More people are buying their homes with cash – Mar. 10, 2011
The all cash buyer is a big force in today’s market. Most regions are reporting anywhere from 30%-50% of homes sold are being sold for cash.
Laura Dominguez-Vasquez and her husband, Luis, recently sold their Coral Gables, Fla., home to all-cash buyers for just under $1 million. They’re now shopping for a new home and intend to pay cash as well.
The busy professionals have three kids, aged 14 to 20, and they don’t have the time or inclination to mess around with homebuying. "The process has to be painless," she said.
The Vasquezs are not unique; cash buys are becoming common. The number of homes bought with cash jumped to 32% in January compared to 26% a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors.
In Southern California, about 30% of the sales in January were cash, according to DataQuick Information Systems. Same thing in Denver. In Phoenix and Las Vegas, cash sales topped 50% of all deals.
Read the full story at More people are buying their homes with cash – Mar. 10, 2011.
The McCoy Case Analyzed – MERS Smackdown! | Q-Law Blog
There is a very interesting thing going on behind the foreclosure mess – MERS. MERS stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration System and was a system concocted to make it easy to transfer a mortgage from one company to another, without having to record it at the county. Problem is, the law in most states requires that it be recorded to be valid. Oops.
“…the powers accorded to MERS by the Lender [whose name appears in the Trust Deed] – with the Borrower’s consent – cannot exceed the powers of the beneficiary. The beneficiary’s right to require a non-judicial sale is limited by ORS 86.735. A non-judicial sale may take place only if any assignment by [the Lender whose name appears in the Trust Deed] has been recorded.”
[Frank R. Alley III, Chief Bankruptcy Judge, published opinion, Donald McCoy III v. BNC Mortgage, et al., Adversary No. 10-6224 -fra, Case No. 10-63814-fra-13, February 7, 2011]
Slapdown! In a relatively uncomplicated adversary proceeding in Oregon’s bankruptcy court, Judge Alley hit the nail squarely on the head: If lenders in Oregon want to foreclose people out of their homes, they must follow ORS 86.735(1). Or in the words of one Oregon title counsel, Judge Alley’s decision means that “…all assignments behind a MERS trust deed must be recorded for a non-judicial foreclosure. In McCoy, it appeared there were unrecorded assignments by the original lender identified in the promissory note. A “beneficiary” in Oregon is defined as the entity or person identified in the trust deed as the one for whose benefit the trust deed is given (or their successor in interest) – that was not MERS, but rather the original lender making the actual loan to the borrower.
For some reason, this relatively simple requirement has been routinely and flagrantly ignored in virtually every non-judicial foreclosure I have reviewed last year and this year. I suspect if I went back to 2008 and 2009, I would see the same thing. And this holding isn’t confined to situations in which MERS is the (nominal) beneficiary.
Read the rest of the story at The McCoy Case Analyzed – MERS Smackdown! | Q-Law Blog.
Home Value Depreciation Picks Up Speed In January | Zillow Real Estate Research
Some bad news from Zillow:
The pace of home value declines further accelerated in January with monthly home value depreciation reaching 1.2% and annual depreciation hitting 7.3%. This rate of monthly depreciation is the highest seen in the national index since December 2008 (see Figure 2). The median home value nationally in January was $172,182, down 28.2% from its peak in June 2006 (see Figure 1).
Of the 131 metropolitan regions with a Zillow Home Value Index in January, 124 metros experienced year-over-year declines in home values (95%), four metros saw annual increases (3%), and three metros were flat from year-ago levels (2%). The markets experiencing the largest annual declines in home values included Ocala, Pueblo, Mobile, Flagstaff, Atlanta, Spokane, and Detroit. See the interactive chart below for data on all 131 metro areas.
Does price per square foot matter?
A great little article from Spencer Barron’s blog in Denver. If you need to buy or sell in Denver, Spencer is your go to guy!
Only to the lender. I should qualify that a bit. In a true apples to apples neighborhood in the suberbs, the price per square foot (PSF) of the comparable sold homes matter. Especially to the lender who will be lending on it. They need metrics like this in order to explain to shareholders why they lent the money.
Builders use price per square foot for an area to help project their potential profits compared to their cost to build.
Investors can screen neighborhoods for homes that are significantly below the average price per square foot for the neighborhood.
For you and I. We need to be more specific. One way is a comparative market analysis or CMA.
There is one certainy though, to determine the value of a property, you can’t simply take the square footage and multiply it by the area’s PSF or even the comparable home’s PSF. It’s just not going to get you where you want to go.
As an example, I once met a man that built a massive addition on the back of his house. He added over 2000 square feet (SF) to his home. He then did the calculation; my home is 3400SF X $200 PSF = $680,000. Unfortunately, he simply added massive rooms without any appeal to them. He added only one jack and jill style bathroom for the 2000 SF he added. That was supposed to be a shared master bath. Needless to say, buyers didn’t see it and had a 100 other options for under $680,000 that were superior.
He ended up selling for $385,000 or $113 per SF. For him, using price per square foot to determine his value sent him down the wrong path by more than 40%.
via Does price per square foot matter?.
Value of a Sink
Do home improvements increase the value of your home? Well, it depends. Teresa Boardman of Saint Paul Home Realty wrote a great post about it:
Sometimes I get asked questions I can not answer and I suspect no one else can either.
Making improvements to a home can increase it’s value but . . there is always a but. . not all improvements have a measurable return on investment and there are variables. For example spending 100K on a new kitchen in a $120,000 home does not make that home worth $220,000. Home values have limiting factors like location and size. It is possible that no matter how many improvements are made to the $120,000 home it can only be brought on value by another $30,000.
For small improvements like the sink just pick out the one that you like best. A sink is not going to impact the value of a home. Unless of course there is no sink in that case buyers will want about 500% the cost of a sink taken off the price of the house.
In an upper bracket home with a high end kitchen the sink may matter but it has been my experience that the people who buy those homes usually don’t have a problem with buying that perfect sink.
The same rules apply to kitchen appliances and washers and dryers.
