Dan Melson: November 2014 Archives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wouldn't.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original Article here

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

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

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

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

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

Probate is a special purpose listing when the property is being controlled by the estate of someone who died. Probate listings almost always go to full service agents because the probate judges are looking to get the best deal possible. Furthermore, the probate attorneys and executors aren't going to do the work, and the deceased definitely isn't going to do the work. There are often debts and there are almost always tax bills, and there are always heirs looking to get the most money possible. Probate is a real pain to deal with, and it takes forever, because the courts are involved. Nor are they necessarily great deals. For most local probates as of this writing, the court or the heirs have set a minimum bid that's more than the property is worth, because they evaluated the property on the basis of the prices when the owner shuffled off the mortal coil. However, with declining values, they're only hurting themselves. There's one not too far from my office where I had a client it would have been perfect for - except that the minimum bid is at least $40,000 more than the property was worth on the market back then. It had been on the market for a good long while before I found it, and it's still on the market today, more than six months later. If they'd priced it $20,000 lower, it probably would have sold within a month of going on the market. By the time I found it, prices were diverging by $40,000. Now, it's more than that.

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

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

The major and irrefutable drawback to getting a personal loan for the down payment is that it impacts debt to income ratio. You have to account for the fact that you owe this money, and you are obligated to make those payments, and therefore, you cannot afford as big a real estate loan as you otherwise could. Since most people try to stretch their budget further than they should anyway, this can be a deal-killer. It can force you to buy a less expensive property than the one you have your heart set upon, or even than the property you could otherwise afford, at least by debt to income ratio. Of course, if you don't have a down payment, you can't buy the property of your dreams either. But if you buy a property, especially while the market is down, leverage can mean you will be able to buy the property of your dreams much sooner and much easier, or in plain words, buying the less expensive property is smart if that's what you can afford now. Of course, if you've got more than enough income but no down payment, that's the situation where getting a personal loan for a down payment is a serious possibility. Say you're a doctor who just spent the last two years paying off your student loans ahead of schedule. You've got a great income, but you spent everything on getting rid of that debt, and as a consequence, you don't have much for the down payment, right when it will do you the most good.

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

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

If you want more for the property, tell me why in the heck you think I should give it to you. What you want (more money) is irrelevant. It's counterbalanced by what I want - which is the exact opposite, to pay less money. Start a conversation for crying out loud - that's what I was trying to do. I didn't expect them to take my first offer, but my clients have the ability and interest to give them what they want - cash - for what they have: a property they don't want. Even if my clients are getting a loan, it still amounts to cash for the sellers. That's what any offer is really saying - "We're interested in buying this property, if we can reach an appropriate agreement." The initial offer is your bona fides as to what sort of agreement you're willing to reach. I don't make first offers I expect to have accepted, but neither do I make hopeless low-balls unless it is just a shot in the dark and I don't care if it "poisons the well" of possible rapport. I do want a reasonable response, and I do everything I can to encourage such a response rather than an ultimatum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

This is a question that gets asked a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

From an email:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One more reason to be very careful investing in trust deeds

Caveat Emptor

Original here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor (and Vendor)

Original here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tax Service Fee is not junk, unfortunately.

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

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

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

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

Mortgage Insurance Premium is not junk but may be avoidable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

Why do this?

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

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

So why isn't everybody doing them?

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

People always assume they'll be able to refinance later. Even most of my articles have it as an implicit assumption.

But what if you can't refinance later?

There are situations where it happens. Many situations, as millions of people are finding out now. When I originally wrote this I was getting large numbers of search engine hits from people who were looking to refinance into another negative amortization loan, but Wall Street had figured out that they weren't good investments by then. Currently, it's due to over-reaction to losses that were,at the root, the lenders and investor's own fault - but the practical upshot is that millions of people who should be able to qualify to buy or refinance cannot. But people don't pay attention to most real estate problems until they're smacked in the face with a cold haddock. With a half million dollar investment on the line, this is roughly equivalent to pigs following a swineherd to the slaughterhouse, but people still do it.

It is one thing for an investor who can afford to lose the entire investment to make a bet on the future of the market. If they win, they win. If they lose, the investment may be gone but they've still got a place to sleep for the night. It was a calculated risk where the dice came up snake eyes. Never any fun to have happen, but survivable. Furthermore, in order to be able to win, it must be possible for you lose.

It is something entirely different to counsel someone to make a bet they cannot afford to lose. If the consequences of a losing bet include homelessness, bankruptcy and might as well be permanent damage to your credit rating which makes it impossible to get started again, that's a different category of bet.

Real Estate loans, done wrong, are a "bet the farm" type bet - on something that nobody involved in the decision making process can control. Not the consumer, not the loan officer, and definitely not the real estate agent who says, "I know someone who can do the loan, and the Payments will be affordable.

There are several things that can prevent someone from successfully refinancing. Some of them may be somewhat under consumer control; most of them are not. These include:

Time in line of work: You can change employers and not fall afoul of this, but changing from employee to self-employed (or vice versa) can mean you don't qualify. Changing careers because the economy means there's no demand for what you used to do is also a turndown for at least two years - potentially forever if the new career doesn't make enough.

Documentation of income can mess you up more than anything else, often for the same reason that time in line of work does. You were getting a regular paycheck and a W-2, now you've gone to self employed, the clients have been a little slow in paying, and you've been very certain to take all of the legal deductions on your tax form. Good for your tax bill, not so hot for your ability to qualify for a loan, particularly if you've had to put more than usual on credit. Once again, the interest expense for business items may be deductible, but it can also put a huge crimp in your debt to income ratio. Not to mention that stated income loans are no longer available anywhere I'm aware of, making life difficult for the small business owner who wants to buy real estate.

Changing from owner occupied to investment property can sink you, particularly with a loan to value ratio over 80 percent. Your employer says you can keep your job, but you've got to move to Timbuktu, which means you can't live here any more, and because you can't live here, you no longer qualify for "owner occupied" loans

Loan guidelines change over time. This one has been a killer problem for a lot of folks of late, as when I first wrote this, guidelines had tightened more in the previous few months than they loosened in the previous ten years, and it's continued to the point where it's gotten ridiculous. No more stated income, no more 100% conventional financing, no more 95% conventional financing (I am currently aware of exactly one lender who will do it, and their rates aren't the best), as neither PMI companies nor second mortgage lenders will touch it right now. The only way to go above 90% loan to value is FHA, VA, or seller carryback, and even that last may not be acceptable to some lenders, and when you refinance most carryback sellers expect to be paid in full. The down payment assistance programs are dead. Even if you are one of the folks who still theoretically have significant equity, you may not be able to refinance into something sustainable.

Then there are market problems. If the property has lost value from when you bought, you may owe more than the property is worth. For quite a while I;ve been writing about what a pain it is to refinance when you're upside down, as well as the fact that it's not likely to be an improvement over what you've already got, even with Fannie and Freddie's 125% refinancing program.

I wrote Losing Property Value with Highly Leveraged Properties in March 2006 (updated just a few months ago), when people were still in denial about the problem, or thinking it was somebody else's problem. But the problem is always a possibility, and it's no respecter of anyone's stress level. Life is what happens while you're making other plans.

