly ones with weak or no buyer's agent, are silly about attractive pictures. Even otherwise perfectly rational ones who are aware of trick photography and Photoshop. Sometimes, they'll make up their mind they want the property before they actually see it, just from the pictures. They'll still want to look, but they're not careful. Lots of turkeys get sold this way. I don't advise trick photography or Photoshop, by the way - people will realize you were attempting to play them. But picking your shots and vantage points carefully can show even awful properties to good advantage. De-emphazine anything that may point out your undesirable features or call attention to them. Don't try to hide it, but you don't want to call attention to it, either. Most people have holes in their perceptive ability big enough to sail multiple ocean liners abreast, particularly when it comes to looking at property. If one buyer spots it, the next one or the one after won't. This is why you want more people looking at your property than the absolutely perfect property next door. Make sure the property is advertised where it will draw attention. You need a quick sale. You don't want people wondering why it's got a large number of days on the market - then they go looking for reasons why nobody else bought. Lots of people aren't interested in anything that's been on the market over thirty days, as in they won't even look at the listing online. If you fool yourself about property value for even a short period of time, or aren't willing to do what is necessary to begin with, you can cost yourself literally thousands of dollars for every dollar you think you're saving. Know what kind of buyer are you looking for - unrepresented ones without agents, or ones where their agent is just trying to crank a transaction. Make certain they're able to qualify for any necessary loan before accepting their offer, however, because a large percentage of these can't, meaning you are wasting your time. The competently advised buyer who is ready to deal with your issue is a distinct second choice, because they're not going to offer as much, and they're going to walk away if you try to insist they pay what the property isn't worth. The worst of all possible worlds is someone who insists upon perfection who suddenly realizes the property isn't perfect partway through the transaction - because they're going to bail out, and you may not get any compensation for them wasting your time. To the maximum extent possible, just ignore whatever problem issues your property may have. Don't lie, and if someone directly asks, don't pretend it isn't there, but don't bring anybody's attention to it, and don't act like it's important, and you'd be amazed how often prospective buyers will pay attention to your attitude rather than anything else. You would be amazed how often unrepresented buyers, and buyers whose agents are trying to crank a transaction, never notice something that should be a deal killer, or don't pay proper attention to it. Actually you shouldn't - because that's probably what happened to you. If you're in the position of needing to sell to a Bigger Fool, it's not an impossible task, but it is one where you've got to get it right the first time, and you need a sharp agent who knows what they're doing. A discounter or someone who just hangs out a sign in the yard is going to cost you more than you could possibly save over the more expensive agent who actually makes it happen on good terms. If you're a buyer, none of these techniques are in any way a secret. They are in widespread use. If this bothers you, the best way to prevent it from happening to you is get someone who is going to point these issues out and compare them to other properties. In other words, Get yourself a good buyer's agent before you start looking. And if they won't point out these sort of issues, they're not a good buyer's agent and you should stop working with them and find another agent who will. These folks are trying to unload their problems, and you don't want to be their Bigger Fool. Caveat Emptor ]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2010://3.4997 2010-08-24T14:00:00Z 2010-08-24T13:54:12Z

I hear people complain that they've never had a good buyer's agent, that they can't find one, or that they one they had hosed them (Sometimes, they're wrong about that, by the way). I also regularly get email from people...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ Finding a good buyer's agent is trivial. Literally as easy as moving your eyes and turning your head to look around. Open your phone book. Run a search engine. If you're in San Diego County, contact me. You get the idea. At last resort, stick your head out the window and yell. Seems you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a real estate agent. The one thing to understand, and you need to understand it before you start looking, is that for every good buyer's agent out there, there's at least one not so good one. The best way to handle this is by giving every agent who wants one a chance to work with you. You have literally nothing to lose beyond a little bit of your time. But while you shouldn't give anyone an exclusive agreement, there is no reason whatsoever not to sign a non-exclusive representation agreement. A non-exclusive buyer's agency agreement is quite