Feb 23
Help Protect Your Home: Clear Your Roof of Snow. Plenty of homeowners in the United States live with the harsh realities of winter. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, residents in Rochester, New York, receive about 8 feet of snow each winter. Homeowners in cities such as Cleveland, Minneapolis and Denver typically can …
Feb 23
Mortgage Bills May Soon Be Simpler to Grasp. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed a standardized mortgage statement that sets out to make it easier to understand the information about your loan on one page. The proposed mortgage statement, released last week, includes a breakdown of such items as the amount paid from the …
Feb 22
Property sales up in the US and building sector confidence increases. Residential property sales in the United States edged upwards for the seventh month in a row in January, according to the latest RE/MAX national housing report. It shows that real estate sales are now 3.4% above levels seen a year earlier in the 53 …
Feb 21
Bernanke: Low Rates Will Help Banks. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, says keeping interest rates low will spur loan demand and eventually help improve banks’ profitability in the long run, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Fed has made a rare vow to keep key rates “exceptionally low” until late 2014. But banks have …
Feb 21
Agents: Attracting Business to You Every Time You Leave the House. Most real estate prospecting strategies focus on the pursuit of business, or going out there and actively looking for targets to prospect. Fair enough. But you can also generate a significant amount of business for yourself using attraction-based strategies that don’t require you to …
Feb 20
Housing Affordability Reaches New Records. Housing affordability rose to a record high during the fourth quarter of 2011, which means a home buyer’s purchasing power is greater than it ever has been before, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index. The index showed that 75.9 percent of all new and …
Feb 17
Home Builders Are Feeling More Optimistic. Signs are improving in the new-home market and builders are feeling more optimistic about where the real estate market is heading, after coming off last year’s worst year on record for new home construction. For the fifth consecutive month, builders confidence in the single-family home market increased in …
Feb 16
6 Ways to Capture Clients at Open Houses. Try these tips for turning your open houses into a dependable flow of income for your business. If you’re getting ready to hold an open house, lock the door. And forget about programming all your visitors’ numbers on your phone’s speed dial: You never want to call …
Feb 15
Obama seeks billions for home energy retrofits. In his $3.8 trillion budget for 2013, President Obama called Monday for $6 billion to expand home energy retrofits and $1 billion to promote electrical vehicles and build manufacturing innovation institutes. His budget makes another attempt at the Home Star program, which would give homeowners rebates for efficiency …
Feb 14
Could the Mortgage Deal Lead to a Jump in Foreclosures? A $25 billion mortgage settlement announced between major banks and state and government officials is supposed to bring aid to troubled home owners, but it could also bring a wave of new foreclosures, CNN Money reports. During the yearlong negotiations, some banks slowed down repossessing …
Feb 13
30-Year Mortgage Rates Hold at Record Lows. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 3.87 percent this week, matching last week’s all-time record low. As for other rates, they ticked up slightly this week, but still hovered around record lows compared to historical standards, Freddie Mac reports in its weekly mortgage market survey. “A strong January employment …
Feb 10
States Negotiate $26 Billion Agreement for Homeowners After months of painstaking talks, government authorities and five of the nation’s biggest banks have agreed to a $26 billion settlement that could provide relief to nearly two million current and former American homeowners harmed by the bursting of the housing bubble, state and federal officials said. It …
