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Having a rent-a-website $35 per month. Having a custom developed website (that actually gathers information) $899. Being in the top three on Google, Yahoo and Live ... you guessed it. Priceless. For the last several years my money maker websites have been in the top 10 on at least two of the three almost every week for my most important key phrases. I have to admit I had a little inside information since I've been "online" since before there really was an "online". Then in 1994 I switched from BBS's to the brand new "world wide web" technology and eventually owned a fairly successful web services company which catered to The NRA, American Outdoorsman, Shari's Restaurants, Hunter Engineering, SiGARMS, The Canadian Pooplayer's Association, and so on. That is when I learned about paying attention to people much more in control than yours truly. Major changes have taken place since that time but the basic techniques for getting on top and staying on top are still the same as when Gossamer Threads was the name of the day and Google was what babies did. Fresh relevant content with lots of links from other sites with fresh and relevant content. Active Rain is a beuatiful boost because, for the most part, there are few links from or to blacklisted sites associated with AR. Many users of AR have learned much about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and the value of being "on the front page" of the major engines. We have learned how to make sure keywords are in the title of the page and in the URL (Uniform Resource Lookup a.k.a. web address) and repeated just the right number of times within the content. Too many and you lose. Too few and you don't get ranked high. But right now I want to introduce some of you to the Google Trends machine. Now that you are aware that keywords need to be properly used, that you need to link to and be linked from relative content and avoid blacklisted sites you will love this trend tracker. I can almost assure you that checking this regularly and following the trend reports in combination with knowing your client base and market horizon you will be even more greatly rewarded for your pointed effort. First An Example You may guess that searches for FHA have gone up over the last few weeks but would you have also guessed that searches for refinance have gone down?
What you are looking at is a trend track from Google Trends where the red line is FHA and the blue line is refinance. This was accurate as of 10PM eastern on 9/Oct/2008 and may be a little more telling than you would have expected. You can check the current results by visiting this link. The top lines are general search terms and the bottom pair are news search. I think you would agree if you were a loan officer this is a valuable bit of information to have, agreed? So give it a try for yourself. Try keywords important to you in your market area and your line of service.
### RealNowRadio coming soon to a streaming audio near you! If you are interested in participating please visit the site and contact Ken. THE OPINIONS IN THIS COMMENTARY ARE STRICTLY KEN COOK's PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT REFLECTIVE ON ACTIVE RAIN, NOVATION MORTGAGE, or ANY SPONSOR OF THIS WEBSITE. EDUCATION BEATS LEGISLATION EVERY TIME. Get your clients, friends and family members to a LENDER RUN home mortgage seminar as soon as possible. Copyright©2008 Ken Cook. Georgia and Florida real estate investment loans, FHASecure and FHA Home Loans, nationwide commercial hard money and small business loans, non-recourse loans for real estate investors Novation Mortgage, 2501 E Piedmont Road, Suite 201, Marietta, GA 30062 Georgia Residential Mortgage Licensee 20014. Florida Mortgage Broker Business MBB 0703760 FHA Lender - Equal Housing Lender
When I teach my Real Estate Investor's Quick Start Workshop (3 hours - shameless plug) I teach the importance of evaluating not only the individual property but the surrounding area. One of the things I teach is that you need to know how many foreclosures are ON THE MARKET in the area. Trulia provides a lot of tools for fast glimpses into an area. Sure, you can use your MLS if you have access to it. But here is a down and dirty quick trick for the common man (and as pros you need to see what they are seeing, too). To see how many foreclosure listings there are in a city use this link in your browser: http://www.trulia.com/for_sale/Atlanta,GA/foreclosure_lt/ or http://www.trulia.com/for_sale/San%20Fransisco,CA/foreclosure_lt/ Simply replace the CITY and STATE with the area you are looking for. If there is a space in the CITY or STATE such as Las Vegas or New York replace the space with %20 like this Las%20Vegas,NV or New%20York,NY
