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Category: Real Estate (page 97 of 266)

October 8, 2008

Camp Pendleton/Oceanside Fires News On Twitter

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

It’s fall in San Diego, right?

Here we go again:

More than 1000 acres of land on Camp Pendleton goes up in flames, after a wildfire breaks out on the base Wednesday.

If you want to follow the action, check out this Twitter feed and this blog.  Social media are the 21 century version of the ham radio operators. Twitter played a big role during the 2007 San Diego Wildfires; it should be even more useful this year.

Think good thoughts for and send out prayers to Unchained graduate Don Reedy tonight. He’s in the eastern path of the fire.

October 8, 2008

Will Mortgage Brokers Be the Hope For Homeowners?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

The FHA Hope For Homeowners program was designed for existing homeowners, struggling with mortgage payments and an “upside-down” equity position in their primary residence.  It is a new program with lots of misinformation.  Some believe it can only be offered by existing loan servicers, some think only participating lender/servicers can offer the program, and few are certain if the program will be offered through mortgage brokers.

I discussed the key components of the FHA Hope For Homeowners loan program on Mortgages Unzipped.  They are are not limited to but include:

  • An appraisal will be performed and the maximum loan amount will be 90% of that appraised value.  All subordinate liens will be extinguished and the exiting lienholder will have to agree to a loss of principal.
  • The current housing payment must be more than 31% of the homeowner’s gross monthly income.
  • The homeowner must not have misrepresented his/her income on the original loan application.
  • The homeowner must get a new 30-year fixed rate loan and qualify based upon documented income.
  • The homeowner must agree to an declining equity sharing agreement (for the existing equity), with the FHA, for a specified period of time.
  • The homeowner will share in future appreciation with the FHA.
  • The program is completely voluntary; existing lienholders don’t have to participate.

This article isn’t about whether the Hope for Homeowners program is a “good” idea.  I believe that the future of mortgage refinancing lies in the immediate reality that lenders will accept short payoffs for refinance loans in addition to resale transactions.  Robert Kerr made a comment, about a year ago, about the morality of loan modifications and suggested that lenders should “mark-to-the market”and accept lower balances to be commensurate with declined valuations.  That comment inspired my semi-satirical recommendation of short payoffs, cross-collateralized against the net present value of government retirement entitlements. Robert made me think that the moral is the practical.

Will the investors play ball? One lender, acquired at the tail of the sub-prime boom, sold its entire loan portfolio for about 22 cents on the dollar this past summer.  This means that a $300,000, 100% financing home loan, made in 2005, was bought for $75,000.  Read more

October 8, 2008

It’s a great time to be a Realtor or a lender — if you’re a good one. At BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando, you’ll learn how to dominate your market in the dark days ahead

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What came out of last night’s Presidential debate? No matter who wins, we all lose. As painful as it might be to suffer a quick drop in housing values, followed by a recovery, we are in for a much more extended agony. Whether Obama wins in November or McCain, we’re in for an lengthy period of government “help” — mortgage work-outs or price supports or some other crafty means of disguising the true value of homes. This might be good for you if you are headed for foreclosure but haven’t yet crossed the bar, but it promises years of depressed housing prices for everyone else.

That’s bad for homeowners — but good for many landlords. And it’s bad for lenders who have perfected the art of re-financing the same clients again and again — but good for lenders who can generate the flow of new business necessary to live off of primary purchase loans. And a perpetually plateaued real estate market is very bad for by-owners sellers and lazy, stupid, cheap Realtors — but very good for Realtors who can actually get the job done.

An all of this is why you should be coming to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando. We’re about nothing but practical tactics for taking advantage of the internet to build your business — which is precisely what you need to be doing right now. Real estate has always been a hard way to make an easy living — and it’s about to get a lot harder. The Realtors and lenders who can sustain a pipeline of viable prospects will prosper in the coming years. The rest will get other jobs.

