Archive for the ‘Mortgage Rates’ Category
Wednesday, January 26th, 2011
Starting February 1st, there will be some new rules from the Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives Program that should help ease the pain of buying or selling a short sale in Portland. First, “Once a sales contract has been initiated, loan servicers then have 30 days to approve or reject the transaction.” This should speed up the rate at which it takes to close on a short sale. Right now there are twice as many short sale listings than bank owned listings on the active market, but there are 2-3 times as many sale pending bank owned properties than short sale properties. It’s pretty obvious what’s more attractive to buyers. Also, “Another big change: Loan servicers will no longer be restricted on paying second-lien holders, allowing them more freedom particularly when dealing with second-lien holders when borrowers owe less than $100,000. Loan servicers used to be restricted to paying second-lien holders no more than 6 percent of outstanding loan balance (with an overall limit of $6,000) in exchange for releasing subordinate liens. Second-lien holders have been another big obstacle to completing short sale transactions.” (more…)
Posted in Mortgage Rates, Moving To Portland, Portland Real Estate, Tips When Buying a Home, Tips When Selling a Home | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
The latest market report for the Portland Real Estate market shows a steady level of continued price reductions on homes for sale around the Portland Metro area. Back in August we talked here on the McDonald Group Real Estate blog about the Portland Business Journal article stating that thirty-two percent of Portland homes for sale in early summer experienced at least one price reduction, ranking Portland No. 16 on Trulia’s list of price reductions in America’s 50 largest cities. Those numbers are sticking around.
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Tags: First time home buyer, for sale, home buying, Homes for sale, housing market, interest rates, Lending, Low Prices, mortgage, portland market, Portland Real Estate, portland real estate market, real estate, Short Sales
Posted in Bank Owned, Investment Information, Listings, Market Report, Mortgage Rates, Portland Real Estate, Real Estate Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, August 12th, 2010
In a report published in the Portland Business Journal yesterday, we learned that thirty-two percent of Portland homes for sale, listed since the beginning of this month, experienced at least one price reduction. That ranked Portland No. 16 on the website Trulia’s list of price reductions in America’s 50 largest cities.
(more…)
Tags: First time home buyer, for sale, home buying, Homes for sale, housing market, interest rates, Lending, Low Prices, mortgage, portland market, Portland Real Estate, portland real estate market, real estate, Short Sales
Posted in Bank Owned, Investment Information, Market Report, Mortgage Rates, Moving To Portland, Portland Real Estate, Real Estate Tips, Short Sales, Tips When Buying a Home | No Comments »
Monday, August 9th, 2010
FHA is about to begin charging a higher percentage for mortgage insurance on case numbers created after September 7th 2010. The claim is that the amount of the loan will be less because the fees will be less, which is true. Problem is they are off-setting that savings to buyers by increasing the mortgage insurance rates; initially only by a slight amount but with the “authority” to just about double that increase at any point in the future. Even at the slight difference in percentage rate it easily negates the savings on the loan itself within just a few years and at the higher rate they could raise it to those savings would be negated withi
n 1-2 years.
(more…)
Posted in Mortgage Rates, Real Estate Tips, Tips When Buying a Home | No Comments »
Friday, April 16th, 2010
There’s a great article in the New York Times touching on this very topic. I have many clients waiting for home prices to further drop before finding their home match but the reduced home prices should be balanced with the rising interest rates. Unless you are paying cash you may pay in an interest rate what you’d be saving in a reduced home price AND all the while missing the time you could be spending in your new home! A great lender, Steve Nassar of Alpine Mortgage says: (more…)
Tags: interest rates, new york times, steve nassar
Posted in Mortgage Rates | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
Interest rates are well over 5% now, roughly 5.3% last week now at 5.5% and still climbing. Yesterday in fact there were several rate increases 
throughout the day with some lenders stating their base rates are now at 5.75%. Several lenders we work with feel there could be another slight dip in rates later this year however that would jeopardize the tax credit for those of you in the market to take advantage of it, in other words waiting *might* get you a half point lower rate if those lenders are correct however it will cause you to miss the tax credit deadline to be closed on a home purchase.
(more…)
Tags: inflation, interest rates
Posted in Investment Information, Mortgage Rates, Real Estate Tips, Tips When Buying a Home | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
I meant to get to this post yesterday as that’s well, when the story came out…however my cell phone tends to agree with Bernanke that 
things are looking up because it’s been going nutts recently…today was even worse (umm, errr - Better!), but I had to get this in.
(more…)
Tags: Bernanke, economy in recovery, federal reserve chairman, hit bottom, joint economic cimmittee
Posted in Investment Information, Market Report, Mortgage Rates | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
In a widely circulated story, Barack Obama was apparently misquoted. Leading publications state that he said, “Wait a minute now, I didn’t authorize attacks on the Pirates, I authorized a tax on the pirates.”
