Fall is here and that means the 2nd most busiest season for home buying!

The real estate market is open 365 days a year – yes, even on holidays – but there are cyclical trends to the marketplace. Some of those ups and downs are based on mortgage interest rates and housing availability, but some are based on season.

Next to spring, fall is the busiest season for home buying and selling. Autumn offers certain benefits to home buyers, including year-end tax breaks, pleasant weather conditions for moving and a wide selection of homes for sale. Read on to learn the advantages of buying in the fall.

Year-End Tax Breaks
Come September and October, people start to think about what year-end tax breaks they might be eligible for. Fortunately for home buyers, owning a home can yield great dividends in tax returns. For example, both mortgage interest and property taxes are deductible from gross income. Furthermore, if you have prepaid some interest before the due date of your first payment, and if you close your loan before the year’s end, that interest can also be deducted.

Getting Ahead of Mother Nature
Buying a house before the deep freeze of winter sets in is very appealing to most home buyers. No one wants to worry about icy roads, snowstorms or blackout conditions on moving day, nor is it fun to move in sweltering summer heat.

School Year and Holidays
By wintertime, kids have settled into school, established friendships and become involved in extracurricular activities. Moving in summer would be least disruptive to your children’s schooling or social calendar, but autumn is next best. Also, by moving in fall, you’ll be settled snugly into your new home before Thanksgiving and the winter holidays.

More Home Choices
While home demand is not as keen in fall as it is in spring, it’s still high, so competition can be high, too. Fall buyers and sellers tend to be motivated to move, unlike the window-shoppers who sometimes come out in spring.

You may experience pressure to buy, due to the quick turnaround of houses on the market, but you’ll also benefit from the broad selection of homes available. In fact, between September and December, you may be able to visit several open houses in a single day, and listings will be updated frequently. Therefore, to make sure you don’t miss out on your dream house, it’s a good idea to regularly check listings and check in with your Realtor.

Fall Home-Buying Tips
Given the home-buying competition and the short, pre-holiday timetable in autumn, you may be tempted to place a bid that is out of your price range, for fear of losing the home. Before you make an offer, know what kind of house you need and what you can realistically afford, and stick to your budget. You may want to explore prequalifying for a loan so that you’ll be ready to act when you find the home you want. And as always, whatever season you buy in, buy at the best time for you and your family, and hold out for the right house – there are always more homes to see and to choose among.

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Shutdown Will Stall Home Loans For Thousands

Beginning next week, thousands of home buyers will be unable to get approvals for their mortgages because of the government shutdown, potentially undercutting the nation’s resurgent housing market.
Without paperwork from the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration and in many cases the Federal Housing Administration, banks and other mortgage lenders will be less willing to make loans, if they can make them at all. For instance, lenders rely on the IRS to confirm borrowers’ income and on Social Security to confirm their identity.

Every day that government offices remain shuttered will delay an ever-larger fraction of mortgage closings, industry leaders say, jeopardizing mortgage and interest-rate approvals and spooking sellers. About 15,000 new home mortgages and 18,000 refinancing's on average are completed across the country each day.

On Friday, House Republicans continued to insist on changes to President Obama’s health-care program as a condition for funding the government. But with attention on Capitol Hill shifting to an Oct. 17 debt-ceiling deadline, there was no end in sight to the government shutdown, nor relief for prospective home buyers.

“Most people don’t really think about, ‘Well my loan is going to be underwritten by a federal agency,’ ” said Marj Rosner, vice president and sales manager at Long & Foster, a real estate firm. “But the government has a huge imprint here.”

Major lenders are scrambling to figure out whether they can risk making some loans without the federal paperwork and assessing whether they should require additional documentation from borrowers because the IRS has no one working who can verify income.

Many mortgages were able to close as scheduled this week because the paperwork was completed before federal employees were furloughed, but some home loans have already been frozen.
“The problem is going to grow in magnitude every day this shutdown goes on, because lenders’ liability is at risk,” David Stevens, chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association and former head of the FHA, said after a conference call Friday with heads of a dozen banks.

