Helpful Lists to Make Buying a Home by Louise Scoggins

Making lists can be a very helpful way to quickly see a good deal of organized information. When considering a important decision such as buying a home, making lists can be the easiest way to get a grasp on what you are looking for.
Firstly, put together your ideal house list. This includes all your desires such as a pool or wraparound porch. If you are married, you and your spouse should try to agree on one list; after all you are only buying one house. After you are finished with your list, set it aside and formulate your minimum home list. What is the bare minimum you would both be willing to live with if you absolutely had to? Any potential houses you consider should fit in between one of those two lists. If it doesn’t, you wouldn’t like it.

Another way to approach this idea is to make a ‘needs’ list and a ‘wants’ list. Confusing needs and wants is probably your biggest challenge to avoid when crafting this list. Your wants list will most likely be the much larger of the two lists, but that’s okay. The goal of this exercise is to get an idea of what you are looking for in a house. What are the selling points that will appeal to you or that you want to actively look for? What are some of the features you are not willing to compromise on? Does the laundry room need to be on the same floor as the bedrooms? Is a finished basement a priority? Are you looking for single story houses only? Making these lists should be a fun exercise. If at any point you get stressed out or upset, take a break and come back to them when you are fresh and relaxed.

As a way to prioritize the lists you made, create one last list of your top five or ten criteria. The top things that must be present in a house before you will consider it at all. This is your no compromise list. Your realtor will benefit from this list the most as it will help him understand which houses would be most interesting to you.

Then you are ready to go house hunting! After a while though, it might seem like all the properties blend together. How can you remember which houses had the features that you wanted? One idea is to make a simple scorecard for each property you visit, noting features for each room and whether the residence was acceptable to you or not.

Purchasing a house shouldn’t be a stressful event. By dreaming a little and staying organized, you can have fun and find the house that is a good fit for your family. Who knows, your realtor make take one look at your dream house list and drive you right to it. Okay, probably not. But you never know.

About the Author
The Metro House Hunters Team are leading Realtors in the Austell Real Estate market. For more information on Austell Homes, please visit www.Cobb-County-Real-Estate.net

Buying a home with no money down has become easier than ever. Unfortunately, it has also become more necessary than ever, thanks to ever-falling savings rates. With that in mind I would like to respectfully suggest that if you need to buy your home with no money down, you may have a more general problem with your finances that needs to be worked on. In any case, there are times when it makes sense to have a lower or non-existent down payment, so let’s look at four ways to accomplish this.

1. Have the seller finance part of the deal. For example, if you can get a mortgage loan for 90% of the purchase price, and the seller lets you make payments on a second mortgage note for the other 10%, you have a no money down deal - especially if the seller pays closing costs. Some sellers will be willing to do this if you pay full price or close to it. The lenders on the first mortgage may not agree to this, though, so ask them.

2. Get the seller to finance it all. Sellers need at least some cash, so how can they provide all the financing and still get cash? By creating two notes and selling one. Let’s look at an example.

Suppose the seller is asking $220,000 for his home. He expects to get about $210,000 for it, and he needs at least $150,000 in cash to pay off his $130,000 mortgage and have a little left over. You offer him $240,000 for the home, in the form of two mortgage notes. The first is for $200,000 and the second for $40,000. As part of the deal, you have arranged for a “note buyer” to buy the first from him for $170,000.

Now he has $170,000 at closing, plus you are making payments to him on the other $40,000, meaning he got the $210,000 he expected out of the sale. Of course, you had to overpay for the home due to the steep discounting ($30,000) on the sale of the first note, and you will have payments on both. In other words, there are only certain times when this technique will make sense. (Certainly it would if you could rent a property for more than the two payments and other expenses added up to.)

3.  Borrow the down payment on your credit cards. This is either a great way to get into more financial trouble or, if you handle it right, a good way to stop renting. If you can get a $95,000 loan on a $100,000 condo, for example, you only need $5,000 for the down payment. Why not get a cash advance on a credit card when there is a low-interest deal?

