Homeowners who are facing foredlosure may want to read the information on the new HUD program that became effective earlier this month.  In a nutshell, this program "encourages" lenders to participate in a program to write new loans that will replace troubled mortgages.  The new loan is based on 90% of the current appraised value of the home.

There are lots of conditions and the owner must agree to share equity with HUD when the property sells.  There is also a payback of the up front equity that is created by the new loans.  The details and additional information are found at the follwing link.

http://www.hud.gov/hopeforhomeowners/consumerfactsheet.cfm

Be sure to look at the information by state that is provided on this site.  Also if you have not visited this site before take a look around while you are there.  There is a huge amount of well written information available.

Eileen's Green Team at Gateway

http://eileenmusser.point2agent.com/

In this market most buyers and sellers as well as their agents need some knowledge of the SHORT SALE process. 

What is your best advice to consumers and professionals when it comes to short sales, either on the sale side, or the purchase side.

Most of us don't want to become the latest and greatest expert on the subject, but we need to be prepared because sooner or later we are going to run into a short sale situation.

Are there on-line courses that give a solid orientation?  Obviously I am not looking for an overpriced "make me a millionaire in a day" program.  (been there, done that!)

Thanks in advance for your comments.

Eileen's Green Team at Gateway Realty

We finally moved in to our new "built green" house on the Susquehanna River.  It has been quite hot here for the last several days, so dispite our recent conversion to thinking green, we buttoned 'er up tight and let the AC run.  (set at 76 degrees, so we're being a little bit good!)

This morning the installer came by to do our fireplace set-up and started to do the TEN HOUR burn-in.  HELLO!!! in the middle of a heatwave in July???????  We have so much work to do in this quest of ours!!

I explained nicely that we would rather smoke up the house and run the fireplace on a day when the outside temperature was something less than 90 degrees.  (He explained nicely to me that he was just doing his job ...)

Well, anyway, back to the ICF walls.  After the fireplace installer left, I opened all the windows to get the smell out of the house and went up to my office to get down to work.

I soon heard what I thought was a jet flying low over the house; then the thought flashed through my mind that it must be a tornado.  It was a brief moment of insanity!  The sound was really just a train lumbering up the track on the other side of the river.  In the short time that we have been in the house we have become so accustomed to the silence inside the ICF walls that when I opened the windows the sound of the train startled me.  Just a short time ago that sound was so much a part of our life here on the river that we didn't even take note when the train passed.  (Except for that one 2 am run with the engineer who lays on the horn starting above Marietta and doesn't get off it until he is well below Wrightsville. But that's a story for another time.)

Anyway, these ICF walls are pretty cool!  (NPI)

Eileen's Green Team at Gateway

The Central Penn Business Journal has recognized the efforts of several Realtors who have earned the designation EcoBroker in order to bring environmnetally responsible practices to the business of helping their clients buy and sell homes.

The article by Eric Veronikis, with photography by Amy Spangler, can be viewed in its entirety at the following link:

http://www.centralpennbusiness.com/article.asp?aID=66641

Eileen Musser, a Realtor with Gateway Realty, Inc. in Lancaster, Pa., enrolled in the EcoBroker course last fall, in part to learn more about green building methods.  She and her husband, Glenn have just completed construction of a home on the banks of the Susquehanna River in York County.  Green features of the home include ICF(insulating concrete forms), steel roof, Energy Star appliances and windows, high efficiency hybrid heat pump with propane back-up, zoned heating, engineered and composite materials to minimize the use of virgin timber, and south facing transom windows to bring natural daylight into laundry and bathrooms.

The other EcoBrokers named in the article are Judy Waltman-Baccon, an agent with Morgan Collins Realtors Inc. based in Spring Garden Township, York County, and Mike Newman, an agent with Lancaster County's Long and Foster Real Estate Inc. He recently moved to Pennsylvania from New Mexico where he found the green housing movement to be more prevalent.

