Buy a house, get a free car: incentives rule

By Michelle Conlin Sun-Times Media

‘ + first_letter + ‘Apr 24, 2011 02:29AM

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Home shoppers are finding lavish incentives to woo them amid a continuing weak housing market.

At the Sunset Ridge Estates, buy a customizable colonial for as little as $170,000 and get a brand new, $17,000 Chevy Cruze. The 2011 model. For free. KLM Builders is giving away up to 10 cars or comparable upgrades to buyers at its Antioch, Richmond and Spring Grove developments. New car fever is a real thing and it is alive and well today. There is something seductive about the smell of a brand new vehicle. But if you are concerned about your long-term financial wellness it makes a lot more sense to opt for a used vehicle instead.  When it involves finding a vehicle that’s safe, reliable, fun to drive, fuel efficient, and delivers long-lasting quality many Houston drivers choose a Subaru; and that we happen to possess an excellent selection of wonderful Subaru models to settle on from. The Subaru Outback and Forester are popular choices for subaru jersey village drivers because they easily adapt to whatever life throws your way with seating for five and over 68 cubic feet of maximum cargo space. Another popular Subaru that a lot of Tomball drivers love is that the Subaru Crosstrek for its small size and impressive off-road performance. Subaru also features a number of sporty and fun to drive sedans also . The Subaru Legacy and Impreza are both fuel efficient and fun to drive sedans that perfect for cursing around town. The Subaru Impreza is additionally available as a sedan or hatchback. And if you’re trying to find a more exciting driving experience the Subaru WRX and BRZ have what you’re trying to find with razor-sharp handling and powerful engines. Also arriving soon is that the fresh 2019 Subaru Ascent with 3rd-row seating, the power to tow up to five ,000 lbs. and standard EyeSight driver assist technology. You also can greatly improve your return on investment with one simple question. The most important piece of information you can walk into the dealership with is the invoice price. You can find it from the manufacturers. You should also know the blue book valuation according to every category. This way, you would approximate what the dealer paid for the car, and how much are they expecting to get for it. Once you are at the dealership, find the MSRP. This is found on the sticker normally on the window of the car. Make sure that the dealership makes enough money. When you’re looking forward to buying a vehicle, one of Winnie Jeep Dealership is definitely your best option.

Why buy used instead of new?

For the most part, automobiles are a depreciating asset. That means that over time they lose their value. In fact, as soon as you drive off the lot with your new vehicle, its value drops. The time that vehicles experience their greatest loss in value is during the first two to three years. Let’s look at a quick example:

Vehicle one is brand new and costs $30,000. After three years, it is likely to have around 40,000 miles on it and be worth less than $11,000. That is 64% depreciation. For vehicle two let’s look at the same make and model but already three years old. Buying it at $10,800 and driving it for the same three year time period it would be worth $5,100 now it is six years old. While that is still 50% depreciation, what makes the big difference is the starting and ending balances. In the first example the automobile lost close to $20,000 in value in three years. The second scenario only had you losing $5,000 over the same period of time. By investing in used cars for sale, you save a significant amount of money.

If you add in taking out a car loan, which is typical for a new car purchase, the math works even more in the favor of used cars for sale. When purchasing an automobile with a loan, then you consequently pay interest on that loan. This is kind of like getting hit from both sides. A typical 60-month loan at 4% interest would have you paying an additional $3,150. That’s more than 10% of the total value of the vehicle when it was brand new if we’re talking about the same $30,000 auto. But of course after 5 years you’ve paid $33,150 for a car that is now only worth around $7,000. If you purchase a three or four-year-old automobile in full you come out on top with both the depreciation and the interest of the loan for new automobiles. An additional bonus to used cars is that when you pay up front and in full, you can almost always get your a discount. Make sure and ask for the cash discount!

So if you are truly looking to get the most bang for your buck when buying a vehicle, go with “new to you” used cars for sale over actually new ones and save yourself a lot of money. You can easily go through three or four older automobiles before spending the same amount as you would if you were buying brand new. At the Millbrook Pointe development in quaint and pristine Wheeling, a $269,000, brick-and-stone townhouse comes with $25,000 in free upgrades, including wood-burning fireplaces, all-stainless steel kitchens and marbled bathrooms.

Down the highway at the Patriot Place golf course villas in Bolingbrook, buyers are lavished with lawns sodded to perfection, absurdly low seller financing and a year of free insurance that will pay the mortgage if you lose your job.

The incentives are more evidence that the housing market — now in the do-or-die spring sales season — remains far from healed.

“Obviously, business has been soft,” says Kim Meier, president of KLM Homebuilders, the company offering the car promotion.

