I love your site and you are very knowledgeable. I have one quick question for you. I bought a home, I made it through closing, I moved my family into the home. During the process I used some closing...
At any given time, I will usually have at least one set of clients who really need to consider a condo or townhome who nonetheless have their hearts set on a single family residence. I agree to include single...
There is no such thing as a free lunch, but lots of people will pretend there is. It seems to me that many people consider compensation earned by real estate agents as paying some kind of toll. They think of...
We live in (A California city). In a 2 bedroom 1 bath home on approximately a 20,000 Sq. ft. lot. It is easily worth 500K to 600K with a current mortgage of $116,000. The mortgage/Title is in the name...
For a while there, the forty year mortgage had started to make a comeback, and a few lenders started introducing the fifty year mortgage. The reason, straight from the horse's mouth, the lender's representatives, is lowered payments. In an uncertain...
How do you transfer house ownership after someone dies and leaves you the house in a will? The will must be probated. Once all debts of the estate are paid and the court agrees to a final disposition of...
Scapegoating mortgage brokers or anyone else is not the answer, nor is prohibiting yield spread. We've been here before (in the early 1990s), congress did something remarkably similar except a little bit more sane. It didn't work then. Why would...
I just moved into a rental house with an option to buy. I figure I can probably save up around $40-45k for a down payment in three years. how should i save? The Roth IRA tax loophole for first...
When things went south in the real estate market, I saw more changes in the lending industry in a few months than the previous five years. But those changes mostly restored us to the place we were a few years...
And I don't know why people expect it to be. Cancel that. I do know why. Popular media. It's not all that common in popular media, but on those occasions I see someone buying a house in the movies...
As a good buyer's agent, I love a challenge. When someone comes to me trying to make a budget stretch just a little bit further than it would usually go, that's the kind of client I love to have....
This is going to be a long article and somewhat technical in places, but it needs to be covered and it's important to everyone who is thinking about getting a real estate loan. "Fall-Out" is very simple: The number...
On a fairly regular basis I get email asking what I think of this or that loan calculator on the web, this or that predictive model for real estate prices or loan rates, etcetera. Loan calculators are pretty simple when...
Quite a while ago, when loan standards were other than they have become, I wrote an article with the title Is a VA Loan a Good Deal? Back then, if you could qualify for a loan that was both...
With a lot of people running around like Chicken Little screaming about the sky falling, a lot of folks who would like to buy property due to the much-lowered prices are wondering if there is any way they can...
Not too long ago, I started negotiating for a property. I did extensive research online, and and I and my clients visited several competing properties. We made an offer that was a little under 90% of the asking price, and...
Dear Mr. Melson, I was wondering if you could offer some insight re: the other side of the equation: what to do *after* you've bought a vampire property. We bought one, quite by accident, despite a house inspection by...
(This article was originally written in July 2008. The genesis was a bad experience with medical office staff, but it applies to every customer service situation there is. If the professionals themselves are too busy to handle your problem personally,...
In many transactions when I originally wrote this, the buyer has absolutely no money, or an amount that was not sufficient to pay the costs that they would traditionally be expected to pay in order to close the transaction. Today,...
When it comes to mortgage loans, people get distracted by the darnedest things. Let's look at Wal-Mart. You think they got to be the largest retailer in the world by making less money than their competition? I assure you...
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