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Clients frustrated? Feel ripped off and can't call the police to file a report? For starters, go HERE. Read up on the "Notice and Opportunity to Repair Act" in Idaho; it is constructed in a way that is similar to an inspection contingency in a Purchase and Sale Contract, with sensitive time-limits (so that your or your clients' problem does not go on, and on, and on--part of the original problem, right?)--Just read through it, and you get the idea that there is help for you or your clients, on the shiny side of the badge (law).
We all know that sometimes construction defects, major and minor, just never get fixed by the builder because it is supposedly "expensive" for that builder, and enforcing what is right for the new construction buyer is major-league expensive too, right? Well, someone working for the State of Idaho, perhaps following other States' lead (California has laws like this, and takes it a step further: if you are a senior citizen homeowner with this problem and the builder blows you off, watch out! And maybe that is "coming soon" to Idaho...stay tuned) put this law into place, thereby potentially making "enforcement"/legal costs less expensive for consumers.
Contractors in Idaho must register with the Idaho State Contractors Board, as provided by Idaho Law. There is a short pdf handbook entitled, "Residential Construction" that you can download, and it tells you how to check out the contractor ahead of time, how to file a complaint if necessary (which goes on the contractor's registration--not good), and supplies phone numbers and links for your clients to get help.
Here's a link to the Idaho Consumer Protection Manual, and it even includes info for problems when a contractor repairs or remodels your home.
Great resources, right under our Idaho noses, right?
Go to the Office of the Attorney General's site for help on issues such as Foreclosure, Mortgage Modification, etc.--there are links all over the page and the entire site that might help. Check the tabs on the left, including the ones marked Consumer Protection, Idaho Statutes (and there are some doozies involving housing), and even that ever elusive Concealed Weapons info tab. (What? You can have a concealed weapon in Idaho? Hmmm...)
Seriously...
You know the questions your friends and clients ask you all of the time: "So Bev, 'they' said on the news that the housing market is improving--what do you think?"
Well if, for example, you scratched your head and were scepticle when the recent "news" of improving employment numbers made you wonder, "Hmm, what about temporary holiday jobs?" Then this post is for you:
Check out this revealing article, and use what you know, as well as any market intuition (or any other intuition--i.e. "common sense") you may possess to put it all together and determine whether you believe it down to your toes...our clients need us to get real, and stop parroting the insane-stream media, whose data and information just does not add up! Do your own research--I know many of you have, and I encourage you to write about it here at AR, and construct our very own "main-stream," particularly about this subject; one that we hold near-and-dear and are counted on to know the most about already.
Kudos to Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker, for posting aptly titled "Fraudie/Phoney", and providing for us a sobering smack on the side of the head, that even reveals by the end of the post, the fact that the gub-mint will now be handing out multi-million dollar bonuses, yes "Wall-Street" style, for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's executives! If that cliffhanger doesn't make you click on the link (which you better hurry and click, lest it leads to a virus or gets pulled off the internet toot-sweet...) how about phrases like "double counts," the reality of ""33% foreclosures," or "organic transactions/meeting of the minds," or one of my favorites, "underwriting quality."
C'mon, get real, and get to clickin'!
Excellent service resource for unexpected seller needs: Powerful Rental Listings!
Via Sara Bonert {Real Estate Internet Marketing} (Zillow):
I have an investment property in Florida. In the last three years, twice I’ve listed it for sale. Twice I’ve ended up renting it. Twice I’ve relied on my agentto help me with the decision making that took me down this path to simply get the home occupied. It is a big reality that today’s real estate market is forcing many people, like myself, to wear the landlord hat because of market conditions.
Today I am excited to announce that Zillow is expanding its marketing services to not only include homes FOR SALE, but now also include the ability to market homes as being FOR RENT.
Zillowhas always been a little different than other real estate sites because our foundation is a data base of ALL homes, not just homes that are currently on the market. Today we have about 93M property records on the site, with about 3.6M of them having been flagged as being for sale. Because of this, we get people in all stages of home ownership, from renting to buying to owning.
According to the U.S. Census American Housing Survey 2005, there are 34M rental households in the US, with 53% of rentals being 4 units or less and 30% being single family homes. And when we look at the 8M+ people that visit Zillow each month, nearly 1M of them are exclusively renters with untold others “on the fence” on whether to buy or rent.
So what is Zillow’s new product?
- Zillow offers a Featured Rental Listing for just $9.95 for 180 days. Featured Listings are sorted to the top of search resultsand receive six times more views than non-featured listings.
- Rich rental listings can be created with unlimited photos and detailed property information, and you only have to post this information once for up to 180 days.
How will people find my Rental Listing on Zillow?
- Of course we’ll have the standard search, but we couldn’t just stop there.
- Zillow has built the industry’s first search by monthly payment– allowing users to simultaneously search for homes for sale and for rent based on a monthly payment they can afford. (monthly payment on homes for sale will be calculated using that day’s mortgage rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage rate, assuming 20% down)
Zillow’s goal is to help people make intelligent and informed choices in all stages of life – whether they are renting, deciding whether to rent or buy, shopping for a home today, refinancing, remodeling or just dreaming. With the addition of rental listings and search, we are giving our users another tool to help them throughout their decision making process.
Click here to experience the For Rent search on Zillow.
Announcement on the Zillow Blog.
Post a home for rent.
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Read this article, which is noted (not linked) by Realtor Magazine to have come from Associated Press (?) and if you know nothing about the ACORN videos, better turn to YouTube.com for the video part 1 and video part 2 and get up to speed on the organization. You won't be bored, and you might even send the link around to your friends!