With this in mind, at least for your own principal residence, you want to have a sustainable, fully amortized loan in place, with a fixed period of at least five years. Actually, I'd be more comfortable with shorter fixed periods now that the air is out of the market. Even if we do lose a little bit more, which I don't think we will here locally, by the time three years are up, values are very likely to be at least 20% higher - and you will have paid down the loan by several thousand dollars. But most people who chose shorter fixed period loans, or Option ARMS (which have no fixed period at all) was the low initial payment allowed them to appear to qualify for the loan for a more expensive property than they could really afford. This is precisely the reverse of how it needs to be done: Figure your purchase price budget using an available thirty year fixed rate loan, and then if you want a loan with a shorter fixed period in order to save interest and closing costs, you still want to stay within the same purchase budget, not choose a loan because that's the only way you can afford the payments on this property that's way beyond your budget. Lest you now have figured it out yet, that's a recipe for personal disaster of a sort that takes many years to recover from, and some people never do recover from it.

For this reason, having an unsustainable loan, where the payments are going to adjust to something you cannot afford later, can change the answer to "Is it a good idea to refinance?" from "No - the available tradeoffs between rate and cost don't save me any money (or don't save enough)" to "Yes - I need to move to a more sustainable loan, and if I don't do it now, I may not be able to qualify later." If the market value of the property may be ripe for deflation, if your employment or income may become unstable or undocumentable, if your payments are predictably going to adjust to something unaffordable within two to three years - in all of those situations I have advised people that refinancing may not put them into what appears to be a better situation now, but if they wait, their current loan is going to become unaffordable and there is a serious chance they will not be able to qualify for another loan when it does. Sometimes the situation can be as simple as loan guidelines are likely to tighten up later - I predicted the demise of 100% conventional financing as a consequence of market deflation almost five years ago. Being temporarily "upside down" on your mortgage or having insufficient equity to refinance well under current guidelines is not a big deal if your loan is a fixed rate fully amortized loan, or even a medium term hybrid ARM. The loan is in place, on terms that you can handle. You keep on making those payments, your lender is happy, your pocketbook can handle it, your loan balance decreases, and prices will come back - sooner than a lot of people think, in the current media hullabaloo. In a year, or two, or three, you'll have equity, be able to sell for a profit, your job or income will be stable and documentable again, and the rough patch will be behind you. It's what happens when you need to refinance now and can't that gets folks into trouble.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

Dan,

Okay, so now I'm in the process of just making an offer on a house and it's already getting confusing despite all my reading. It would have been worse has I not spent all this time reading but just when I think I have a solid grasp of this process something else springs up.

The agent is saying that with the offer we have to say who the lender is and if we change lenders we have to ask the seller for permission, basically, since it's a part of the offer. Is that normal?

It's a short sale (seems like everything we look at is!) and on the home there are two loans. This is what I heard from the sellers agent. The first lender signs off on just about any offer (and so far I'm told there are offers all the way to $189k) because for the most part they're going to get all their money back. The second lender has not signed off on any offer so far but the sellers agent says if you offer X (it's $199k in this case) they'll take it. First of all, how can the sellers agent even go into details like that? (And he told ME because I called him after I talked to our agent because I couldn't believe she knew all those details about first and second loans and what the second lender would settle with.) Second, how would he know how much they would settle for and third, why would that lender tell anyone what the lowest they would take is? Seems to me this is all speculation on what that second lender might do.

Okay, so the asking price is $199k and my agent knows we have about 3.5% saved, that's it! So we go and get pre-approvals from lenders for $200k. So far so good. Then we find a house we like and the asking price is $199k. And we lean that if we offer the asking price chances are it'll get accepted (usually we learn that there are 3 offers already and we need to offer more . . . yes, even in the down market!). Once I finally get over the fears and decide to do it the agent tells me we should offer $204,500 to cover closing costs. WHAT? I'm confused again.

Any light you can shed will be greatly appreciated.

I don't know much about your local market and its current state. Some things are appropriate in some buyer's markets, but will only get the door slammed in your face in seller's markets. On the other hand, some things are necessary in seller's markets, but are giving away far too much in buyer's markets, and there is an entire continuum between buyer's markets and seller's markets. Handling offers and negotiations in a manner inappropriate for the current market will pretty much guarantee failure, either by asking for something so outrageous that the door metaphorically gets slammed in your face, or by giving away all sorts of things including money that there is no need for. To know what is and is not appropriate, you need an agent who knows your local market, who's willing to really work on your behalf, not just fax offers back and forth.

As far as the lender goes, I have NEVER named a buyer's lender in a purchase offer, and I'm not about to start, for precisely that reason - and the fact that it's none of the seller's business. But it might conceivably be part of the standard contract in your state, for reasons I don't understand, being a California boy. Some state laws are a bit, shall we say, different? On the other hand, some lawyers I'm aware of could build a serious case that this particular item is a RESPA violation, which is federal law and applies everywhere in the US.

It's easy to figure out approximately how much they owe. The original dollar amount of existing liens is public record, everywhere in the US. From there, you can make a pretty good estimate of how much they owe. Not that it's generally a good idea to focus on what is owed. Whether it's free and clear, or upside down, the property is only as valuable to you as it is. You're not going to pay $400,000 for a property that's only worth $200,000 if they're upside down. Neither is there any reason to be willing to pay less if they own it free and clear. It's still worth what it's worth, and failing to understand that, by either the seller or the buyer, is a recipe for failure. Buyers do not care what a seller "would like to get," and sellers don't care about what a buyer can afford except as it applies to the question, "Can they afford this property?"

A short sale is a short sale is a short sale. Unless there are reasons like "pretty much everything is a short sale", buyers should avoid short sales. Even done right, it's a month and a half or more process of the lender trying to beat everyone up for more money by wielding a VETO. If you do decide that you want that particular property badly enough to fight through the short sale process, I wouldn't start by accommodating the lender. They're still going to try to beat you up, only they're starting from a better point for them and a worse one for you.

As far as over offer to cover seller paid closing costs: We do live in a net world. Are you asking for seller paid closing costs? You shouldn't if you don't need to, but if you are, it's kind of like an equation. If X, a price they will accept on an offer without seller paid closing costs, equals $200k, then X plus $5000 for closing costs is $205k. Actually, since they pay commissions on the higher amount, you should feel lucky if they agree to a price that doesn't add anything more than the closing costs cost them. Some markets, however, are priced to include a certain amount of sellers paying buyer costs, and if that's not needed in your case, you should be able to get an offer that's lower by about that number of dollars to be accepted.

The critical questions I usually ask are: Suppose you get it at that price. Happy or sad? Suppose you don't get it at that price, but someone overbids you marginally and does. Angry, or don't care? Finally, how many real competitors for your business are there? Is this property head and shoulders above everything else with a comparable asking price, or are there hundreds of other properties just as good, that you could just as easily make an offer on and be happy with? The answers to these questions will help a good agent determine what a good offer is, and what it isn't. A bad offer can poison the well, and a too good offer gives away too much. You want the property on the best terms possible, but you do want the property or you shouldn't make an offer. If you're a flipper looking to score on a low ball offer, you don't care if you poison the well (you're pretty going to walk away if they're not desperate enough to take the first offer or something close), but pretty much everyone else does.

From your email, I'm getting suspicious there's some tendency on behalf of that particular agent to inflate the price so they get paid more, and possibly even collusion. But there's no way to be certain, and no way to tell that it's even the way to bet without knowing more about your market. Only another agent in your market would know about that, which is one reason why any specific negotiating advice you're going to read in a forum with a national audience is so much wasted breath at best. There are possible exceptions to everything I've written in this article, and I know what they are and where they would be applicable, but it all has to do with a given local market at a given temporary time or specific situations where you're going to be getting something extra in exchange for giving up something that isn't normal. For anything beyond a particular local market under particular market conditions that apply in a very time limited fashion, detailing these would be so much wasted space on the page. All of this is one more reason you want a good buyer's agent on your side before you start looking at property. Dual Agency is a recipe for disaster for buyers (and for the sellers too!).

