September 4th, 2010 by admin

RISMEDIA, September 3, 2010—(MCT)—For anyone under the age of 57, mortgage rates are now the lowest they’ve been during your life. This fact isn’t lost on a growing number of homeowners who have started a new wave of refinancings.

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported this month that refinancing applications are up 26% during the past four weeks and account for about 82% of all mortgage applications. Not since May 2009 has the volume of refinancing applications been higher.

“We are extremely busy, and it feels good,” said Charles DiPino, Jr., a senior vice president at New Penn Financial, a mortgage banker in Columbia, Md. “The phones are ringing off the hook.”

The calls started coming during the past month or so as rates continued to drop week after week. Mortgage giant Freddie Mac last week reported the average 30-year fixed-rate loan dropped to an average of 4.36%, a rate not seen since March 1953. (Harry S. Truman was president then, and the Academy Awards was shown on TV for the first time.)

Meanwhile, the 15-year fixed-rate mortgage hit a record low of 3.86% last week; while a one-year adjustable-rate mortgage averaged 3.52%, more than a percentage point lower than a year ago, according to Freddie Mac.

“Rates continue to hit new lows because of the weak U.S. economic recovery and the concern that it could fizzle altogether,” said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst with Bankrate.com.

But McBride and others advise against waiting to refinance in hopes that rates will fall further. If they do keep falling, that means the economy is getting even more anemic.

“You can win the battle and lose the war,” McBride said. “You might lose your job and not qualify for the lower rate.”

Refinancing to a lower rate, of course, can reduce your monthly payment. But some homeowners are refinancing to shorten the term of their loan, particularly baby boomers who don’t want this debt hanging over them in retirement, McBride said. And some want to trade in the uncertainty of an adjustable-rate mortgage for the dependability of a fixed-rate loan, he says.

Amy Crews Cutts, Freddie Mac’s deputy chief economist, said despite the uptick in refinancing applications, the numbers still aren’t as high as they should be, given the record-low rates.

Homeowners could be having difficulty qualifying, Cutts said. It could be their creditworthiness has deteriorated. Or their income dropped because of a loss of overtime or they were forced to take a new job that pays less, she says.

So who can qualify for these great rates?

“We’re still in a very tight credit market,” DiPino said. Homeowners with credit scores of 660 or 680 can qualify for refinancing, but the best rates are reserved for those with scores above 700, he says.

Also, generally if you don’t have a certain amount of equity in your home—20% for the very best rates—you might have to pony up more cash to get a new loan, McBride said. Homeowners’ equity has fallen along with a drop in home prices or because they took money out of their house the last time they refinanced, he says.

Some homeowners, though, won’t need that much equity in their homes to get super-low rates if they qualify for a streamlined refinancing program for loans owned by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, said DiPino, the mortgage banker. The program, which requires passing a credit check, is designed for those seeking a lower monthly payment, he says. In other words, you can’t refinance to tap the equity in your home.

Of course, there are other factors to consider, such as how long you’ll remain in the house before determining whether refinancing is for you. But with rates these low, it’s worth taking a look.

Should you refinance?
Mortgage rates hitting the lowest levels in decades have caused a rush of refinancing. Check out calculators at Bankrate.com to see if refinancing is worthwhile. The refinance calculator can tell you how much you’ll save and how long you must live in the house to recoup refinancing costs. The FICO score estimator will give you an idea of your credit score. To qualify for the best terms, you’ll need a score in the 700s.

(c) 2010, The Baltimore Sun.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

Copyright© 2010 RISMedia, The Leader in Real Estate Information Systems and Real Estate News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be republished without permission from RISMedia.

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RISMedia » Real Estate

September 3rd, 2010 by admin

RISMEDIA, September 2, 2010—“The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) is giving homeowners and buyers until October 4, 2010 to lock in a low monthly insurance premium,” said Gibran Nicholas, chairman of the CMPS Institute, an organization that trains and certifies mortgage bankers and brokers. “After October 4, the monthly insurance premiums on FHA loans will increase by over 63%.”

What does this mean for home buyers?
A home buyer purchasing a 0,000 home using a 3,000 FHA mortgage before October 4 would pay an insurance premium of .46 per month. If the same home buyer waits until after October 4, the insurance premium would jump to 8.01.

