Information regarding Mortgages in Reno Real Estate

The Reno/Sparks home market is ridiculous, and everyone knows it. If you’re a seller, your house is sold over the weekend. If you’re a buyer, in some cases you have to endure your agents writing 20 or more offers before yours finally gets accepted.

Now we’re getting to a place where inventory has gotten so tight, would-be sellers who’d love to sell can’t because they don’t know where they’d move to. So what’s going on? Let’s look at the numbers: 

  •  January Median at $360,000 is up 4% from December 2017, up 19% from a year ago
  • January Unit sales at 400 are down 19% from December 2017, up 19% from a year ago
  • January new listings up 51% at 470 compared to December, up 20% from one year ago
  • The January median sales price at $360,000 started…

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These terms are often used interchangeably when talking about a person's eligibility for obtaining a home loan. They are very different and carry different weight when you are writing an offer on a home. Here's why:

A pre-qualification ("pre-qual" is how you will commonly hear it) letter is simply based on the buyer verbally telling the lender their income and assets. A pre-approval letter is when the buyer/borrower's documentation is received and reviewed to verify the data. At an office meeting I heard a great explanation of a pre-qualification letter; "it's not worth the paper it's printed on."

As a buyer, this is important to know because a pre-approval letter will give you a more accurate picture of what you can actually afford to buy a house…

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     You’re probably thinking “ok, great year for real estate; but what’s next?”. It’s true. 2016 brought some stability to the Northern Nevada market, and it seems we can expect those trends to continue modestly into 2017, and really, until new homes are built.

     To get an idea of the complete picture, we’ve got to examine a few key facts. Of all homes sales in 2016, 55.3% were attributed to homes under $300,000 and 39% of homes that sold were priced from $300,000 to $600,000 for a grand total of 94.3%. That’s right…94.3% of homes sold in 2016 were priced under $600,000. This shows demand for homes priced under $600,000 is very high, while supply remains largely static, pushing prices up for homes in that range. We don’t expect a huge jump in…

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You might have noticed from November through December, and ending around Christmas that mortgage rates increased at an incredibly fast pace. Perhaps the quickest in history. Things mellowed out a bit around Christmas, when most people were on vacation, and then ramped-up again at breakneck speeds through January. Rates seemed poised to jump out of a metric called the "consolidation pattern" leading into this week; that is until the Feds made a statement at the beginning of the week addressing all the small changes made to the policy statement...see the tight range in the chart below.

 Then we saw something remarkable happen; rates stayed in the 2.44% trading range, remaining largely inside the "consolidation pattern", and hitting the brakes on the…

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The  Congressional Authority for loan limits established under the Economic Stimulus Act for 2008 will expire on January 1 and the loan limit for an FHA loan will go from $403,750.00 to $325,450.00. If you fall within these parameters you need to get your loan in place now before the limit drops. Remember you can still do a 5% down conventional loan.

I have some great lenders and now is a great time to buy, prices went up 25% this year and will go up again in 2014.

Happy Holidays.

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I've just partnered up with 3 of Reno's top Real Estate Industy leaders to bring you an informative Real Estate blog. 

www.RenoRealEstateGurus.com
David Hughes - Reno Residential Guru  Reed Simmons - Reno Commercial Real Estate Guru Stephanie Hanna - Reno Mortgage Lender Guru Erin Schiller -  Reno Title and Escrow Guru We are excited to be bringing you all the news and updates from all aspects of the Real Estate Market.  We will also be adding other authors such as a home inspector, appraiser, water rights expert etc., this will become the resource in the Reno area for all of your Reno Real Estate questions. Reed Simmons with Grubb and Ellis in Reno has been in the real estate industry for 30 years and was once a partner at Dickson Realty.…

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That was quicker than I thought, it was just 2 weeks ago that they had halted foreclosures due to the Robo Signing scandal. Bank of America has resubmitted affidavits in 102,000 foreclosures in 23 states. This would allow them to resume foreclosures in those states.

They plan on resuming foreclosures in the remaining 27 states as soon as it completes the review of the foreclosure process in each one of those states. According to a bank spokesperson the basis for the foeclosure decisions was accurate, meaning the people they are foreclosing on are behind on their payments and should be foreclosed on.

Bank of America is just one of 6 loan servicers that have been under scrutiny for allowing employees to sign off on affidavits without reading them. BOA and…

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Bank of America announced last week they will be halting foreclosures in all 50 states while they investigate their pending foreclosures for fraud. Apparently they have been engaging in something you have probably heard about called "Robo Signing", which basically means bank employees forged notarized documents to accelerate the foreclosure process.

The arrogance by which these banks have operated throughout this foreclosure process is appalling. What does this mean for the average buyer and seller is a delay of the inevitable. Most guestimates are a 3 to 12 week bump in the road. In the short term could be good for sellers because this will give them less competition, in the long run this could hurt values as there will be a flurry of foreclosures that…

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FHA Changes effective October 4, 2010: What's it really mean to the average buyer?

The good: FHA has maintained a miniumum 3.5% down payment.

More Good:The up front mortgage insurance premium (ufmip) has been reduced from 2.25% of your loan amount down to 1%. This amount is not actually collected upfront, but rather financed back into your loan. The lower this is, the lower your final loan amount is.

The Bad: The monthly mortgage insurance, or annual premium as FHA calls them is going from .55% to .90% on all loans that are for 95% or more of the sale price/value, and from .50% to .85% for all loans less than 95% of the sales price/value. So this monthly premium is almost doubling.

Simply put, for a buyer purchasing a $100,000 home with an FHA loan…

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The key here is you have to have been in contract by April 30 of this year. If you were, they are giving you until September 30 of this year to close and take advantage of the $8000 tax credit for first time home buyers and $6500 credit for homebuyers who are buying a new primary residence.

The first tax credit that was to expire June 30 of this year has caused some back log with buyers trying to meet that deadline. This new deadline to September 30 should give everyone some breathing room.

Read the Reuters Article lining out the details of the extention.

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