December 15th, 2007 by George

How far will my money go in another city?

From money.cnn.com

Check out this calculator to find out what you need to earn to maintain the same lifestyle.

 Subscribe in a reader

December 14th, 2007 by George

Allow me to run a search for you on homes built after 2006 to your specifications for:

• Size - square footage
• Bedrooms/Bathrooms
• Price
• Location - school districts, neighborhoods, etc.
• Builder

I can email this information to you immediately.

Also visit our new site, NewLowcountryHomes.com, for information

 Subscribe in a reader

September 15th, 2007 by George

By Robert J. Bruss
Inman News

You’ve been looking for months for your first home, or you want to upgrade to a nicer home in a better community. It’s a great time to buy a home, everybody tells you.

Finally, you find the ideal home for sale, which has most of what you want (there is no such thing as the “perfect home.”)

But when you sit down with the mortgage lender to go over your income and credit to see if you can obtain the home loan you need, the lender says your FICO (Fair Isaac Corp.) credit score is too low to get an affordable interest rate. A mortgage at 7.5 percent interest is the best he can arrange, but he’s not sure you can qualify for the high payment.

Will you give up, resigned to waiting a year or two before buying a home? Of course not.

You know the house you want to buy has been listed for sale three or four months so the sellers must be anxious. The eager real estate agent phones to ask if you got your mortgage preapproval. You report the bad news that you’re not willing to pay 7.5 percent interest.

Fortunately, you’re working with an experienced realty agent. She suggests renting the house for up to two years until you can improve your FICO score. Then she explains you can lock in the purchase price at today’s market value. “Tell me more” is your swift reply.

WHAT IS A LEASE-OPTION? Your real estate agent then explains a lease-option, also known as “rent to own” in many communities, is a combination rental, sales and finance technique that has been used by thousands of home buyers and sellers.

However, a lease-option is not the same as a lease-purchase, which obligates the buyer to buy, usually within a year or two. With a lease-option, if home prices plummet, the buyer doesn’t have to exercise the option to buy.

Personally, I bought my current residence with a lease-option when I realized I was “cash challenged” without enough money for a down payment. Through my buyer’s agent, I offered the sellers a 12-month lease at $1,500 per month with $10,000 nonrefundable option money. As the vacant house had been listed for sale about six months, I asked for a 100 percent rent credit toward my option purchase price, which was just slightly below the asking price.

After hesitating about 10 days, my sellers accepted, but only for a six-month rental term. I readily agreed. Three days later, I hired a moving van and moved into my new home. About five months later, I exercised my purchase option and took title. At the closing, I received credit against the option price for my $10,000 option money plus the $7,500 total rent paid for five months.

Lease-options work especially well when there is an oversupply of homes listed for sale, such as the current “buyer’s market” in many cities. When a home seller needs someone to pay enough rent to cover the mortgage payment but doesn’t require an immediate cash sale, a lease-option can be ideal.

THERE ARE ALWAYS MORE LEASE-OPTION BUYERS THAN SELLERS. For some unexplained reason, there are usually more “rent to own” buyers than sellers. Having used lease-options to buy and sell houses for almost 30 years, I’ve learned a properly marketed lease-option can solve problems for both buyers and sellers.

The key to lease-option success is the amount of rent credit the tenant will earn each month toward the down payment. Although I negotiated a 100 percent rent credit when I bought my present home, as a seller I usually agree to only a 33 percent rent credit. As a motivated seller, I’ve agreed to 50 and even 100 percent rent credits.

Although the lease-option buyer doesn’t get any income-tax deductions, the buyer’s rent credit is far better, like a “forced savings account.” Of course, if the buyer doesn’t exercise the purchase option, the rent credit plus the option money is forfeited.

Read the rest of this entry »

 Subscribe in a reader

September 15th, 2007 by George

By Lauren Baier Kim - realestatejournal.com

Selling a home in a down market is not unlike hawking ice cream in February.

In this cold real estate climate, there aren’t many people clamoring to buy, leaving home sellers
facing a tough time. Some may go the traditional route and hire a real-estate agent at a full commission to sell their home.

But when the housing market is sluggish and home prices drop, this can be costly: a seller of a $200,000 home could pay $12,000 in real-estate commissions at a 6% rate — cutting even more into homeowners’ potential profits. Also, securing financing for a new home is increasingly difficult for many people.

