Category: Finance and Mortgage (page 1 of 2)

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

J. Craig Anderson in today’s Arizona Republic:

The Obama administration’s $75 billion mortgage-relief effort is projected to help as many as 9 million overextended borrowers, including thousands in Arizona.

If recent history is a guide, though, financial relief for some could be short-lived.

More than half of the past-due loans modified in the first half of 2008 were back in default six months later, according to a recent report by federal bank-oversight officials.

While many have lauded President Barack Obama’s plan as a worthwhile effort to help struggling homeowners, local and national experts said there are clear signs that loan modifications that reduce payments, interest and even principal won’t significantly curb foreclosures.

In the Phoenix area, modifications are even less likely to prevent foreclosures than they are nationwide, experts said. Borrowers who owe far more than the current value of their homes may quit paying their loans regardless of how affordable the payment is.

As always of late, this is bad news for homeowners, very bad news for sellers, but it is good news for buyers and investors. Moreover: The sun will come out. Maybe not tomorrow, but someday soon. All we have to do is soak up our excess inventory and the Phoenix real estate market will turn, regardless of what happens in the rest of the country.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). Since I wrote this on Tuesday, events have overtaken some details, but it remains that few if any borrowers in the Phoenix area will be able to renegotiate or modify their loans under the Obama plan. Everyone who used to have home equity will still get to bear their losses unassisted, however.

 
The federal government’s housing casino will never play fair as long as there are votes to be bought by cheating

To qualify for a renegotiated mortgage under the plan President Obama announced last week, your new loan can be as much as 105% of your old loan — which sounds to me like curing alcoholism with a good stiff drink.

But the people who are in the worst trouble on their loans bought with 100% financing. Even if there had been no decline in values, they probably could not refinance at 105%, not without bringing cash to cover the closing costs.

But, of course, the typical home in the West Valley is down 50% from its peak value in December of 2005.

Suppose you bought a new home for Christmas 2005, paying $275,000. If you get everything just right, you might be able to sell it today for $135,000. You still owe $275,000, but you can refinance your note at only $141,750 under the Obama plan.

Something’s going to have to give.

But what about the people who were move-up buyers in 2005? They may have put 50% down, which means they’ve lost all their equity, but they probably can’t lay claim on a hardship refinancing. What about the people who paid all-cash? Now we’re talking about people who have actually lost real money — their own money.

Meanwhile, many of the people who end up qualifying for restructuring could easily continue to pay on their notes. We all of us pay on our car loans, even though a car loses half its value when you drive it off the lot.

But we don’t think of our cars, clothing, furniture or appliances as investments. By mucking around in the real estate market, the federal government set up a system of middle class welfare, encouraging us to gamble on our homes as if they were leveraged stock issues — or casino games.

This has turned out to have unhappy consequences. A truly free market in real estate would be a boon to us all — but don’t hold your breath. The federal housing casino will never play fair as long as there are votes to be bought by cheating.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Obama’s housing rescue plan won’t rescue housing, but it will delay the eventual recovery of the real estate market

President Barrack Obama came to Mesa Wednesday to announce his new housing initiative. The location made for good political theater, given that metropolitan Phoenix is one of the hardest-hit real estate markets.

The president promises millions of refinanced or renegotiated mortgages, at a price tag of $275 billion. The putative beneficiaries are homeowners, who may be able to negotiate their monthly payments down to less than 30% of their monthly incomes. But it is the lenders who will cash in, if the Obama plan works.

How’s that? Obama is hoping to shove a floor under still-declining home prices. Lenders will take a hit on millions of reformulated mortgages, but the hope is that this will save them even more money, in the long run, by stemming the rising tide of foreclosures.

In other words, the Obama plan is a price-support scheme. The market argues right now that homes are overpriced — which in turn suggests that the available supply of homes substantially exceeds existing demand.

That’s important. Prices for premium-quality homes are very low, and interest rates are still hovering at historic lows. Mortgage money is easily available to owner-occupants, and Fannie Mae just loosened its standards for rental-home investors. Even so, the number of homes being offered for sale at current prices still exceeds the number of buyers willing to pay those prices.

In reality, prices need to continue to drop until demand matches or eclipses supply. It wouldn’t hurt to convert some housing to other uses, or simply to tear it down altogether.