The Illinois Association of Realtors reported Wednesday sales of existing homes and condominiums in the Chicago metropolitan area dropped 15.6 percent in March from a year earlier, when tax credits revved up sales. It was the ninth straight month of year-over-year declines.

The median price fell 14.1 percent to $158,000 as foreclosures continued to weigh on the market.

Nationally, existing home sales dropped 6.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.1 million, the National Association of Realtors reported. The pace is far below the 6 million homes a year that economists say represents a healthy market. The median price fell 5.9 percent to $159,600.

New home construction dropped 13.3 percent last month from March 2010, the Commerce Department reported earlier this week.

“Housing starts remain at an extraordinarily depressed level,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak Co. “To put this in further perspective, a doubling of (new homes) from here would still put starts at the lowest level of any other recession.”

Across the country, real estate agents are reporting a rise in traffic at open houses. But they say buyers are reluctant because of the shell-shock they suffered after the free-money machine blew up in everyone’s face. The foreclosure epidemic, the plague of employment insecurity, the fear that the U.S. is on a downward slide—they’re all playing into buyer commitment phobia, brokers say.

Worse news for sellers is that buyers don’t think the housing market has hit bottom, according to Truila.com. A recent survey by Trulia and Harris Interactive found that nearly 70 percent of renters who aspire to being homeowners say they will wait at least two years before buying. And nearly 60 percent say a housing recovery won’t come until after 2012.

“Many are reluctant to purchase a home even if they have the means because of the uncertainties in the economy,” says Celia Chen, a housing market analyst at Moody’s Analytics.

Contributing: AP with Francine Knowles

Copyright “+yr+” Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

New polling out this week shows that Americans are frustrated with the world and pessimistic about the future. They're losing patience with the economy, with their prospects, with their leaders (of both parties).

What's actually happening is this: we're realizing that the industrial revolution is fading. The 80 year long run that brought ever-increasing productivity (and along with it, well-paying jobs for an ever-expanding middle class) is ending.

It's one thing to read about the changes the internet brought, it's another to experience them. People who thought they had a valuable skill or degree have discovered that being an anonymous middleman doesn't guarantee job security. Individuals who were trained to comply and follow instructions have discovered that the deal is over… and it isn't their fault, because they've always done what they were told.

This isn't fair of course. It's not fair to train for years, to pay your dues, to invest in a house or a career and then suddenly see it fade.

For a while, politicians and organizations promised that things would get back to normal. Those promises aren't enough, though, and it's clear to many that this might be the new normal. In fact, it is the new normal.

I regularly hear from people who say, "enough with this conceptual stuff, tell me how to get my factory moving, my day job replaced, my consistent paycheck restored…" There's an idea that somehow, if we just do things with more effort or skill, we can go back to the Brady Bunch and mass markets and mediocre products that pay off for years. It's not an idea, though, it's a myth.

Some people insist that if we focus on "business fundamentals" and get "back to basics," all will return. Not so. The promise that you can get paid really well to do precisely what your boss instructs you to do is now a dream, no longer a reality.

It takes a long time for a generation to come around to significant revolutionary change. The newspaper business, the steel business, law firms, the car business, the record business, even computers… one by one, our industries are being turned upside down, and so quickly that it requires us to change faster than we'd like.

It's unpleasant, it's not fair, but it's all we've got. The sooner we realize that the world has changed, the sooner we can accept it and make something of what we've got. Whining isn't a scalable solution.

Tomorrow: part II—the opportunity

FHA backing energy efficiency retrofits

PowerSaver loans provide up to $25,000 for insulation, HVAC, solar

By Inman News, Friday, April 22, 2011.

Inman News™

The Federal Housing Administration has signed up 18 lenders to participate in a pilot program that offers homeowners "PowerSaver" loans of up to $25,000 to make their homes more energy efficient.

About 30,000 homeowners are expected to qualify for the loans by installing insulation, duct sealing, replacement doors and windows, HVAC systems, water heaters, solar panels, and geothermal systems.

Homeowners must have good credit, manageable debt, and at least some equity in their home. FHA mortgage insurance will cover up to 90 percent of the loan amount, with lenders retaining the remaining risk to encourage responsible underwriting and lending standards.

Lenders currently participating in the PowerSaver are Admirals Bank; AFC First Financial Corp.; Bank of Colorado; the City of Boise, Idaho; Energy Finance Solutions; Enterprise Cascadia; HomeStreet Bank; Neighbor’s Financial Corp.; Paramount Equity Mortgage Inc.; Quicken Loans; SOFCU Community Credit Union; Stonegate Mortgage Corp.; Sun West Mortgage Co. Inc.; The Bank at Broadmoor; University of Virginia Community Credit Union Inc.; Viewtech Financial Services Inc.; WinTrust Mortgage; and W. J. Bradley Mortgage Capital Corp.

