Fri. Oct. 23 2009 | 8:15 AM ET
Discussing extending the homebuyer tax credit, with Howard Glaser, former HUD secretary counselor; Shari Olefson, Fowler White Boggs; and CNBC’s Trish Regan.
The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) is reporting there are more than 100,000 suspicious claims involving the $8,000 first-time-home-buyer Tax Credit. Currently there are 167 criminal cases regarding the tax credit.
As the December 1st, 2009 deadline for the tax credit nears, many hope Congress will extend and even potentially increase the tax credit. With over one million claims submitted, there’s no question of it’s success.
He felt that we won’t hit the floor for values until late 2010, but it varies by region. He gave an example, showing that Boston had hit it’s floor in early 2009 and is already rising. This is an important factor for homeowners to consider when looking to buy or sell a home
Recently, I was having lunch with my friends Rob Novak (fellow Loan Officer) and Andrew Norman from ING. It was one of those lunches where topics moved left to right without filters or agenda. While sharing ideas and opinions of the current marketplace, the topic of first time home buyers was mentioned. At that moment, I told Andrew, “By the way, if any of your clients have children who are looking to buy their first home and would like to get more for their money, tell them to buy a multi-family.”
From that statement, we started to discuss all the benefits of why a first time home buyer should buy a multi-family. Within a 2 minutes of talking about this, I wondered “Why didn’t I think of this earlier?!” FHA has always allowed buyers to use FHA financing to buy a multi-family as their primary residence.
The basic concept is simple. The buyer buys a duplex, triplex or four-plex with the same 3.5% down payment requirement as a house. They rent out the other units and cover the difference from the mortgage payment as their share. If the homeowner decides many years later that living in a multi-family doesn’t fit their lifestyle, they either sell the property or move out and rent the unit they were living in.
There is a new bill being introduced that would increase the minimum down payment for FHA loans from 3.5% to 5% (HR 3706).
I understand that some congressman want to protect the financial stability of HUD as well as the American people. The last thing we need is a bunch of FHA foreclosed homes on the market.
However, I don’t believe this is the answer. Yes, that sounds pretty bias considering the fact I’m a mortgage loan officer and my job is to help people get loans, but the loss of 100% financing never scared me and my business has only grown since the market has downturned.
I’ve always found it interesting that there are so many websites that claim to have a listing of foreclosed homes. Many of them claim they have HUD (US Department of Housing and Urban Development) foreclosures which are foreclosed homes that had FHA loans.
Though many of these listings may be accurate, there is only one real source to find HUD foreclosures. HUD contracts different management companies to handle their listings, meaning the websites that list real HUD foreclosures haven’t been easy to find. For instance, Ten Management is the company that lists HUD foreclosures for Washington state, as well as many other states.
Whether you’re looking to sell your house or just take a glance, this is a question that many homeowners are wondering.
The first place to check is Zillow, which is a real estate website designed to aid consumers in finding information on real estate and home loans. The site was originally created to tell consumers what the estimated value of any given property was. Continue reading What is My House Worth?
I found a pretty good article that gives buyers tips to stopping foreclosure. This sort of information can’t be spread around wide enough or fast enough. Too many people are losing their homes.
Mortgage and home loan help is available and theres practically nothing more aggravating and more heart breaking than the thought of losing your home since you can no longer keep up with your mortgage payments. One out of seven of homeowners in the United States are living with this agony,the sad part is many already think its too late and end up losing their home since the did not get the mortgage help that could have stopped the foreclosure.
Most of the time however thats not the plan.
However bad your monitory situation may be, you still might be able to avoid having your bank foreclose on your land. And foreclosure is something you definitely want to stay away from and you must stop foreclosure. When you have a foreclosure on your credit report, your credit rating will be severely damaged so much that you will have a hard time to find landlords owners who will let you rent from them. There are ways to get mortgage help and end foreclosure, We will go over it|them|options in this article.
If you’re having a hard time keeping your head above water: Because a mortgage broker led you to buy more house than you could purchase and told you you could “simply refinance” once the rates went up, or because you got shoved into a rotten mortgage loan that has interest rates rising exponentially every time your A.R.M settles on you consider the following tips, Also consider some of the valuable resources at the bottom of the page.
I just received a notice from Talon Title and Escrow that some banks are now holding funds from a Cashier’s Check!
This means if you receive a cashier’s check and you deposit these funds into your bank account, the funds may be held until the check clears. This is the first I’ve heard of this.
There are many situations where this can affect a consumer, but I will point out a glaring problem related to this in a real estate transaction. If you sell your home and plan to use the proceeds of your sale to put down on your new purchase, your down payment could be “held” until the check clears! In other words, you would be homeless for the “holding period”.
I would check your bank’s policy in regards to this topic if you’re planning on selling and buying a house in the near future.
Talon pointed out that having your funds wired into your account is another solution.
One of my clients and good friends sent me a link to an article that sums up the debacle pretty well.
It sounds like most clients now know where to send their payments. There has been some issues related to escrow accounts not paying taxes or insurance. There have also been issues where borrowers received escrow refunds from overpaid escrow accounts and having their checks bounce! That was news to me.
Rumors have been going around about the $8,000 first-time-home-buyer tax credit being extended beyond December 1st, 2009. There’s even rumors of it being increased AND including all buyers, not just first time home buyers.
Nothing is set in stone yet, but there’s obviously a lot of interest in this topic. Some skeptics say that many of the buyers would buy anyways. Though this may be partially true, my personal experience with my buyers have been the exact opposite. All of them know about the tax credit and want to take advantage of it. Some of my buyers are rushing to get to buy a house before it expires.