literally a bet that consumers cannot lose. And here's the rub: The agents who won't work without an exclusive contract are the ones that can't really compete. The agents who will work on a non-exclusive basis are the ones that know they're good. I don't care whether someone is working with just me, or has ten other agents on the line. I am willing to make the bet that in heads up competition, I can beat anyone else. If I'm wrong, then I get the important benefit of knowing I need to improve. And the agents who are not willing to make that bet are among the ones you should avoid at all costs. Nor does the mere fact you have an agreement mean you must continue to work with them. On the contrary, all of the good agents maintain something close to a "fire me at any time!" policy - it's implicitly part of the non-exclusive agreements I advocate. There are only two reasons why you didn't get a good buyer's agent: ignorance and not trying. Ignorance as in you don't know that a listing agent is working to get the best deal for the seller. That is their contractual and fiduciary duty. A seller wants the highest price, quickest sale, with the fewest problems possible, and it is the listing agent's responsibility to see that they get it. If you bought when there was a better property cheaper, if the seller would have negotiated a better deal, if you don't understand that the disclosure they bury in the middle of 425 other pieces of paper is really important, that's not the listing agent's problem. Ignorance as in you don't know how critically important it is to get expert help in the biggest transaction of your life. Ignorance as in you didn't do the tiny bit of research that lets you know not to sign an exclusive agency agreement. Ignorance as in you don't know how much you don't know about putting all of the information in the proper context, whether something is trivial or whether it really is a deal killer - information you have no hope of knowing unless you make a habit of buying and selling real estate in this area. Ignorance as in you don't know that the number one set up for buyers who spend too much to buy properties they should not have considered purchasing at all is that they don't have an expert on their side. Not trying explains itself. You just didn't try, whether because you thought it wasn't important (there's that ignorance factor again), or because you thought you could save yourself money by not having one (ignorance yet again). Go ahead and tell that to a roomful of agents sometime. Buyer's agents or listing agents or both, it makes no difference. The good ones will all laugh because no matter how often they hear it, they've learned enough that it's still funny, and we're always encountering examples. If it isn't the funniest thing I've ever heard, it's a real contender. When I try to explain what they did wrong to people who ask, they say something like, "You're blowing the tiny details way out of proportion!", usually in quite a defensive manner. Ladies and Gentlemen, real estate is all about the details - lots and lots of details. Details ad nauseum, and even small details can make a difference of tens of thousands of dollars in the value of a property. Furthermore, it is precisely those details upon which your agent will be judged. It doesn't do yourself any favors to pretend you didn't cost yourself four or five times or more what you saved. If your agent was yourself, look in the mirror for the person to blame. There is no one else. If the ego thing is more important to you than the money, that's fine, but you need to admit it to yourself at least. Otherwise, get a buyer's agent before you start looking. A good buyer's agent is far more important than a listing agent. There is no other factor that even compares for predicting how well you will do in real estate. Get more than one if you like. As long as you don't sign any exclusive agreements, you can always hire more and fire the bad ones you already have. The big thing to evaluate agents on is not experience, but attitude. Not have they been doing transactions for eighty-three years, but are they going to tell you about the problems and issues they see with this property? I would work with a brand new agent with the ink still wet on their license who will bring your attention to issues over the most experienced agent in the world who won't. Heck, I'd advise still working with the newbie even if the more experienced agent also will. For that matter, in my personal experience, an agent who says "I've been doing real estate for (some number of) years!" is most likely about to tell you what they've been doing wrong for all those years. Experience doesn't make it right, particularly in the face of the complexity of real estate and the fact that most state regulators don't know any more than beginning consumers, and it can be almost impossible to prosecute for some of the worst abuses there are (e.g. buying listings) It may take some cut and try for find a good agent, but firing a bad one takes no effort and shouldn't require a confrontation - if you signed the right agreement in the first place. You just stop working with them. Whereas if you sign an exclusive buyer's agency agreement, firing a bad one takes a formal release, and you can't force them to do it. It's bad business, but probably the majority of brokerages won't sign such a release. What they'll do is talk like they will, in order to get you into the office, but if they can't get you calmed down or substitute another agent, they refuse to actually sign. If you sign a non-exclusive agency agreement, on the other hand, you just stop working with them. If there was something they showed you that you liked enough to buy, you would have already made an offer. Furthermore, you probably wouldn't want to fire them. Therefore, you just leave that agreement in place and stop working with them, and your problem is solved. Pretty neat, huh? Caveat Emptor Original article here]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2009://3.4558 2010-08-23T14:00:00Z 2010-08-23T14:26:35Z

