Entries from Searchlight Crusade tagged with 'practices'
Assuming Seller Concessions On Loan Quotes
I recently received an email asking about a Good Faith Estimate on a $200k loan. The person asking my opinion attached the actual "estimate" to the email. In addition to a point of origination and a point of discount...
How to Avoid A Repeat of the Housing Market Mess
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...
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,...
The Loan Shopping Koan
It's very easy for loan providers to talk about a much better loan when you're shopping than they have any intention of delivering. Then you give them thirty to sixty days after you sign up, and you're put into 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...
Short Sale Negotiators and the Interests of Potential Buyers
I am seeing a very disturbing trend these past few months. Rather than do the work they should be doing, listing agents are treating the entire short sale process as a kind of "Black Box", delegating the negotiations with the...
They Told Me Not To Make My Loan Payment
I've heard this story, in all of its variations, at least hundreds of times. Someone will send me an email and say "They told me not to make my loan payment because I was going to skip one. So...
Don't Rely On Reputation - There Are No Silver Bullets
On a regular basis, I get emails that ask me what I think of a particular company. When I check out public forums, I see questions about particular companies every time. "What do you think of X Realty, or Y...
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...
Restricted Sale Property: Very Difficult to Find A Loan (Even harder to find a good one)
This is a warning to those who purchase restricted sale property. I've gotten a couple of calls for refinancing these in the past couple months, and I've never covered this subject. A restricted sale property is one where the...
You Want an Agent That Can Pay ENOUGH Attention to YOU
A lot of advice gets given to choose a "top producing" agent. These highly corporate offices may have the name of an individual agent attached to them, but they are in fact transaction mills. They have done pretty well for...
Inducements to Use A Builder's Lender for a Purchase
One of the things I'm seeing more of in MLS listings and developer advertising, among other places, is the phrase "$X in closing cost credit (or "$X in free builder upgrades") given for using preferred lender" Sounds like a bargain,...
Realtor and Loan Officer Responsibility: Can the Client Afford The Property?
Every so often, I write about professional responsibility. Every month I get a couple of magazines because I'm a Realtor. There was a letter from someone who was proud of the fact that he had never asked someone if they...
Shopping For The Best Loan In The Changed Lending Environment
It shouldn't be any surprise to anyone with the headlines of the last few years that shopping for a mortgage loan has radically changed. Indeed, a lot of the regulatory changes seem directly aimed at what were the best...
Who Has An Interest That Should Be Protected In A Real Estate Transaction?
I've been answering this question for a long time. Whose interests do we need to be concerned about, in a "If they are harmed, we've got a problem" sort of way? Who has a primary stake in a real...
Loan Providers Offering to Pay For The Appraisal
This is one of those commercial gambits I keep seeing that has nothing intrinsically wrong with it, and yet it is most often a tactic employed by the more costly loan providers. In short, sharks and scam artists. The basic...
My Loan was Denied - What Fees Can I Recover?
"What mortgage fees can i recover after loan denial" was a search I got. The answer is basically, "None." The only thing that should be charged up front is a credit check, which costs about $20, and you should be...
Loan Fall-Out And The Effects Upon Consumers
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...
Online Real Estate Photographs - You Have Heard of Photoshop?
When Israel invaded southern Lebanon a few years ago, this picture from Reuters ran worldwide The problem was that it was heavily photoshopped by a Palestinian stringer trying to make it appear like the Israelis were setting the entire...
Lipstick on a Pig: Selling the Property You Should Never Have Bought
Lots of properties have some kind of problem with them. Maybe you bought in full recognizance because of something else about the property, but probably not. Mostly it's directly a result of not spending the effort to find a good...
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