Do you want to be more recognizable, more popular, more read, more noticed than you have been to date? Want to meet more people in the biz? Want to alert more people to your AR postings? Sometime earlier in life, things change so quickly in the economic realm I cannot recall if it was this year or last, I looked at something called "Twitter". Then I re-looked. Ever re-look? I relooked just last week. On Twitter I find many AR friends and many new friends but I want to be able to find all of the AR users who also use Twitter. Haven't used Twitter? Try this link for my Twitter. Once you get there go ahead and sign up. The trick to Twitter is getting your thoughts out in 140 characters. Sometimes it is more difficult than you may think ... especially if you are in the 50 and over crowd where everything must be grammatically proper. Or at least close! Posting links in Twitter uses up too many of your characters so the big hiccup is making your links short(er). Long before I knew of Twitter I knew of TinyURL.com and if you Tweet you'll need it. For example I changed the URL http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/10/02/mckinney-accuses-gov ernment-slaughtering-prisoners-dumping-bodies-katrina/ to become http://tinyurl.com/3snf2z - and that's a big difference. Join me on Twitter and you'll find a large number of your AR friends plus meet many more. ALSO: If you don't know about RealNowRadio you need to check it out! If you DO Tweet leave your Twitter in your comments! This is not the bottom. I repeat, this is not the bottom. Why? Simple, we are not yet doing the right things. When I say we I mean people. We are doing, in many senses, the same things we did to cause the last two major panics. The only difference this time from the last two, and I'm speaking of 1837 and 1929 of course, is we have more backstops in place. The news that CITI is cutting back massively on their wholesale outlet is just one more indicator of how bad things really are. Remember, most financial companies do not operate to the future, they operate based on the pain they feal right now. CITI is no different. They feel the burn of market failure so they pull in their tentacles. Not to trivialize it but this is just another jerk of the knee reaction in a time when the market is screaming for stability. CITI flinched. But so did Wachovia, just before they announced failure. In a society which is in a state of flux more than anything else we need a stabilizer. Right now there are none. Words of politicians, no matter how young and dynamic or old and weathered, are useless and the sound of a cracked cymbal. They neither comfort nor do they provide accurate and factual information. True enough we will come through this because we always have. The question on everyone's mind is, "how much longer with this last and how much lower will it go." The truth is nobody knows. You may wonder how I can say with certainty this is not the bottom. Really it is very simple: decision makers are still afraid. Oh, they prefer the phrase lacking confidence but when you disseminate it the base meaning is simply "scared". ING boasting of 100,000 loans with only 330 foreclosures is fantastic. It made me feel good because I have a little bit in ING. Not a lot but enough to buy groceries for a few months if needed. But I digress. The point here is that we are not at the bottom or even a bottom and we will continue to slide down as long as lenders remain in fear. Until those who have are willing to share with those who need the market will continue to fall and the bottom will continue to elude. The 1/2 point target cut really means nothing. Oh, it means I can advertise a lower rate to people who are interested but if I cannot cover the paper, what difference would it make if the rate was zero? Look for the bottom when you see big lenders opening new wholesale channels and when you see trading have more days up than down. There is no way we will avoid market instability for the next few weeks or even months but when you average the day and compare it to previous days you will recognize the bottom without Cramer yelling about it. I can't watch that guy, sorry. Stay calm, keep working, keep praying, and remember the pain. See you at the polls in November. I dare you to vote for inexperience in a time like this. ### RealNowRadio coming soon to a streaming audio near you! If you are interested in participating please visit the site and contact Ken. THE OPINIONS IN THIS COMMENTARY ARE STRICTLY KEN COOK's PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT REFLECTIVE ON ACTIVE RAIN, NOVATION MORTGAGE, or ANY SPONSOR OF THIS WEBSITE. EDUCATION BEATS LEGISLATION EVERY TIME. Get your clients, friends and family members to a LENDER RUN home mortgage seminar as soon as possible. Copyright©2008 Ken Cook. Georgia and Florida real estate investment loans, FHASecure and FHA Home Loans, nationwide commercial hard money and small business loans, non-recourse loans for real estate investors Novation Mortgage, 2501 E Piedmont Road, Suite 201, Marietta, GA 30062 Georgia Residential Mortgage Licensee 20014. Florida Mortgage Broker Business MBB 0703760 FHA Lender - Equal Housing Lender