“In this example, the home buyer would lose .55 per month, or ,146 over a ten year timeframe,” Nicholas said. “Although the upfront mortgage insurance premium is going down after October 4, the real impact to the home buyer is actually a net increase in their out of pocket costs because the monthly premium is going up by 63%. Remember, sellers can pay the upfront premium or it can be financed into the loan amount, so home buyers rarely pay the upfront premium out of pocket. On the other hand, the increase in the monthly premiums will be paid right out of the home buyer’s pocket with their mortgage payment each month.”

Ironically, home buyers who plan to be in the mortgage for less than three years and decide to pay the upfront fee themselves (instead of having the seller pay it for them), may actually save money by waiting until after October 4 to apply for an FHA loan. “Home buyers with a short term time horizon may actually benefit from this change because the upfront premium will be reduced to 1% from 2.25%,” Nicholas said. This change will impact over 30% of the home buyers in today’s market who use FHA-insured financing. Home buyers considering an FHA loan should find and contact a CMPS professional in their area to discuss their options and what this means for their situation. Also, you can follow CMPS Institute on Twitter to stay updated on these and other mortgage and housing industry developments.

For more information, visit www.cmpsinstitute.org.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

Copyright© 2010 RISMedia, The Leader in Real Estate Information Systems and Real Estate News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be republished without permission from RISMedia.

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RISMedia » Home Buying 101

September 3rd, 2010 by admin

RISMEDIA, September 3, 2010—Following a sharp drop in the months immediately after the expiration of the home buyer tax credit, pending home sales have modestly risen, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator, rose 5.2% to 79.4 based on contracts signed in July from a downwardly revised 75.5 in June, but remains 19.1% below July 2009 when it was 98.1. The data reflects contracts and not closings, which normally occur with a lag time of one or two months.

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, cautioned that there would be a long recovery process. “Home sales will remain soft in the months ahead, but improved affordability conditions should help with a recovery,” he said. “But the recovery looks to be a long process. Home buyers over the past year got a great deal, and buyers for the balance of this year have an edge over sellers. For those who bought at or near the peak several years ago, particularly in markets experiencing big bubbles, it may take over a decade to fully recover lost equity.”

Yun added, “Affordability could reach a generational high in the second half of this year because of rock-bottom mortgage interest rates, helped partly by the Fed’s very accommodative monetary policy. The loan underwriting standards are tighter, but home buyers can improve their chances of getting a loan by staying well within their budget.”

The PHSI in the Northeast rose 6.3% to 62.5 in July but is 21.1% below a year ago. In the Midwest the index increased 4.1% to 66.7 but remains 25.7% below July 2009. Pending home sales in the South rose 1.2% to an index of 86.3, but are 15.6% lower than a year ago. In the West the index jumped 11.6% to 95.0 but is 17.6% below July 2009.

The national index had fallen 29.9% in May and another 2.8% in June.

For more information, visit www.realtor.org.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

Copyright© 2010 RISMedia, The Leader in Real Estate Information Systems and Real Estate News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be republished without permission from RISMedia.

RISMedia » Real Estate

September 2nd, 2010 by admin

RISMEDIA, September 2, 2010—What’s the number one absolute best way to get more organic traffic to your real estate blog, website or lead capture pages?

Content creation. (“But, what on earth am I supposed to be writing about or videoing, and how will it get me business?”)

Don’t worry—it’s not your fault that you don’t know what kind of content to create, it’s your broker’s for not grabbing you and shaking a niche out of you.

Here’s the thing: 99 out of 100 real estate brokers out there are just plain ignorant or willfully blind to this next point—If everybody in your office was mandated to create just one piece of targeted, niche-focused content per week (or even better per business day), your office could surely dominate the local marketplace in short order.

We’ve talked about this concept a number of times before, and a few months ago we detailed a plan for how this might work, called the 2010 Real Estate Broker Market Domination Plan. The plan itself lays out a strategy for how you might go about creating an architecture for leveraging agent created content to zoom the GCI of your office or team, but it doesn’t go too much into specifics about what kind of content you might create.