But forcing an arbitrary floor under prices is unlikely to have happy consequences. Despite his rhetoric, Obama’s plan can only reward our economy’s wasteful grasshoppers, at the expense of its thrifty ants. A price-support will serve to delay recovery, since it will do nothing to solve the supply and demand problem. And, as the worst of all foreseeable consequences, a price-support plus the $8,000 tax credit from last week’s stimulus bill could fuel new building — adding even more supply to an already over-built real estate market.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Prices for Phoenix-area real estate are very low, but are they low enough to justify a run on the market?

Looking for some rock-solid investment advice? Buy low. Sell high.

That seems obvious enough — except it often turns out to be the opposite of what people do. There are legions of people in the Phoenix market who bought high and are having to sell low.

The trouble is, it’s hard to know which is which until after the fact. Many people bought homes during the boom at what seemed to be high prices, only to sell them a year later for even higher prices.

That was a very fun game to play — until the music stopped and left you without a chair. Many putative experts — I was one of them — thought the boom would go on even longer than it did.

But what about now? Prices are very low, but are they low enough to justify a run on the market?

The technical answer is yes. Phoenix-area home prices are nicely aligned with incomes, and premium rental homes are comfortably cash-flow-positive from the first tenant.

The market’s response is no. So far, there hasn’t been a fire-sale mentality in the marketplace to go along with the fire-sale prices. I’m working with several investors who are picking up multiple properties, often for cash, but there is nothing like the activity we saw in 2004 or 2005.

But all that could change very soon. The Fed continues to hold interest rates very low, and there is talk of forcing the rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage down to 4%. And the so-far-unadopted stimulus plan includes a $8,000 tax credit for first-time home-buyers.

Lenders will find a way to turn that tax-credit into a short-term loan. And $8,000 is a 10% down-payment on an $80,000 home. Putting 3.5% down on an FHA loan, $8,000 is enough to get an $225,000 property.

If owner-occupant buyers soak up all the excess resale inventory, that should cause prices to stabilize or even start to rise. If, instead, new-home builders use the tax credit to build even more homes in our already-overbuilt market, the bottom will be but a distant dream.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Workable real estate deals may require even more creativity

I do a lot of work with buy-and-hold rental home investors, more and more of whom are able to come into Phoenix with all-cash offers. Poor me, I know.

But: I’ve been spending a lot of my time, lately, thinking about “triangle-trade” strategies — old-style funding mechanisms that we were happy to forget all about when money was easy.

So picture a buy-and-hold investor with 100% equity who wants the best deal he can get when he sells his former rental home. Why not do a lease-purchase instead of a straight sale? The investor can help his buyers accumulate a down-payment, perhaps working with them to improve their credit score at the same time. The investor gets a higher purchase price, the buyers get a lower monthly payment, everybody wins.

Or how about selling with a contract-for-deed? There are a lot of people out there with great incomes but lousy credit — more every day. If an investor — or ordinary homeowner — is willing to take on the risk of a carrying back a note, the home can sell now, rather than languishing on the market.

Or if the seller isn’t able to carry the whole mortgage, how about carrying back a second loan? If the seller has the equity, and if that will swing the balance with the buyer’s lender, it can make sense.

San Diego Realtor Don Reedy has come up with his own blast from the past: Parents help their kids get into homes by co-signing on the loan and helping with the payments, then share in the equity on resale.

Single people or single parents or childless couples could do the same sort of thing with a larger home: Go in on the home together as tenants-in-common, using their combined income to qualify for the loan, then paying the mortgage and sharing in the equity on a pro-rated basis.

Buyers are not in short supply, nor are homes available for sale. Creativity could make all the difference, going forward, in putting workable deals together.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
For some, the most financially-astute course of action may be to fake their way to foreclosure

Looking for some good news in the Phoenix residential real estate market? So is everyone else.

New foreclosures are down, as are new foreclosure filings. Lenders are working with homeowners to help them stay in their homes, just in time for Christmas. That’s good news right?

Maybe. It turns out that, of the folks who negotiated loan workouts in the first quarter of 2008, 60% are back in default on their loans.