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

I had made a request to repair that included $3700 credit for closing costs. I wanted to get things done like safety issues and more critical maintenance issues done. Our estimate said that it would be about $4900 to do all the maintenance we were looking for. The seller was doing a bit, but not all.

The seller apparently balked at giving us any credit. He felt they conceded all they could. Anyway, my agent convinced them to at least counter. I was a bit angry at the initial balk. (the emotion part of the deal). After the initial anger, I went looking for problems and found one that frightened me. My agent had given me the inspection report from the seller's purchase of the home six years ago. There were things on there that were still a problem two years later. Primarily, high water pressure in the house (with the dire warnings of damage to pipes and fixtures as the potential side affect). Secondly, ants. The report six years ago had mentioned ants. Every time I looked at the house, (we visited it 5 times), I always saw ants not many usually only 1 sometimes 2. So, my residual anger ballooned these concerns way up. My ignorance was on the pipes. I have since talked to one plumber and an extended family member who is a retired contractor, home builder and home inspector. It was his comments that alleviated my fears about the pipes and allowed me to calm down a bit. He basically said, "Wow, six years of a pressure test - and it passed. Great! We usually only do two hours." He also said, get a regulator on it, but you shouldn't have a problem.

So, emotions, ignorance and too much time to think - nearly killed the deal.

On the other hand, sometimes people don't get worked up when they should. This person wasn't clear, but I'd get upset if my agent tried to placate me with a six year old inspection - as in "Fire him and sue him" upset. If it's just compare and contrast with a brand new inspection, fine. But if someone else paid that inspector, they may not have any responsibility to you, and you want them to be responsible to you. I wouldn't accept the inspection that the previous prospective buyer had done. Sometimes, agents trying to make sure a transaction goes through will try to give you an existing inspection, because they know what problems that will show. This is always the hallmark of a commission grabber, and you should fire them and file a lawsuit and a complaint with your state regulatory agency if they won't go quietly. Then start looking for something else.

An inspection around here will almost always reveal some defect which wasn't dealt with in the first round of negotiations that resulted in the purchase contract. Usually, they're dinky little stuff. Replace one light bulb, brace the water heater, maybe replace the garbage disposal. Sometimes, however, it is major work: rotting substructure to the roof, foundation damage, etcetera.

It does not matter if it is major or minor. It needs to be fixed. The way I usually explain minor stuff to sellers is, "You don't want to lose a $500,000 sale over $30 in repair work, do you?" It does sound rather silly, doesn't it?

If it's major, it still needs to be fixed. Here's a new defect in your property that causes it to be worth less than the agreed upon price. You can often get the buyer to accept the property for a lesser price - estimated cost of repairs plus an allowance for them being the person who has to deal with it. You're not getting out of major repairs on the cheap unless the buyer's agent hoses their clients. I want a reliable contractor out there to give my buyers an estimate for major repairs plus some money for all the ancillary expenses, and you'll find that's about par for the course. As the seller, you can have your choice between fixing it, giving them an allowance that makes your buyer happy, or losing the transaction.

Lest you think, "I'll just forget about that prospective buyer," even in seller's markets the next one that comes along is likely to find exactly the same set of defects and want exactly the same set of repairs, which is going to cost - you guessed it - pretty much the same amount of money. The only differences are one, in the meantime, you've spent some money on your mortgage, taxes, etcetera, and two, the earlier offer is usually the better one. In other words, same situation, but you're out more money.

Somebody's going to ask about "as is" sales. They really don't make much difference to this fact. I'm not going to let a buyer put in an offer on an "as is" property without an inspection contingency. The inspection shows something major that we didn't already know about, the choice is going to be give us an allowance, fix the problem, or lose the transaction. It's only an actual "as is" sale if the inspection doesn't reveal anything new and major. Matter of fact, selling "as is" is a red flag that tells me the seller probably knows about something major, unless it's a lender-owned property. If it is lender owned, "as is" and "without warranty" are the ways that business is done. Otherwise, it really doesn't mean a lot beyond that you are indicating that you would rather give an allowance at close of escrow than pay for repairs.

For buyers, you don't need to freak out about every last little thing. If you're getting a screaming deal, the fact that you need to put a handrail up in the stairway at a cost of a couple hundred bucks shouldn't cause you to pull out of the deal. If the owner doesn't want to make repairs, be willing to accept the cost plus something reasonable to represent your time and the decreased utility in the meantime. Don't demand triple the cost of major repairs unless you really are going to have to spend that much sitting in hotels and eating out until the work is done.

A reliable contractor is your best friend in subsequent negotiations. First off, it should tell you what it really is going to cost. If they've said that it's going to cost $7500 to fix, that's better information than any agent or inspector can give you. This does wonders for peace of mind, knowing that it's going to be $7500 to fix the problem after you're in title, not $75,000.

An allowance for construction work from the seller can be a great opportunity if you've got some cash left in your pocket after the sale. For example, if you're going to have to replace the green board in the bathroom anyway, it doesn't cost that much more to add some nice updates and upgrades. An extra $500 for better materials can really go a long way. When you go to sell, more money in your pocket. In the meantime, a much nicer bathroom. Even more to the point, one much more aligned with your personal tastes.

Every negotiation after the initial purchase contract is at least as dependent upon the good will of both parties as the initial purchase contract. If one party or the other thinks they got the worst of the initial negotiations, you can expect that to be reflected in how far they are willing to go for you when the inspection reveals defects. You want the person on the other side of the transaction to be thinking they get a decent bargain, one that they would make again. That way, they won't want to blow it off before it happens, by being unreasonable about the repair negotiations. Yes, this is one more reason that you want a buyer's agent to help with negotiations.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

Every so often, you will see references to a "pocket" listing. These are usually bad for owners, and usually bad for buyers, but good for agents.

A "pocket listing" is one where there agent keeps the listing "in his pocket" rather than advertising it on MLS. This keeps it out of sight to nearly every potential buyer! If it's not known to be available, how many people are going to want to see it or decide to make offers?

If a property is not on MLS, how do people find out about it? Why agent advertising to buyers that there is this wonderful property available that they can only see through this agent. In order to see it, of course, they want an exclusive buyer's agency agreement. This gives them a means to lock up the buyer's business as well as the sellers. Of course, limiting the potential market is a violation of the duty owed to the seller because it also lowers the sales price.

It also gives the agent a lock on both halves of the sales commission, as they're pretty much by definition the procuring cause.

There is also a very high danger to the seller: If the agent does not have your property on the MLS, their buddy the property flipper may be the only one that the property gets shown to. This person then puts in the only offer - and even if other offers get put in, the agent plays gatekeeper by tossing them in the trash unbeknownst to the their client. The flipper offers a low-ball, owner takes it because it's the only offer, flipper turns around and sells at profit. Not that this doesn't happen with properties on MLS, but it's a higher danger if the property isn't on MLS.

There is one situation I can think of where a pocket listing is acceptable: if it is temporary, in order to deal with an issue that will make it difficult to market the property for what it's worth. The owner wants the property available, but it isn't really in their best interest to put it on MLS now.

If I take a listing in December, it's usually better to keep it in my pocket until people are done with the whole Christmas holiday thing and ready to get back to business - usually the second week in January. That way the "days on market" counter isn't 30 or more the first time any potential buyers really consider it. People really do refuse to look at property that isn't fresh on the market - it's dumb, but they do it. The San Diego market usually doesn't return to the usual level of activity until mid to late February, but I can guarantee that your potential market in December is a fraction of the interest the same property would generate at any other time of year, and the lowest ebb continues until everyone is back from New Year's. This period is the best time of year to be a buyer, but the worst to be a seller - and it's completely predictable.

