Daily Archives: April 4, 2013

Single-family rents level off as home prices rise in March | North Salem Real Estate

<a href="<a href=Single-family home rental image via Shutterstock.

Rents on single-family homes flattened in March, suggesting that the more than four million homes that were converted to rentals following the housing bust have reached a supply level that has finally caught up with consumer demand, according to a report released today by real estate search and marketing site Trulia.

Keep control over who repairs your property | Mt Kisco NY Homes

Q: Unbeknownst to me, my tenant hired a handyman to come to the house and perform some repairs. The guy hurt himself and is now threatening to sue me. He says he has no insurance, and my tenant has none, either. I have property and liability insurance, but that’s it. What is the risk that I’ll end up paying the bill? –Jeff R.

A: I don’t think there’s a for-sure answer to your question. It depends on a few factors, which I’ll explain.

First, who was responsible for the repair that the handyman undertook, and how serious was the problem that needed fixing? If it was a repair that seriously affected health and safety, was something that you knew about and were obliged to fix, you may have a problem. That’s because a judge may see your tenant’s response — a self-help measure when you failed to act — as foreseeable. When landlords deliberately or carelessly fail to live up to their duty to maintain fit housing, they must realize that tenants may step in and do the work themselves. If injury results, the landlord is sometimes held responsible.

For example, the tenant whose water heater is broken and unfixed, who burns herself with scalding water brought from the stovetop to the bathroom so that she can bathe in warm water, may have a claim against the landlord.

Real estate lessons from Canada | Waccabuc NY Real Estate

Royal LePage, the largest real estate company in Canada, recently surveyed their buyers and sellers to uncover what matters most in terms of the service they receive from their real estate professional. The results have important implications for both domestic and international real estate practitioners.

Phil Soper, the CEO of Royal LePage, was one of the keynotes at the Banff Western Connection 2013 Conference. After sharing an overview of the current state of the Canadian market, he turned his attention to the next generation of Canadian real estate purchasers including how they differ as well as their expectations regarding the services they receive.

According to Soper, “Everything is new and nothing has changed.”

Eddie LePage actually did the first “virtual tours” with movies back in the 1920s. Today’s consumer expects not only virtual tours, they also expect a media-rich experience. Television is “too single stream” for them. Digital assistants (increasingly small devices loaded with ever-increasing functionality) will shape our real estate buying and selling experiences in ways we can’t even imagine.

Tech-savvy agents have an edge in seller’s market | Cross River NY Homes

Spring has not yet arrived in the frozen northland, but the real estate market has felt like a spring market since the end of last year. It also feels like a seller’s market in several, but not all, neighborhoods. 

These past few weeks I am reminded of the strategies I used during the last seller’s market. Agents who have gotten their licenses in the last five to eight years may have never experienced a seller’s market.

If I had the technology during the last seller’s market that I enjoy today I could have sold so much more. I think that if I were working without all the latest gadgets and apps, the offers I have written in the last week or so never would have happened and, instead of writing this, I would still be dealing with “old school” paperwork.

There was this little house that was listed in the early afternoon and while I was waiting in front of a home for one of my motivated buyers, I got a text message from his wife alerting me that a home just came on the market that might be worth a look. She was at the airport with some time on her hands and used the time to check to see if any homes had come on the market while she was in the air.

Mortgage rates dip from last week | South Salem NY Homes

Mortgages rates slipped this week, even as the S&P 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial hovered around record highs.

The reported decline comes just a day after a Federal Reserve official said that the Fed could begin to wind down its stimulus program as early as this summer and end it altogether sometime late this year.

Rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages averaged 3.54 percent with an average 0.8 point for the week ending April 4th, down from 3.57 percent last week, and 3.98 percent a year ago, Freddie Mac said in releasing the results of its latest Primary Mortgage Market Survey. Rates on 30-year fixed-rate loans hit a low in Freddie Mac records dating to 1971 of 3.31 percent during the week ending Nov. 21, 2012.

Report reveals best practices for real estate marketing worldwide | Katonah NY Real Estate

Consulting firm AIM Group has released its annual real estate report that assesses real estate marketing practices around the world.

The “2013 Real Estate Advertising Annual” explores the business models and advertising tactics of about 90 companies in 29 countries, with a focus on “innovative services, products, payments and partnerships.” 

The report’s introduction mentions the following highlights: 

  • SouFun in China issues a “platinum” club membership card that discounts the purchase prices of participating builders. Revenue from SouFun’s serviced e-commerce increased from $24 million in 2011 to $102 million in 2012. 
  • In Spain, where property sales have yet to recover from the 2007 recession, Pisos.com refocused its business on flat-sharing, rentals and private sellers.
  • Zillow in the U.S., which focuses on value-added services for agents and brokers, acquires what it doesn’t build and in 2012, the company’s revenue grew 77 percent over 2011. 
  • Google Ventures-backed startup HomeLight matches buyers and agents, becoming a kind of “personal real estate concierge.”

Agents question the value of IDX search on their websites | Bedford Hills Real Estate

When Fort Worth, Texas-based broker Greg Fischer decided to build a new website this year for his firm, he chose to leave search out of it.

The search technology available for his site was not good enough, cost too much and didn’t offer enough return on investment, Fischer said. Plus, his value as an agent had to do with relationships, not search, he said.

“Why would I dilute my brand in delivering subpar search?” Fischer said. “If I had Trulia’s search platform, I’d reconsider.”

His new site has pages featuring local neighborhoods and businesses with photos and a section highlighting the firm’s listings, but no search capability.

Nothing to Fear from Zombie Houses | Bedford NY Real Estate

Are zombie houses where the monsters live in the latest Resident Evil sequel? Or are they fraternities decked out for Halloween? Neither.

Zombie houses are what RealtyTrac is calling properties vacated by owners who have moved out and moved on with their lives after getting tired of waiting for their lenders to foreclose.

In a new report, the first-ever “foreclosure inventory ” found 301,874 “zombie” properties have been abandoned by their owners.

Last year at this time some 7.73 percent of all mortgages were more than 90 days delinquent, a function of the backlog of foreclosures in many states following Robogate. The entire foreclosure process, including filing notices of foreclosure on mortgages in default, has yet to return to its pre-Robogate pace, especially in judicial states.

The real news is that serious delinquencies have fallen to 6.78 percent of mortgages in the fourth quarter, the lowest rate since 2008, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. There probably were 12 percent more zombie houses a year ago than there are today, except no one counted them all nor gave them a catchy name. There will certainly be a lot fewer next year as mortgage servicers speed up foreclosure processing as foreclosures are selling at record prices. New processing standards resulting from the signing of the AG agreement a year ago take effect are facilitating processing judicial states as well as elsewhere. States with the highest levels of non-current loans are Florida, Mississippi, New Jersey, Nevada and New York.

While zombie houses will decline, they won’t disappear everywhere anytime soon. At today’s rate of foreclosure sales, it will take 62 months to clear the inventory in judicial states as compared to 32 months in non-judicial states. A few judicial states – New York and New Jersey in particular – have such extreme backlogs that their problem-loan pipelines would take decades to clear if nothing were to change.

More recently, certain non-judicial states, such as Massachusetts and Nevada, have enacted ‘judicial-like’ legislative and/or legal actions which have greatly extended their pipeline ratios. Nevada’s ‘time to clear’ has extended from 27 months in January 2012 to 57 months as of January 2013. The change in Massachusetts has been even more pronounced. Since June of last year, its pipeline ratio has gone from 75 to 171 months. As California’s recently enacted Homeowner’s Bill of Rights is closely modeled on the Nevada legislation, may have a similar impact.