When I'm doing my initial automated search for properties for my buyer clients, I always pay close attention to listings represented by agents out of the immediate area. Why? Because an agent from fifteen or twenty miles away probably has...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ agents don't understand this. I've met a lot of them who won't do the work to stay current in their specialty areas, let alone outside. Prices move, neighborhoods become hot and cool off, and time of year is a variable as well. Major projects happen. The market you knew cold six months ago has changed, and you don't know it at all today unless you have kept up or caught up. My point is this: When you choose an agent who doesn't make a habit or working the neighborhood, if they're being honest with you, they'll tell you it's going to take some time for them to learn enough of the market. If you're a buyer, chances are that you've got plenty of time, but if you're a seller with a deadline, the time it takes that agent to figure out the market can take a large bite out of your sale time. The alternative is to take a chance on pricing from an agent who really doesn't know your market, and marketing from an agent who may not know how to get your property sold effectively here. Far better to insist on evidence that the agent knows your particular market today Caveat Emptor Original article here]]> tag:www.searchlightcrusade.net,2009://3.4556 2010-08-22T14:00:00Z 2010-08-22T13:49:22Z

One of the best ways I have of telling how good a listing agent is is whether they get the counter to me before the offer has expired. Not that someone who gets the counter back to me quickly is...

Dan Melson http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/ hasn't been accepted, indeed it becomes impossible for it to be accepted unless someone is capable of time travel. Missing offer deadlines has become common of late, with sellers hoping for better offers, so they sit on this one until too much time has passed, thus hurting their case further. The other side missing the detail of timeliness gives my clients power. Now my clients can choose to accept what has become a counter-offer rather than an acceptance, because even if the other side intended to give a full acceptance, they haven't. There's this not so little niggling detail of the fact that the original offer has expired. It's dead. It's an ex-offer. The other side missing deadline gives me information. When they respond after the deadline, I'm pretty certain there aren't any other offers going on, no matter what the other agent says. If there are other offers, they're not good offers. If there were other good offers, better than mine, why are they countering me so late? When I have multiple offers on one of my listings, I get each counter out there as quick as I can, and the proviso that another offer is not previously accepted is on every single one of them. This means that my client is in a stronger position than they were in initially. Not infinitely stronger, but noticeably stronger. Particularly in the buyer's market we have locally and in most of the rest of the country. Even in a seller's market, it tells me that no one else wants this property at that price. It may be grounds to counter even lower. This means that an agent who sits on an offer (or counter-offer) is weakening their clients bargaining position, i.e. violation of fiduciary duty. Unless it's the client who just can't respond, that agent has now incurred the possibility of action. Even if the client has been told of the offer, I always feel that I need to tell them that most offers have expirations, and the sooner they counter, the stronger their perceived bargaining position. It's no better for a prospective buyer to miss a counter than it is for a prospective seller. There must have been something about that property that was attractive to you. Properties for sale never last longer than the first person who does what is necessary to get the seller to agree to terms. Once it's in escrow with someone else, it's too late to decide you want it. Unless it falls out of escrow - something not under your control - you are out of luck. Being a back up offer is basically a sucker's proposition. This doesn't mean I make a habit of demanding responses within 24 hours. That's overplaying your hand in most situations. But a deadline of three to four business days is quite reasonable, and situations where it may be to your advantage to delay are rare. If you can't respond to an offer or counter-offer in that amount of time, something is wrong. Caveat Emptor Original article here]]>