Real Estate

Next spring, however, investors might finally have a better hedging product. Just in time for the apparent top of the housing market, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is introducing futures and options on housing prices in 10 cities for the second quarter of 2006.

Earth to editorial board: Spending billions of tax dollars and raising taxes to fund crackpot rail lines does not make housing more affordable. Rather than make it more affordable Rail lines drive housing prices up along the line and increases property sales and payroll taxes to pay for the rail lines. It also diverts transportation funds away from roads where the other 99% of commuters could benefit. Rail does virtually nothing to help traffic, as even the proponents must admit when pressed.

When you're ready to put your property on the market, you want to get the most qualified buyers to take notice. This is especially the case if you have already purchased another property or need to relocate within a short time span. Rather than spending days bickering over a fair selling price or financing terms, you may want to draw those who are ready to do business, so you can finalize the deal as soon as possible. If that's the case, here are some tips that can help to attract those who are ready to sign on the dotted line.

I think we will start to see a greater uptick in mortgage rates and a a couple more Fed rate increases.

Since the American consumer is nearly tapped out and now that housing prices are no longer relentlessly rising, the last source of disposable income---mortgages---are going to dry up and the cruel necessity of soaking the remaining pennies from the populace will require brutal force.

I suppose you've heard about the high cost of living in Hawaii. The housing prices have sky-rocketed over the past few years, and here's proof:

InsureMe Agent Blog has a post up regarding Insurance Journal’s recent article on one of the proposed insurance reforms in Florida.

If you get an email like this, its a safe bet that they’re just phishing for your personal information to sell to other companies. In this case, they want to sell my information to mortgage brokers as a ‘hot lead’. I may also end up on a list of ’suckers’ who would fill out those forms. Don’t let that happen to you.

HouseValues has a nearly useless and manipulative value proposition for consumers looking to get a fix on the value of their property: if you're dumb enough to give us your name, address and other qualifying information, we'll sell it to the first real estate agent(s) who are willing to pay us for access to the ZIP code of your property. We may also sell it to mortgage brokers and insurance agents. That's our call. And we won't guarantee you anything about any of those people. We won't even guarantee that they're properly licensed. They may be scum – that's your problem, not ours.

If you put less than 20 percent down on a home mortgage, lenders often require you to have Private Mortgage Insurance (PMI). PMI protects the lender if you default on the loan. The Homeowners Protection Act of 1998 - which became effective in 1999 - establishes rules for automatic termination and borrower cancellation of PMI on home mortgages. These protections apply to certain home mortgages signed on or after July 29, 1999 for the purchase, initial construction, or refinance of a single-family home. These protections do not apply to government-insured FHA or VA loans or to loans with lender-paid PMI.

There is a new real-estate web site called Zillow.com that I really like. It combines market data, google-like earth maps, and MLS information to give a realistic estimate of specific housing prices. And best of all it’s free! (sponsored by ads apparently). I read about it in the NYTimes and decided to put it to the test myself.

The two-day trip presented me with yet another set of choices. I can buy a small three-bedroom house in the town where Eliomar's father lives for about U.S. $12,000. It's a tempting idea. Besides the ridiculously low housing prices the cost of living is about half of what it is in Salvador. We could live there peacefully and Eliomar could open a small business. There's a small video rental store for sale nearby. We'd be far from the madness of Salvador and Eliomar's youngest daughters could live with us.

So how much do mortgage points save you in the long run? In most cases, buying mortgage points will only lower your interest rate slightly. Typically, each mortgage point you buy lowers your interest rate by 0.125 percent. So if you have a 6.5 percent rate, and you purchased one mortgage point, it would be lowered to 6.375. You will need to use a mortgage calculator to see how much you save each month. You should also calculate how long it will take before you reach the ‘break even’ point. The break even point is when you recover the cost of purchasing the mortgage points. There are four steps in calculating the break even point:

This is the second time that I have used Virginia Commerce Bank, at Mike’s recommendation, both times the process has been relatively painless I worked with the same person both times and surprisingly he remembered me when I called him earlier in the month. I didn’t think a lot about this until I started talking to some of my friends and everyone else had complaints about their mortgage application process including their mortgage brokers forgetting their names (in the midst of the financing process), forgetting what paper work had been submitted, losing paper work, and screwing them with undisclosed closing costs. At both of my closings, conservative estimates were made, and we ended up walking out having paid slightly less than estimated in closing costs.