So here’s a list of possible topics you and your team might be contributing to a central real estate blog monster site on a regular basis.

9 killer niche content creation ideas for real estate agents and brokers:

Before you read the rest of this, imagine that you have one person on your team assigned to each of these ideas, with the requirement that they deliver the related content to the site you own on a regular basis. Or if you are a single person shop, simply pick one or more and make it your job to create one piece of content for your real estate blog or website each and every day.

1. Weekly market update – Take a 5 minute video or screencast interpreting data from your MLS and the general mood amongst buyers and agents in order to deliver a public update on the state of the local real estate marketplace

2. Daily/weekly transaction report - Cut and paste the reported transactions from your MLS as this will garner a lot of organic traffic especially long tail stuff related to property addresses in your area. Be sure to include “real estate sales transactions” in the title of each post—wherever you are, people are searching those keywords.

3. Restaurant of the week - Want to charm the pants off of a local restaurant owner and provide a valuable resource for folks relocating to your area? Do a restaurant review once a week and be sure to include a picture of your dish and why you loved it so much. Chances are good that especially for smaller restaurants and markets, your post will rank organically for people doing a direct search of the restaurant name.

4. Business of the week – This is the same as the restaurant idea listed above: recommend doing actual video tours of each business highlighting the coolest service/product to buy from the place. Can you see this helping you gain top of mind status with the local business owner, then a bunch of referrals as he talks you up to other patrons?

5. Local dog parks – People moving to your area with pets are going to do a search engine search for dog parks in the area. Talk about a non-competitive keyword.

6. “Where in (insert your area here)?” - Take a random photo of a person, place, or thing in your area and post it to your site. Offer a prize to the first reader who guesses what the picture is. Be sure to offer an e-mail signup for folks to receive your latest pictures so they can be one of the first to take a guess.

7. Weekly neighborhood news update – Give each agent in your office an assigned neighborhood and require a piece of hyper local content. Run with this for a month and see what happens to your recruiting/retention efforts.

8. Resident interviews – Interview someone in your area and ask them what they like about their town, what they like to do, where the best place to grab a drink with friends is and anything else along those lines. This is an easy way to generate content that’s interesting to onlookers.

9. Contract chronicles – Grab a clause from one of your real estate forms and tear it to pieces—a nice way to demonstrate competence while creating content that’s sure to be indexed and searched. If you don’t already have an article and a downloadable copy of the standard “Residential Lease” for your state on your website, be sure to get this on your site now.

Here’s the thing, the content you create today will most likely equal traffic to your website tomorrow, next week, next month, next year and probably years and years for now.

If you invest a few minutes creating content for your website today, it’ll pay off for years to come.

If you get 20-50-100 agents in your office each investing a few minutes a week to create content, it’ll pay off for years to come, help you establish local market dominance and make your website the most valuable asset your business has—your piece of cyberspace could be worth 6 figures a year from now if you play it right.

Now that we’ve given you nine great ideas, find out the simplest way to put those ideas into action (hint: its video) by visiting http://realestatevideotoolbox.com.

Josh Schoenly and Ryan Hartman are co-owners of ReTechulous, LLC.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

Copyright© 2010 RISMedia, The Leader in Real Estate Information Systems and Real Estate News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be republished without permission from RISMedia.

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RISMedia » Real Estate

September 1st, 2010 by admin

RISMEDIA, September 1, 2010—With existing U.S. home sales diving to 15-year lows and millions of homes stagnant on the market, home sellers are suffering increasing anxiety, uncertainty and financial stress. To address these symptoms, motivational author Joan Gale Frank has published Home Seller’s Blues (And How To Beat Them).

“This is the first book of its kind to cheer people on and up when their home isn’t selling,” says Frank, a long-time real estate investor domestically and abroad. “It also provides hundreds of practical tips on how to sell a home faster using buyer/seller psychology.”

When her own Arizona home didn’t sell for a year, Frank gathered extensive home selling advice from top real estate experts, home stagers, landscape artists, psychologists and marketing whizzes. Her research paid off. Frank said, “I was able to pinpoint potential buyers and appeal directly to them, which helped sell my house faster. I also discovered how to be happy instead of miserable while waiting for a buyer.”