Fantastic article by Karl Denninger on Market Ticker shows how distressed homes are the "visible side of accounting fraud," and calls for stopping "the looting, and start prosecuting."
"Mark to Myth Losers: Americans" pulls back the curtain on the Wizard of Banking-Oz, defines terms, and points out many of the slimy realities behind the question for so many Short Sales: "What is taking so long for the bank to decide?"
Here's a great article that was also credited as the source for another piece on NAR.com: Click Here to read the original article, "Satisfaction Piece" by Lew Sichelman, and find out about the legal document you need to file with the county so that title companies can verify that you own the house! Helpful information, don't you think?
Hmm, somebody telling it like it is? No way... ;-) Via Mark MacKenzie Real Estate Planning:
Whoever said, Jim Cramer, that the housing market has bottomed doesn't know anything about Option ARMs. Those loans are represented by the light yellow bars in the graph below, the ones that surge in 2010 and 2011.
Never mind that a record 12% of all mortgages are 30 days late, or that the real unemployment rate is 16.5% and that there is a relationship between job losses and foreclosures, the Option ARM loans represent the next major obstacle to a housing recovery, and the problem with them is that they are not easily diffused with a refinance. Sorry, President Obama.
By design, Option ARMs were created as an affordability product that would defer interest payments into the loan balance. The phenomenon is known as negative amortization.
In other words, most owners of these products made a monthly payment that was less than the interest-only payment. Refinancing these Option ARMs into a historically low 30-year fixed rate mortgage will actually increase the payment.
The longer the loan was held, the larger the loan balance would be. Now the problem is that the longer the property is held, the more the home value declines. Rising loan balances and falling home values don't mix well.
During a rising tide in the housing market these products were risky, during a housing depression with falling home prices, they are radioactive.
Admittedly, while the volume of Option ARMs is smaller than the sub prime tsunami that we saw in 2007 and 2008, keep in mind that we didn't have 467,000 people a month losing their job in 2007 and 2008 either.
Great Title for a Great Post: Via John Mulkey, Housing Guru (TheHousingGuru.com):
 Recession over? Recovery on the way? Housing on its way back up? Don’t prepare for the boom just yet. While the talking heads—they’re called that for a reason—are focusing upon a few bits of positive economic news, the economy still continues its slump.
I think it’s important that we be aware of our economic reality rather than to ignore the facts, focusing upon “rosy” news reports and wishful scenarios that may never come to pass. Awareness of the reality is fundamental to making rational and prudent business decisions. I want the facts, and will create my goals based upon what I KNOW to be true.
Here are a few of the reports and the facts behind them:
The jobless numbers have slowed their rate of increase. While the unemployment number isn’t climbing as fast as it was, according to Atlanta Fed Chairman, Dennis Lockhart, we now have 16% unemployment, when you count those who are no longer drawing benefits as well as the underemployed. And a number that no one reports is the huge number of self-employed who are either out of work altogether or who have experienced dramatic reductions in income.
Millions of the unemployed and underemployed cannot make their mortgage payments. They are not in the market for new homes, cars, or other consumer items. The loss of spending power from this group is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Many of the jobs lost in manufacturing will never return, according to experts. And with the government and others predicting unemployment to remain high throughout next year, any recovery will be slow and painful.
Home prices have risen in many areas around the country. Yes, but in others prices continue to fall; with some areas having experienced price declines of as much as 50%. Nationally, home prices are projected to decline by 13% in the current quarter; and no one is predicting a return to pre-recession prices for many years, perhaps decades. With approximately 25% of homes with mortgages now worth less than their mortgage balance, a problem that has been projected to affect one-half of all mortgaged homes within the next two years, mounting foreclosures will continue to keep home prices depressed.
New home sales in July experienced the largest increase in 4 years. Here again, the positive news is overshadowed by the reality of where we’ve been. New home sales dropped off a cliff last year, and have remain sluggish in most areas around the country. Don’t forget that this has been the worst housing market since the Great Depression, so even slight improvements seem dramatic.
Sales of existing homes rose in July to the highest rate in 2 years. Dramatic reductions in prices, coupled with the new home buyer tax credit, accounted for much of the increase; and for those who want or need a home, there have been great bargains available. Buyers have been attracted by opportunities to purchase $500,000 homes at half price; and such deals abound in many parts of the country. But, experts have expressed concern that the end of the tax credit may signal a corresponding drop in sales.
Even if the numbers reflect that the recession has ended, statistics mean nothing to those who are out of work or are facing foreclosure. The number of consumers continuing to struggle is the truly important number. Until the employment numbers show significant signs of improvement and until we can stop the rising tide of foreclosures, the housing bottom we’ve reached will provide no more stability than quicksand.
The Housing Guru: The one source for all your housing questions
In their article, "Commercial Real Estate Lurks as next Potential Mortgage Crisis," LingLing Wei and Peter Grant of Wall Street Journal online outline how this is happening. "CBMS" is an acronym for Commercial Backed Mortgage Securities, and a very telling line in the article, "...many property developers and investors complain there is no way to identify the investors that hold their debt and that it is difficult to negotiate with CMBS servicers." --Wow, "no way to identify" investors? "Difficult to negotiate...?" No...really?
You know how economic experts will tell you that if "they" are talking about trends such as the market finally reaching the bottom, they can do so because the market is coming off of the bottom and you can look back and definitively see that is true? Well, "they" are just talking about this "lurking" as the "next potential mortgage crisis..." --Hmm.
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Bev Boeck
Eagle,
ID
More about me…
My Idaho Place Real Estate, Inc.
Address: MyIdahoPlace@gmail.com, Eagle, ID , 83616
Office Phone: (208) 353-9876
Cell Phone: (208) 353-9876
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