Real Estate. Economics. Business
Title-1 introduces an online tool that allows home buyers and real estate agents to get an accurate estimate of what it’s going to cost to close on their real estate transaction. Be sure to check out their Purchase CalcuRator!
Congratuations to Title-1. I think this is a fanstastic too!
No doubt this was a phenomenal Parade of Homes for the Twin Cities new construction market. According to the Builder Association of the Twin Cities, this was the best Parade since 2007. It probably helps that the number of builders who were presenting their homes is down substantially since 2007, but the foot traffic really was excellent and the sales were well beyond expectations. I recall at the top of the housing market that there were 1,100 to 1,200 homes that were being shown in the Parade of Homes. If I’m not mistaken, I think this year the number was less than 400. Those who have stuck it out are doing well!
First of all, congratulations to home town business giant, General Mills for being named the most reputable big company in America according to the story published in Forbes Magazine. Forbes partnered with the Reputation Institute to conduct the annual research.
Not surprising was to hear the news that my old friend, Freddie Mac was named the least reputable big company in America…closely followed by Fannie Mae and Goldman Sachs.
The least reputable company on the list this year: Freddie Mac. In dead last, for the second consecutive year, the home mortgage financier earned a pulse score of 26.01, which is 3.46 points less than last year. Fannie Mae did only slightly better with 29.52 points. Goldman Sachs proves the third least reputable company, with a score of 36.95.
I’m still involved in one of the worst transactions of my career right now with a Freddie Mac owned property. What a delight.
Tonight the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage school district held a workshop to discuss the possibility of moving to a four day school week next year. Apparently it would save the district $5 million by having no school on Mondays. (My preference is a 5 day school week but if you have to eliminate a day, why not choose Friday instead of Monday?).
According to the story on WCCO, the district would have 17 fewer school days but apparently the same number of hours in the classroom. This district is on the other side of the Twin Cities for me and I have not heard anything weather the school districts in the western suburbs are considering a similar option.
There are a number of properties that are in multiple offer situations right now. I’m working on a bank deal right now and we don’t know the final tally, but we know for sure that there are 10 offers on the property. That was within the first four days the property was on the market. It’s a newer town home in Maple Grove priced under $110,000. If it were priced at $120,000 it would not have garnered nearly the interest that it has just $10,000 lower.
Any home can be sold. It’s all about value. It’s not about the marketing. Trust me. When you see the “marketing” that the REO (real estate owned) agents do, you will know that marketing doesn’t sell homes. Is it priced aggressively? Is it on the MLS? If so, it will sell.
Word is that Freddie Mac and/or its mortgage servicing companies are denying short sales if the home is in the redemption period. In the State of Minnesota, the redemption period is six months so this would be quite a blow if indeed this is a new policy decision by Freddie Mac to deny these short sale approvals.
One of the things I’ve heard is that in part the mortgage servicers are denying the short sale approvals because the costs are too high for Freddie Mac. Realtors and their clients, both buyers and sellers, are not happy about the news. Short sales are difficult enough. They’ve always been a bit of a crap shoot and this only makes it even more so.
One more reason why in my opinion Freddie Mac is the worst bank in America when it comes to REO or distressed properties.
Photo: MSNBC NY LaGuardia Airport
Remember when the airlines absolutely sucked? (Pardon my language but how else to describe?) Remember how awful the customer service was in the airline business in the 1980′s and 1990′s. They seemed to have no care for their paying customers. Service was terrible. Response times were terrible. Few if any seemed to go the extra mile to take care of an issue. It was terrible.
Well I think the banks are the new airlines. And when I mean banks, I don’t mean the front end of the banks – the retail side. Those are some of the nicest, most polite and pleasant people you’ll ever meet. I’m talking about the REO (real estate owned) and foreclosure side of the house. The communication is stunningly poor and ineffective. They are unresponsive. There is no appreciation for those of us in the field trying to “get things done” for our buyers on their properties. We are on an “as needs to know” basis and when we need a response, it might be days to get something back from them. However, once they send us something they DEMAND that it be turned around in 24 HOURS or the deal is potentially DEAD.
It’s difficult to know where the problem lie exactly. It could be the bankers themselves or it could be their asset managers that they’ve hired to “dispose” of their housing inventory.