If the property is undergoing work to make it more salable, that is also a potentially good reason to keep it in my pocket. This gives me a chance to explain what's going on before the prospective buyers see the current state - to frame the issue, so they know what's going on, and what's being done to fix it, before they see it. Especially since most people are visually oriented, if they understand it's going to look good eventually before they see the current mess, that's a much better chance of a good offer and a sale that my client the owner is happy with. Because I properly manage their expectations, they are better able to consider the property than if they see the mess made by construction cold. That's why there's a sign in the yard, but no entry in MLS yet. People who want to live in that neighborhood will see it as they drive around, and I will happily show it to them - with or without their agent - once they understand why it's not on MLS yet.

(I also do not do dual agency - ever. If I'm showing one of my own listings, the people seeing it sign a piece of paper that says I am not their agent, and that they understand I am doing this purely because I owe the sellers my best efforts to get the property sold.)

Temporary is the only thing that can make a pocket listing acceptable. There is a reason - whose end is marked by some definite date or event - that both the owners and the agent understand and agree means it will likely generate a higher sales price if this property doesn't go onto the MLS until it's over. Once it hits MLS, the Days on Market ticker starts going and I lose my ability to frame prospective buyer's expectations, because any listing good agent wants potential buyers to be able to see that property any time with only their agent for company.

Putting a property on MLS means that everybody can see that it's available, and (if the agent has explained the owner's financial interests to them property) that the ability to come see the property is as wide open as the owners can possibly make it. This maximizes the abilities of potential buyers to know the property is available and to come and see it, thereby generating the maximum possible interest and therefore, the maximum probability of highest sales price. Sales is always a numbers game, and you get the best results by pre-loading the odds in your favor. The only possible exception to wanting the widest possible exposure are if there is a temporary reason why people might not like it as much now as they will in a few days.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

One of the things that always seems to be aiming to confuse mortgage consumers is advertising based upon whether the loan is fixed rate, and for how long.

First, I need to acquaint you with two concepts: amortization and term. The term of the loan is nothing more than how long the loan lasts. How many months or years from the time the documents are signed until it is done. At the end of the term, the loan is over. In some cases, the payoff schedule (or amortization) will not pay the loan off in this amount of time, leaving you with a balance which you must pay off at that time. When this happens, it is known as a "balloon payment."

Amortization is the payoff schedule. In other words, if the term was long enough (it isn't always) how long would it take you to pay the loan off with these payments?

There are four basic types of home loans out there. The first is the "true" fixed rate loan, the second is the "true" ARM, or Adjustable Rate Mortgage, the third is the hybrid, which starts out fixed but switches to adjustable, and finally, the Balloon.

"True" Fixed rate loans have the interest rate fixed for the entire life of the loan. Loan term of a true fixed rate loan is always the same as amortization period. Until you pay it off or refinance, the rate never changes. They are most commonly fixed for thirty years, but are fairly common in fifteen year variety, and widely available in 25, 20, and even 10 year variants, and the 40 year loan is one of those things lenders bring in and out of availability depending upon how badly they need it to sell loans. The shorter the period, the lower the rate will be in comparison to other loans available at the same time, but the higher the payment, as you have to get the entire principal paid off in a much shorter period of time. I seem to always use a $270,000 loan amount, so let us consider that. Making and holding a few background constraints constant, when I originally wrote this the rates from a random lender for a thirty year fixed rate loan was 6.25% at par (no points, no rebate). The 20 was 6.125, the 15 year 5.75. The 15 sounds like a better deal, right? But where the payment on the 30 year fixed rate loan was $1662.43, the payment on the 20 year fixed rate loan was $1953.88, and the payment on the 15 year loan was $2242.11 So you may not be able to afford the payment on the 15 year loan. (This particular lender didn't have 25 or 10 year loans.)

Some thirty year fixed rate loans are available with interest only for a certain period, usually five years, and then they amortize over the last 25 years of the period. Some people do this because they expect a raise in their income over the next few years, and some just do it for cash flow reasons, planning to sell or refinance before the end of the fifth year. Using the example in the preceding paragraph, this would have you making a monthly payment of $1406.25 for the first five years, then $1781.11 for the last twenty-five.

If there is a pre-payment penalty on a thirty year fixed rate loan, it is typically in effect for five years. Considering that over 50% of everybody will refinance or sell within two years, and over 95 percent within five, this is an awfully long time for a pre-payment penalty to be in effect. Practically everyone with a five year pre-payment penalty is going to end up paying it.

"True" Adjustable Rate Mortgages, or ARM loans, are adjustable from day one. The interest rate is, from the time the loan starts, always based upon an underlying rate or index, plus a specified margin. There is no fixed period whatsoever on a "true" ARM. This makes them in general hard to sell, because people cannot plan their mortgage payments, and except for the Negative Amortization loans sold on the basis of a temporarily low payment, these loans have always been very rare.

(If someone offers you a rate that appears way below market rates, like 1%, they are offering you a Negative Amortization loan. The 1% is a "nominal" or "in name only" rate, the real rate on these is month to month variable from the start based upon an underlying index, making this a "true" ARM.)

If there is a prepayment penalty on a "true" ARM, it must therefore be for a longer period than the fixed period, which is zero. You are taking a risk that you will have to pay a pre-payment penalty because the rate did something that you did not anticipate, and you may not be able to afford the payments if the rates change but the penalty is still in effect.

Rate adjustments on ARMs can be monthly, quarterly, biannually, or annually, with monthly being most common, including for every Negative Amortization loan I've ever seen.

The third category is the hybrid loan. Hybrids are often called Adjustable Rate Mortgages, and most loan officers are really talking about hybrids when they discuss ARMs. You should ask if uncertain, but in general, everybody from the lender on down calls them ARMs (I myself almost always call them ARMs), but when you get down to the technical details, they are a hybrid. Hybrids start out fixed rate for a given period, then become adjustable. The overall term of the loan is usually thirty years, but the forty is more likely to be available for hybrid ARMs than for fixed rate. Unlike Balloons, if you like what they adjust to, you are welcome to keep hybrids for as long as they fit your needs. There is no requirement to refinance a hybrid after the fixed period.

Hybrids are widely available with 2, 3, 5, 7 and 10 year initial fixed rate periods, and they may also be available "interest only" for the period of fixed rate at a slightly higher interest rate. Two years fixed is typically a subprime loan, and while five and seven and ten year fixed periods are available from some subprime lenders, they are more commonly "A paper" loans. Three is common both subprime and "A paper". Once they begin adjusting, "A paper" typically (not always!) adjusts once per year, while every hybrid subprime I've ever seen adjusts every six months.

WARNING: I often see hybrid loans advertised and quoted as "fixed" rate loans, and you find the fact that they are hybrid ARMs buried in the fine print somewhere. Yes, they are "fixed rate" for X number of years. But this is fundamentally dishonest advertising. This is one of the reasons I keep saying that any time you see the words "Fixed rate," you should immediately ask the question "How long is the rate fixed for?" Please go ahead and ask, for your own protection. Ethical loan officers know that people get sold a bill of goods on this point every day, and so they're not offended. And you don't want to do business with the unethical ones, right?