Home Seller’s Blues was created to share Frank’s findings with other frustrated home sellers. It features comprehensive home selling tips, including quick, inexpensive ways to make a house memorable, attracting more buyers, finding the best Realtor, win/win pricing, easy ways to get a house ready to show in minutes and identifying little problems that cause home rejection.

Several chapters of the book are dedicated to overcoming negative emotions ranging from fear and frustration to insomnia and helplessness. The book also emphasizes how to enjoy life during the entire home selling experience. “Ms. Frank’s insights into the emotions, psychology and real estate strategies of home selling are right on,” says Alexis Halmy, a Portland, Oregon Realtor.

Home Seller’s Blues is available for .99 at the Apple iBookstore, on Amazon’s Kindle, and at http://www.homesellersblues.com. Frank also provides inspiration and often humorous home selling advice on her blog, http://www.housesellingblues.com.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

Copyright© 2010 RISMedia, The Leader in Real Estate Information Systems and Real Estate News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be republished without permission from RISMedia.

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RISMedia » How to Sell Your Home

September 1st, 2010 by admin

RISMEDIA, August 30, 2010—(MCT)—Maria Olmo doesn’t like her chances of paying off her new, 40-year mortgage. “I’ll die before it’s paid off,” said Olmo, who got her 30-year mortgage modified because she was at risk of losing her home to foreclosure. “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in years. They didn’t take my age or my income into consideration.” Since last year, companies servicing delinquent mortgages have been under orders from the federal government to modify the loans rather than foreclose on them.

The goal is to cut the monthly mortgage payments so they are less than 30% of the homeowner’s income.

More than half of the 390,000 mortgages already permanently modified through the federal government’s Making Home Affordable Program have lengthened loan terms—in most cases extended from 30 years to 40 years, according to lenders and federal reports.

Just six months earlier, in January, only about 42% of the loans modified at that point had been similarly lengthened. The U.S. Treasury Department has not released the number of struggling homeowners who have been put into 40-year loans, but lenders say that’s the predominant new term for modified mortgages.

Meanwhile, the number of mortgages that have been changed by trimming the principal on “underwater” houses held steady during that time between 27 and 28% of all modifications. All of the modified loans have had their interest rates reduced.

Orlando lawyer Matt Englett, who specializes in foreclosures, said he advises his older clients against lengthening their terms to four decades. “If you’re 60 and you’re in a 40-year note, you’re really just renting it from the bank, and you’re paying more than you would from someone else you could be renting from,” Englett said. “This is what the car dealers sell—they sell payments. That’s what the mortgage industry has gotten into.”

Rocky Stubbs, Chase vice president for homeowner preservation, said lenders participating in federal foreclosure-prevention programs are opting for interest-rate reductions and longer loan terms before principal write-offs because the government called for that specific, stepped approach to modifying home loans.

He noted that mortgage companies are prohibited by the federal Equal Opportunity Credit Act from considering the age of homeowners when putting them into loan products.

“We cannot look at the credit application of a 30-year-old customer any differently than we would a 90-year-old customer,” he said during a recent interview.

Homeowners who have agreed to go from a 30-year mortgage to a 40-year home loan can always pay more than the monthly minimum if they want to treat it like a 30-year loan and pay off the mortgage sooner, Stubbs added. The modifications typically don’t have any prepayment penalties.

But in east Orlando, Olmo said she can hardly afford her home’s new, ,300-a-month loan payments because she is struggling with less income since her husband is now unemployed. Rather than adding years onto the mortgage, she said, her lender should have accepted that the house has lost value and should have cut some of the loan’s principal.

Englett, the foreclosure lawyer, said 40-year loans make little sense financially, particularly for seniors who face paying the upfront interest possibly for the rest of their lives.

“If you look at the numbers, if someone is 60 years old and they extend their mortgage to 40 years, oftentimes they’re paying 50 percent more to own the house than they would pay if they were renting in the same neighborhood,” he said. “And when they go to sell, they still won’t have enough to pay it off.”

Despite such warnings, Englett said, most older clients opt for the reduced interest rate and longer term—”they get attached to the house and want to stay there.”