Since you can’t “borrow” for a down payment according to many lender’s rules, get the advance a few months earlier for a “vacation.” Take a taxi downtown for your vacation and leave the rest of the money in your checking account until it is time to buy a home. A lender can’t read your mind to know what your intent was, so this is legal, but is it unethical? First, I would like to remind you that lenders encourage you to take out unsecured loans for vacations and depreciating assets like cars and boats, while saying you shouldn’t borrow for a down payment on a home that will likely go up in value. That may be unethical. Playing by the rules and repaying everything you owe is not unethical.

Just be sure that you have a plan to quickly repay the credit card balance. For example, if you commit to using $2,000 of your tax refund to repay the balance, and otherwise paying $150 on it each month, you should have it paid in less than 2 years. If you can’t do that, you are probably just creating more problems for yourself using this strategy.

4. Get a 100% first mortgage loan. There are still some lenders doing these (it is mid-2007 as I write this), and if the seller will pay closing costs, you won’t need much cash at all. The catch? You will probably pay higher interest rates for these loans.

Sellers will almost always want some cash when they sell. Notice they get it in every example above. You might have also noticed that it doesn’t have to be your money. So think about “no money down” as “How do I give the seller what he wants without using my cash.” That is how you buy a home with no money down.

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Source: real estate

The slump that the housing market has seen in the past several months has created a lot of confusion concerning whether the current real estate environment presents a great opportunity to purchase homes or is better left alone until it picks up economic momentum. Expert investors are very contested on the issue, with groups forming sides that correspond to both sides of the question, “Is now the right time to buy?”

The issue revolves around the recent mortgage crisis that has caused a surge of foreclosures which have managed to flood the market with new homes. With a swelling number of homes available for sale, property values have dropped significantly and continue to do so while more people struggle with meeting their mortgage payments. Despite the negative elements and provided you have access to various mortgages, this situation is like a cloud with silver lining; the dropping prices of homes means that, for a lot of people — especially those new to the real estate scene or young couples looking to possess their first home — buying a home now is cheaper than it has been in years.

However, with the loan businesses wary during these troubling times, securing a loan to afford a home now can be a very tricky or outright difficult effort, especially if you don’t have the greatest credit. So, with these conflicting aspects of the real estate landscape, when would be a good time to finally go out and buy that new home?

The optimistic experts believe that the current circumstances present a great opportunity to find outstanding property at rock-bottom prices. If you possess good credit and you plan to stay in a home for a few years, then purchasing a home now is a wonderful way to take advantage of the low costs of ownership while maintaining a solid investment that will pay off for years to come. Although the prices may drop lower in the future, they believe that, over time, the differences in price won’t make much of a difference when you consider just how much you are saving already. Furthermore, if you can manage to find and establish a low interest rate right now, then you’ll be able to save a considerable amount of money when house values climb again.

The more skeptical experts don’t agree with that assessment, however. Many of them believe that the current circumstances are only the beginning of the slump that has defined real estate for 2008, and that these financially downtrodden times will only continue to lower the value of homes, a possibility that will make buying a home in the future a remarkably better deal.

In fact, they believe that home prices are still relatively high. The housing boom of the past several years has contributed to doubling or even tripling the value of homes, creating an environment of extremely expensive, valuable properties that can stand to lose plenty of value before becoming a truly good deal.

Prices are also still adjusted to what people expect their homes to sell for based on the values given a couple of years ago. As these people realize that their homes aren’t  going to sell for their initial estimates, they’ll be more willing to drop the prices even further and present an even remarkable opportunity to find a home at a fantastic deal.

Whatever the differences may be between the experts, one thing they all agree on is that while homes are cheaper than they’ve been in years, loans are harder to obtain and there are stricter requirement for getting a mortgage. Buying a home now may be cheap, but it may not be easy.

Source: Housing Market