Now, I am a huge fan of hybrid loans myself. When I originally wrote this, I went so far as to say that I would never have a thirty year fixed rate loan on my own home unless the rates do something economically unprecedented. Well, that has now changed due to the stringency of qualification requirements and how people's economic circumstances can change to make it impossible to qualify for a new loan. You get a lower interest rate because you're not paying for an insurance policy that the rate won't change for thirty years, without jacking up the minimum payment to something you may not be able to afford. Most people voluntarily abandon their thirty year interest rate insurance policy (also known as "Thirty year fixed rate loan") within about two years anyway. So why would I want to spend the money for that policy in the first place, when I'm likely to only use two or three or five of those years?

Nonetheless, particularly with subprime loans, you need to be careful. I have seen precisely one subprime loan in my life without a pre-payment penalty, and I've seen a lot of loans (at least thousands, maybe tens of thousands - I wasn't counting at the time - where your average real estate agent has seen maybe a few dozen, and your average bank loan officer maybe a few hundred). Many loan providers, even "A Paper" loan providers will stick you with a three or five year pre-payment penalty on a two year fixed rate loan. Why? Because it increases their commission. So if you take one of these loans, you will have a period of time when you don't know what the rate will be doing, but if you refinance or sell during that period, you will have to pay your lender several thousand extra dollars. This puts many people on the horns of a dilemma - whether to keep making payments they can't afford, or pay the pre-payment penalty. The bank wins either way.

One final point about hybrid loans. Once they adjust, they all adjust to the same rate plus the same margin. Unless you need the lower payment to qualify for the loan, it makes no sense to pay three points to buy the rate down on a five year hybrid ARM (or anything else) when it takes eight to ten years to recover the cost of your points. Why? Because you'll never get the money back! When the rate adjusts on the loan you paid three points for (IF you keep it that long), it goes to the same rate as the loan where they would have paid all of your closing costs. Judging by the evidence, most people don't understand this.

The final category of loan that I'm going to discuss here is the Balloon. This is a loan where the amortization is longer than the term. So if the amortization is thirty years, you make payments "as if" it were a thirty year loan, but since the actual term of the loan is shorter, you will have to sell, refinance, or somehow make extra payments to pay it off before the loan term expires. The thing I don't understand is that Balloon rates are typically higher than the comparable hybrid ARM, despite the fact that you either have to come up with a large chunk of cash at the end or sell or refinance prior to that. This makes them a less attractive loan. Furthermore, pre-payment penalties are every bit as common. Balloons are widely available in five and seven year terms with thirty year amortization, and I've seen three and ten, as well. Probably the most common "balloon" loan, though, is for those who do a fixed rate second mortgage, where the best loan available is usually a thirty year amortization with a fifteen year balloon. Since over half of everybody has refinanced within two years anyway, and 95 percent within five, the fact that it's got a fifteen year balloon payment just doesn't affect a whole lot of people, and it shouldn't scare anyone off.

WARNING!: I have seen Balloon Loans mis-advertised in the same way as I talked about with hybrid ARMS a few paragraphs ago. I regard this as even more misleading than advertising hybrid's as fixed. Unfortunately, many states do not have good regulations on rate advertising, and in many others, enforcement is lax. When a loan provider advertises, the entire game is to get you to call, and then control what you see and what you learn from that point on. Your best protection from this is to talk to other loan providers. Shop around, compare offers, tell them all about each others' offers. If something is not real, or it has a nasty gotcha!, if you talk to enough people, somebody will likely tell you about it. If you only talk to one person, you're at their mercy. Even if you somehow ask the right question to discover the gotcha!, the people who do this have long practice in distracting you, or answering another question that somehow seems similar enough that you let it go.

Caveat Emptor



Original here

Everybody knows that you want the lowest rate, and everybody knows that you don't want to pay any money you don't have to, in order to get it. However, not everybody makes the connection that it is always a tradeoff between the two. At any given point in time, each home lender has its own set of tradeoffs in place.

There are two components to the costs of a loan: Closing costs and points. Points have to do with the cost of the money. Closing costs relate to the work that has to be performed in order to get the loan done. These are not junk fees, although junk fees do happen.

Let us consider for a moment the home loan. You want to buy a home for your family, but don't have enough cash. Without somebody willing to loan you the difference, you cannot buy. You check with your family, your friends, your neighbors and they're all tapped out (or say they are). But there's a bank over there willing to loan it if you meet their terms.

The banks are not being altruists, of course. They're making a good chunk of change for doing so. But you would not believe the amount of complaints I hear out sympathetically about how this evil horrible bank is charging all this money and making people jump through all these hoops to get this money ("They want a pay stub! Actually they want two pay stubs! What is the problem with these nazis?"). Fact is that this bank is doing you a favor, risking hundreds of thousands of dollars on you so that you can own a home for your family. They are doing something for you that all of your friends and family were unwilling or unable to do: loan you the money to buy a home. I'd say that puts them pretty high on my "nifty list", not "Nazis", but it's your life. When you think about it, they're doing you a favor by making certain you can afford the payments on the loan (It's more than many agents and many loan officers will do), as well as insuring that if something goes wrong and you can't afford the loan, they'll get most of their money back. Real Estate is not sold on a whim. Just after the market peaked, another agent in my office had a listing of an $800,000 home. The family involved makes about $60,000 a year. Their interest alone was 76% of their gross pay, never mind property taxes and insurance. An unscrupulous agent sold them the house based upon the ability to flip it whenever they wanted, and found them a similar loan agent to get them a negative amortization loan so they've got about fifteen hundred dollars a month being added to their mortgage and they still can't make the payment. But real estate is not like stock; you can't sell it at will. The market cooled just a little bit. They lost their entire investment before they even came to us, and they came to our office to get it sold before worse things happened, and we did everything that could be done, and still nobody wanted to buy it until the price was reduced.

There's a lot of this out there. You would likely be amazed at the loans a competent loan officer can still qualify people for, and that if you understood what you were getting into, you'd drag them into the sunlight and run a wooden stake through their hearts before running away, instead of believing them to be your friend. I'd have gotten an extra client a week, at least, if I didn't sit down with the people to find out what they can really afford before I showed them the $800,000 house that's going to get me paid a Huge Pile Of Money, when I really should be telling them about 2 or 3 bedroom condominiums, or even telling them to continue renting. It's hard to get a client enthusiastic about a 900 square foot 2 bedroom condo when someone else is showing them a 5 bedroom 2800 square foot House! With It's Own Yard! No Shared Walls! and telling them they Know Someone Who Can Get The Loan! Well, I could have gotten them the loan, too, if they really wanted it, but it really doesn't help them if they can't make the payments. The world will catch up to those other agents and loan officers, and I put a certain value on the good opinion of the man in the glass.

Getting back to the issue of closing costs, there is work that has to be done before you get your loan. The people who do that work are entitled to be paid. You don't work for free. They're not going to work for free. As I have covered elsewhere, realistic closing costs without junk fees are about $3400, and can easily be higher. The bank is not just going to absorb these costs because they're going to make money off the loan. They have money, and if you want them to loan it to you, you need to meet their conditions.

Each home loan, whether the lender intends to sell it or not, has a value on the secondary market. They also cost the lender a certain amount (they have to pay for all money they lend, whether by borrowing or by opportunity cost). Based upon these two facts, the lender sets a level of discount points or rebate for each rate for each type of loan. When you pay discount points, you are actually paying the lender money in order to buy a rate that you would not otherwise be able to get. When there is a rebate, it means that the lender will pay out money for a loan done on those terms. A rebate can be thought of as a negative discount, and vice versa. Whatever the level it is set at by the lender, there's going to be an additional margin so that the broker or loan officer can get paid, even if the loan officer is an employee of that lender. This margin is not necessarily smaller by going direct to a lender - actually a broker usually has a better margin than that lender's own loan officers. As I say elsewhere, the supermarket banks often have their best rates posted, and I'm usually getting someone a better loan (lower cost/rate tradeoff) with the same lender.