It gets worse. The typical newer stucco and tile West Valley tract home lost 7.41% of its value. In November. Year-over-year, that house is down 35.46%. Compared to its high in December of 2005, that property is down 48%.

Now there is a silver lining. If you bought your home in 2003 or before, and if you have resisted the impulse to refinance it, you’re probably still ahead of the game, at least by a little bit. And with interest rates at historic lows, this might be the time, finally, to refinance to lower payment.

And investors and first-time homebuyers could not have things better: The selection of available homes is still very broad, prices are below replacement costs, and interest rates are deliciously low.

Better news — for people who don’t own homes: Prices could go a lot lower, and interest rates could drop even more.

But what, then, is the implication for loan workouts? Until home prices stabilize and start to rise again, a loan workout against substantial negative equity might not make the best financial sense.

As we talked about last week, the hit on your credit rating from a foreclosure is a terrible thing. But it’s plausible to me that you could recover from that faster than your home will once again be worth what you’re paying for it.

And that’s the worst news of all: We have mismanaged our economy so dreadfully that, for many people, the most financially-astute course of action they can take is to pretend to be deadbeats, to fake their way to foreclosure. It worked on Wall Street and it can work on Mockingbird Lane, too.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Seriously, who’s a better risk for a mortgage than someone who has already lost a home to foreclosure?

We talked last week about credit flexibility among merchants as they try to find ways around the banking crunch. The flip side of the same coin is how the credit marketplace will react, going forward, to home foreclosures.

You’ve heard all your life that a foreclosure is second only to a bankruptcy in the way it will ruin your credit. This is still true, but “ruin” may turn out to be an adjustable calamity.

Here’s why: A lot of people are going through foreclosure. Ninety percent or more of homeowners are unaffected by the wave of bank repossessions, but that still leaves millions of people who are going to have a foreclosure on their credit for the next seven years.

What’s going to happen to those folks when they go to the furniture store or the jewelry store or the car dealership? They might end up paying a higher interest rate, but they’re still going to get financing.

I have been advising my investor clients for months to ignore recent foreclosures on credit reports. Past performance on every other sort of credit account matters a lot. But if landlords refuse to rent to folks who have lost their homes, they will be turning away half or more of the tenant population.

My take is that, right now, a recent foreclosure is like hospital debt: If everyone else was getting paid before, during and after the financial catastrophe, you just have to look past the elephant in the room.

And here’s the funny part: I am sure this will apply to home loans in due course, also. If mortgage money remains freely available, lenders will find a way to overlook recent foreclosures in order to underwrite new home loans.

We can hope that, this time, interest rates will reflect the true risk lenders are taking on. But this country runs on credit. Just because a borrower recently defaulted on a six-figure debt, that’s no reason to withhold the unlimited boon that is homeownership.

In America, we can sell ourselves on anything — provided we don’t have to pay for it today.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Someday soon we may have to turn back the clock on home lending

Furniture stores are offering weekly payments. Department stores and jewelry stores are making Christmas easier with layaway plans.

Check the calendar. Did someone dial the clock back to 1968?

Not quite, but the credit crunch has got us looking backwards in time to try to remember how we used to do business, back before easy credit made things so easy.

Here’s the dirty little secret no one shared with you: For many, many years, the business of America has been credit.

Car dealerships don’t sell cars, they sell financing, selling your loan at a discount as soon as your tires hit the pavement.

Furniture stores don’t sell furniture, they use your desire for new furniture to get you to sign a promissory note.

One of the best protections of your financial interests is called Regulation Z. The Z reportedly stands for Zales, the easy credit jewelry store.

New home builders are in the same game. That’s why the incentives are so much better if you use the builders’ lender.

And that’s why there’s no interest for the first six months. Or no payments at all for the first two years. And all it takes is one quick signature…

But those days are done. Consumers — and corporations — are defaulting on debt like never before in history. The buyers of promissory notes aren’t buying any longer. Instead, they’re in Washington begging for bailouts.

And that leaves the furniture stores and the jewelry stores back in the merchandise business. They need to come up with ways to get people with no money to part with what little they have — a little at a time — in order to have any sort of cash flow at all.

And all this will come to real estate, too. We still have easy credit, but when interest rates start to climb, we’ll see our own kinds of “old fashioned” financing arrangements: Seller carrybacks, land contracts, wraps, lease purchases, etc.