Here’s just a few of the topics we’ll be talking about:

  • Brian Brady will show you how to build a presence on the internet so that your prospective clients will not be able to go anywhere without finding you.
  • Mitch Ribak will talk to you about the techniques he and his team are using to close dozens of transactions a month.
  • Kelly Koehler will share with you her unique pay-per-click strategies, using an array of long-tail keywords to net clients at a very Read more
October 7, 2008

Does Your Home Equity Have 4 Wheels?

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

I received a call the other day from a young couple wanting to take a look at my new construction project.  Because the building is starting to look more and more like a building, I recommended that they meet me at the site so we could walk through the units – albeit still a skeleton.  For those who can’t visualize the space while it is taking shape, I knew it could be a crap shoot, but hey – they could at least see it in progress.  The plans were taking life.

I was at the site a few minutes before our scheduled appointment, checking up on the progress, pleased to see that the steel staircase had been installed.  We could use stairs, not ladders.

At roughly 2:00pm, a jet black, late model Range Rover Sport with chrome tipped exhaust screeched to a halt in front of the building.  It was snazzy.  Out hopped my potential clients – young – attractive almost 30-something couple.  Unfortunately, not quite dressed to walk through an active construction site – but we’d manage.

We introduced ourselves.

“I like your car”  I said.

“Yeah – it’s a sweet ride”  the husband said.

I handed them the marketing brochure and rattled off my schpel regarding the developer, the construction method, available finishes, delivery etc.  I asked them about their timing – what was prompting a the search for a new home?

“We want to take advantage of the market” the husband stated.  “I’ve been reading that home prices are way down and developers are really hurting – we want to make a deal.”

Can’t say I haven’t heard that reason before.

“Do you have a home to sell?”  I probed.

“Umm – we’re not sure if we’ll sell.  I think we may keep our current place – at this point, we’re expl….”

“We’re expecting a baby and we need more room” the wife interjected.  “We have a 2 bedroom condo that we purchased when we got married 2 years ago in Lakeview.  We’re not sure what we can get for it – so we don’t know if we should sell our not.”

Ahh – the voice of reason.

“Honestly, that is Read more

October 7, 2008

Following a trail of breadcrumbs from an internet-enabled cell phone

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written about our breadcrumbs philosophy before. Cliff’s Notes: If we build a single property web site for a listing — or a previewing site for buyers featuring dozens of houses — we never delete worthwhile work product from our file server:

We leave the pages and sites on our file server forever. If there were anything confidential in the pages, we would excise it. But there never is — because the web is not secure. So the pages live on forever, each one a detailed chronicle of a particular house at a particular moment in time.

This Sunday just past, a potential buyer was sitting outside 14179 West Shaw Butte Drive in Surprise, AZ. From her phone, she Googled the address. Guess who she found?

I’m not the lister on that house — and it had sold before she called me. But I stand a fair chance of selling her something else, with my client-acquisition cost being pretty close to $0.00.

Leaving breadcrumbs on the trail is not a strategy, not even a tactic. It’s a side-effect. We’re building the content for other purposes. But we sometimes get extra business simply by not killing those pages. This has always been good for us, going back years, but it promises to get better and better. First, we’re always building new pages, which increases our long-tail exposure. And second, there are more and more web-enabled mobile phones out there every day.

There’s more: I think it’s important to “triangulate” on pages like this from a weblog, this so Google finds the new content in a sprightly fashion. I talked about triangulation at Unchained in Phoenix, and I’ll be addressing it again in Orlando. (And if you buttonhole Brian Brady, he might reveal to you what I’m doing in this post as a side-effect of having written it.)

Bur even though this is all just a side-effect of other efforts, we still have a complicated, scientific name for this phenomenon: We call it free money.

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October 7, 2008

More WP security fun…

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

A while back, I wrote a post about how my blog was hacked and what I did about it. Turns out it dropped me out of Google for a week or two, but the experience was well worth it. Shortly thereafter, Eric Bramlett posted the solution of setting Google Alerts on your site. (Can’t find it, or I’d link to it). Trace and others had some good comments and suggestions as well. I did what Bramlett suggested and I want to show you an example of how it works.