In a special package of articles this week, RealEstateJournal.com looks at people who’ve sold their homes using a variety of
nontraditional methods:

• A Seattle Internet entrepreneur who posted a “Make Me Move” price of $1.25 million on Zillow.com for his condo and sold his home for close to that price.

• A widow in New Jersey, looking to downsize, swapped her home with neighbors who were looking for more space.

• A CEO decided to auction off his multimillion Florida estate after a long listing period failed to net a buyer.

• A couple who went the “for-sale-by-owner” route and left an expensive Portland, Ore., suburb for a
more affordably priced area in Montana.

• Another couple who got lucky and sold their home at a yard sale.

• Plus, some recent home sellers explain how they sold their home in the current market.

 Subscribe in a reader

September 6th, 2007 by George

Here is a summary of the number of homes for sale in the Tri-County market as of September 6, 2007…

August 26th, 2007 by George

Wonderful new construction townhome community, priced from the 140’s…

 (to be continued)

 Subscribe in a reader

August 23rd, 2007 by George

From the Wall Street Journal…

With the housing market looking increasingly frail, home builders and real-estate agents are going to new extremes to attract buyers, dangling lavish incentives and slashing prices.

Here are some tips for getting concessions from home builders:

• Buy a finished home: Builders want these off their books.

• Get a preapproval letter: This shows a builder you have financing already in place.

• Close quickly: Wrap up a purchase within 30 days; builders want to sell before the next bank payment is due.

• Avoid contingencies: Don’t make your purchase contingent on selling a home or finding financing.

RealEstateJournal.com offers advice for getting discounts on brand-new homes.

In Boca Raton, Fla., Gordon Homes is offering to pay two years of property taxes and insurance — worth as much as $150,000 on houses priced as high as $2.5 million — for buyers of completed homes at its upscale Azura development. In Richmond, Va., Orleans Homebuilders Inc. is offering “Sizzling Summer Sale Savings” that include as much as $100,000 off the cost of upgrades ranging from granite countertops to a conservatory. And in Medford, Ore., Diane Adams, a real-estate agent, is offering to pay four months of mortgage payments on the $975,000 house she and her home-builder husband constructed on 20 acres near Crater Lake.

“I’d also negotiate a lower price, too,” says Ms. Adams, an agent with Re/Max International Inc. “I just want this house off our books.”

Across the country, the theme is the same: Home builders and home sellers are juicing their efforts to unload single-family homes. Among other things, they are offering buyers cash discounts of as much as 20%, throwing in a pool and agreeing to finish basements, garages and other spaces at a cost of several thousand dollars — incentives much richer than builders were offering as recently as six months ago, when the downturn didn’t look as bleak.

Since then, home builders have been hit hard as rising mortgage delinquency rates have made lenders much more reluctant to issue new loans, causing home prices to fall and inventories of unsold homes to rise. In June, new-home sales had fallen more than 40% from their peak two years ago, and more than half a million new houses — nearly eight months of supply — sit in inventory, according to the most recent report from the National Association of Home Builders. Contract cancellations, meanwhile, have hit nearly 30% for some builders.

Things may not get better for a while. The National Association of Realtors said yesterday that new home sales this year were likely to fall 19% from last year, worse than its previous forecast of a 17.7% drop.

Many builders never expected the housing market to fall this far. Now they’re struggling with empty land, too few buyers and an inventory of finished homes that have been sitting empty for months — and some are growing desperate to free the cash locked up in their real estate by enticing the dwindling number of buyers. The latest survey taken by the National Association of Home Builders indicates that 56% of builders are now offering incentives, up from about 45% a year ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

 Subscribe in a reader

August 5th, 2007 by George

In 2006, Money Magazine put together their annual list of the Best Places in the country to live.

Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina came in at number 70 out of the top 100.

View how Mt. Pleasant and Charleston stack up compared to the top 10 here

 Subscribe in a reader

August 3rd, 2007 by George

Data from Charleston Trident Association of Realtors.

Median home price is up 5% over 2006 so far in 2007.

Data is year to date as of July 25, 2007.

 

 Subscribe in a reader

July 14th, 2007 by George

From the Post & Courier

Latest article about Summerville Homes

 Subscribe in a reader