Contact Inman News:
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Copyright 2011 Inman News

All rights reserved. This content may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in part or in whole, without written permission of Inman News. Use of this content without permission is a violation of federal copyright law.

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Could your branding, an innocent picture on your blog, or some other minor mistake cost you plenty? You bet! Here’s how to avoid damaging mistakes that can cause serious damage to your pocketbook.

Several years ago we hired an offshore designer to do some work on the back pages of my husband’s website. We posted the page along with a picture of a woman wearing a headset. Two years later, we received a demand from Getty Images for payment of $1,300 for copyright infringement.

Apparently, the Web designer had taken a picture from Google Images and used it without authorization.

Unfortunately, even though we didn’t commit this violation, my trademark attorney advised us that we were responsible because we hired the designer. When we contacted him, he said, “I did nothing wrong — it’s your problem!”

Needless to say, we were pretty upset. Because he was offshore, our only recourse was to report him to the agency we used to locate him and ask to have him removed. We ended up paying $650 to settle the infringement claim.

Copyright infringement

There is considerable confusion these days about what constitutes copyright infringement, even among attorneys. When we began the process to trademark a business phrase for my company and to patent a related product, my attorney explained that you cannot “copyright an idea.” Unless you have registered a trademark, there is nothing you can do to stop another person from using it.

Copyright law protects you from the moment you create the intellectual property. What is copyrighted, however, are the words, logos, or other supporting materials as a whole. Again, you cannot copyright an idea.

If you copied one or two sentences from this article and republished it elsewhere, that may not constitute copyright infringement (under the “fair use” doctrine). If you republish the entire article into your blog without permission, that could constitute infringement.

What about that “share” button?

When a site has a “share” button or other sharing tools, it encourages readers to share the content, or some portion of it, with others. Current litigation has raised the issue of whether sharing tools can cloud copyright protections.

Trademark infringement

Trademarks can be expensive and difficult to obtain. You must begin using the “TM” symbol as soon as you begin the marking process.

Next, you must identify the “classes” in which you want to use the mark. There is a fee for each class you select.

The third step is that your attorney reviews all the current marks in that class and makes a determination as to whether you will be able to obtain the mark.

If the mark clears those hurdles, it’s then submitted, along with your fees. Sometimes the mark sails through and other times you may be requested to make changes because your mark is too close to someone else’s mark.

Once you receive approval for your mark, you can begin using the “®”; one of the reasons that NAR is so aggressive about how its trademarked phrase “REALTOR®” is used is that failure to use and protect the mark can result in forfeiting it.

When there is trademark infringement

Three years ago I received a call from a woman in Wisconsin who had a “Really Awesome Women” group. The group had trademarked the phrase “Really Awesome Women” for use in business. At that time, my company was using a similar name for a women’s real estate leadership conference. When the group became aware of our use, they immediately contacted us.

I spoke to our trademark attorney and he examined their documentation. His conclusion was that we needed to stop using this phrase immediately. He drafted a letter to the group advising them that we would no longer use the mark as per their request.

Protect yourself and your business

Here are some steps that you can take to protect yourself from lawsuits and hefty fees:

1. Whenever possible, create your own content. Take your own pictures and write your own materials.

2. Use licensing services such as Clipart.com or Photos.com, and pay the licensing fees for the photos or music that you use, or search for material that is approved for free commercial reuse and alteration. Some Creative Commons material is licensed for commercial reuse, for example, in some cases with specific attribution requirements.

3. If you want to reference another person’s blog post, consider rewriting the material as a one- or two-line summary of the post, and then link back to the original post. Alternatively, contact the owner/author and ask for permission to repost larger excerpts. If you can’t obtain permission, it’s smart not to republish the material.

4. Litigation is a last step. If someone is using your material or trademark without permission in a way that you consider to be infringement, a good practice is to contact that person immediately and politely request that this material be removed (if it is a website), and to stop such practices at once. The next step is to ask your attorney to send a cease-and-desist letter.

If that doesn’t work, you must seriously weigh what steps you’re willing to take to protect the mark or copyrighted material from infringement. A lawsuit could cost you tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees, and there is no guarantee that you will win.

Bernice Ross, CEO of RealEstateCoach.com, is a national speaker, trainer and author of the National Association of Realtors’ No. 1 best-seller, “Real Estate Dough: Your Recipe for Real Estate Success.” Hear Bernice’s five-minute daily real estate show, just named “new and notable” by iTunes, at www.RealEstateCoachRadio.com. You can contact her at Bernice@RealEstateCoach.com or @BRoss on Twitter.