We may be headed into tough times, but we still have a roadmap from 1968 to show us how to sell actual economic values and not just easy credit.

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
A workout loan can be a win-win solution to avoiding foreclosure

We talked last week about lender “workout” loans — a scheme lenders have come up to keep homes from falling into foreclosure. The premise is simple: If you can’t pay your mortgage, the lender will write you a new loan that anyone could pay.

I’m not kidding. Let’s say you bought a house in 2005 for $300,000. If you put nothing down, your payment might be $1,500 a month — not counting taxes and insurance. But the market value of the home is now $150,000 — a $750 mortgage payment.

As an investment, your home isn’t performing all that well. You bought at the top of the market, and you probably can’t even sell at a loss.

Worse news: Your hours at work have just been cut back.

You’re not in foreclosure. You’re making your payments. But you are an excellent candidate for what lenders call “jingle mail” — mailing in your keys and your deed. This would wreck your credit — for a while — but you’re looking at wrecked credit anyway.

But wait. Your lender’s workout department wants to speak to you before you do anything rash. If you qualify — which means if you have income — they might suggest something like rolling both of your mortgages into a new interest-only third mortgage at a very low interest rate.

Your existing monthly obligation of $1,500 will accrue month-by-month as new debt by negative amortization. In two or three or five years, you will resume paying on your old debt while you continue to pay down the new debt accrued on the third mortgage.

If this sounds silly, it’s because it is. The lenders are doing everything they can to make bad debt look good — temporarily. But a workout could be a win-win for you. If the market rebounds strongly, you can refinance all three notes. And, if not, you will have lived almost rent-free for the next few years before you lose the home in foreclosure.

P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. But who would ever expect to find suckers running our banks?

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Restoring a bargain-priced lender-owned home is easy — if you have cash — but a HUD 203k rehab loan makes it easy even is you don’t

Last week we talked about troubled homes and how they can be restored to livability. That’s fine if you’re an investor with pockets full of cash. But what if you’re an ordinary home-buyer? How can you pick up a bargain-priced home and then refurbish it to its former homey comfort?

If you’re buying with an FHA loan, chances are the home is going to have to be at least partially restored before you can close on it. FHA loans require a more-rigorous appraisal, and any defects rendering the home uninhabitable will have to be corrected before you can proceed.

So if the range is missing from the kitchen, it will have to be replaced. If the water heater is broken, it will have to be repaired. If the pool is green, it will either have to be restored to swimmable condition or drained.

Who is responsible for these repairs? Normally, habitability issues would fall to the seller. But most foreclosure properties are sold “as-is” — take it or leave it. If you have cash, you can pay for the repairs prior to close of escrow and then move in as planned.

But what if you don’t have that kind of money?

One solution is to write your repair issues into your purchase contract. If the seller agrees to restore the pool and replace the range, you’ve dealt with the habitability problem in advance.

Another option is to take advantage of HUD’s 203k rehabilitation program. With a 203k loan the loan underwriter can attach what amounts to a construction loan onto the primary purchase loan. So you could buy a lender-owned home for $100,000 and finance an additional $10,000 to refurbish the kitchen after close of escrow. The appraiser will assess the value the home will have after the improvements have been made.

As you might expect, the fine print is extensive, but for an FHA 203k loan in Phoenix your purchase price plus rehab costs can run as high as $362,000. At 3.5% down, that’s an easy way into a nicely upgraded home.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
Other types of credit may be feeling the crunch, but home mortgages are still readily available

Bad news about the economy is coming in from all directions, so you may be in the mood for some good news: There is plenty of money available for home loans.

By taking over FannieMae and FreddieMac, the federal government has essentially nationalized the secondary mortgage market. The lenders themselves are still private entities, but the government’s loan guarantees are viewed as being so strong that, by now, virtually all residential real estate loans are coming through Fannie, Freddie, the FHA or the VA.

The other way of saying the same thing: There is virtually no secondary mortgage market left for non-conforming or sub-prime loans.

So while you may have trouble getting new car financing or a loan for your business, you should have no problem getting a home loan — if you qualify and if the amount you’re borrowing falls within the limits set by the four government agencies guaranteeing home loans.

