There are 3 weekends left in October and a few fun things to do if you want to get out and do something! Old Tucson Studios (on the West side of town) is once again continuing to scare everyone with Nightfall- Harvest of Fear! This is their rendition of a ghost town with live acts, a haunted house, plus fun and game for the whole family, although really little ones might get too scared. This event is going on till the stroke of midnight on October 31st (closed on Monday & Tuesdays). For more details go to NightfallAZ.com .
Another neat thing to do this fall is to visit Apple Annie's in the Wilcox area (520-384-2084). Till the end of the month you can visit Arizona's largest Corn Maze. Apple Annie's also has orchards, where you can pick apples, peaches & pears. They also have a burger barn, a gift shop & a bakery. They will be closing for the season October 31st.
Yesterday, I went on a tour of 5 or 6 multi-million dollar homes in The Canyons, Alvernon & Skyline area. They were all very different and each one had something I liked from the negative edge pools to the modern guest houses, and the huge closets, beautiful bathrooms, and spectacular views of the city at night, plus the mountains right behind us! The last one I looked at had a swim up bar just like at Westin La Paloma Resort, except on a slightly smaller scale. I was then looking at some Tucson Area stats, it looks like there are currently 278 homes in the Tucson area that are over listed for over 1million, and 5 have sold in the last month and a half! 63 properties over a million have sold so far this year. Fun to dream sometimes! Someone is buying these homes, will be me someday!
For a long time I did not want anything to do with listing short sales. It's too hard, we don't get paid enough, and it's too sad. Then several months ago I had a change of heart. This occurred after I kept seeing good people that didn't do anything wrong lose their home because they didn't know what to do. And then their credit was ruined for seven years on top of losing their home. The part that really made me MAD was all the people that were trying to get money from these people that had none. I don't know how these people & companies sleep at night when they are basically kicking people when they are down. Some of these companies say they can do a loan modification for the troubled homeowners for just a couple thousand dollars, and then do nothing or just disappear. In my opinion the false hope that these companies give is almost as bad as taking the money. If the troubled homeowners had a couple thousand extra they wouldn't be ask risk of losing their homes.
What my team tries to do is sit down with troubled homeowners and show them all their options. We will help them with a loan modification. We have edited countless hardship letters the last several months. I never thought I would be using my degree in English in this way! Many homeowners come to us with the goal of keeping their homes, which we try our hardest and best to help them accomplish. For some of them it just isn't possible to stay in the house, but we can usually save their credit (a little) and their dignity. After lots of research we have concluded that a foreclosure will ruin a person's credit for 7 years while a short sale will only ding their credit for 2 years. We also do a lot of counseling and listening. We know that this is probably one of the hardest times that these people may have experienced in their lives and some are so worried that they become sick, and that just makes everything worse. We try to instill before we end the first meeting that this is not the end of the world. And as Hugh Rowley (one of my partners) usually says "There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it is not an oncoming train"! We also tell them that they are not alone and they probably didn't do anything wrong it is just the economy.
Inevitably, they ask why and how we can help them for free. This is a 2 part answer. First we tell them that usually out of every 10 homeowners that we meet there are a few that are so behind and underwater that the best option for them is to do a short sale, in which we get paid by the bank when it closes. We also believe in Karma, if we keep helping people, then good things will come our way. These troubled homeowners are so grateful after we have saved them from foreclosure that they tell everyone they know about us. These people might not have any money, but they probably know people with money, who want to buy or sell property.
If you aren't in Southern Arizona, I would suggest contacting Hope Now as they provide free counseling across the country.
A new program started last month that I think is pretty exciting! It is called Your Way Home AZ. The gist of this program is that if you meet certain income guidelines and can be approved for a mortgage you could get 22% in purchase assistance from the Arizona Department of Housing when buying an eligible foreclosed home. Basically the state will loan you 22% of the purchase price at zero percent interest, that you do not have to pay back if you live in the home for a certain amount of time. If that 22% is $15,000 or less that the amount of time you have to stay in the house is 5 years, $15,000 - $40,000 you have to live in the home for 10 years. Eligible foreclosed homes are basically ones that have no major issues but may need a little cleaning before moving in, or move in ready homes. Trust me, while there are a lot of forecloses that need a lot of work there are also eligible foreclosed homes on the market right now. In order to get this money from the program you have to use a lender that is approved to do this program and they will explain it more thoroughly to you. You will also have to attend an 8 hour home buyer education class at a Non profit. When else have you basically gotten $15,000 or more for sitting in a class for 8 hours?
In other exciting news Tucson has been celebrating it 234th birthday all month, and there will be a big party on August 20th in the Downtown area! To celebrate Tucson's birthday, the 4th Avenue underpass is being reopened at 4pm on August 20th! The 4th Ave. underpass has been underconstruction for the past 2 years and has made it difficult to walk from the 4th Ave. area to Downtown. Something I usually only do during Club Crawl, twice a year, but that extra several blocks really kills my feet, no matter what shoes I am wearing. If you have never made it down to 4th Ave., or it been at least a decade you may enjoy attending this event in which several City Council members including Karen Uhlich and Nina Trasoff will be there along with live music, an Antique and Hot Rod car show and merchant specials. My personal favorite spots in the area are Bison Wiches and The Shanty ( on 4th) and Hotel Congress (Downtown). I hope to see you there!