More tools for YOUR success (all free by the way). Everyone knows the headlines. Even the bum at the corner can ask questions like, "How 'bout that bailout, eh?" Furthermore even the bum on the corner can offer his political wisdom, "That Bush done messed up everything they oughta vote him out." The truth is most of us know as little about the back end of macro economics and financial polity as a 10 year old does about real estate regulations. So it's good that we actually earn our living providing our services to main street where most people are just like us. Some can tell a different story but most will report that their buyers are fearful and uncomprehending of the current state of the industry. Sellers are all over the board from feeling trapped with a home they fear they cannot move to still thinking they can get 10% more than the property appraised for just because they redid the kitchen and bath. Our job, you job and mine, is to pinpoint reality and be open and honest about it. The truth today is a divided one: it's a great time to buy and it's a terrible time to buy. The time to buy is now if you have either divested yourself of your previous real estate holding (as a non-investor) or you can see a way to hold your previous property as a rental until the market turns. After all when it is a great time to buy it is not a great time to sell. However, for many people, the time to sell is now. Ken - you're confusing me. You just said the time to buy is now in the opening of that paragraph and then you closed with the time to sell is now. Which is it? The time to sell is now if you are facing foreclosure or other financial hardship which is a certainty if you keep your existing property with the existing loan. One solution to help keep your home is HOPE for Homeowners but it is not for everyone. In fact it is not even for the majority of people facing foreclosure. Selling short (short sale) nay be an option for you but it could take time and there could be ramifications from it. Walking away and just leaving the property there is really not an option when there are so many other ways including loan modifications. As a real estate agent it is your duty to understand all of these options beyond the headlines. In other words you need to understand these options well enough to write the story which follows the headlines. You need to know about HOPE for Homeowners even though there is no commission in it for you. There will be, however, referrals for you. You also need to know about short sales. I used to do short sale training but I think I trained too many so now there are thousands of experts. Your clients, and mine, and our prospects, often believe they know everything there is to know about a subject simply because they saw it on the evening news or they Googled it. Just like agents with years of experience are certain that a client can't Google up enough knowledge to fully understand the real estate transactional process they also cannot Google up enough education to fully understand the economy on a macro or micro scale. That is your job. Pulling a CMA does not make you an expert on your market area. It helps but it is only one tool to use to help you understand your "farm". If you call me right now on my cell phone and I am on the river in a canoe I can give you some solid, up to date facts and figures about my market areas. It doesn't make me special it just means I use some of these tools (and you may have others) to study and stay on top of my market area. I also use some others for which I have a subscription but I will not cover those here. Without even looking at any of these tools I can tell you that my county, Cobb County, has the lowest foreclosure rate in the metro area at 3.7% - I can tell you my city, Marietta, has a population of roughly 70,000 and we have grown by about 13% since 2000. I can tell you the rough demographic makeup and name the mayor and city council as well as the police leadership names by zone and Board of Education. I can also talk about businesses and employers, colleges and universities and any planned redevelopment zones in my area. YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO POP-OFF THESE NAMES AND NUMBERS IN YOUR AREA! Here are some of my free favorite tools to help me stay on top of the information in my micro area: City Data - "City-data.com is reaching 10.4 million absolute unique visitors per month with 92.2% of visitors from the US and 1.9% from Canada (Google Analytics, September 2008). As of October 1, 2008, Quantcast.com ranks us as the 123rd largest website in the U.S. Our forum is one of the most widely read forums in the US. Our website is frequently referenced by the media." City Facts USA - "Here you will find information about every city, from large like New York to as small as Lost Springs, WY (2000 total population 1*) in USA. Information includes but not limited to demographic facts ((race, income, ancestries, education, employment etc.), housing data, State and county information, zip codes information, area codes, radio stations, maps etc. We also interested to collect the little know interesting facts about your city or any city in USA." CenStats - This is data from the Census Bureau and it provides a lot of detail about industry in your area. BLS Data - the Bureau of Labor Statistics lets you create your own dataset online. Very cool stuff. I can't give you all the links for your area but here are some I keep up with. You should easily be able to find these for your area with a little searching: Cobb Chamber of Commerce Knowledge is power and having more knowledge is more power. Know your market because THAT is really your product. See you at the top! See you at the polls in November. I dare you to vote for inexperience in a time like this. THE OPINIONS IN THIS COMMENTARY ARE STRICTLY KEN COOK's PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT REFLECTIVE ON ACTIVE RAIN, NOVATION MORTGAGE, or ANY SPONSOR OF THIS WEBSITE. EDUCATION BEATS LEGISLATION EVERY TIME. Get your clients, friends and family members to a LENDER RUN home mortgage seminar as soon as possible. Copyright©2008 Ken Cook. Georgia and Florida real estate investment loans, FHASecure and FHA Home Loans, nationwide commercial hard money and small business loans, non-recourse loans for real estate investors Novation Mortgage, 2501 E Piedmont Road, Suite 201, Marietta, GA 30062 Georgia Residential Mortgage Licensee 20014. Florida Mortgage Broker Business MBB 0703760 FHA Lender - Equal Housing Lender Like many of you I have been blogging for a long time. Many of us have been blogging since long before others new it as blogging and even before it was called blogging. I cannot take credit for any of the tools and tips you will read below but these are some very helpful links I have gathered from across the web through my own searches and those of friends. If you haven't tried it you can always post for free to http://BlogX3.com (Blog Blog Blog temporarily known as "The 24") where you favorite AR bloggers have added some great SEO juice especially Scott Schang and Katerina Gassett - now it is open to you as well! Want to try Twitter? My twitter is http://twitter.com/thekencook (The because plain Ken Cook was taken ;) - don't worry if you don't understand Twitter, you'll find many of your AR friends there. Now here are a million more tips. Okay, it's not really a million and it won't guarantee you an hour on cable news dedicated to you: How to Get 6,312 Subscribers to Your Business Blog in One Day Got any more to add of your own? We'd love to know about them.
See you at the polls in November. I dare you to vote for inexperience in a time like this. THE OPINIONS IN THIS COMMENTARY ARE STRICTLY KEN COOK's PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT REFLECTIVE ON ACTIVE RAIN, NOVATION MORTGAGE, or ANY SPONSOR OF THIS WEBSITE. EDUCATION BEATS LEGISLATION EVERY TIME. Get your clients, friends and family members to a LENDER RUN home mortgage seminar as soon as possible. Copyright©2008 Ken Cook. Georgia and Florida real estate investment loans, FHASecure and FHA Home Loans, nationwide commercial hard money and small business loans, non-recourse loans for real estate investors Novation Mortgage, 2501 E Piedmont Road, Suite 201, Marietta, GA 30062 Georgia Residential Mortgage Licensee 20014. Florida Mortgage Broker Business MBB 0703760 FHA Lender - Equal Housing Lender
Unless you are facing or have faced foreclosure you may be astonished at what people go through - and leave behind - when they are facing foreclosure. To get an idea watch this short video then come back here. If you are facing foreclosure there are so many things you can do. First you can contact Project Hope Now. It's a consulting group which will point you in many directions and even give some very good advice. They are a not-for-profit organization and you can get them at http://hopenow.com or by phoning 888-995-HOPE (4673). When facing foreclosure people have a tendency to lose pride, lose hope and become depressed. Depression is powerful and can cause you to make some very wrong decision. One thing you NEVER want to do is to quit claim your property to a real estate investor (or anyone for that matter). This is almost always a scam. First of all chances are very high that you are "upside down" in your property which means you owe more than it is worth. Only a foolish investor will pay more than the current market value for most properties unless your property fits into the grander scheme. It's probably a 99.999% chance your property does not. The scam there, often, is the scammer will get you to quit claim your property to them at which time they will rent it to a tenent. Instead of using the income and paying your payments like they promised they will pocket the funds and let the home go into foreclosure. They lose no skin and no sleep. There are other scams and techniques you need to be familiar with and need to avoid. They all only just make bad matters worse. Most importantly foreclosure does not sneak up on you. Reports indicate that as many as half or more of people who wind up foreclosed never even attempt to speak with the servicer or bank. There is no excuse for that. Even if they