They are now costing my buyers money because of their unresponsiveness and lack of attention to detail. The latter has really been incredible lately and it’s amazing anything gets done. If you’re reading this as an end consumer, you may not care in a broad sense what real estate agents get paid to put these deals together, but I would hope you care about your own particular agent. Freddie Mac has started to cut commissions to Realtors now I guess perhaps because their deals are so easy that Realtors shouldn’t get paid their 3% 
Currently I’m working on a Freddie Mac property where they misspelled my buyers name. It’s a common name and they added a letter that should not have been there. They have to send it back to be revised. That was last Friday. It’s now Wednesday afternoon…5 days later…still no revised contract. It has to work its way through the bureaucracy for one letter!!! Meanwhile, this is costing my buyer money as interest rates slowly tick higher.
I’ve had other dealings with Freddie Mac and they would definitely get my vote as the worst bank in America to buy a house from. Bank of America might be a close second after the debacle I am currently working through right now. There are plenty of characters who might, on any given day, might earn the award of being the worst bank in America when it comes to buying REO property.
One thing is for sure, these parts of the banking business and asset management business charged with disposing of these properties must have taking their customer service training from the same folks who trained the airlines many years ago.
The latest Case-Shiller Home Price Index was released today and it seems to be a bit of a mixed bag of results for many cities. However, in Minneapolis, home prices declined by 1.8% year over year. Data was reported for the month of January 2012. I have been saying for some time that as we started to move in to 2012 that the Minneapolis area would start to print much better numbers in the Case-Shiller Index. It wasn’t that long ago and we were leading the nation for several months with the largest percentage of year over year declines. That now appears to be behind us.
Overall for the 10 and 20 city composites, home prices declined year over year by 3.9% and 3.8% respectively. Most housing analysts and the economists I read have generally been predicting that we’d see about another 5-6% decline in home prices this year. Based upon activity I’m seeing in some markets, we may do better than that.
Atlanta now has the distinct honor of being the worst performing market in the county with home prices down by 14.8% year over year according to this report.
Detroit gets the honor of being the best performing market with home prices up…yes, up, 1.7% year over year. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s great news for the Detroit area which has extremely difficult the past several years.
Below is a table showing the scores for the 20 cities studied by the Case-Shiller Index.
(Click on Image to Enlarge)
A friend and business partner of mine recently completed a fabulous project where he took an existing screen porch and converted it to living space and extended the lower level right underneath the porch to accommodate for a much improved exercise room.
The story below is written in first person by Nate Jurmu, who is the owner and builder for Meadow Creek Building Corp.
This project was exciting because we were able to take an existing screened porch, and convert it to a spectacular hearth room with vaulted ceiling accented with beautiful reclaimed wood beams from Big Wood Timber Frames and capped off with a stunning Town & Country fireplace. While the room is brand new, the timelessness of the reclaimed wood beams adds old world charm and really makes the room interesting and come to life! It’s memorable once you’ve been there.
This project was an excellent example of working in collaboration with a client and architect. Murphy & Co. Design of Buffalo, MN developed the architectural plans for this remodeling project.
At the start of the project, we installed in a new foundation for the area where we expanded the exercise room in the lower level. Also, since this was a substantial expansion of the square footage of the home, we had to think about the heating and cooling components for the newly created space. My clients already had a geothermal system in their home. We were able to expand it in to the new exercise room as well as the upstairs space that was once a screened porch – radiant floor heat not only in the exercise room but also the wood floor in the hearth room!
The audio and video components for the hearth room were incorporated into the cabinetry in the exercise room underneath, eliminating any cabinetry by the fireplace.
For some additional accents to the exterior, my clients had a hot tub outside on a patio and we rebuilt the deck and added a pergola that extends over the hot tub. The outside fireplace was already existing.
Customers wonder how we are able to match up siding and roofing material without having to redo all the of the siding or put on a new roof. Usually we are able to get very close in matching up colors and materials so that it’s not noticeable. Once in a while there may be just too much fading in the existing siding or shingles to make a great match, but those are issues we can discuss to come up with a reasonable solution that works for you.
We can accommodate any size project – no project is too big or too small for us to consider. If you have some ideas on remodeling existing space, adding on or building new, please don’t hesitate to give us a call and we can arrange a free consultation.
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