For the past couple months two of my associates and myself have been working on getting a new website up and running. Mark Schneider found Diverse solutions after extensive research, and Hugh Rowley and myself think they do one of the best searches around.
We really want to provide a service to buyers and sellers without alot of advertisements or asking for anyone's information.
What do you think of the site so far. We are still adding content.
I was looking at November solds in TARMLS, and even though November is not over until tomorrow, it Sunday, I think we will be okay. There may be a couple that got closed in the last couple days and were not entered, so this is not an exact count.
I did go through the Short sale and REO solds to try to make suret that they were indeed short sales or foreclosures. There is nothing on TV on Saturday nights, and I was bored. I included Central, East, West, North, Northwest, Northeast, South, Southwest, and Southeast (no extended areas), plus only did the searches for Residential, not residential income or commercial. I found 514 solds in November, of those 109 were foreclosures, and 32 were short sales. That shows that 27% of the solds were short sales or foreclosures. Some properties are selling, and not even a third of the solds are foreclosures, so there is hope for those that need to sell.
The bad news is that with the same search criteria we have 6,946 active listings in MLS, and those are just actives, not active contigent or active capa of which there are 820 as of today, and 304 pendings.
I have been getting more calls in the last week, but most of my calls are for foreclosures that were priced so well that they are already under contract, and there aren't any other deals as good as those unless I start seriously lowballing some agents. I do tell these callers that I can search out other good deals for them and I am in plans to meet with several so we will see. Most of them are first time homebuyers which I love, because they get soo excited!
I am thinking about doing a class for my company on Social Networking, because in our office meeting last week my manager asked how many people have Myspace or Facebook pages and I was the only one. I have always thought that the more times my name and contact info is out there the easier it will be for people to find me. What I really have to work on is quality as well as quantity. I wish I had more hours in the day to write more blogs.
So, I want to talk about the importance of being on a few of these sites since they are some of the most popular sites on the internet and a great way to connect with people. I was searching around on the internet for aticles about Facebook and Myspace and didn't find as many as I thought there would be. I also spent some time on Alexa.com looking up the traffic of different sites.
Maybe the most important reason to be on either Myspace or Facebook is that they get lots of traffic mostly from word of mouth. According to Alexa.com, RealEstate.com (my company site) is ranked 14,041, Facebook is ranked 5 and Myspace is #7 in the World. Facebook just passed Myspace with worldwide traffic earlier this year. In the US, Myspace is #3, Facebook is #5, and Realestate.com is #3,421.
Other interesting sites Worldwide are
3. YouTube
16. Hi5
29. Photobucket
214. LinkedIn
875. Realtor®.com
891. Twitter
1,417.Zillow
2,215. Trulia
9,659. Active rain
I use Myspace more for my friends and old class mates. I do mention that I am a Realtor®, and often mention real estate related things in my current status and mood section. I have in the past put little blurbs on the U of A page mentioning that as a grad I know the university area very well and can help people find rentals or houses to buy. From this simple free blurb I have gotten several rental leads that I referred to a rental agency and sold one student a $240,000 condo.
I read Jason's blog and felt encouraged and excited that he is having success with several sites.
In the current Tucson real estate market there are an abundance of short sales and foreclosures. The most common reasons that homeowners are going into foreclosure is that they bought the home a few years ago, and then the market went up dramatically, so during that time they refinanced their home. Then the so-called bubble burst and prices started to drop. So, now the homeowner owes more for the home than it is worth, and some things happen were they can't pay the mortgage. A short sale is when the owner of a property sells it for less than they owe with bank approval. A seller can also have a short sale, even if they have never missed a payment but the property is worth less than the mortgage amount. However, I have heard that most banks will not consider a short sale unless the owner is behind on their payments, not to say you should stop making payments just be aware of that.
There are a few options when someone is behind on their payments:
Talk to the mortgage company to see if they can restructure the loan or do something to help the owner.
Have a company like Hope Now negotiate with the mortgage company for you, I don't believe they charge anything they just want to help.
Put your house on the market with a Realtor®, if you have a lot of equity, it probably will not be a short sale.
Whatever you do, don't do nothing, which is a sure-fire way to loose your house and ruin your credit for at least 7 years.
If the owner chooses to list their property it is very important that the listing agent is short sales expert, many are not. There are just so many extra things that a listing agent has to do and know that it is very important that they know what they are doing. The agent should contact the bank immediately to let them know that they are representing the owner, normally the bank wants something in writing proving that, and then they have to find the right person to talk to. Sometimes finding the right person to talk to in the Loss mitigation department can take weeks, so the agent should do this part before they even have a contract to save everyone's time.
After getting a contract for an amount that is less than what the owner/seller owes, the owner or their real estate agent have to talk to the mortgage company to see if the mortgage company will take less than they are owed. Most of the time they will, it is just tricky sometimes to figure out how much less the mortgage company will accept. Most banks and mortgage companies do not want to take back a house because that will be added costs for them and then they have to put it up for sale and hope it sells, which all costs time and money.