Nor will the problem disappear as soon as the government reopens. “Even if this were to get resolved in a week, you’ve got an enormous backlog,” said Eric D. Gates, president of Apex Home Loans in Rockville. “It’s going to double or triple the effects in terms of delays.”

The approval of mortgage applications requires several interactions with the federal government that many home buyers may not know about. Lenders have become much more meticulous about following federal rules after the housing crisis that began in 2007, and are now more thorough in verifying the information on loan applications. These concerns were far less common when the government last shut down in 1995.

“The need for document checks and quality control just didn’t exist,” Stevens said. “Today, we’re in a world of huge risk and regulatory requirements.”
Among the obstacles, it is furloughs at the IRS that could have the widest impact. Lenders routinely file a form with the IRS asking for a copy of a borrower’s tax returns. The purpose is to make sure that the buyer provided accurate income information.

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Should You Fix Up Your House Before Selling It?

Recently I put my home up for sale, and because it needed a new roof, deck, and septic system, came face to face with this question. This article is based heavily on that experience, in which I made a serious mistake that other sellers can avoid.

It is easier to sell a house that is attractive to potential buyers, which means that you spend a little time and money on cosmetics. This is partly just a matter of making sure the house is clean, the yard is neat, the driveway is swept, bushes pruned and so on. Easily fixed structural defects, like a loose shingle, should be fixed.

Houses almost always look better when furnished than when empty — and they also look larger. If you are moving to another residence and plan to take your furnishings with you, try to arrange to show the house before you move out of it.
But if your house also has structural defects that are costly to fix, as mine did, the challenge is in deciding whether or not to fix them before sale.

Every house has defects, some obvious and others hidden. Both types will affect the price a buyer is willing to pay. It is a mistake to think that a potential buyer will assume that the only defects that exist are those that are visible. Serious buyers will most likely invest in an inspection by a company that specializes in such services. The firm retained by my buyer produced a document of 22 pages of small print, plus many photographs. Buyers that don’t retain an inspector will probably assume the worst about the unseen condition of the house.

There aren’t many buyers who will pay a price based on the assumption that everything they can’t see must be OK. Pricing the house on that assumption is a good way to keep it on the market unsold indefinitely. While you continue to pay for utilities, taxes and insurance, the condition of the house worsens and your real estate agent loses interest in trying to sell it.

Facing up to the issue means asking yourself whether you will come out better if you fix the structural defects, or if you offer it at a lower price “as is.” If the repairs cost $15,000 but it results in a sale price $20,000 higher, you want to do it. If the post-repair price is only $10,000 higher, you don’t. The likelihood of each outcome depends on the circumstances.

There are two circumstances that favor fix-up before sale. One is where there is a large variance in the cost of the fix-up, and a potential buyer is likely to over-estimate the cost. In the case of a septic system, for example, the cost depends on the condition of the soil, and if the seller knows that the condition is favorable and the cost low, it makes sense to fix it before sale.

The second and probably more compelling circumstance is where most potential buyers have the capacity to make only a small down payment, and are therefore not in a position to fund the cost of major repairs after purchase. By making the repairs before sale while setting a correspondingly higher price, a buyer is in effect financing the improvement in the mortgage. If a buyer with limited cash had to make the improvements after purchase, the financing costs would be substantially higher.
But note that fixing structural defects before sale takes more time, which a seller may or may not have. In addition, depending on the type of defect, the value to a buyer may be less than the cost to the seller if the “fix” involves questions of taste.

I sold my house as is because I had already committed to a new one and wanted detachment from the old one as soon as possible. Furthermore, the buyer who fell in love with my old house had the financial capacity to pay for all needed improvements. She didn’t need the larger mortgage that would have been obtainable if I had made the improvements. In addition, one of the required improvements to my old house was to a deck, which could be done in a variety of ways based on individual taste, and it made no sense to do it according to my taste.

If a house has significant defects, the smart seller will order his or her own inspection, and in some cases, solicit estimates of the cost of required fix-ups. This will help in deciding whether the best arrangement is pre-sale fix-up, sale as is, or some combination of the two.