But within a given type of loan, the lender always sets the loan discount higher for the lowest rate. The lower the rate, the higher the discount and the higher the rate the lower the discount. Choose the lowest rate, and pay not only closing costs but the highest discount as well. Whether it's coming out of your checkbook or being added to your mortgage, you are still paying it. Choose a somewhat higher rate, and there will be no discount points, just closing costs. There's a name for this rate where there's no points but no rebate; it's called par. Rates below par involve discount points, rates above par will get you some or all of your closing costs paid by the bank or broker.

Many people will want the lowest rate; after all that has the lowest payment. But it is (or should be) the client's choice, not a choice made for them by the loan officer. It's actually easier to qualify for lower rates, because the payment is lower. However these lower rates can be costly, because the fact is that the median mortgage age in this country is about two years, and fewer than 5% of all loans are more than 5 years old. This means there's a 50% chance you've refinanced (or sold and bought a new home) within two years, and over 95% within 5 years. The exact numbers vary over time, but I see no reason for these consumer habits to change. Furthermore, I'm a consumer, and so are you. There are people who bought a place and paid off their 30 year loan and now own the property free and clear, but they are rare these days. Much more common is the person who bought their house in the 1970s, has refinanced ten or twelve or fourteen times, and now owes ten times the original purchase price. More common yet is the person who's on the third, fourth, or fifth house since then. You might be one of the first group, or you might not be, pretend you are, and be hurting only yourself. It's likely to be a costly illusion.

Let's look at three different 30-year fixed rate loans. All of them start from needing $270,000 in loan money. Rates are lower now than when I first wrote this, but the comparison of results is still valid.

Loan 1 gets a 5.5% rate, but has to pay two points to get it, so his loan balance starts at $270,000 plus $3400 plus two points, or $278,980. He paid $8980 to get his loan. Loan 2 gets a 6% rate at par, and his loan balance starts at $273,400, because he only had to pay $3400 to get the loan. Finally, Loan 3 chooses a 6.5% loan where all closing costs are paid for him by the bank or broker. His loan balance starts at $270,000.

Your first month interest with Loan 1 is $1278.66, and principal paid is 305.36, on a payment of $1584.02. Loan 2 pays $1367.00 interest and $272.17 principal with a loan payment of $1639.17. Loan 3 is going to pay interest of $1462.50, principal of $244.08, and have a total payment of $1706.58. So far, it's looking like Loan 1 is the best of all possible loans, right? But look two years down the line when 50 percent of these people have refinanced or sold:

Remember, the original balance was $270,000. Loan 1 has paid $2130 less in interest the Loan 2, while Loan 3 has paid $2301.92 more. Furthermore, Loan 1 has paid down $7728 in principal, while Loan 2 has only paid down $6921 and Loan 3 still less at $6237. It's really looking like Loan 1 was the best choice.

But remember, 50% of all loans have refinanced or sold within two years. When you refinance or sell, the benefits you paid money to get stop. But the costs to get those benefits are sunk on the front end, and you're not getting them back. Look at the balance of Loan 1. The person who chose this still owes $271,251 - $1251 than they did before they chose the loan in the first place. Furthermore, his balance is $4773 higher than loan 2, and even though he paid $2130 less in interest, he's still $2643 worse off. Furthermore, whether he refinances or sells and rolls the proceeds over into a new property, the new loan is going to be for $4773 more money than Loan 2's new loan. Assume everybody got a really fantastic new loan at 5%. Loan 1 is going to have to pay $238 more per year to start with in interest expense for his new loan, simply because his remaining balance on the old loan was higher. Loan 3 is in even better shape than Loan 2. He's paid $2301.92 more in interest, but his balance is $2715.99 lower, for a net benefit over loan 2 of $414, not to mention that his interest costs on his new loan will be almost $136 lower simply because his starting balance is lower.

Now let's look 5 years out, when over 95% of the people will have sold or refinanced.

At this point, Loan 1 has saved $5353 in interest relative to Loan 2, while Loan 3 has spent $5783 more. Loan 1 has cut his balance difference to $3535 more than Loan 2, so he looks like he's ahead! Furthermore, Loan 3 is really lagging, having paid $5783 more in interest although the difference in balance is only $1660 to his good.

Well, loan 2 is ahead of loan 3 pretty much permanently at this point. Assuming all three refinance or sell and buy a new property with a 5% loan right now, Loan 3 is only going to get back $83 per year of the $4122.80 he's down relative to Loan 2. Especially considered on a time value of money, that's permanent. But despite Loan 1 being ahead of Loan 2 right now, Loan 2 will get back almost $177 per year. Ten years on, assuming a ver low 5% rate, loan 2 is back to even, and most of us are going to be property holders the rest of our lives. Consider also that 95% of the people who chose loan 1 NEVER got this far - they never broke even in the first place.

The point I'm trying to get across is that money you roll into your balance hangs around a very long time. And you're sinking potentially many thousands of dollars into a bet that most people lose. Yes, if you keep the loan long enough, the lower rates (at least for thirty year fixed rate loans) will pretty much always pay for themselves, several times over in many cases. The other point I'm trying to make is that most people don't keep their loan long enough for the benefits to pay for their costs to get those benefits.

As a final consideration, consider what happens if one year later interest rates are one-half percent lower. I can get Loan 3 the same loan that Loan 2 has for zero cost. He's got the same interest rate as Loan 2, whom I can't help right now, but a lower balance - neither one of his loans cost him anything. And it has happened that the rates dropped down to where I could get someone 5.5% on a thirty year fixed rate loan for zero - lender pays me enough to pay all the closing costs. Net to them, zip. Suppose rates do this again. I call Loan 2 and Loan 3, and now they've both got 5.5 %, but this doesn't help Loan 1. Now Loan 2 has the same as Loan 1, while only adding $3400 to his balance to get it, as opposed to Loan 1 adding nearly $9000, and Loan 3 has the same loan without adding a dime to his balance. Who's in the best position?

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

The short answer is not only "yes" but "damned straight"

I refinanced my house, and the lender put as one of my payoffs my Acura lease that I have 3 years left, whick equals about $19,000. I told him that was a lease and not a credit card, and he said he would take it off. I'm supposed to get my money tomorrow wired to me, but when he sent me a good faith estimate to sign today the Acura lease was still there. He said I would have to take it like that cause he forgot. I'm not gonna pay $20,000 on a 3 year lease left for a 30 year fixed rate refi!!! In the end I will have paid over $40,000 for a car I will only have for 3 more years. Can he do this to me? I need the money and signed everything else??? Please help

The first thing you have to understand is that THE most important measure of whether you can likely afford a loan is your debt to income ratio. If you make $5000 per month gross and you have to pay $3000 of it in debt service that's a 60% debt to income ratio.

Debt to income ratio is total cost of housing PLUS contracted monthly outlays divided by gross monthly income. It includes student loans, car leases as well as car purchase payments - everything you have contracted to pay out on a periodic basis. They want to measure how well you can afford to make payments out of continuing income. In the email quoted above, I see warning signs of being over-extended already.

For myself, I don't like the idea of refinancing a short term debt into a long term debt. I don't like suggesting it to clients - while debt consolidation refinance can be powerfully beneficial, there are huge traps that most people fall into. The benefits only happen if you keep making the equivalent of the same payments, and only if you keep doing it longer than the consolidated debts would have lasted. If you're doing it for reasons of cash flow, the only justification is to keep yourself out of bankruptcy. This person seems to understand that debt consolidation is generally a bad thing, but wants some cash out that they really can't afford.