If you think you want to buy a short sale you have to be flexible on time, because it may take the mortgage company weeks or months to approve your contract, and they will most likely not make any repairs on the property. Once again it is important that your buyers agent understands short sales and what has to be done in order for the transaction to close. If you want to buy a foreclosure, the process is usually not as long, and you can usually get a good price, but again most foreclosures are "AS-IS", and the bank has no knowledge of the property, it is just a file to them.
Any other Questions feel free to contact me!
Jennie James
RealEstate.com REALTORS®
Tucson, AZ
Certified Foreclosure, Short Sale and REO Specialist
One MSNBC reporter stated "You never want to see how sausage is made, and the country saw this week, how sausage is made, with a lot of pork." In order for the house to pass the bailout/rescue package there had to be a lot of pork added to the bill. After attending the Community Roundtable on Financial Markets and the Economy hosted by the Eller Business College at the University of Arizona, listening to several hours of reports and debates on news channels and talking to several colleagues I think I can understand the economic situation as much as I can.
The speakers at the U of A roundtable were Eller College of Management dean Paul Portney, finance department head Chris Lamoureux, and bestselling author and economist Gerry Swanson. This event packed one auditorium and several overflow classrooms with live feeds. One of the problems with the current economic situation is that most of the country does not know how we got to this point. Although Mr. Lamoureaux was full of doom and gloom his speech was very informative. All three gentlemen were very informative, and while listening too them I found out I knew more than I thought I knew, I had just not put it all together. I encourage you to listen to the whole presentation, since it is online. I am a graduate of the University of Arizona, although my degree is in English, and was very proud that my school was able to put on such a stellar event with such short notice.
Mr. Swanson stated that the U.S. economy is based on confidence. For instance, confidence that a $20 bill will be accepted at a store for $20 worth of items. The confidence level in the U.S. is low now with a president with a low approval rating, housing prices declining and many people feeling that their money may not be safe in the bank. How do we fix this? Well, the economist as the U of A felt than the Bailout/ Rescue bill may help a little but it will still probably take the country a year and a half to work out our economic problems. If this bill fails and we just let these problems work themselves out, they probably will, but it will take several years and be very painful for the whole country.
I have hope and confidence that the bill finally passed by the House and Senate will let us know that the floor has not fallen out from underneath us, and slowly but surely things should get better.
I should state that I do not think that down payment assistance programs were the bad guy, quite the opposite. Many of my clients used the FHA Ameridream program because they have good jobs, and good credit ratings, they just could not save $10,000- $20,000 because they had to pay for healthcare or education expenses that have gotten out of hand. Most of these buyers are not the ones that are being foreclosed on, at least that I know of. It was the people that overextended themselves and bought 2, 3 or 4 houses because they could get the loans for them, then the market started to go down, and they were stuck with these houses. Most, if not all of the real estate market problems are because of mortgage industry problems, first they were too lax, now they can't loan money even if they wanted too.
For more information on the Eller College, and the full presentation go to www.eller.arizona.edu
The saying for years has been "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". The Green movement has gone much further in the last couple years, and green tecniques that have been around for 20 or 30 years are becoming more popular. There are tips out there on how to reduce your carbon footprint for every area of your life, if you just take a couple minutes to look for them. Some of my favorite tips are below.
1. Buy locally- If you can reduce the trip of the items you are buying it saves gas and carbon emissions. So maybe start small and for now just try to buy fruit and vegetables locally, then at some point you may want to buy clothing that is made in the USA, and so on. Your house was made in the USA (if you live in the US), and it is your biggest investment, why not try to make sure that other large investments were made in the USA. That not only helps the environment but also the US economy.
2. Live close to where you work. The less you have to drive everyday helps save you money, reduce carbon emissions, and maybe you will have less frustation from being stuck in traffic less.
3.Recycle at home and work. If you workplace does not have a recyling program , take a box to work and collect the used paper, cans and water bottles to take to your home recycling bin. Sometimes, the back seat of my car looks like a recycling bin, because I throw recycleable back there until I get home.
4. Compost- If you have a back yard you can start a compost pile. There are different types of composting. You may want one compost hole in your back yard for fruit and vegetable waste, and another one for pet waste. There is a great article about composting pet waste at this site- http://www.plantea.com/dog-waste-compost.htm
5. Solar panels are a really neat way to conserve energy buy using the sun, which we have alot of in Tucson, almost all year round. Beside putting solar panels on the roof, you can also use them to heat the pool or, you can get a solar water heater. These products are a little expensive to begin with but they soon pay for themselves in the money you will save. One site where you can look at solar items to buy is Real Goods Solar Inc.
6. If you can't afford a hybrid, you can just try to drive less, by routing your errands and making the most effective trip. Or if the drug store (or any other errand) is just around the corner considering walking or riding your bike.
There is this neat website on how to calculate your carbon impact at the website below. Click here
Also you can go to A Brighter Planet and buy planet shares which are premium carbon offsets. A Brighter Planet Inc. Website
I hope you found something here that was of interest! Stay cool be green and contact me with any of your real estate needs!
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
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