(c) 2010, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

Copyright© 2010 RISMedia, The Leader in Real Estate Information Systems and Real Estate News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be republished without permission from RISMedia.

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RISMedia » Homeowner’s Toolkit

September 1st, 2010 by admin

RISMEDIA, September 1, 2010—E-mail marketing lists are a necessity in any real estate market for industry professionals who are serious about getting their name and message in front of as many people as possible. While building an e-mail marketing contact list will take some time and dedication on your part, the following techniques provided by Melanie Attia, product marketing manager for Campaigner will help you create a list in no time.

Do’s

1. Leverage marketing programs you already have
No one can opt in if they don’t know you have valuable information to share, so don’t forget to:
- Include a line in your email that links to the sign-up page on your website whenever you purchase or rent an email list for a campaign.
- Lead back to your website from listings you have on partner or affiliate sites.
- Bring a computer to tradeshows and ask anyone who visits your booth to sign-up for your emails.
- Keep sign-up cards by your local store’s register.
- Refer listeners to your website in your radio ads.

2. Make it easy to opt in
Once people are on your site, make it as easy as possible to opt in by having a very visible link on the home page, or other webpage(s). Signing up should take as little time as possible, so don’t ask for too much information at this point.

3. Know your target audience
When someone opts in, ask only a few questions, like company name, industry, or location. You can also include a survey in your emails to gauge interest. Understand where people are coming from so you can make adjustments in future communications or promotions. One of the best resources for helping you expand your opt in list is your existing opt in list, so be sure to take advantage of it.

4. Consider the 4 C’s
Clear. Concise. Compelling. Customer-centric. When you write an email, put yourself in the reader’s shoes and ask, “Why shouldn’t I hit the delete key right now?” Your readers are not opting in because they want to hear a sales pitch. They have a need—to save time, money, or effort, and of course to improve productivity and success. Your message must be compelling enough to convince people to sign up, valuable enough to keep them wanting more and useful enough to pass along.

5. Pass it on
“Word-of-mouth” works in the online world too, it’s called “viral marketing.” A good message will be passed along. Your next job is to make it easy to forward your email to others, who will forward it to others, and so on. If the people it’s forwarded to like what they see, they will opt in too, so include forward or subscribe instructions like a one-click “forward” link in every email you send.

Don’ts

1. Offer fabulous prizes for signing up
While this might seem like a good idea, you’ll end up with subscribers who want to win a prize, not learn useful information about your company and/or products. The prize should be the useful information you provide, so offer a newsletter, a free seminar, or more information about your products and services.

2. Deluge your subscribers with too many emails
How much is too much? It depends on your message, so set expectations. Let people know what they’re in for before they hit the ‘submit’ button. After they’ve had time to digest the information, ask a sample from your list what is the ‘right’ number of emails; they’ll let you know. Otherwise you’ll find out the hard way with an unsubscribe request.

3. Be everything to everyone
Your sign-up messaging, as well as the information in all of your emails should be focused and hit a nerve. Don’t be afraid to address audience’s needs one at a time. Hit the crucial ones first, and save the rest for later to keep them on your list and wanting more. If you’re too generic, in hopes of getting more people to opt in, you’ll end up being “nothing to everyone.”

4. Spend too much money acquiring names
An opt in list is a valuable asset and that means an investment on your part to build and maintain it. Be sure to budget appropriately and ahead of time, find the most cost-effective ways for reaching your target audience and know how much each name will cost. Keep in mind potential revenue, and lifetime value of each customer, and chose accordingly.

5. Live in a vacuum
Continually view, read and explore how other companies or organizations—from competitors and partners, to businesses in completely different industries—build their opt in lists. Most will use the same tried-and-true techniques, but you’ll spot an occasional guerilla tactic that will inspire you to try something new—it just might work for you too.

Melanie Attia is the product marketing manager for Campaigner.

For more information, visit www.campaigner.com.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

Copyright© 2010 RISMedia, The Leader in Real Estate Information Systems and Real Estate News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be republished without permission from RISMedia.

