Entries from Searchlight Crusade tagged with 'strategy'

Why You Shouldn't Have All Your Money In Real Estate

Is there any problems with having all your money in only real estate? That was a question I saw. The answer is YES there are problems! 1) No diversification. The real estate market tanks and you are hosed. The...

How to Sell Your Home Quickly and For The Best Possible Price

There's really nothing mysterious about this. There are some subsidiary tricks and issues, but the most important thing is obvious. The economic games theory is crystal clear, as is the research into what really happens. But most people don't like...

Buyer's Markets: Time for Listing Agents To Earn Their Money

One of the most common things I'm seeing as I roam about the East County looking for bargains: Agents not doing their jobs. Even when there were 40-plus sellers per buyer, single family detached homes that are priced appropriately were...

The Future of Real Estate Agency is Expert Consultants, Not Controlling Market Access

Expertise and attitude, not control of an informational chokepoint, is the way that things are going. Let's analyze this from both sides of the problem. The current owner looking to sell really needs a marketer. For better or worse, most...

Buyer's Markets Are A Great Time For Moving Up

I have said repeatedly that buyer's markets are not the time to be selling a property if you have any choice. There is one exception: People looking to turn around and buy a more expensive property. If you're looking to...

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...