This morning, I received an alert (one of many that I have on my site), to wit:

Google Web Alert for: site:ericonsearch.com +viagra

High gas prices and online marketing…a correlation? : Southern …
… phentermine shipped tramadol without perscription dopamine phentermine generic cialis pills generic viagra levitra prescribing information valium valium …

This as-it-happens Google Alert is brought to you by Google.

I quickly went and found the offending post(s) and promptly deleted hundreds of “bad neighborhood” links. Nice. And yes. I am making further changes to beef security that I am not going to talk about publicly. Will be happy to share them with you privately one to one if you have been hacked.

The good news about this go around is that we are being PROACTIVE and getting to them before we have to bug Google or other search engines about it. By setting yourself up a boatload of alerts for site:mydomain.com +(insert poker,porn, or pharmaceutical term), you can get ahead of any issues that arise.

If you Google “Indiana SEO” or other similar terms, you will see that as of today’s date, I am still blessed to be doing OK for now.

So if you haven’t taken the time to do this to your blog… Now’s a good time.

October 5, 2008

Please Come Again

by

Realtor, Rabble-Rouser

Author website

According to the clock on my dashboard it was 2:43pm – where had my day gone?  – I couldn’t help but wonder.  I had just wrapped up with my client who proudly unveiled the newly renovated rental units at the building he just purchased on Washington Park – the proposed location of the Olympic Stadium if and when Chicago should land the 2016 Summer Games – best described as an “up and coming” part of Chicago’s south side.  He wanted me to see what he had done and wanted my assurance that he could get the units rented at a much higher rent than was usual for the area.  From what I saw – he would have no problem renting the units – for how much?  that was yet to be seen.

I was hungry and I hadn’t had anything to eat – with the exception of the venti Red Eye I’d picked up earlier that morning during my walk with my dogs – breakfast.  I had to be back on the north side of town for a 4:00pm appointment, so I knew I didn’t have time to eat – and there’s scarcely any place to eat nearby the building – or at least that’s what I thought.

Okay forget about lunch – I’ll just pick up a diet Pepsi I figured – I can stop at the Shell station before I pull on to the Dan Ryan to head back north.  As I began my journey, I turned onto one of the wide boulevards lined with overgrown empty lots and neglected buildings.

I wasn’t paying attention to the street names – I was simply heading towards the freeway when I noticed a stand alone convenience store – a building at a nondescript corner at the fringe – on the “other side” of the up and coming neighborhood – not sure where the real boundary lay, but I had the distinct impression it wasn’t “up and coming” any time soon.

I couldn’t help but notice the store – it was the only business operating in several blocks.   I’m sure most could identify with seeing Read more

October 4, 2008

The Life

by

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

I know a guy who makes stupid money. He doesn’t even call it money. He calls it trump.

“I make sick trump,” he once told me. (Stupid money.)

“I have a Hot Mess at home,” he continued. “And she’s sick, too.” (An attractive girlfriend with a drinking problem.)

“It’s ill.” (Troubling.)

According to this guy, a derivatives trader at the Chicago Merc, if you don’t make 30/40 (million per year) you’re not a Whale. (A sick big spender with a lot of trump and at least one Hot Mess at at least one sick home.)

“30/40 is the magic number. You can buy all the whores in Sin City with that kind of trump.” (Duh. Even I figured that and I don’t really have a head for math.)

Not surprisingly, he met his own Hot Mess at the Paris Las Vegas. They were doing ice block Southern Comfort shots (don’t ask) together at a Whale’s private party and decided to hook up for the near, if not immediate, domestic future. He shipped her and her Two Brats back east to Chicago. This guy trades farm futures so I would imagine he knew what he was getting into. Although not risk aversive, he has assured me on more than one occasion that he is not yet a Whale. He’s more than a Chump certainly, but definitely not a Whale.

A Chump is a million dollar a year guy. You are either a Chump, a Whale, or Bank in his world (The Life). Bank trumps Whale. Then Chump. Everyone else is Home Depot. Wonderful.