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Tags: Bernanke, mortgage, real estate, stock market
Posted in Investment Information, Market Report, Mortgage Rates, Portland Real Estate, Real Estate Tips | No Comments »
Monday, May 4th, 2009
Before we launch into the plethora of investor updates, let’s take a look at the market. With the absence of any bond-market news, the focus continues to be on stocks. Asian stocks rallied last night back to levels last seen in October. To many, in spite of the poor earnings results by many companies, it would appear that investors don’t want to miss out on a rally, and seem to be putting cash to work in the stock market. From last week, the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index rose for the second straight gain, from 57.3 in March. Today we have Construction Spending and Pending Home Sales. Tomorrow the ISM Services number, Thursday our old friend Jobless Claims, and then on Friday we can get fired up about all of the Unemployment data. Hourly Earnings are expected to be up .2%, Nonfarm Payrolls -663,000, and the Unemployment Rate expected around 8.5%. The results of the government’s stress tests for 19 large financial institutions will be released on Thursday. We also have the Treasury selling over $70 billion in securities Tuesday-Thursday, which is weighing on the bond market. 10-yr is at 3.14% and mortgage prices are a shade better than Friday afternoon.
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Tags: investing, mortgage market, real estate market, stock market
Posted in Investment Information, Mortgage Rates, Real Estate Tips | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
The big question, when will we hit bottom or have we already? As Realtors we and others in the industry that we work with daily are frequently hearing buyers saying they are waiting for the bottom to buy; hence the point of this blog entry. Keep in mind statistics
and trends are found and compiled after events, not before them thus if you are waiting for confirmation on hitting bottom you’re pretty much guaranteed to miss it. Additionally think about this, in Portland we’re seeing -2% to -7% depreciation rates, so lets say on a $300,000 home if you’re “waiting for the bottom” then you’re betting that home would be $285,000 in one year at -5% *if* (and that’s a huge if) we continue to see a solid decline for the next year, so you’d save $15,000 right?
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Tags: depreciation, hitting bottom, interest rates, portland housing market
Posted in Investment Information, Market Report, Mortgage Rates, Portland Real Estate, Real Estate Tips, Tips When Buying a Home | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
Despite the outbreak of swine flu and the low level Air Force One fly over of NY city causing panic and evacuations yesterday and even in spite 
of the economy in general, guess what? Consumer confidence is up and not just up, but WAY UP. Economists expected an uptick, from 26.9 points in the NY Based Conference Board to 29.5, but it instead jumped to a whopping 39.2; yet another sign we may have hit bottom and are beginning to make the trek back up. I’ve been hearing more and more “we’ve hit bottom” from some economists and even a one liner in an article about 2 weeks back in the Oregonian home section, but this article with MSNBC.com mentions the same thing “another sign the housing crisis could be bottoming”, article available here. They mention in that same paragraph that home prices dropped sharply again in February but for the first time in 25 months it was not a record breaking drop.
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Tags: consumer confidence, hitting bottom
Posted in Investment Information, Market Report, Mortgage Rates, Portland Real Estate, Real Estate Tips, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, February 13th, 2009
The house just passed the $787 Billion stimulus bill which will now go to the senate for final passage 
then to President Obama’s desk soon after that. The bill was shaved a bit, specifically and relevant to our business, the $15,000 tax credit for home buyers appears to have been cut however it’s unclear at this time (no, I have not read the 8 inch thick 1,071 page bill) as to the extent of the cut, so far as I can tell from reading through a few articles on it it seems as though income limits were placed on it, likely meaning higher income individuals and families and possibly higher purchase price homes will not qualify for the credit. Additonally the higher loan limits portion of the bill for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac appear to have survived.
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Tags: 15000 tax credit, home buyer tax credit, house passes stimulus bill, loan limits
Posted in Investment Information, Mortgage Rates, Real Estate Tips, Tips When Buying a Home, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thursday, February 5th, 2009
I wanted to post on this real quick as it’s currently a hot topic in the headlines. Part of the stimulus package being proposed is a $15,000 tax credit for all home buyers, both first time and repeat home buyers. This would replace the $7,500 tax credit “loan” that is currently in effect. A big difference between this new tax credit and the $7,500 one (more…)
Tags: stimulus, Tax Credit
Posted in Investment Information, Mortgage Rates, Portland Real Estate, Real Estate Tips, Tips When Buying a Home | No Comments »
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
We have several resources on our site for buyers but nothing really detailed about lending, credit issues, points etc until now. Obviously there are a lot of sites on the internet that provide this information however we find most of the information out there is either sporadic bits and pieces here and there or far too extensive and confusing or just a page with limited information and riddled with ads. So in an effort to provide a “one stop” mortgage and lending information page for our clients and website users we put together the following page: http://www.yourroadmaptohome.com/mortgage_lending_information.htm. (more…)
Tags: financing a home, First time home buyer, Lending, mortgage
Posted in Investment Information, Mortgage Rates, Real Estate Tips, Tips When Buying a Home | No Comments »
Starting February 1st, there will be some new rules from the Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives Program that should help ease the pain of buying or selling a short sale in Portland. First, “Once a sales contract has been initiated, loan servicers then have 30 days to approve or reject the transaction.” This should speed up the rate at which it takes to close on a short sale. Right now there are twice as many short sale listings than bank owned listings on the active market, but there are 2-3 times as many sale pending bank owned properties than short sale properties. It’s pretty obvious what’s more attractive to buyers. Also, “Another big change: Loan servicers will no longer be restricted on paying second-lien holders, allowing them more freedom particularly when dealing with second-lien holders when borrowers owe less than $100,000. Loan servicers used to be restricted to paying second-lien holders no more than 6 percent of outstanding loan balance (with an overall limit of $6,000) in exchange for releasing subordinate liens. Second-lien holders have been another big obstacle to completing short sale transactions.” (more…)
