Tag Archives: buy

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Be ready to buy your first home

Money

First-time home buyers have it tough. The supply of homes for sale is tight, and lenders are tightfisted.

Student debt, at an all-time high of nearly $30,000 per grad, is getting in the way of saving for a down payment, says David Stevens, president and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association. But it’s a great time to get your foot in the door.

“Interest rates remain the envy of even your grandparents,” says Keith Gumbinger, vice president of mortgage publisher HSH.com. First, make your finances sparkle.

Read the turning-point checklist…

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How Buyers Can Irk Sellers

Both parties have to come together in a transaction, and real estate professionals sometimes find themselves wedged in the middle of buyer and seller disagreements. Some sellers may accuse the home buyers of being too pushy with their demands.

Bankrate.com recently highlighted several ways that homebuyers have been annoying some sellers.

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3 Next-Gen House Hunting Tips for Singles

The American household has changed – big time. More and more, people get married later in life, if at all. Many even go from married to single and back multiple times throughout their lives. This all means that more and more people are buying homes while single. Many unmarried folks are buying homes to live in on their own, while others are looking for homes to live in with their children, parents or other partners – past, present and future.

If you’re embarking upon the process of buying a home on your own, here are a few things to factor into your thought process and your action plan…

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Why 2014 is a Good Year to Buy a Home

If you didn’t buy a home in 2013, you may be kicking yourself now. Home prices climbed nationally an average of 13.6 percent in the past 12 months, according to Tuesday’s release of the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index.

Don’t make the same mistake in 2014, suggests Benjamin Weinstock, real estate attorney and partner at the firm Ruskin Moscou Faltischek in Uniondale, N.Y.

Market forecasters predict that 2014 will be another year of gains for the real estate market, even though the rapid pace of sales in 2013 cooled off a bit at the end of the year. On Dec. 30, The National Association of Realtors said its pending home sales index, based on contracts signed last month, rose 0.2 percent in November, below the 1 percent rise forecast.

Home prices are expected to rise about 5 percent next year, says Weinstock. Higher mortgage rates will dampen the pace of both sales and price gains, but not bring them to a halt. The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage is expected to rise from 4.5 percent to 5 percent in the next year.

Even aside from expected price gains, buying a home is almost always a good investment in the long run, says Weinstock. Tax benefits are not to be overlooked.

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New Low for First-Time Home Buyers

New Homeowners

First-time home buyers accounted for 27 percent of sales nationally in December, the lowest since the National Association of REALTORS® began tracking them in 2008. Typically, first-time home buyers account for 40 percent of the market.

Why are their numbers dwindling? Housing experts point to several hurdles, such as high student loan debt, less-than-perfect credit, low employment and wage growth, and the double-digit growth in home prices this past year.

Read more…

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With home buying, planning ahead will make the multiple-step process easier

Planning

If you’re planning in the spring to buy your first house, you already may be feeling a bit overwhelmed about what can often be a complicated and convoluted process. The good news is that you have plenty of time to learn the myriad steps to buying a home and getting prepared for the endeavor. Many experts say that — even before finding a real estate agent — the first things you should do are to get your finances together and to find a lender who can get you prequalified and advise you on how much house you can buy.

Read the article…

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5 Reasons It’s Better to Own Than Rent

Checklist

There are plenty of valid reasons to own instead of rent, especially in the current low rate environment. Let’s take a look at why homeownership simply makes more sense than renting, especially over a long-term basis.

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4 Home Buying Ducks to Get in a Row for 2014

Home Tour

When it comes to putting your ducks in a row for buying a home, a few things are key. First, start early. Whenever you think you should get started doing the actual prep steps, work backwards about 3 or 6 months before that on the calendar and start then.

Secondly, be bold. Many buyers-to-be hesitate to get into the not-so-adorable territory of credit and savings, out of a fear that they’ll learn something that will kill their dreams. The bolder you are about going into scary territory, the faster you’ll learn the truth of what work lies ahead of you – and the more time you’ll have to do what it’ll take to overcome any challenges. Also, just the knowing will make anything scary less so. Here are four ducks you’ll want to start getting lined up and comfortable with now if you hope to buy a home in 2014.

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Skyrocketing rents hit ‘crisis’ levels

Since the housing crisis began in 2008, approximately 4.6 million homes were lost to foreclosure, according to CoreLogic. The vast majority of those homeowners became renters. Even as housing recovered, credit tightened, pushing even more potential buyers out of homeownership and into rentals, both apartments and single-family rental homes.

There are now 43 million renter households, or 35 percent of all U.S. households, the highest rate in over a decade for all age groups, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies; 4 million more renters today than there were in 2007. For those aged 25 to 54, rental rates are the highest since the center began record keeping in the early 1970s.

As a result, rental vacancies have fallen dramatically, and rents have skyrocketed.

Read the article…

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Why today’s home buyer needs a real estate agent more than ever

Home Tour

Last summer a Realtor got an email from a local real estate attorney who wanted to buy a house. He’d just gotten engaged and wanted to save some money by representing himself.

This attorney wanted to do all the work an agent would do to find and buy his first home, and get paid a commission for his work. She explained to him that the commission is payable to the listing agent who agrees to pay a portion of it to the Realtor representing a buyer.

Read more…