All three Realtor/EcoBrokers seem to agree that there is a growing interest in building with an eye to the health of the environment, enhanced health of the occupants, and the monetary benefit of lower costs to operate and maintain a home.

Lets keep it going!

Eileen's Green Team at Gateway

Glenn and I have just built a fairly green home for ourselves (with the help of our favorite builder-who isn't particularly eco-savvy).  We did some things right, and some not so right.  The EcoBroker course helped tremendously, and I guess it was good to experiment on my own project rather than on a client's home.

Within the next year we will be remodeling or rebuilding the cottage that is on the lot adjacent to the new home.  We are fortunate enough to be on the banks of the Susquehanna River, but the site is not perfect for solar applications.  (view is to the north, wooded hill rises steeply to the south) 

 Here is the question I would like any of you to address:

Is it worthwhile to have an architect design "GREEN" projects to maximize positioning on the site, introduce state-of-the-art materials and technologies, select the type of insulation, HVAC, etc.?  I pretty much handled all of that on my own in the first house and ended up with some systems that probably have a payback of.........NE-VER!

 Here are some of the features we used:

ICF walls  (probably not economical because of the large number, quality and positioning of windows; good for resistance to wind, fire, flood, critters, and insurance companies! 25% discount.....)

Steel roof

Drip distribution on-lot septic system (the only plan I found that local authority would accept due to slope) $$$

Energy Star appliances and windows

Engineered lumber where applicable

Transoms for passive indoor lighting

Cross ventilation

Hybrid high efficiency propane HVAC with 2 zones

Programable thermostat

Drywall scrap was collected for recycling

 Considered and rejected based on local customs and resistance by local authorities:

•·         self composting toilets

•·         rainwater capture into a tank for alternate use (somehow, somebody, NOT ME, approved running rainwater into a rock pit for on-lot re-absorption-- $$$$$$$$$$) No runoff into the Susquehanna and subsequently into the Chesapeake Bay...

•·         gray water recycling

 Considered and rejected due to initial cost considerations:

•·         On demand hot water

•·         In-floor heat

•·         Active Solar Heat/hot water

•·         Greenroom on south end (could be added later)

•·         Geo-thermal heat source

 Your comments are invited!

Eileen Musser, EcoBroker, ePro, Realtor

Eileen's Green Team at GATEWAY REALTY, INC.

Today I had a call from a family searching the nation for the ideal community to call home.  Their "ideal" is a community that is, or shows promising signs of becoming, progressively "green".  

Access to the arts, theatre, and cultural diversity also rank high on their wish list.  They value availability of outdoor activities, hiking and/or water sports but are of the opinion that you can only spend so much time walking a trail.  If they could find all this AND could find new friends able to engage in intelectual dialogue, (not too leftish or rightish) they would move tomorrow.  (have cash will travel!) 

So tell me.........where is this utopic (her word!) community?  If you know, email me.   A referral is likely.

Remember, GREEN is the lead word here.

Eileen's Green Team at Gateway Realty Inc.

And now a word from our turf man..............

My chief engineer at Musser Turf Services tells me that as the dry hot summer months begin we need to get down to bunny eye level and take a look at our lawns.  Try this:

1.  Stoop down a bit and look across the newly mowed lawn.  Is the surface fresh and green, or does it have a tanish silver haze?

2.  Sit right down in the grass and pull a single blade or two for closer inspection.  Do the individual blades of grass look frayed at the top?  Are they a micro putty knife shape or do they look more like nano sized paint brushes? 

If the surface has that silver haze and the blades are frayed you have a pretty good sign that it is time to sharpen or replace the mower blade.  Back in the day when we used reel mowers we got a good scissor action that snipped the blades off clean.  Now that most of us are using a rotary blade we tend to get into the habit of clubbing the grass to death.

Go ahead and spring for a new blade.  Take the old blade to the shop and have it sharpened.  Then it's quite easy to swap out the blades now and then so that your grass has a better chance of staying green and healthy through the brutal summer heat.

