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A short pay simply means you owe more on your home or property than what it’s worth. Many people who purchased a home in the past several years (with little or no down payment) now find themselves “upside down” in their homes, and maybe the financing on that purchase money loan or loans has reset to substantially higher payments. Read more.
We all want to hear stuff what makes us feel good (or at least not bad), but when you think about selling your home or other property you need wise counsel. What do I mean?
First, many sellers don’t have an accurate sense of the market value of their home for any number of reasons. And second, human nature being what it is (hungry real estate agents need your listing!), it can be tempting to a seller to hear an agent claim that if you list with them... Read more.
Real estate goes in cycles. During the heyday of exponential price increases a few years ago, sellers called the shots. It wasn’t unusual to have more offers than what you really wanted. We stopped taking offers on listings once we had ten!
In that environment, it wasn’t unusual to see commissions paid by the seller to the listing agent in the 1 – 1.5% range (plus whatever was to be paid to the buyer’s agent), and many discount brokers jumped into the market with those low commission structures. Brave souls sold their own homes For Sale By Owner (but that’s another topic). It was easy selling a home. Today, in a completely different market, a seller should pay… Read more.
Everybody generically calls the loan on their home a mortgage, but that’s technically not true in California for most of us. We have a Deed of Trust, or simply, a Trust Deed. When we borrow money with real estate as collateral, two documents are signed, one a private document (the “note”) and a public document (the Trust Deed). Read more.
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