1. They don’t want to be inconvenienced during the holiday season.
2. They believe that they will see more potential buyers and as a result will get a higher price.
3. In the northern part of the country, they might not want people walking through the snow and then into their house.
4. All of the above

In a normal real estate market, this may make sense. However, this market has been anything but normal. This spring will also see some abnormalities. The biggest difference will be the direction prices will take.

In years past, the spring market would favor the seller because increased demand would outpace any increase in supply: the number of houses coming onto the market would not be as great as the number of buyers newly entering the market. In most situations, when demand is greater than supply, prices increase.

The reason this spring will be different is that the supply of homes coming to the market will be dramatically impacted by foreclosure properties being released by the banks. Many believe this increase in inventory will far outweigh buyer demand. In situations where supply is greater than demand, prices decrease.

Will This Actually Happen?
RealtyTrac, in their latest foreclosure report, explained:

“U.S. foreclosure activity has been mired down since October of last year, when the robo-signing controversy sparked a flurry of investigations into lender foreclosure procedures and paperwork. While foreclosure activity in September and the third quarter continued to register well below levels from a year ago, there is evidence that this temporary downward trend is about to change direction, with foreclosure activity slowly beginning to ramp back up.

This will impact prices.

What Do Experts Believe the Impact Will Be?
Here are the pricing projections by several major entities:

Zillow believes we will not see a bottom in prices until the first quarter of 2012.
Standard & Poors thinks prices will drop %5 in the next few months.
JP Morgan Chase believes prices will depreciate 6 to 7% over the next six months.
Barclays says prices will fall 7% by the end of the first quarter of 2012.
Bottom Line
You may pay a hefty price for the convenience of not having your property on the market right now.

This acticle was provided by the KCM Crew from the KCMBlog.com posted October 18, 2011.

5 Steps for a Successful Short Sale

Lenders and the federal government, prompted by the sheer volume of loan modification and short sale requests, have overhauled their systems and programs, making the foreclosure avoidance process much easier than in the past.

If you are considering short selling your home to avoid the financial and emotional fallout of foreclosure, you should be aware of the five steps you should take to increase your chances of a successful transaction. 

First, do you qualify?

You must:

1. Have a verifiable hardship, like unemployment, medical bills, or relocation
2. Must have a monthly income shortfall
3. Be insolvent (you have no cash or assets that can be sold to pay down the mortgage), or headed towards insolvency 

If you meet these qualifications, follow these five steps to a successful short sale:

1. Contact me so we can identify your servicer, fill out a short sale packet for the lender, and assemble all the required information needed to list your home for sale
2. Gather financial information (i.e., bank statements, pay stubs) from at least the last three months
3. Keep your house in showcase condition for showings, and make as many repairs as necessary and that you can afford
4. Expect the lender, junior lien holders, and private insurance companies to request more paperwork, and try to gather requested information quickly to ensure transaction efficiency
5. Set realistic expectations and work with me, the lender, and the buyer to the satisfaction and benefit of all parties involved 

For more information about how the short sale process works, or about any other foreclosure alternatives you may qualify for, call The Elite Asset Management Team; 505-798-1000. We can help you alleviate the burden that the threat of foreclosure brings, and we can develop a strategy to help you breathe a little easier.

www.AvoidNMForeclosure.com

Contact Pete or Sean RE/Max Elite 8300 Carmel NE Albuquerque, Nm 87122 505-798-1000

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While normal texting charges apply, most people have high-limit or unlimited texting plans. If that’s you, you might just find yourself addicted to Google SMS in no time flat.

I hope you enjoy this little tip.  As always the Elite Asset Management Team is available for any of you questions on Albuquerque Real Estate and we are never to busy for your referrals.

Have a good day!

It’s common sense that lenders will be looking toward the short sale solution. Even though they are accepting less than is owed on the property, they lose far less than in a foreclosure sale.