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RISMedia » Real Estate

August 31st, 2010 by admin

RISMEDIA, August 31, 2010—A home buying guide published recently by the Appraisal Institute teaches home buyers when to buy, how to find a real estate agent, how to choose the best home on the market and more—all from the uniquely unbiased perspective of a real estate appraiser. An Insider’s Guide to Home Buying by Mark R. Rattermann, MAI, SRA, notes that real estate appraisers are professionally trained to render an objective opinion of a home’s value. Because they are not paid by sales commissions, they have the unbiased perspective needed to help home buyers weigh their options carefully, make logical decisions and effectively navigate the sales negotiation and mortgage application processes.

Rattermann provides expert advice that will help protect consumers from abuse, explains biases that exist in the real estate industry and provides clues to possible problems, potentially protecting home buyers from significant financial losses.

In the book’s introduction, Rattermann writes: “The goal of this publication is to help home buyers ask the right questions. In many cases, people wish they had asked a few more questions before making significant decisions. Because the real estate industry is constantly changing, buying real estate requires you to stay current, research popular trends and attitudes and become an informed buyer.”

A real estate appraiser and agent in Indianapolis, Rattermann has worked in the real estate industry since 1979. He has written seven books about real estate and appraisals, some of which have been translated into Korean, Greek and other languages, and has lectured on a variety of real estate topics in 45 states and five countries. He has written 15 real estate training seminars and also writes on residential topics for The Appraisal Journal, the Appraisal Institute’s quarterly technical and scholarly publication. The Appraisal Institute is one of the nation’s largest professional organizations of real estate appraisers.

For more information, visit www.appraisalinstitute.org.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

Copyright© 2010 RISMedia, The Leader in Real Estate Information Systems and Real Estate News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be republished without permission from RISMedia.

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RISMedia » Home Buying 101

August 30th, 2010 by admin

RISMEDIA, August 31, 2010—Slow month? I’m sorry, slow year? As any agent knows, it’s tough out there in today’s housing market. But others around you are not only surviving, they’re thriving. So what is it that is keeping you from achieving success? Here are four potential reasons you’re not tapping into your potential.

The Economy
Okay, so this one is a given, really. With the housing market currently weighing down the entire economy, it only makes sense that your grand days of selling a neighborhood of houses a month are over.

But for those of you who have been in the game for a while, you knew that the all-you-can-sell buffet was not going to last forever. Now that the plates have been cleared and the bus boy has wiped the table clean, it’s time you learn how to cook for yourself. Luckily, you’ve probably been through this before.

And for those who joined in when the getting was good, you’re now seeing how hard it is to be an agent in a down market.

Just think, though: there was a time when interest rates were at 19%. If agents could move houses then, you can move houses now.

Your Approach
Over-the-top selling is so 2006. Nowadays, people are craving honesty, not salesmanship. Gone are the days when you could convince a home buyer that the ticky-tacky two story on the strawberry lot ten miles from the highway would only increase in value. Buying was more about leveraging and less about lasting consequences, since staying in the home for five or more years was not too likely.

Today though, you need to sell a home, not just a building. Buyers today are not looking for a quick turn-around or a beefy boost to their portfolio. They want a haven. And with the old adage that ‘home values can only rise’ having been thrown out the second story window, if they’re buying, it’s to settle down for decades, not years.

Your job now is to perfect the tie between house and human, to make sure that the building you’re selling is a home and not just bricks and mortar. Your approach should be to listen more, talk less and seek out the perfect fit.

Your Tools
You don’t get it—that bus stop bench is in the perfect location. So why hasn’t anyone called?

Maybe it’s because you’re still mailing out postcards to potential clients with nary an e-mail address or website listed. With more than 90% of home buyers using the Internet to search for a home, if you do not have a Web presence, you might as well be using smoke signals to get your name out there.

New home buyers are looking to stay connected with you just like they would with anyone else in their lives. They want online access, so friend your clients on Facebook, use DotLoop’s text-alert system when negotiating a deal, and create an informative and helpful website for yourself.

After all, the only time a client is going to connect with you via a bench ad is when they are texting you while waiting at the bus stop.

Your Passion
Okay, you’re online, you’re genuine and you’re using all the right tools and online channels to communicate with your clients. So, why are you still stuck?

