Tag Archives: Bedford NY Luxury Homes

Home prices in Southern California hit four-year high | Bedford NY Real Estate

Leave a reply

Southern California is on the rebound when it comes to home prices, but sales are beginning to fall as inventory levels decline, DataQuick said in a report Friday.

During the month of September, counties in Southern California saw the median home price edge up to $315,000, a 1.9% jump from $309,000 in August and a 12.5% increase from September of 2011.

It’s also the highest median in more than four years.

San Diego-based DataQuick attributes the jump to a modest supply of homes for sale and demand sparked by recent levels of affordability in the market.

Still, prices are ticking up and sales are falling with low-end deals and foreclosure resales hitting five-year lows.

Low mortgage rates and a falling supply of homes are doing two things in the region: sparking new sales and cutting back on supply levels. Meanwhile, more mid-to-high end homebuyers are moving into the market to pick up the slack while taking advantage of low interest rates.

“It appears that not quite half of the 12.5% year-over-year gain in last month’s median sale price can be attributed to a shift in the types of homes selling,” DataQuick said. “In September, price levels for the lowest-cost third of Southern California’s housing stock rose 13.2% year-over-year, while they rose 7.7% in the middle and 3.5% in the top third.”

Sale levels fell with only 17,859 properties sold in the counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, Ventura, San Bernardino and Orange during the month. That number is down 20.4% from the 22,438 sales recorded a month earlier and down 1.6% from last year.

via housingwire.com

How to create a sense of urgency for buyers | Bedford NY Real Estate

Leave a reply

Question: When is the last time you sold a home when the buyer had no urgency to buy the ones you showed?

Notice I did not say, “No urgency to buy a home.” I said, “No urgency to buy the ones you showed.”

My guess: Not recently, if ever.

Let us ask this another way. Why would your prospects submit an offer if they saw no benefit or had no fear of losing the homes you showed them to another buyer?

“There is no way I can create urgency if it is not there,” say some real estate agents.

Uh … that is exactly what we do for a living. We help real estate buyers find deals so good that the self-imposed pressure is so great — they have to buy it if they can.

Stay with me on this, because I am about to help some of you make huge commissions by tweaking your showing schedule.

Usually “urgency” has to do with the action the other party needs to take by a certain date or time period. When it comes to buyer urgency, the buyer must have a strong desire to make the purchase, or the urgency factor will not be a factor.

If there is no fear of losing the house if they do not act soon, there is no urgency. So after you have developed trust and determined their needs, including a vision for their lifestyle, your showing schedule must meet or exceed their expectations.

We are talking buying pressure here, but not sales pressure. We are talking about the buyer’s urgency, their desire to make a buying decision before they lose the opportunity.

The best sales I ever made were ones where I put no pressure on the prospects, but showed them properties, prices and terms they could not resist. It makes it a lot more fun this way.

Experienced, successful agents know what I am sharing is the truth. Case in point:

I recently helped a couple purchase a presale home from a production builder. They both liked the home. In this case, the home was not the urgency. The price of the home was not the urgency. How can these be urgent when they are building 300 homes in that location, and my prospect would be buyer No. 3?

The builder offered them a substantial upgrade allowance package. We all knew that all the builders were offering something close to this number, so while the offer was competitive, it was not a reason to buy NOW. So far, we are still ahead of the builder.

But when the on-site agent reminded us one more time, now that we had settled on the house we got into a serious financing discussion with a couple who planned to pay cash for the home.

If the couple used the builder’s mortgage financing, they would get a $5,000 contribution towards closing costs, IF they were one of the first five to purchase in their new community. So far, one person had bought two homes, so my couple would be the third.

So, with just that, they quickly understood that they could lose $5,000 by just being the sixth person to purchase.

The “urgency” phase of this presentation was just getting warmed up.

It was time to see the actual home sites, to get an idea of the view. At this point, the on-site consultant knew that the couple had a dog. The builder had only a few home sites available in this phase, one of which was directly across from the dog walk.

The wife, who was constantly taking the “I don’t know why we are moving” stance, commented on how she could walk her dog and sit on the front porch watching others walk their dog. She got so excited that she turned to her husband and told him to write a $15,000 check “right now. We don’t want to lose this home site.” Fear of losing something she had not a vision for, until she visited the site.

Her husband didn’t move that fast, but within two days, they were signing a contract, which the builder prepared, and now are taking care of every detail of a presale, while I am off doing other things, waiting on a nice commission check in December.

As I have thought about first-time homebuyers or those coming back into the market, I can see why with cash contributions and incentives “new homes” are projected to be a preference over short sales.

It is not hard to see why qualified, cash-strapped homebuyers at any level might buy a new home.

Showing new homes requires a GPS, an automobile and the ability to make an introduction, and giving your prospects time to understand the complete deal, price, financing and incentives.

This not only will help you close more new homes, but it gives your buyer prospect a real price baseline from which to judge the value of resales. This cannot help but help your resales’ closings ratios.