In fact, in the Albuquerque area, short sale transactions represents between 7% to 10% of all transactions in 2010.

It may be a surprise to many that lenders actually want to work out a solution that benefits all parties. Oftentimes, the lender is seen as the villain in the situation. I’ve found that the lenders want to avoid foreclosure just as much as homeowners. The free, downloadable report on this website talks more about working with your lender, and details all the foreclosure alternatives available to you.

Call Pete or Sean today about our free foreclosure report; I can help you develop a plan to work with your lender and avoid foreclosure.

1.  Reality check yourself . . . before you wreck yourself (and the sale of your home, that is). The age-old real estate advice to wanna-be sellers is to get real about pricing – and like my sweet Grandma’s advice about always rinsing the cake batter out with cold water, never hot, the caution against overpricing is advice that will stand you in good stead. (And that cold water trick works, btw – rinsing with hot starts to cook the batter to the bowl!  But I digress)  Before you even get to pricing, though, first you should get real about what your goals really are. Why do you want or need to sell?  And how badly – how important is it to you?  What would it take to make selling make sense?  If you even think you may want to sell your home next year, get clear on these items in your own head before you even talk to anyone outside of your household. Your very next step is to look at your mortgage account statement online and find out what you owe, and find out what your payoff amount would be.

Step 3? Get a reality-based idea of what your home is worth – by talking with several local real estate agents who have a strong, recent track record of succesfully selling homes in your area; these are the folks who’ll have a strong idea of what recent sales are the most comparable to yours, and what a local buyer would agree to pay for your home, as well as what it might appraise at. If 3 agents give you one range, and one gives you a bizarrely higher number, be skeptical about the outlier; there are rare bad apples out there in the agent world who will tell you whatever it takes to get the listing.  Get real and stay there – don’t fall prey to the fallacy that your home is worth more than others, for no substantive reason beyond the fact that, well, it’s yours.

Then, move toward making a decision about whether selling actually makes sense for you. Whatever you do, don’t let your mental GPS steer you anywhere near that fantasyland where all your plans for selling, moving, etc. rest on the hypothetical that you can get 25% more than your home’s actual fair market value. That sort of magical thinking costs you and your agent the time, inconvenience and money it takes to try to conjure up a sale that just ain’t gonna happen, and that doesn’t even count the opportunity costs of other things you could be doing with those resources. If your home’s current value is bizarrely less than you want or need to move on, consider a short sale and price it appropriately or consider staying put and sprucing up your home so it better suits your needs – but don’t price it at your “wishful thinking” price and set yourself and your agent up for failure.

2.  Figure out the lay of your local land.  National blogs and media outlets offer all sorts of useful advice about whether, how and when to sell your home, but there’s one thing that sort of advice cannot convey: what’s going on in your local market. Get active in Trulia Voices, ask questions and read blogs in your local market and start talking with the real estate brokers and agents from your area who are actively blogging, listing properties and answering questions. They can give you the hyperlocal essentials you need to knows.  Sure, it’s a buyer’s market nationwide, on average.  But if you live in Omaha, that may mean that homes sell at or near asking in 45 days or less; in Mesa, Arizona, your home could stay on the market 6 months and sell for 30% below asking.  In my neck of the woods, it’s not bizarre for homes to sell at 5 percent above asking, in two weeks – and that’s still a buyer’s market compared to the 20% above asking sales that were common in 2006.  

Every market is different, and you can neither know what to expect when you list your home for sale, nor implement smart strategies for getting your home sold without knowing what’s going on in yours. 

3.  Tour nearby Open Houses. Your job, as the seller of your home, is to present a compelling package to buyers – compelling enough to make them sign away 30 years of their lives and the vast majority of their worldly possessions in exchange for your home (kinda ups the ante, doesn’t it?). To do that, it helps to get inside the minds of your home’s target buyers.  And to do that, you need to think how they think and see what they see.