In addition, a seller-ordered inspection will tend to equalize the negotiating power of the two parties. I discovered this the hard way when the buyer used her report to drive down the price. Buyer-ordered inspections are designed, consciously or unconsciously, to provide bargaining ammunition for the buyer by exposing everything that is wrong or might go wrong. I did not have my own inspection, which would have emphasized the trivial nature of most alleged defects and the small cost of fixing them. That was a costly mistake.

But note that fixing structural defects before sale takes more time, which a seller may or may not have. In addition, depending on the type of defect, the value to a buyer may be less than the cost to the seller if the “fix” involves questions of taste.

 

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Holding out for a better offer is not always a good idea when selling

WHEN it comes to selling your home, should you accept the first offer or should you wait for something better to come along? 
 

This is a question that gets asked a lot. And while there is no hard and fast rule, the general consensus among industry professionals, including most real estate agents is that frequently, the first offer proves to be the best.

That's not to say that a seller should instinctively accept whatever offer comes along first.
Rather, it points to the importance of pricing a home correctly to sell in the current market.
This takes effort on the part of savvy sellers to research the market and the competition; and to select and collaborate with a reputable real estate agent in order to settle with confidence on a realistic asking price.

Real estate agents are able to provide market appraisals - a seller should seek these from at least three different sources - that are based on knowledge of the local area, comparison sales and overall market conditions. Confidence in the asking price means that a vendor will be better equipped to assess and respond appropriately to any offer.

While there is no real science involved in the premise that first offers are often the best, it is clear that the longer a property sits on the market, the more shop worn or stale it becomes.
Generally, a property attracts the greatest interest when it is first presented to the market. A new listing will attract the highest numbers of potential buyers. This means competition, which in turn, helps to drive prices upwards.

During this initial phase, real estate agents are primed to get a new listing in front of their most serious buyer prospects. Activity is at its peak during this early phase.
A five-year study by RP Data has shown that vendors overall, received less by waiting longer to sell.
RP Data examined the average discounting levels for property sold within a number of different time frames - less than 30 days, 30 to 60 days, 60 to 90 days, 90 to 119 days, and 120 days or more.
Over the study period, it was found that homes that sold in less than 30 days, recorded the lowest levels of discounting. And homes that took the longest to sell - more than 120 days - consistently recorded the highest discounting figures.

On average, for homes selling in less than 30 days, asking prices were discounted by -3.9 per cent. In the 30 to 60 day selling period, the average discount was -5.2 per cent; 60 to 89 days -6.5 per cent; 90 to 119 days -7.6 per cent; and 120+ days -10.1 per cent.
Naturally, sellers are keen to get the best possible price for their property. In general, smart buyers do their homework and make reasonable offers. And astute sellers - those who recognise a serious offer or one with potential - will be inclined to accept.

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What Does the Government Shutdown Mean for REALTORS?

HUD, VA give more vouchers to help veterans

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs started a third round of HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing funding to local public housing agencies across the U.S., the company said in a press release.
Additionally, since 2008, a total of 58,250 vouchers have been awarded through HUD-VASH and 43,371 formerly homeless veterans are currently in homes of their own.

“Our nation’s veterans have sacrificed and given up so much for our freedom so it is our responsibility to do whatever we can to make sure they are taken care of,” said HUD Secretary Donovan. “These vouchers are vital to helping America end veterans’ homelessness one veteran at a time.  I look forward to continue working with Secretary Shinseki and the Department of Veterans Affairs to target assistance to our homeless veterans. ” 

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4 Tricks To Getting Your Good Credit Back!

These habits contribute to 30% of your score's calculation and can be easier to clean up than payment history, but that requires financial discipline and understanding the tips below.

1. Keep balances low on credit cards and other "revolving credit". High outstanding debt can affect a credit score.

2. Pay off debt rather than moving it around. The most effective way to improve your credit score in this area is by paying down your revolving (credit cards) debt. In fact, owing the same amount but having fewer open accounts may lower your score.

3. Don't close unused credit cards as a short-term strategy to raise your score.

4. Don't open a number of new credit cards that you don't need, just to increase your available credit. This approach could backfire and actually lower your credit score.

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