Mortgages and Real Estate

Is virtual staging worth it to sell your house?

Zac Bissonnette Dec 5th 2009 @ 3:00PM EST Filed Under: Real Estate, Technology

If you've ever stumbled on HGTV, you know that there is a big push toward staging homes for sale. Cluttered, tacky, dirty, and even unfurnished homes are, we're told, a lot harder to sell than tastefully decorated homes because buyers need to be able to visualize themselves living in the property.

And with a glut of homes on the market, staging may be more important now than ever. But it's also expensive: hiring a professional stager and renting furniture to showcase a home can cost thousands of dollars -- and it may be worth it on a million dollar property. But on a $100,000 condominium or starter home, it tends to be impractical.

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The home of the future: smaller, simpler, more affordable

Amy Pyle Dec 5th 2009 @ 6:00AM EST Filed Under: Budgets, Home, Real Estate, Saving Money, Mortgages, Cyber Monday

Marianne Cusato was busy designing cottages for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina when requests started pouring in from developers, builders and homeowners across the country begging her to create a similarly compact dwelling for them.

"I was very focused on disaster housing and the small-house movement came to me," Cusato told WalletPop.

Though Cusato's 300- to 1,800-square-foot Katrina Cottages -- now for sale at Lowe's -- are an extreme example of the smaller-is-better mentality, the movement appears to be more than a fad, especially now that the economy has tanked.

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Salvaging the real estate market by becoming a Section 8 landlord

Jason Cochran Dec 3rd 2009 @ 2:45PM EST Filed Under: Bargains, Entrepreneurship, Home, Real Estate, Recession, Bankruptcy, Video, Recession Diaries, Mortgages

Real estate prices have bottomed out. Depending on the market-- Las Vegas, Arizona, Southern California -- house prices can be insanely low.

In Broward County, Fla., for example, homes that once cost more than $200,000 can be had for as little as $30,000, many as foreclosures. Now that the days of high-profit speculation in the real estate market have come to a close, real estate investors are turning to another program that provides a more modest, but still reliable, return.

The Section 8 Rental Voucher Program is a federal endeavor that pays the rent of qualified low-income renters. The homes they live in are privately owned by everyday people, who receive monthly rent checks from the government on behalf of their low-income tenants. Considering rent is paid back at what amounts to something close to market rates, renting an inexpensive property to the Section 8 program can more than pay for itself.

WalletPop's Jason Cochran traveled to Broward County to meet with Suzanne Dunn, a real estate investor who has independently jumped on the Section 8 market. She gives us an overview of how it works for people who want to become landlords:

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Where cheaper homes are best sellers and why 'beige' matters

Charles Feldman Dec 3rd 2009 @ 2:00PM EST Filed Under: Home, Real Estate, Mortgages

You like beige? The color beige. I guess I don't consider beige a real color. I mean, not like, say, red or blue or bright yellow. Those are colors. Beige is, well, beige! For reasons known only to a select few in Washington -- let's call them for the sake of discussion, "the beige crowd" -- the Federal Reserve Board's periodic summary of economic conditions around the nation is referred to as "The Beige Book." You can probably see why the government will probably never produce a best seller.

Before you turn blue with exasperation about my reflections upon the Fed's "Beige Book," let me tell you why I am even bringing this whole matter to your attention: The newest Beige Book tells us that "home sales and construction activity improved across much of the nation," but it also reports to us that "prices were generally said to be flat or still declining somewhat." Now, " declining somewhat" doesn't exactly have the ring of precision that I would like, but it does paint in a broad stroke the state of the real estate market in these United States.

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Biggest is better Down Under

Diane Wedner Dec 2nd 2009 @ 7:30PM EST Filed Under: Real Estate

Move over, gluttonous U.S. homeowners. Australians now eclipse Americans in building the largest homes, Reuters has reported.

What, you thought Americans are the only ones who gobble up square footage?

Australian homes have expanded in size an average 10% in the last decade to 2,310 square feet (214.6 square meters), according to a Commonwealth Bank of Australia study. The average size of U.S. homes starting construction in the second quarter this year was 2,091square feet (637 square meters), according to the National Assn. of Home Builders. Not exactly a hut, by the way. In fact, the floor size of U.S. single-family homes ballooned 13% to 2,459 square feet (750 square meters) from 1998 to 2008. Take that, Aussies!

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Future cities more urban, less suburban

Amy Pyle Dec 2nd 2009 @ 4:30PM EST Filed Under: Entrepreneurship, Home, Real Estate, Transportation, Career, Investing, Mortgages

Like many business people, Donald Monti sees opportunity in the flurry of foreclosures across the nation -- but he's no suburban real estate speculator.

Instead, Monti -- a Plainview, NY, developer -- has seen the future and it looks more like a city than a suburb.

