Entries from Searchlight Crusade tagged with 'strategy'
Full Service Agent For Discount Price? Demand Specifics!
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...
Dual Agency: Using the Seller's Agent as Your Buyer's Agent
Is it unwise to use the listing realtor as your purchase realtor? A house I'm interested in purchasing is being sold by the realtor selling my house. Although she's done a decent job selling my house, I fear she...
Should I Buy A Home? Part 3: Consequences
Continued from Part 1: Preparation and Part 2: Process This is about the long term consequences of the decision to buy or not to buy a home, and economic benefits analysis into whether you should want to buy. In order...
Should I Buy A Home? Part 2: Process
Continued from Part 1: Preparation I am considering buying a home, although I have not made up my mind on the subject. This is not due to indecision, but rather due to a lack of necessary information. There are many...
Two Things Sellers Need To Understand About Buyers
There's an old saying in sales: "The best way to achieve your dreams is to help others achieve theirs". I wasn't able to run it down to the original attribution, but it is as true a saying as can...
Nightmare Mortgages and Self-Destructive Behavior
This article started with another one of those desperate consumer fishing calls a while ago. Loan standards have tightened since then (In my considered opinion, over-tightened and the lenders and Wall Street will figure it out within a couple years)....
Can You Keep Your Home Through Bankruptcy?
The answer is "Yes." You don't have to lose your home in bankruptcy. I've done loans for many clients who kept their homes through bankruptcy. But they kept their mortgage payments current, or close enough to current. The condition...
Flipping vs Fixing vs Investing
I get occasional questions about the difference between these three kinds of activity. Well, there are subjective parts to the answer, but here are some general guidelines: A true flipper is looking for a quick turn on the property, usually...
Lender Paid Mortgage Insurance or Regular PMI?
If I am buying a foreclosed home for 220k of which 200k is being financed, and the home comes back at being valued at 285k from my mortgage company, am I still required to pay PMI? If so, how in...
Mortgage Transaction Case Study
Note: This article was originally published November 2007, when rates were higher than currently I had been corresponding irregularly with this gentleman during his hunt. It happens he lives outside of California, and I only work inside California, so...
Working with Multiple Agents While Searching for a Purchase
If you have three real estate companies sending you emails with multi-listings, if you want to see one of the properties, who gets the commission? There five properties that I want to see the inside of the houses. Company A,...
How To Keep Listing Agents From Filtering Out Offers
This is a real, major and pervasive problem in the industry. For a while, it mostly went away as listing agents were desperate for any offer, but it has come back. At least two properties my buyer clients have...
When Selling, You Need To Understand Your Target Market
One of the hard things to get through to sellers is to understand the characteristics of the sort of buyers they need in order to have a successful transaction. If a given set of prospective buyers can't afford the property,...
Where Would I Invest A Million Dollars?
Somebody asked me that. Well, I'd want to set some aside for liquidity and reserves, in case something happened where I needed money now. invest those funds in a diversified mutual fund and money market portfolio. Once that's done, I'd...
Bridge Loans
One of the things I'm seeing a lot of these days is blanket advice on bridge loans. A bridge loan is a loan that you take out with the explicit intention of having it be short term. The most common...
Segmented Real Estate Markets And Taking Advantage of Them
Market segmentation is what happens when certain things are much more in demand than others. For instance in the hot market brought on by the tax credit of 2009, the central area of San Diego was in high demand,...
Economics of Housing in High Density Areas
Here are the facts of the situation, whether you're talking about San Diego or Manhattan, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, or any of the other densely packed, high cost areas where all the employment and career opportunities are. Fact 1:...
When You Should Not Buy Real Estate
Okay, I did an article called Why Renting Really Is For Suckers (And What To Do About It). Fairness demands that I do a companion article on situations where buying is not a good idea. There actually are some. First...
I'm Competing Against Multiple Offers. How Do I Proceed?
The first thing to consider is that maybe you shouldn't. You never want to get involved in a bidding war. There's a classic riddle I ask every single one of my buyer clients at least once. "How often does...
Why the Real Estate Buyers Agent's Commission is Paid by the Seller
I have to admit I'm uncomfortable with it and don't like it. As a buyer's agent, here I am getting paid by someone who not only is not my client, but whose interests are aligned, in most issues, opposite to...
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