Visiting the other homes your target buyers will also see online and/or in real life will give you a sense for how your home’s price and condition will measure up to the competition.  Go view other homes that are for sale in your area, making sure you see at least a few that fall into each of these categories: (a) properties in your neighborhood or similar neighborhoods, (b) homes in your home’s general price range, all around town, and (c) homes that have similar numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet – no matter what the price. You’ll likely end up seeing homes in a wide range when it comes to price and condition; know that your home, to sell, will need to beat these on one or both measures. Also, if you try to go to at least a few open houses, rather than just asking your agent to show them to you at your convenience, you’ll also get a sense for what sort of buyer traffic you can expect from open houses, and you can even chat with those home’s listing agents about local market dynamics and what factors they believe may help or hurt that particular listing.

4.  Formulate a plan: in A-B-C order.  Collaborate with your broker or agent to put an action plan in place.  Make sure you address: list price, list date, showing arrangements and the property prep work (see #5, below) that your agent recommends you do prior to listing the place. To minimize the stress of a somewhat inevitably stressful experience (i.e., selling your home!), work with your agent on Plans B and C now, too!  What is the average number of days a home stays on the market in your area before it sells (DOM)?  (Hint:  don’t look at the ones that never sold, because you don’t want to be part of that group!)  Decide up front if your home sits on the market for X number of days with no offer, you’ll lower the price to Y.  Also cover alternative marketing plans/vehicles for your home, and even calendar when you might start to offer transactional incentives, like closing cost credits, interest rate buy-downs, throwing in personal property and even making reverse offers to buyers who have expressed an interest but can’t seem to get off the fence. At some point along the timeline, include a pause where your agent can interview buyer’s brokers who have shown your home to collect buyer feedback, so you can course correct your pricing, marketing or staging strategies accordingly.

5.  Do your prep work – fix and pre-pack.  If you are sure you’re selling in 2011, and want to put your holiday vacay time to good use, make a list of all those little repairs you’ve been wanting to do forever, call up your neighborhood handyperson and get ‘em done. Loose knobs and handles, double-hung windows that are painted shut, the frayed carpet on the steps, that broken bathroom tile – fixing those things can give your place just the patina and polish it’ll take to compete with the ample, low-priced competition you’ll have next year.

It may be tough for non-distressed home sellers to compete with foreclosures and short sales on price.  But one area where individual home sellers usually can best the competition is CONDITION! Your home can present to buyers in tip-top  condition in a way that most foreclosures and short sales cannot.  And this includes staging – most foreclosures will be shown vacant, and/or with the debris of the former owner’s lives tragically littering the premises.  Short sales are usually (but not always) a bit better, but are most often shown fully occupied, furnished and cluttered – just as the owners live in them, because of the distressed nature of the sale.  As a non-distressed home’s seller, it behooves you to ensure that your home’s curb appeal is at it’s best and that throughout the interior, the buyer is able to visualize the lovely life they can, scratch that, WILL live once they buy and move into your home.  Depersonalizing and decluttering are essential to this staging effort; in fact, one wise Trulia Voices contributor tells her sellers to go ahead and start “pre-packing” – put most of the personal items that make your home yours in a box, like you’re getting ready to move (which you are!) and leave your place in as close to model-home move-in condition as possible.

With all the doom and gloom there are some small signs of slow economic recovery. In 2010 there has been 1.5 million jobs added. Also, interest rates have been low and will continue below 5% through 2011. There are estimates that there will be 5.4 million homes sold in 2011, which is still at year 2000 levels. There is a forecast for unemployment rates to start to decline to 8% by 2012.

Lastly, Dr Yun stated that the Rocky Mountain States have in the past shown high levels of growth in population and this equates into a demand for homes. In the next 3 to 5 years we can expect the Rocky Mountain States to continue to grow and continue to help improve the housing market in the Albuquerque area. The rates for foreclosure are lower in the Albuquerque area and we will begin to see signs of the rate of foreclosure to decline by the end of 2011 and through 2012.