It may just be that you’re no longer interested in real estate. At least, not like you once were. And that’s okay. Before you declare that you’re an agent and always have been and that real estate is in your blood, take a minute to really ask yourself: do you care anymore?

Maybe you don’t, but perhaps you will again in the future. Or maybe it’s time to move onto another career path. With today’s shaky housing market, only the most fervent and passionate will be able to wade through.

The real estate industry is in the midst of a radical transformation. How you leverage technology, your approach and your passion will determine whether you will be an agent five years from now. Change is inevitable, but not always easy. But remember: change always starts with you.

Are you ready to crush it once again?

DotLoop was designed specifically to overcome the challenges of the traditional real estate negotiation process. DotLoop marries the technological with the traditional, creating a collaborative online environment that uses the Internet as a tool agents can use to connect with their clients, saving them time and money. Our system allows the agent and client the ability to interact on their own terms, dissolving distance and sending fax machines further into obsolescence.

For more information, visit www.dotloop.com.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

Copyright© 2010 RISMedia, The Leader in Real Estate Information Systems and Real Estate News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be republished without permission from RISMedia.

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RISMedia » Real Estate

August 29th, 2010 by admin

RISMEDIA, August 30, 2010—(MCT)—Maria Olmo doesn’t like her chances of paying off her new, 40-year mortgage. “I’ll die before it’s paid off,” said Olmo, who got her 30-year mortgage modified because she was at risk of losing her home to foreclosure. “This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in years. They didn’t take my age or my income into consideration.” Since last year, companies servicing delinquent mortgages have been under orders from the federal government to modify the loans rather than foreclose on them.

The goal is to cut the monthly mortgage payments so they are less than 30% of the homeowner’s income.

More than half of the 390,000 mortgages already permanently modified through the federal government’s Making Home Affordable Program have lengthened loan terms—in most cases extended from 30 years to 40 years, according to lenders and federal reports.

Just six months earlier, in January, only about 42% of the loans modified at that point had been similarly lengthened. The U.S. Treasury Department has not released the number of struggling homeowners who have been put into 40-year loans, but lenders say that’s the predominant new term for modified mortgages.

Meanwhile, the number of mortgages that have been changed by trimming the principal on “underwater” houses held steady during that time between 27 and 28% of all modifications. All of the modified loans have had their interest rates reduced.

Orlando lawyer Matt Englett, who specializes in foreclosures, said he advises his older clients against lengthening their terms to four decades. “If you’re 60 and you’re in a 40-year note, you’re really just renting it from the bank, and you’re paying more than you would from someone else you could be renting from,” Englett said. “This is what the car dealers sell—they sell payments. That’s what the mortgage industry has gotten into.”

Rocky Stubbs, Chase vice president for homeowner preservation, said lenders participating in federal foreclosure-prevention programs are opting for interest-rate reductions and longer loan terms before principal write-offs because the government called for that specific, stepped approach to modifying home loans.

He noted that mortgage companies are prohibited by the federal Equal Opportunity Credit Act from considering the age of homeowners when putting them into loan products.

“We cannot look at the credit application of a 30-year-old customer any differently than we would a 90-year-old customer,” he said during a recent interview.

Homeowners who have agreed to go from a 30-year mortgage to a 40-year home loan can always pay more than the monthly minimum if they want to treat it like a 30-year loan and pay off the mortgage sooner, Stubbs added. The modifications typically don’t have any prepayment penalties.

But in east Orlando, Olmo said she can hardly afford her home’s new, ,300-a-month loan payments because she is struggling with less income since her husband is now unemployed. Rather than adding years onto the mortgage, she said, her lender should have accepted that the house has lost value and should have cut some of the loan’s principal.

Englett, the foreclosure lawyer, said 40-year loans make little sense financially, particularly for seniors who face paying the upfront interest possibly for the rest of their lives.

“If you look at the numbers, if someone is 60 years old and they extend their mortgage to 40 years, oftentimes they’re paying 50 percent more to own the house than they would pay if they were renting in the same neighborhood,” he said. “And when they go to sell, they still won’t have enough to pay it off.”

Despite such warnings, Englett said, most older clients opt for the reduced interest rate and longer term—”they get attached to the house and want to stay there.”

(c) 2010, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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