For too long, the real estate industry has wondered why prospects would shop new homes, then buy a new one, many times without using the broker.

The reality is that the only urgency you have going for you is the urgency or perceived urgency residing somewhere in the prospect’s mind. You can affect “urgency” by showing them homes they get excited about living in.

You control no urgency tools nor have you exposed your prospects to any that would give them a solid reason to purchase soon. Thousands of dollars are riding on the buyer’s decision to act or not to act.

You must give the buyers decision-making tools that help them feel good and smart not only about the home they buy, but also about themselves.

Many prospects will end up preferring a resale to a new home, but it does not matter. What matters is that they closed on a home you showed them and are happy with the deal.

Make sure your buyers get the “urgency” story. It is an urgent imperative in your showing schedule. What are your thoughts?

via inman.com

Smoke & Mirrors in Foreclosure | Bedford NY Real Estate

Leave a reply

One in every 681 housing units was served foreclosure papers nationwide this August according to RealtyTrac.  That is not a record number, but it is an ongoing number, and one which partly reflects problems in the foreclosure process.

Florida just received its portion of a $25 billion national settlement with the five largest mortgage servicers.  Why?  Because the court found that Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and Ally Financial had employed robo-signers who were more signatory than sincere about verifying the facts of the foreclosure cases to which they signed.

Problems in documents during the boom years of real estate have led to document doctoring during the bust for some loans.  That makes foreclosure cases worth examining.  Even if you owe money and you know you owe money, you may have a legitimate complaint with the way your mortgage was handled, or the proper party owed.

Furthermore, a foreclosure defense not only looks at the legal aspect of your loan, it also gives you a chance to seek a resolution (like mortgage modification or short sale) while you request that the lender to go beyond the smoke and mirrors and check the actual documentation.

For August, RealtyTrac reported one out of every 681 households received foreclosure complaints in the US.  In Florida, it was one out of every 328, and within Florida, Duval was in the top ten counties having the highest number of foreclosures.

via jacksonville.com

Bedford NY Real Estate | Nearly one-third of mortgaged homes underwater

Leave a reply

The negative equity problem for U.S. homeowners might be worse than previously thought, at least according to a new measure from Zillow ($40.27 0%). 

The online real estate data provider, in its first negative equity report, said 15.7 million, or 31.4%, of homeowners were underwater on their mortgages in the first quarter. That’s up from 31.1% three months earlier but down from 32.4% in the first quarter 2011. 

Homeowners owed $1.2 trillion more than the value of their homes in the first quarter, according to Zillow.

With roughly 10% of homeowners 90-days-plus delinquent on payments, negative equity “remains only a paper loss” for most, said Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries.

“As home values slowly increase and these homeowners continue to pay down their principal, they will surface again,” Humphries said in a news release.

But Zillow’s measure is considerably higher — and subsequently more dire — than another report on negative equity among homeowners. A CoreLogic ($17.50 0%) study from the fourth quarter 2011, the most recent available, tabulated roughly 11 million underwater homeowners, or 23% of all mortgaged properties.

Zillow said it analyzes available outstanding mortgage debt data, including lines of credit and first and second mortgages, provided by credit agency TransUnion. CoreLogic uses its own database of mortgages, which the company says accounts for roughly 85% of mortgages in the U.S.

Cynthia Nowak, a Zillow spokeswoman, said the company’s survey covers an estimated 50 million out of roughly 53 million mortgaged homes.

The differing numbers of underwater homeowners might have to do with the general problems of covering such a huge market, said Bill Emmons, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. There’s no absolute way to measure outstanding mortgage debt, he said, but the bigger difference likely comes from how each outlet measures home values.

“Even if you do come up with estimates for individual house values, it’s almost always assuming orderly market conditions,” Emmons said. “There is no answer or no solution to assigning values to something that hasn’t sold yet.”

The real issue, Emmons said, is that the different measures haven’t changed much. Zillow’s first-quarter reading fell just one percentage point from a year earlier, while CoreLogic’s fourth-quarter numbers came in at the same level as third-quarter 2009.

This negative equity and loads of debt present problems for the economy and skittish lenders, Emmons said. But for homeowners, the bigger harm is that negative equity raises the probability that other factors, like unemployment, could lead to default.

“It’s sort of like your immune system being compromised,” Emmons said. “You’re just more vulnerable to anything coming along.”

Even for a current borrower, negative equity makes it harder to move and to refinance their mortgage, said Fred Furlong, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

But all households, even those from states that didn’t see huge price drops, have cut back on nonmortgage debt on similar levels, Furlong said. It’s as if “there has been a broader lesson” from the housing boom and bust, he said.

Zillow’s report is especially bleak for metropolitan areas in states hit hard by the housing crisis. Las Vegas led the country’s biggest cities with 71% of mortgaged homeowners underwater in the first quarter, followed by Phoenix at 55.5% and Atlanta at 55.2%.

Pittsburgh marked the low among big cities at 16.7%, trailed by New York at 21.3% and Boston at 22%

via housingwire.com