haven't been what you would consider "co-operative" at least tell them your situation, ask for a work-out, and try and save your credit if not your home. I will talk to anyone facing foreclosure. I may be able to help. I may just be able to listen. Either way, I'm here. Call me on my dime at 866-946-0120 ext 101 - ask for Ken or email me anytime. See you at the polls in November. I dare you to vote for inexperience in a time like this. THE OPINIONS IN THIS COMMENTARY ARE STRICTLY KEN COOK's PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT REFLECTIVE ON ACTIVE RAIN, NOVATION MORTGAGE, or ANY SPONSOR OF THIS WEBSITE. EDUCATION BEATS LEGISLATION EVERY TIME. Get your clients, friends and family members to a LENDER RUN home mortgage seminar as soon as possible. Copyright©2008 Ken Cook. Georgia and Florida real estate investment loans, FHASecure and FHA Home Loans, nationwide commercial hard money and small business loans, non-recourse loans for real estate investors Novation Mortgage, 2501 E Piedmont Road, Suite 201, Marietta, GA 30062 Georgia Residential Mortgage Licensee 20014. Florida Mortgage Broker Business MBB 0703760 FHA Lender - Equal Housing Lender
Albert Einstein is reported to have said, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." If the door is locked when you first try to open it do you try again or do you find the key? Keep that illustration in mind when you think about business opportunities. Most of them are not locked they just need to be opened. Those which are locked all have a key - your job is to find that key. As a mortgage lender I find a great number of doors to opportunity which at first try seem locked. The truth is most of them are only latched and can be easily opened. My apparently locked doors are rarely individual clients but rather real estate agents and brokers. Trust me, I used to own a real estate company and I know how many people try to solicit us for referrals to their mortgage solutions. As a mortgage lender you would probably be blown away at how many appraisers, inspectors, insurance agents, title agents, and closing attorneys come after our business. Add to that the number of radio stations, television stations, newspapers, coupon books, and magazines and my day is almost full. Top that off with a bally of credit repair companies, mortgage lead companies and people wanting me to send my employees to their seminar and it easily would fill an eight hour day if I took just 15 minutes with each person. So you could initially think the door to me as an opportunity is locked ... but it isn't. There are tricks that work on me and handing me a squishy ball is appreciated but judging from the number of squishy balls, note pads, Ruebic's cubes, magic 8balls, bendy critters, golf tees, and other trinkets on my shelf those do not get my business. So keeping those things in mind let me demonstrate the perfect plan for failure. I'm not going to use the obvious such as never actually working but rather give you a working plan for failure. #1 - Have bad command of the English language when speaking in English. This is not a prejudice this is a communications issue. This includes everything from really deep south gutter talk to uptown Chicago slang and California valley. It's not the accent ... it's the words you choose. #2 - Stop in unannounced and do anything more than drop off your fluff and ask for an appointment. (Hint - if you take the time to drive to my office and set up an appointment, you'll probably get 5 minutes of my time - I expect the same if I drive to yours). #3 - Have bad or invasive odors. I know, this isn't a fun topic but it is reality. In fact a wonderful agent stopped in my office about 3 weeks ago. He was wearing a dirty suit and smelled like garbage. It was so bad I could not breathe around him. He only stopped in to ask if he could bring a builder client to my office the following Tuesday. I said yes, of course, but immediately plotted the seating arrangement and fan location. Fortunately when the two returned he was smelling better and dressed cleaner. You know what is just as bad? Overload on perfume or hairspray. If you must put on some cologne please do it 15 minutes before you walk into someone's office - not as you are exiting the car. #4 - Talk over or at your contact. Nothing makes me more nuts than to be having a conversation where the other party is never paying attention to what I am saying because they assume they know the answer to the question I have yet to finish. We have one secondary market rep who never listens. Never. I have to leave the room when they are present and that's not good since I'm a major portion of the decision making. #5 - Fail to show up for an appointment or be more than 5 minutes late without a phone call. Not showing will seal the deal for me unless you have a very good verifiable excuse. Yesterday a portion of I285 was closed and caused an attorney to be 50 minutes late for a closing. The two agents were there with the buyer. The listing agent (Michelle Miller we love you!) probably kept the peace while the buyer's agent (total PITA from day one and will never get a recommendation or lead from my office) was not peaceful. But the attorney called every 10 minutes to give a progress report. Had she not called the deal would have, at best, been moved to today and cost us a redraw fee. #6 - Lie. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a local agent here with whom we had a bit of a scuffle. More than anything else what really yanked our chain is that she lied in front of everyone to make herself look bigger and my company to look smaller. Listen, when you say you are number one in volume for your area you better define your area and demonstrate by who's numbers you are number one. We used to say we were number one in real estate investment finance, and we were, and those numbers were demonstrated by Georgia Department of Banking and Finance published numbers. Between my house and the mall 5 miles away there are more number one agents and car dealers with their names on billboards than I can recaount. Several years ago a stock broker called me and advised me to invest in a little company called Enron. I did not because I am a contrarian investor. When he called back some months later I remind him of his "free tip" and he said he never gave that advice. Recently I have been getting calls from a very large gold dealer assuring me gold would continue to rise until it hits $2000 ... 'nuff said. #7 - Talk bad about your competition. They may be my best friend! Just tell what you can do and then if the prospect asks you specifically about your competition still be careful! My sister is a real estate broker and if you start bad mouthing her you are done. I don't care how rotten she is :) Don't bad mouth. State facts and make your claims. #8 - Swear, curse or tell off jokes. Two lessons - even if the person you are talking to says something like, "Man this is a great flipping day!" Do NOT respond with "Gosh derned right it sure is!" And if one more person says to me, "You're really trying to Jew me down" I'm just going to point to the door and walk away. Three weeks ago I met a contractor at a rehab job for him to give a quote. He wasted absolutely no time in telling me how the condition of the world was all because of Jews, Catholics and Republicans. Then proceeded to ask me if any of those labels fit me. Uhm, reckon he got the job? I don't care if you think George Bush is Satan and Obama is really Osama shaved - I don't want to hear it in our business meeting! If you want to wear an Obama button or have a McCain bumper sticker on your briefcase and I engage you about it ... different song. #9 - Insinuate you are the only possible solution for your prospect when you know that to not be true. First of all unless you are capable of pulling a piece of real estate out of your hat or you are giving away properties with no strings attached there are millions of you. Thousands in my immediate area. All I want to know is what separates you from the crowd and for me that is being both friendly and to the point. If I walk into a real estate office to drop off my fluff and ask for an appointment and the gatekeeper or the broker or manager is rude to me I remember it. I have a large circle of friends and thousands of clients. Of course there are more! I would absolutely love to read yours and add them to my list. Have a powerful and successful day out there.
See you at the polls in November. I dare you to vote for inexperience in a time like this. THE OPINIONS IN THIS COMMENTARY ARE STRICTLY KEN COOK's PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT REFLECTIVE ON ACTIVE RAIN, NOVATION MORTGAGE, or ANY SPONSOR OF THIS WEBSITE. EDUCATION BEATS LEGISLATION EVERY TIME. Get your clients, friends and family members to a LENDER RUN home mortgage seminar as soon as possible. Copyright©2008 Ken Cook. Georgia and Florida real estate investment loans, FHASecure and FHA Home Loans, nationwide commercial hard money and small business loans, non-recourse loans for real estate investors Novation Mortgage, 2501 E Piedmont Road, Suite 201, Marietta, GA 30062 Georgia Residential Mortgage Licensee 20014. Florida Mortgage Broker Business MBB 0703760 FHA Lender - Equal Housing Lender
Here we go again. Starting October 1, 2008 (that would be tomorrow if you are a timely subscriber) a major portion of HR3221 and other changes to FHA and other types of lender will go into effect. Now remember, FHA does not actually buy loans as do the GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact we have been taught that the FHA is the only government corporation that runs in the black using only funds generated by its own business. In other words it is not funded by tax payer dollars. We haven't heard a lot said about the liquidity, or illiquidity, of FHA during the last several weeks. But I digress. We just finished a several month period where the FHASecure Refinance was supposed to have been king. FHA, in fact, claims hundreds of thousands of refinances using the FHA Secure yet I have