That is the only reason a loan officer should broach the idea of debt consolidation. Unfortunately, it happens far too often because loan officers are paid on the basis of loan size. Larger loan equals bigger paycheck. Also, all too many consumers understand only cash flow, and that cutting their payments means they apparently have more money to spend on entertainment, travel, toys, or whatever else their personal desires point them towards.

The basic challenge illustrated, however, is that in order to qualify for the loan, this person does not make enough money - or hasn't proven they make enough money - to satisfy the underwriting guidelines on debt to income ratio. In plain English, they cannot afford the loan they are contemplating. Perhaps they could afford it if they only had the home loan, but they have car payments, car leases, student loans, credit cards, and installment payments on other goods as well. All of these are contracted monthly outlays. You must continue to pay them.

(Believe me, you don't want to tell a prospective lender you want to stiff existing creditors! They don't take it well)

The homeowners nonetheless want the money. The email didn't say why, but I strongly suspect it's a desire rather than a need. So the loan officer is trying to find a way to get it to them by qualifying them for the loan. It's within the context of serving the client's perceived "needs", and yet it rarely serves client interests. There are damned few loan officers who reflexively use this kind of red flag as a reason to sit and and consider whether the client real interests are served by the loan; after all, if the answer is "no" they don't have a loan and they don't get paid. I try, and I usually find out later that they got a worse loan from someone else because they didn't want to tell me they appreciated my concern but wanted to do it anyway. Nonetheless, if loan officers supposedly have a fiduciary responsibility (and we do) it should be an obvious requirement for situations where the client may be compromising their long term ability to afford the loan. I doubt the results of the Era of Make Believe Loans would have been so devastating if consumers in this situation had some mandatory protections in the form of counseling on the effects of getting this money. This is one thing that should have been done in response to the overextension of credit to so many homeowners, and wasn't. Might have something to do with the fact that the big banks make large campaign contributions, while homeowners, not so much.

There are tricks that enable the lowering of debt to income ratio, and debt consolidation is the chief of those. It has perils for the consumer, but it does exist. By spreading the principal payments over 30 years (and usually by lowering the interest rate), debt to income ratio can be greatly lowered. This gets the loan approved, which means the consumer gets the money they want and the loan officer and their company get paid. Win-win in the present tense. All too many of these, however, sabotage that homeowner's financial future - it just takes a while for that to be apparent.

Keep in mind, the question is not "Do they owe this money?" They do. There is no question about that. Nor are their existing debts the moral responsibility of a real estate loan officer. The question is whether a way to restructure the debt exists that both qualifies this homeowner for the new loan they want, and does not unduly compromise their financial future. The question for the lender and the underwriter, however, is even more concrete: Does the new loan or loan structure comply with underwriting guidelines such that there is a reasonable expectation of future payments being made on time? That is the bottom line. If the projected monthly payments are too high, the answer to the question is "no", so people go looking for ways to lower those monthly payments and change the answer to "yes."

A $500 car payment that would have been paid off in 3 years may add only $100 or so to a real estate loan payment. If the homeowner makes $5000 per month, that cuts their debt to income ratio by about 8% right there. For a loan officer, 8% off Debt to Income Ratio is a huge amount, and I've seen situations where debt consolidation cuts 20% off a Debt to Income ratio. When 45% is the cutoff, consolidating debt can make a huge difference in a homeowner's ability to qualify. The trick is for it not to lock the consumer into a situation where a year from now they've got to have a new car to get to work because the old one disintegrated, and there's just no way they can afford it. The lender and underwriter do not care about that. They care whether the projected monthly cost of housing plus debt service is within guidelines.

I don't know by how much, but its apparent this person is in that kind of situation. They want the money, but given their other debts, they can't afford it without consolidating their other payments into the loan. The homeowners have the right to refuse, but then the lender has the right to refuse to fund the loan. It is a strict quid pro quo: cut your payments by this much (in addition to whatever other underwriting requirements there may be) and we will fund your loan. Don't, and we won't. While declining to consolidate may be the smart thing to do in many situations, most consumers decide they want whatever benefit the loan has enough that they decide to do what the lender requires. It is the homeowner's choice, but the bottom line is that if you want the loan in such a situation, then yes you have to do it.

Caveat Emptor

Somebody asked me about a deferred payment mortgage for a purchase. The long and the short of the story is that they don't have any cash to put down, and they can't qualify for the payments under any kind of reasonable debt to income ratio.

A few years ago, in the era of Make Believe Loans, we could have gotten this person a loan. It wouldn't have been the smartest thing in the world, but we could have done it. I'm confident I would have turned him off the idea back then too, as I did many others who hated me then but may now be reconsidering. Most have figured out that the loan officers who had a policy of "just shut up and get paid for putting the loan through" were not their friends after all.

Even then, however we would have to have dealt with calculating debt to income ratio, as well as the fact that purchase money loans evaluate the property on a lower of cost or market basis, where the appraisal is the "market" and the official purchase price is "cost." Since it's the lesser of the two values that is used, there is never equity at purchase in excess of whatever down payment you make, at least as far as the lender is concerned.

A paper fixed rate loans use the fixed rate of the loan for calculating front end ratio. They are permitted to use a higher rate than actual, but not a lower one. If your rate is 6%, and they use 6.25% because the rate isn't actually locked on a $300,000 thirty year fixed rate loan, the number they will use is $1847.16. This is not an arbitrary number; it's the most important measurement of whether or not you can afford the loan. The front end ratio, which is the loan payment itself, is not generally a deal breaker if it's too high, but the back end ratio, which is the loan combined with taxes, insurance, homeowner's association, and all your other monthly debt service, is a deal breaker - as well as the most important measurement of whether you can afford the loan. Those other numbers are all fixed based upon your situation. You owe what you owe, property taxes are what they are, and you only make what you make - or actually, as far as the lender is concerned you make what you can prove you make. I've written against overstating your income from the very first on this site.

Why do they use the higher number? As insurance against available rates going higher. If rates decline and you can actually lock in something better (or for a lower cost), no problems ensue. But if that payment goes up at all when you go to lock the loan, that means the file has to go through another complete underwriting. One dollar per month or ten thousand, it makes no difference. Up is up. So to avoid that, loan officers who are not complete doofuses add a quarter percent or so to the rate they expect in order to generate a "qualifying rate" and "qualifying payment" with some room for error when the loan isn't locked. That way if things do get worse, the whole process doesn't have to start all over again. (Regular readers will understand it's really about the tradeoff between rate and cost, but a higher cost for the same rate also triggers re-underwriting, albeit focused on cash to close rather than debt to income ratio)

When you move to A paper ARMs, the allowable back debt to income ratio actually goes down, usually to 38% from 45%. Not only that, but the rate used to compute the payments is usually much higher than actual. The calculations require the use of, not the initial rate on the note, but the final, fully indexed rate on the note. They use current rate for the underlying index the ARM is based upon, plus the rate margin. Say the initial loan rate is 5.25% but the underlying index is at 4.75% plus a margin of 2.25%, they will use 7% for the purposes of determining whether or not you actually qualify for the loan. In the $300,000 example above, this means they'll use $1995.91, even though the actual rate and payment is lower - and due to lower maximum debt to income ratio, the ceiling on what you can afford at a given income level will be lower. Depending upon the lender, they may even add a bit of a margin to that qualifying rate. This makes it significantly harder to qualify for an A paper hybrid ARM than a fixed rate loan, even though the rates and payments are lower, and is certainly one reason why there aren't more of these loans out there. Nonetheless, this procedure they use for qualification does mean that someone who manages to qualify should be able to afford whatever the payment eventually adjusts to.

