Real Estate Insights

The National Association of Realtors publishes the Real Estate Insights monthly. If you want a copy of the latest issue in pdf format, just drop me an e-mail.

There are some market indicator statistics that are published in this newsletter. A quick glance includes the following:
Existing home inventory is up.
Existing home sales is down 1% from March.
Housing Affordability - falling prices will entice buyers back into the market
Mortgage Rates have climbed to just over 6%.

For your copy, just send me a quick e-mail. Back issues are also available.

Microsoft Office Problem

I recently was having a problem with PowerPoint 2007 running very slowly. A switch from slide to slide in the editing view, would take anywhere from 4-20 seconds. Just typing a word would take 5 seconds per word!  This was getting very annoying.

There are several good suggestions from others in the community about loading a local printer driver, changing graphics hardware acceleration, among other things. Here’s a list:

Read more

How’s THAT going?

When I meet people for the first time, they usually ask THE question when I mention that I’m in real estate. The question: “How’s THAT going?” or “Isn’t that a tough business?” or “Isn’t it hard to sell homes right now?” or somthing else to the effect.  Frankly, the real estate market is not as bad as the press makes it out to be. We’ve seen an up-tick in the amount of house showings, as well as houses that go pending. I got quite a bit of interest for one particular house with the on-line marketing model that I use. In fact, that house sold in 2 weeks. Of course, it was priced right, staged nicely, and showed well.

The market isn’t really that bad right now. It certainly isn’t as robust as previous years, but houses still sell. People still buy. Real estate transactions still take place. Business goes on.

Just Sold

Sorry folks. The best first-time house is now gone. This lovely cottage in Arden Hills sold quickly.

Microsoft Office vs Open Office

Is Open Office a viable alternative to Microsoft Office? The short answer is maybe. If you don’t need to share files with anyone else, and you only generate documents for yourself, then Open Office may work for you.
I just recently installed it to get around a Microsoft problem. But unfortunately, it is not compatible with Microsoft Office documents. They claim to read and write Office files, but in reality, it does not work correctly.
If you open a powerpoint file in Open Office Impress (the presentation software), it butchers the PowerPoint, and you’ll have to move every element on every slide around. It also doesn’t support the nice shading that PowerPoint does. Then when you save the file, and open it back up in PPt, everything is messed up.
Same goes for Word and Excel files. Open Office software is great, if you don’t need compatibility with anyone else, or if you don’t want great looking documents, or if you don’t use any other computers that have Microsoft Office loaded. But if you want great looking documents, Microsoft Office is better. The newest version has fantastic drop shadows and the animation is much smoother than Open Office.
If you need to share documents with other people, Microsoft Office is the way to go, since most people already have it. If you need to use other computers that already have Microsoft Office loaded, you don’t want to learn how to use 2 different office suites. All the menus are totally different as well many of the keyboard shortcuts. I really wanted Open Office to work, but the above requirements rule out Open Office. Sometimes you just get what you pay for. Read more

Difference between Short Sale and Foreclosure

What’s the difference between a Short Sale and a Foreclosure?

A Short Sale is when the homeowner owes more than the property is worth, and cannot pay back the difference. They are short of full payoff. Here’s an example: Let’s say the homeowner buys a house for $200,000, with a primary mortgage of $160,000, and a secondary mortgage of $40,000. 2 years later, they need to sell the house but the values have dropped. Now the house is worth $170,000. If they put the house on the market at $200,000, they will get no buyers interested in the house and no offers. If they put the house on the market at $170,000, they will have to bring $30,000 to sell the house, or see if the bank would take less for the house than the full mortgage (a short sale).

The word Foreclosure can mean a couple of different things, depending on when in the foreclosure process that particular house is in. If a house is “in foreclosure” that usually means that they were served a notice of intent to foreclose. This is usually the period of the notice up to the sheriff sale. The redemption period is after the sheriff sale and before the bank takes the house back. This period is called the “redemption period” or “6 month right of redemption period” or usually “in foreclosure”.

After the bank takes the property back, it is called “foreclosed” or “bank owned” or “reo”, which stands for Real Estate Owned.

To sum it up, a short sale is when the seller owes more than what the house could sell for, and cannot come up with the difference, and a foreclosure is when the seller is delinquent on payments. A house can be be both a short sale and in foreclosure at the same time as well.