read or heard testimony from not one person whom I know personally who closed one. Again, I digress. The change on October 1 is the end of FHASecure and the inception of Hope For Homeowners. While I sit here waiting for a clear to close on my final seller funded (Nehemiah) down payment assisted FHA purchase I am answering emails in bunches from readers wanting to have more information about this new Hope For Homeowners. I am not going to pretend to have all the answers nor to presume the answers I have are what is actually going to occur - for many reasons, most of which I do not even yet know. Instead of treating this as an absolute like I did the FHA Secure I will operate under what we have been told and how we have been trained until I gain some actual experience. What is Hope For Homeowners? According to the official information Hope For Homeowners "will continue FHA's existing and successful efforts to provide aid to struggling families trapped in mortgages they currently cannot afford. Under the program, certain borrowers facing difficulty with their mortgage will be eligible to refinance into FHA-insured mortgages they can afford". Of course this is also what FHA Secure claimed to "allow families with strong credit histories who had been making timely mortgage payments before their loans reset-but are now in default-to qualify for refinancing". While it all sounded good finding an investor to actually purchase the paper was a joke and getting FHA to offer any assistance there a waste of time. Some claimed to do hundreds or dozens and others just laughed. I heard Jim Beavers, one of the architects of the death of seller funded down payment assistance, whining because wholesale lenders and mortgage investors hadn't gotten behind the program. Then he issued sort of a "threat" and said, "If you didn't like FHASecure you're gonna hate Hope For Homeowners". Well, Jim, they didn't. So it remains to be seen why anyone would want to participate in Hope. I mean from what I understand the value of the property is marked to market and any encumbrance above 90% of market value is expired. Our example for the remainder of this rather lengthy article will use an example of a borrower who owns a property which is currently valued at $185,000 but has a first mortgage of $190,000 and a second mortgage of $30,000 actively liened against it. Write that down somewhere if you need to as we move to answer our next questions. For Whom is Hope For Homeowners? Now that you have a basic concept of what Hope is, along with a few dozen questions you did not have prior to reading the first few paragraphs, we can examine that same bit of information provided by HUD, "will continue FHA's existing and successful efforts to provide aid to struggling families trapped in mortgages they currently cannot afford. Under the program, certain borrowers facing difficulty with their mortgage will be eligible to refinance into FHA-insured mortgages they can afford". We will simply take that statement apart and see who we can identify. "Struggling families" is the first that is mentioned. I already know you do not have to be a family but you do need to be an American citizen or legal resident. "Trapped in mortgages they currently cannot afford" could be ambiguous but you know there are guidelines. Without getting technical let's hit a couple of bullet points from HUD: * Their mortgage must have originated on or before January 1, 2008; When FHASecure first came out HUD wanted the homeowner to have missed a mortgage payment, or more than one, but only after the adjustable rate had increased and they could not have been late on any other payments. Hope has some differences but one similarity is that the borrower must be qualified for the loan with the exception of mortgage troubles. In other words bad credit borrowers because they have a slow payment history will not qualify. Requiring the MORTGAGE DTI to be above 30% just goes inline with capping MDTI (lower ratio) in the same range as qualifying for an FHA loan to begin with except in this case having an MDTI higher than the normal requirement would be a key indicator that the mortgage is to heavy of a debt load for the homeowner and a signal they really need help. To answer "for whom" it would be simple to say anyone who could qualify for an FHA insured home loan if their HDTI was less than 31% but who are in a mortgage that breaks the ceiling for their debt load. (If any of this is difficult to understand, confusing or you just have questions you can email me - I'm up most of the night - or phone me at 678-946-0100 during normal business hours EST). How Can You Take Advantage of Hope For Home Owners? Do a search for an APPROVED FHA Lender who is local to your area or region. Yes, there are unapproved loan officers making FHA loans and by using one you will almost certainly over pay for their services, you will not have the protection of the Federal Government should they hoodwink you, and they do not have direct access to all of the tools and information companies like my