One of the reasons subprime loans got so popular was that they stopped using this method of determining whether an applicant qualified for the loan. The subprime lenders started qualifying applicants based strictly upon the minimum initial payment, despite the fact that they knew good and well that the payment was going to adjust upwards at a known time. Even if the initial payment was "interest only" or negative amortization. They just assumed that the people would get raises, be able to refinance with increased equity, or just be able to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, or something else equally hope based. Three strong verses of "Kumbaya" would have been about as intelligent, but it worked so long as Wile E. Coyote didn't look down. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that this is one of the reasons why subprime crashed so hard, especially in conjunction with stated income loans. Because this made it absurdly easy to qualify for a loan, especially a larger loan than people could really afford, subprime loans were ridiculously popular for a while, even among people who should have been able to qualify for A paper had they limited their budget to what they could afford. When the adjustments hit, it was predictable as gravity that those folks who qualified subprime couldn't make their payments. When the market values stopped rising so quickly that they supported serial refinancing, it didn't take very long for large scale problems to emerge. In the overall scheme of things, subprime loan qualification was good for real estate agents who wanted easy commission checks, irresponsible loan officers, and people with the sense to cash out of the market while things were still going crazy. For the people who applied for subprime loans, not so much.

You should want to qualify with the toughest standards you can meet, preferably A paper full documentation, and even the A paper ARM standards if you can, but this concept was a little bit difficult to get across to the people who already had their hearts set on a property that was way too expensive for them, especially when everyone else is encouraging the speculative atmosphere. It got to the point where newspapers were running articles on "What's a fair margin over index for negative amortization loans," when the correct response would have been, "RUN AWAY."

The whole situation is enough to make you understand exactly how many people outsmarted themselves in pretty much the same wise as the people pictured in this clip:

Unlike the fictional characters portrayed, however, the consequences for borrowers who get in too deep does not end when the director yells, "Cut!" You might want to bear this in mind when figuring out exactly how much loan you can really qualify for. Even the subprime lenders who survived have now figured it out, proving that even the silliest English Knight ("Ca-niggit") can learn when the pain gets bad enough.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here

With the current popularity of pursuing a "green" lifestyle and some sustainability (garden plot, edible landscaping, micro-orchard, etc.) in one's yard area, I value your input about what to look for in an older subdivision with larger lots that aren't "vampire properties." And how do you factor in local ordinances? Thanks!

First off, I want to say that it's not my place to pass judgment on anyone's housing preferences. This person wants more green, so I'm going to help them with that. If someone else doesn't, I'll help them with that too.

If you're really looking to be green, there are a lot of reasons not to buy a single family detached home. In heating and cooling, materials, and most especially land use, single family detached homes are about as un-green as it comes. Talk to the sustained use experts, and they'll tell you that single family detached housing is horribly wasteful of everything involved. The "greenest" housing is high rise condominiums and apartment buildings. Not what everyone wants to hear, but nonetheless the truth.

With that said, there are degrees of "green". Small sized plots are not agriculturally efficient - that's one reason why Zimbabwe (to name the worst example) has gone from breadbasket to starving in a few years time - they broke the big farms up into little farms supporting one subsistence level family each. So you're not going to produce enough to offset what the land could do as part of a commercial farm or large public park, but you can do fairly well if you check with your local greenery experts. Locally, Kate Sessions (our most famous landscaper) was known for gardens that were both beautiful and water efficient - to the point where the City of San Diego doesn't water large portions of Balboa Park at all. Pretty much every greenhouse locally has someone whose advice to make the landscaping efficient is worthwhile. Even townhomes can be worthwhile - I know folks with dwarf fruit trees in the back yards of their townhomes, and if a homeowner's association was to make an effort, most of them would make far more more difference than a single plot owner - because while it is a common interest development, when you put them all together, you usually have several times the land available of most single family detached urban dwellings. Trees provide shade in summer and keep it cool - and they help break the wind and lower heating bills in winter. Obviously, check with someone local to you for specific recommendations because I'm pretty sure orange and lemon trees don't do so hot in Minnesota winters. Grass is nice, and good for resale, but it's a big user of water - a no-no for Green living in most of the west. It wouldn't be such a big deal to water grass with 'gray' (used water, no longer potable) if lawns weren't so notoriously un-"green".

For heating and cooling, double or triple paned windows and good, tight weatherstripping are pretty much mandatory for greens. Newer housing has this sort of thing already installed, and lots of older ones homes do, as well. Given the cost, it probably is not worth the cost on a purely monetary basis to replace existing windows with modern ones for that reason alone, but that doesn't stop a lot of people. I'd think wood floors - replaceable, polishable, durable - would be superior to anything else, but I can't cite chapter and verse. I know a lot of beautiful hardwood floors that are the better part of a century old - while even travertine starts looking dingy and ready for replacement in considerably less time than that. When wood starts looking old, it can be re-polished to its original shine more easily than anything else I'm aware of. Finally, wood is a much more renewable resource. Trees grow back. Quarries do not. Petrochemicals do not.

Good insulation is a feature of eco-friendly housing as well, but be careful: Too much can actually be a health hazard, as it can cause Radon gas to build up to levels that are illegal in uranium mines.

Modern air conditioning units work without CFCs. R410a ("Puron") is what home systems are in the process of converting to, as CFCs and HCFCs are being phased out. I don't have any first hand experience with this, but if you're replacing your system, it appears to be worthwhile to consider replacing with a high efficiency modern system. The difference in price is smallish, and the difference on your monthly bill significant. The upshot is that you'll pay for replacing your prior system with a high efficiency system a lot more quickly than a low. I'm also told that simply running the ductwork underground for a certain distance can negate the need for heating and air conditioning altogether - all you need is a good fan to pull the air through. Be careful that the static ground temperature in your area will support this first - check with a local expert. Needless to say, that last suggestion about burying roughly 100 feet of ductwork isn't really an option for the owners of anything but single family detached housing, even though it needn't be in a straight line..

The square-cube law is always in effect. Heat and cold leak in and out via surface area, while you're heating or cooling cubic volume. The smaller the surface area, as a proportion, the longer it takes for heat and cooling to leak out. A featureless cube (or better yet, sphere) is more efficient than a rambling single story ranch house. Nonetheless, it's more efficient to heat a small structure than a large one, and body heat from the inhabitants helps more in winter. A 1200 square foot dwelling is more "green" than a 3000 square foot dwelling for the same family. Is that going to stop me from showing 3000 square foot dwellings to those who want them? Absolutely not. Once again, this is "other factors being equal."

If you really want to go green, especially in the west, you're going to get into recycling the water you use. Laundry water can be used for a lot of plants, as can bath water. The ultimate instances of this are pretty disgusting if you think about them, but people do go a lot further than this, and every drop of water on this planet has gone through such a cycle multiple times. It's all pretty much dependent upon how far you want to go on your own hook. My main objection to the City of San Diego's water recycling plan was that it wasn't good enough to get out all contaminants, and people weren't going to get their own discharges back, so they could drop stuff into the drain like old engine oil, and be confident it wasn't coming back to their tap.

Green construction is no better and no worse, as far as intrinsic durability and aesthetics go, than non-green construction. It can be more expensive (How many hardwood floors have been laid down these last ten years?), but quite often, you can actually save yourself money in the end if you're willing to make the up-front investment. How far you want to go is a function of your preferences, pocketbook, and your area of the country.

Caveat Emptor

Original article here