1. The market is improving. Most markets have either turned or are close to turning.

2. All real estate is local. Homes in great locations are always in demand.

3. Spring is coming soon. Many potential buyers are starting their online searches right after the holidays, making mid- to late February a great time to start marketing.

Having a head start on your competition never hurts either. Have a Happy Holidays.

30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 4.32 percent in the week ending Sept. 2, down from 4.36 percent last week. A year ago, 30-year mortgages averaged 5.08 percent.

The average rate on a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage fell to 3.83 percent, down from 3.86. A one-year adjustable-rate mortgage averaged 3.50 percent, down from 3.52 percent.

In New Mexico, a 15-year fixed rate is 4 percent, while a 30-year fixed rate is 4.44 percent, according to MortgageLoan.com.

Mortgage applications rose modestly last week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, led by gains among homeowners refinancing existing mortgages. Refinancing activity accounted for 83 percent of all mortgage applications last week.

If you know anyone can take advantage of these low-interest rates feel free to call one of the Elite Asset Management Teams. We specialize in homes for first time buyers and are very experience with the Albuquerque Foreclosure Market.

Over the last few months I have personally had the opportunity to ask several people (at random) about the residential real estate market.  I did not mention that I was associated with the real estate industry.  During our conversation, the majority had expressed a concern for future values.  Most believed values would continue to drop.  Combined with the media and some pessimistic people, it is our job to be the educator in our business. 

Here are some facts of today’s market and these examples will apply to any value with the same percentages: 

Let’s use a $200,000.00 value and to make things easier, let’s assume 100% financing.  At 4.500% the P & I payment would be $1,013.37 

Assume values dropped an additional 10% – NOW using a loan amount of $180,000.  Assume 6.500%, the P & I payment would be $1,137.72.  $124.35 higher! 

Okay, for those who view as “half empty” – With a 20% drop using $160,000 assuming 6.500%, the P & I payment would be $1,011.31, only $2.06 difference!!! 

History has proven that buying real estate is a good investment.  Generally over time, most can depend on appreciation.  The majority of business that we do generate is primarily consumers who are purchasing a home to occupy as their principal residence.  The consumer’s concern should be narrowed to personal preference.   As history has proven, the investment overtime should be sound.  However, past results do not guarantee future performance. 

If the consumer’s primary motive for purchasing is strictly investment, the approach is completely different.  As we are all aware, timing is everything!  Buying real estate does not provide a prospectus as does investing with stocks or bonds.  That said, personally, I have done very well over the last twenty years by buying real estate.  Today my real estate investments lie in a shallow valley, as do my other investments. I recognize that this is the time to buy.   A buyer’s market combined with historic interest rates should help buyer’s fear. 

If your purchaser’s are buying below $300,000, a great option is a thirty-year FHA fixed rate mortgage.  FHA loans are assumable with qualifying.  This will release the seller from any future liability along with creating a low interest rate for future buyers!  Assuming values do decrease, the assumable mortgage will add a valuable feature for future buyers!

Well said Jason!

Pending home sales in the Albuquerque area rose for the third consecutive month in July.

There were 752 pending sales of existing homes in the Albuquerque metro region in July, up from 729 in June and 678 in May, according to the Greater Albuquerque Association of Realtors. Pending sales spiked in April at 1,271 as the federal home buyer tax credit expired.

Nationally, pending home sales rose 5.2 percent in July from June. Those sales, however, remain 19.1 percent below July 2009, according to the National Association of Realtors.

GAAR President Mark Pando said the Albuquerque market is “slowly gaining ground” after having seen a dramatic drop off in pending home sales when the home buyer tax credit expired.

Nationally, home sales will remain soft in the coming months, said NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. “But improved affordability conditions should help with a recovery,” he added, noting “but the recovery looks to be a long process.”

Read more: GAAR: Sales of existing homes rise in July – New Mexico Business Weekly
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