Novation Mortgage in Atlanta, Georgia. Check your state and if we are licensed and approved there I will be more than happy to work for you. Although there are dozens of national advertisers, email spammers, flashing spinning website buzzy buttons, and even telemarketing calls, I strongly urge you to work with a local lender or broker from your area. Chances are the pricing between Ditech and Corner Mortgage will be equal or slightly different one direction or the other. As an example we normally beat Ditech, Wells Fargo and Countrywide with our overall closing costs and rates. If you do not know how to shop for a mortgage send me an email and I will send you a PDF flier that alerts you to tricks used by everyone but most "the big guys" to get you to participate with them. Final Word Don't wait around and see how it goes. This program is scheduled to run into 2011 but with the economy like it is who knows what changes could happen earlier. THE OPINIONS IN THIS COMMENTARY ARE STRICTLY KEN COOK's PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT REFLECTIVE ON ACTIVE RAIN, NOVATION MORTGAGE, or ANY SPONSOR OF THIS WEBSITE. EDUCATION BEATS LEGISLATION EVERY TIME. Get your clients, friends and family members to a LENDER RUN home mortgage seminar as soon as possible. Copyright©2008 Ken Cook. Georgia and Florida real estate investment loans, FHASecure and FHA Home Loans, nationwide commercial hard money and small business loans, non-recourse loans for real estate investors NOVATION MORTGAGE 678-946-0100 or 866-946-0120 Novation Mortgage, 2501 E Piedmont Road, Suite 201, Marietta, GA 30062 Georgia Residential Mortgage Licensee 20014. Florida Mortgage Broker Business MBB 0703760 FHA Lender - Equal Housing Lender
It was June 18th and Europe was at war. The French army had marched through the region and wrecked havoc on many cities. The year was 1815. Under the leadership of Napolean they army marched against the "aggressor nations" as they were attempting to mobilize for an assault on Paris. In a town called Waterloo they found a great surprise: the liberators may have appeared unprepared but they delivered the final blow to Napolean's army. The British suffered huge losses in the battle. A financial market panic caused a liquidity problem. Baron von Rothschild saw an opportunity and uttered his now famous and oft quoted (and misquoted) statement: "Buy when there is blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own." We call it contrarian investing. It is my personal style of investing and today, there is much blood in our streets. It is the blood of the American tax dollar - it is our own blood. Is real estate a safe investment? Historically speaking real estate is a sound investment. Most of all it is lasting. As a general rule real estate doesn't fall into the sea - although that does happen. Stocks go up and down in value, generally require all cash purposes, generally are not under your control, cannot be improved for better value, generally cannot be leased or tenant occupied. Real estate can be all of the above. Financed, improved, let to tenants. Many people do not know that you can hold real estate in your self-managed retirement accounts. IRA real estate investing has kicked up a few notches as of late and there is much opportunity on the market today which make this a very valuable prospect. Single and multi-family housing as well as commercial properties have dropped in value significantly nation wide. While many people are unaware of this tactic at all most are unaware that your retirement account can be the source of the down payment and it can be the mortgagor to finance properties held in it. Yes, it is a fact. With as little as 30% down payment coming from your self-directed retirement account you can achieve a long term, conventional style loan, to acquire and hold properties in your retirement account. The loans are slower to get closed but just about as fast to get approved. They are made to the IRA and the rates are very reasonable for non-recourse investment grade loans. THE OPINIONS IN THIS COMMENTARY ARE STRICTLY KEN COOK's PERSONAL OPINION AND NOT REFLECTIVE ON ACTIVE RAIN, NOVATION MORTGAGE, or ANY SPONSOR OF THIS WEBSITE. EDUCATION BEATS LEGISLATION EVERY TIME. Get your clients, friends and family members to a LENDER RUN home mortgage seminar as soon as possible. Copyright©2008 Ken Cook. Georgia and Florida real estate investment loans, FHASecure and FHA Home Loans, nationwide commercial hard money and small business loans, non-recourse loans for real estate investors Novation Mortgage, 2501 E Piedmont Road, Suite 201, Marietta, GA 30062 Georgia Residential Mortgage Licensee 20014. Florida Mortgage Broker Business MBB 0703760 FHA Lender - Equal Housing Lender
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Ken "Yes You Can" Cook Marietta, GA More about me… Ken Cook - Novation Mortgage - FHA/FNMA/FHLMC/Private Office Phone: (678) 946-0100 Cell Phone: (404) 402-6039 Email Me ;) Links;) Archives
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