“No offense,” he tells me, “but the average Joe Home Depot in this country is living paycheck to paycheck. They couldn’t care less when the market goes apeshit. (Apeshit means apeshit. Think about it.) They squawk like they do care but they got no real skin in the game. Bullshit 401K pennies maybe. They got no trump. Joe Home Depot can always find another Home Depot with matching funds to bag nails and pay the bills. A Chump, however, is ruined in an apeshit scenario. The Life is over for him. I know Read more

October 4, 2008

Other types of credit may be feeling the crunch, but home mortgages are still readily available

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Other types of credit may be feeling the crunch, but home mortgages are still readily available

Bad news about the economy is coming in from all directions, so you may be in the mood for some good news: There is plenty of money available for home loans.

By taking over FannieMae and FreddieMac, the federal government has essentially nationalized the secondary mortgage market. The lenders themselves are still private entities, but the government’s loan guarantees are viewed as being so strong that, by now, virtually all residential real estate loans are coming through Fannie, Freddie, the FHA or the VA.

The other way of saying the same thing: There is virtually no secondary mortgage market left for non-conforming or sub-prime loans.

So while you may have trouble getting new car financing or a loan for your business, you should have no problem getting a home loan — if you qualify and if the amount you’re borrowing falls within the limits set by the four government agencies guaranteeing home loans.

And there’s the rub: For most of the Phoenix area, qualifying for a conforming loan should be no problem. But higher-priced homes are sold with non-conforming “jumbo” loans, which are difficult to obtain right now and come at much higher interest rates.

Using an FHA loan, it is still possible to buy a home with “nothing down.” FHA borrowers are obliged to pay a 3.5% down payment, but this can be offset by the $7,500 tax credit incorporated in the mortgage relief bill passed in July. FHA borrowers can ask the seller for up to 6% in closing costs, so they can take possession of the home for no money out of pocket.

But there’s a catch: To obtain an FHA loan, the home will have to pass a rigorous FHA appraisal, which will eliminate many foreclosed homes unless the seller is willing to correct the most serious defects.

All that notwithstanding, while the financial sky might be roiling with dark clouds, real estate is still a silver lining. Because of the government’s loan guarantees, lenders are willing Read more

October 3, 2008

Bloodhound Blog Radio: Living in a Post-Bailout World

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Last Monday, Sean Purcell and I hosted Top Dawg Greg Swann on Mortgage Mondays on Bloodhound Blog Radio.  We discussed what real estate agents and lenders can do in a post-Bailout world.

The bailout bill passed today after the Senate signaled its support to the House.  President Bush signed this bill into law and the world is safe, once again.

Interesting points in our conversation:

1- The Community Reinvestment Act (original sub-prime loans), conceived in 1977 and super-charged in 1995, was the actual starting point of the “toxic loan” revolution that took our economy down.

2-The Bailout may be an instrument to keep people into homes through the “loansharking collection” principle.

3-Greg talks about his strategy of working with investors (and why it works).

4- Predictions about the convergence of low-priced and mid-priced homes through financing caps.

5- Strategies for REALTORs to find ready, willing (and most importantly) and ABLE clients.

If you run an 8-minute mile, you can get a 10K in while you listen to this on your iPod.  Mere mortals should just download the podcast and try to get 3 miles in on the treadmill whil listening to the three of us.

Listen to the podcast here.

October 2, 2008

Deregulation is the New Regulation

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

From the Wayback Vault in The New York Times Building:

Fannie Mae, the nation’s biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates — anywhere from three to four percentage points higher than conventional loans.

”Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990’s by reducing down payment requirements,” said Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s chairman and chief executive officer. ”Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.”

Some Lessons I’ve Learned From The Credit Meltdown:

(1) Borrowers who can’t meet prime underwriting guidelines are “sub” prime

(2) When government regulates private industry to make crappy loans and the crappy loans are the cause of the crisis, you can’t blame the theory of deregulation; you must levy the blame at overregulation.