Eileen's Green team at Gateway Realty, Inc.

PS> No, I am not so 'green' that I have given up my lawn!

Some days you just feel very old!!  Today seems to be one of those days.  You know it might not be your greatest day when.......

-your 6 year old grandaughter suggests that you need to "go on a diet to get a little ....taller!" and you have to admit that she has at least half a point.

-your 4 year old grandaughter asks "Don't old people know how to text?".... and she is completely right!

Well, it isn't so much that we don't know how, it's just that we don't quite get the point.  If text messaging had come first and then we suddenly had the ability to call somebody and just talk right into the phone, wouldn't just be the greatest?!?

So here's the question......  Should I really be looking for a phone plan that takes away my 3000 minutes a month of talk time but gives me free texting?  If so, what plan do you suggest, and what is the cost?

What have you found to be the best balance?  Are most of your clients, customers, service providers and co-workers using text routinely? 

For that matter, if I am going to change plans anyway, how important is it to cash in my Palm Z72 and go to a Trio, Blackberry, or some other system that I haven't even heard of yet?  To this point I have said that I don't really want to sit in every meeting with one eye on the screen of a little hand held device of some sort.  Am I really giving up a great deal of business because it sometimes takes me more than three minutes to reply to an email?

How much is too much when it comes to being instantly available all the time?  Is it rude to be reading text messages under the table when you are supposed to be taking a listing?

Grandmas everywhere probably want to know.  But don't text us the answer; We think we're doing pretty dang great to be blogging!

Eileen's Green Team at Gateway

Sometimes when I am just about to nod off to sleep my brain comes unglued and my thoughts seem to take a trip of their own invention.  Here is my last flight of fancy.

Imagine we all go to a football game, but the bleachers have been replaced with little electronically guided bumper cars.  There is a game going on down on the field, but most of the crowd is watching a giant screen in the end zone.  Each fan has an electronic pea shooter.  By some mechanism that nobody quite understands you can flash your thoughts to the screen with a well placed shot from your magical peashooter.

If another fan can load and fire quickly enough to hit your message before it fades from the screen he can either follow your train of thought, or flash up an unrelated message of his own.  If enough BBs hit the screen at one time, then the author of the target message gets a zap and his bumper seat spins a little closer to the end zone.  Now he has a better shot at the screen and can hope to be bumped still closer the next time his message gets a flurry of hits.

The stadium becomes a riot of scrambling marksmen, frantic to light up the screen.  Because everybody is so busy working their own peashooters they stop reading the messages all together and just fire at random whenever they are locked and loaded.

Now mix in a couple hundred inventive vendors, running through the crown hawking better peashooters, some of them self loading, some with auto-fire mechanisms, some of them just prettier than the rest.  Well you can take it from there! 

I think I might just put down my peashooter for a while and float down to a quite corner until you clever fans figure out a less frantic system.  I know the game might be over by then, but who was watching anyway!

Eileen, selling green in Central Pennsylvania

From time to time I come across links to 'free trial' versions of programs designed to clean up my hard drive, remove errors in my registry files, and unclog my start-ups among other things.

I use my computer as much as I drive my car, and I know about as much about what is under the hood in one as the other.  Just so you understand, my dad was a mechanic, but I am a first generation computer user.  No guesses on my age please, but I was very proud of my 8088, thank you!

The last clean-up/speed-up program that has come to my attention found three hundred and eighteen errors of which it generously fixed 20 before asking me to pay to download the full product.  It is no great surprise, I suppose, that four of the errors it found were leftovers from the last clenup/speed-up programs I have used over the three years that I have been 'driving' this computer.

Which, if any of these programs do you suggest?  Do you know if any of them have caused harm?  I really do think it is time to blow out the carbon on this machine.

Eileen Musser, Realtor, ePro, EcoBroker

Lancaster and York, Pa