Monti is taking his vision for revitalized, livable and walkable downtowns in smaller cities to America's biggest downtown next week, to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange where he'll speak at a Wharton School of Business forum titled "The Road To Recovery: Investing in the Global Real Estate Rebound." He will be joined by Christopher Leinberger of The Brooking Institution.

The concept taps into the now familiar desire of empty nester boomers and young professionals for more urban lifestyles. Monti and Leinberger call them the "creative class:" 12% of the workforce in 1980, 33% today and an estimated 50% in a decade. Quite a potential market.

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Save us, Dubai World, from another year of bad commercial real estate!

Charles Feldman Dec 2nd 2009 @ 12:00PM EST Filed Under: Real Estate, Recession, Investing

Another year?

Maybe longer, says the chief economist with the Texas A&M Real Estate Center, before we even begin to see a recovery in the dismal commercial real estate market.

Should be pretty obvious why: despite nonsense to the contrary, any talk of an economic recovery is still premature, especially with the twin curses of unemployment and foreclosures continuing to rise.

The A&M economist predicts that it will be "high net worth investors" who will probably be the first to get their toes wet in any commercial real estate recovery.

But before the anticipated rise, says the economist, Mark Dotzour, there will come the deepening fall: He says real estate prices, rents and occupancy levels will all go further south.

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Treasury Dept. 'SWAT teams' to move in on mortgage industry: War or a joke?

Charles Feldman Dec 1st 2009 @ 12:00PM EST Filed Under: Borrowing, Home, Real Estate, Mortgages, Refinancing

The theater darkens. The coming attractions are over. The movie studio logo (your choice) appears. The screen explodes into brilliant light. Music thunders and soars. Vans marked "SWAT" fill the large screen. The "SWAT team" jumps out and rushes into ... the bank, to pressure officials there to step up mortgage modifications. The title of the film appears: " Mortgage SWAT -- The Movie." The audience laughs. Yes, I said the audience laughs. Or should!

And just as a movie audience should laugh at such a silly idea for a film, people should laugh even harder since this is no movie script but real life (no, not real life television ... real, actual, life! (The type with no syndication rights!)

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Is it immoral to walk away from an upside down mortgage?

Zac Bissonnette Nov 30th 2009 @ 2:00PM EST Filed Under: Real Estate

Let's say that you owe $500,000 on the mortgage for a house that, because of the crumbling real estate market, is now worth $200,000.

You can afford to make the payments -- but it feels stupid to write a check every month to make interest payments on a loan for a property worth so much less than you owe on it.

What should you do? In a controversial paper, University of Arizona Law School professor Brent T. White argues that you should stop paying the mortgage, hand the bank the keys to the house, and move on with your life.

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Buying a home? How rising mortgage rates might keep you there awhile

Zac Bissonnette Nov 30th 2009 @ 9:00AM EST Filed Under: Real Estate

StraighTalkAboutMortgages broker Tom Vanderwell makes an interesting point in a video recently posted on his website.

He recently asked a customer planning to move in three to five years this question: "If, three to five years from now, mortgage rates are 7, 8, or 9%, will you still move?"

Here's why it matters: let's say you buy a house now for $250,000, and put down $50,000. With a mortgage at 5%, your monthly payment will be $1097.75.

But let's say you decide that you want to move to another $250,000 house five years from now (i.e. you switched jobs), after inflationary concerns and the end of artificially low rates have driven interest rates higher. Let's say that in five years, rates are up to 8%. All of a sudden, your mortgage payment rises to $1467.53 -- your mortgage expense has risen 33%, even though all you did was trade one $250,000 home for another $250,000 home.

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Mortgage modifications, take two: Obama tries a bigger stick to make banks lower loan payments

Charles Feldman Nov 29th 2009 @ 10:00PM EST Filed Under: Banks, Real Estate, Mortgages

You know that old saying about how in life there are no second acts? Perhaps not. But that doesn't apply to government work.

On Monday, the Obama administration is set to try one more time to get mortgage companies to reduce payments in an effort to bring a halt to ever-mounting foreclosures.

The first effort was a huge flop: Of the half million or so loan modifications made since the first push was on, only about 2,000 became permanent, according to a Congressional oversight panel.

In an interview with the New York Times, Michael Barr, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for financial institutions said, " The banks are not doing a good enough job ... some of the firms ought to be embarrassed, and they will be."

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Why Dubai should matter to you: U.S. real estate could take big hit

Charles Feldman Nov 28th 2009 @ 1:00PM EST Filed Under: Real Estate, Recession, Investing, Mortgages

Funny thing this globalization: Just when you think everything is starting to settle down and maybe, just maybe, the world's economic plight is finally on the mend, along comes news from a place such as Dubai that threatens to send everything into a tailspin all over again.

Stock markets have already felt the shock waves from the news that Dubai's state-owned investment arm--Dubai World--needs to restructure its debt...a fancy way of saying, it simply can't pay its bills. Bills, by the way, that come to some $59 billion. And, there is no app to download that can easily fix that!

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