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that by the year 2001, 50 percent of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s portfolio be made up of loans to low and moderate-income borrowers. Last year, 44 percent of the loans Fannie Mae purchased were from these groups.

(3) When you move down the credit and income scale, you can expect more defaults.

Here’s Senator Obama, talking about his solution:

Finally, I will modernize our outdated financial regulations and put in place the common-sense rules of the road I’ve been calling for since March – rules that will keep our market free, fair, and honest; rules that will restore accountability and responsibility in the boardroom, and make sure Wall Street can never get away with the Read more

October 2, 2008

Making the Riccelli bet to take away the fear of trying something new

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Richard Riccelli doesn’t write here very much, but, when he does, it’s pure gold. I’ve been writing in BloodhoundBlog about Richard since the blog was young, as have others, and Richard has been writing with us for as long as we’ve been a group blog. I can’t sing his praises enough. I’m sure I can’t even see nine-tenths of his genius, but I am forevermore enthralled by what I can see.

A peculiar aspect of Richard’s brilliance is his uncanny ability to identify and excise the deal-killing objection. In his own marketing business, his fees can run dauntingly high. Don’t want to pay? No problem. If he loves the project, Richard will work for a cut of the take instead. This is unheard of in direct marketing, and the shear audacity of it can silence every other objection he might hear from his clients. How can you argue with free?

For months now I’ve been playing with Riccelli-style direct marketing ideas at ABetterListing.com. The site’s not done yet. Taking account of testing, it will never be done. But it takes on its first big market test tomorrow.

This is the back of an open house invitation card for a house we’ll be listing next Friday:

Cathleen and her crew of energetic teenagers will be distributing 2,500 of those cards this weekend, with another 2,500 going out next weekend. The whole launch is a Very Big Deal since the house we’re listing falls into the Jumbo Zone — where desire is unlimited and loans are unavailable.

But ABetterListing.com was built for this kind of door-to-door direct marketing promotion, and the promotion itself is built around a Riccelli bet: We’re betting that we’re better than anyone else you’ll talk to, and we’ll pay off on the bet if you don’t agree.

An even better Riccelli bet would be this: “If we don’t get you a contract within 30 days, we’ll sell it for free!” Unfortunately, in the neighborhood we’re working in, homes are selling in 267 days — on average — when they sell at all. We’ll save that offer for a better market.

I’ll talk more about ABetterListing.com another Read more

October 2, 2008

2009 started yesterday…

by

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

One of the coolest parts about my job is that I get to hang out with some of the best REALTORS that Louisville has. That’s not hyperbole. I am not blowing sunshine up anyone’s hindquarters. It is simply the truth. Often, when I am lost in my own thoughts or troubles, or in solving the latest issue at the office, or maybe even worrying a little too much about the latest market news, one of these great people will snap me out it.

Case in point.

Michael Higdon is one of the agents in our office. He dropped by on Tuesday, and plopped down in a chair across from my desk. “2009 starts tomorrow, and nobody around here knows it.”, he announced.
“At least they are not acting like it.” It kept coming. “They are gonna slow down…do less prospecting…when what we are doing today will be the checks that get cashed in January.”

*2009 starts Wednesday, October 1.” he said with finality.

My first response (in my own mind) was “That’s a great way of mentally overcoming all of the negativity.” (I did not say it out loud, but my mind was still churning on the fact that my wife had just called with an plumbing issue at home, I had not finished up the taxes, the incessant bad economic news, a 5 year old nephew that had just been diagnosed with leukemia, and a myriad of other issues….the same ones that ALL of us have).

He went on to chat with me about some of the things he was doing to CREATE the RESULTS and the WORLD that he desires for himself and his family (and more importantly how he was going to not let the outside world be the arbiter of his efforts). Bottomline: He was taking ACTION. As my mind let go of the troubles of the moment, I started to focus more clearly on the IMPORTANT things that needed to be done. I gained some clarity that rather than worrying about the stuff I could not control, I could turn the knobs that I was able to and, as a result, create Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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