And there’s the rub: For most of the Phoenix area, qualifying for a conforming loan should be no problem. But higher-priced homes are sold with non-conforming “jumbo” loans, which are difficult to obtain right now and come at much higher interest rates.

Using an FHA loan, it is still possible to buy a home with “nothing down.” FHA borrowers are obliged to pay a 3.5% down payment, but this can be offset by the $7,500 tax credit incorporated in the mortgage relief bill passed in July. FHA borrowers can ask the seller for up to 6% in closing costs, so they can take possession of the home for no money out of pocket.

But there’s a catch: To obtain an FHA loan, the home will have to pass a rigorous FHA appraisal, which will eliminate many foreclosed homes unless the seller is willing to correct the most serious defects.

All that notwithstanding, while the financial sky might be roiling with dark clouds, real estate is still a silver lining. Because of the government’s loan guarantees, lenders are willing to take risks on homes loans much more readily than on other types of credit.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
In a declining market, buying a short sale is too tall an order

Is it time to kick the stilts out from under short sales?

Right now in most neighborhoods in the Phoenix area, the houses that will draw the most attention from buyers will be either short sales or lender-owned homes. They’ll be in all states of repair, but the prices will be very aggressive.

And of those homes, the lender-owned homes will actually sell. They may be completely trashed, but the people whose job it is to sell those properties are judged by how quickly they can unload non-performing assets. Make an aggressive offer and you’ll get a aggressive deal.

There are downsides, of course. You can inspect all you want, but don’t expect repairs. Because of this, many lender-owned homes will not qualify for FHA or VA financing. And once escrow closes, you’ll have to restore the home to livable condition.

By contrast, a short-sale home might be in better condition. And it might be even more aggressively priced. The trouble is, the price in the MLS listing will be meaningless. The seller can approve that price, but the seller’s lender has to approve it as well. And the people who approve short sales aren’t judged by how quickly they sell the home but by how much money they bring in.

The lender can take from 60 to 90 days to respond to your offer for a short sale home. And the response may be to counter at a higher price. If you counter back, you may wait another 30 days for a response.

Here’s the worst part about this unwieldy procedure: Home prices are still falling in the Valley. You could wait months to get approval on a contract for a house that is now worth tens of thousands of dollars less than what you offered for it.

My take? We need to cut short sales off at the knees. It seems foolish for Realtors to take them as listings, and beyond foolish to encourage buyers to pursue them. Lender-owned homes are offered by motivated sellers. Short sales are a waste of time.

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by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
This endless election season may give the real estate market time to self-correct before new legislation can make things worse

Looking for a silver lining amidst the black clouds of financial news? Here’s one: The fact that we’re in the middle of an election campaign gives us at least a fighting chance of solving our own problems without more government interference in the real estate market.

Everything that’s happened so far has been a triumph for the government approach to what should be free markets. Since the 1930s, the Federal government has been guaranteeing home loans. That made it easier for Americans to buy homes, but it dulled that flinty due diligence we expect in bankers.

Our tax laws favor homeownership with deductions, credits, capital gains exclusions and favorable loan terms. It’s nice to save on taxes, but these incentives induce us to own homes where we might otherwise do something else with our money.

In the recent past, the Federal government decided everyone should own a home, no matter what. After 9/11, the Federal Reserve Bank reduced the cost of money to almost nothing. Hundreds of different arms of government at all levels gave away financial incentives to homeownership. And the U.S. Treasury seemed to hint that American mortgage-backed securities were as safe as houses.

This has turned out to have unhappy consequences. That old-style flinty banker could never conceive of houses losing even 20% of their value, where the Phoenix market has given back twice that much since the market peaked.

Even so, the sky has not fallen. Wealth is not dollars, wealth is the productive power of the American economy. The majority of Americans still have significant equity in their homes, with many of them being owned outright.

What’s happened is that lenders and their financiers and, unfortunately, the American taxpayer, have taken a hit to the wallet. If the Federal government can restrain itself from overreacting, we’ll dig ourselves out in due course. And that’s why we’re blessed by this election: It will be at a least a year before the Feds can marshall any significant new legislation, and, by then, we could be well on our way to solving our own problems.

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