From the Desk of Bob Caldwell

VA Loans

It's a new year and our troops are home from Iraq--as I've indicated in my previous blog, "Location, Location, Location," it also seems like 2012 will be the year where the values of homes in most regions in the United States bottoms out before going up. As a mortgage banker who has specialized in VA Loans in the past, it is almost certain that that many veterans will be considering homeownership--especially if you live and work in the Washington/Baltimore Metropolitan area, as is my case. Amongst these VAs are those of the "internet generation," born somewhere roughly in the mid-to-late 1990s and do not remember life before computers and the internet. One of the first places the "internet generation" will turn to in the search for the perfect home, is a simple Google search. Looking up the 2012 rates for VA Loans after several of my co-workers asked me questions about them, I was startled by the sheer amount of private, non-government websites with misleading names like "military.com" higher up in Google's search results than the actual information. So a word of advice for both our veterans and anybody working with them on buying a home: pay attention to where the search enginge's results are directing you!

That said, here is a county-by-county breakdown from the VA's own website of the rates for any 2012 VA Loans: 2012 VA Loan Limits