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Friday, August 31, 2012

Real Estate Lingo For The Newbie


In today's real estate market there is a lot of uncertainty. The sub-prime mortgage crisis is the buzz word phrase that has a lot of people talking. One lesson that can be learned from this situation, is that it is so important for prospective homeowners to know what they are getting themselves into. Buying a home can be stressful, and overwhelming, but knowing what you are signing on for is paramount to securing an investment that will serve you well. A little education can go a long way. Below is a glossary of key terms associated with all things real estate. If you are a "newbie", familiarize yourself with these as you begin your real estate search:
We'll begin in the middle of the alphabet with "M" words, as "mortgages" seem to be the hot topic these days.
Mortgage: is a lien on the property that secures the Promise to repay a loan. A loan to finance the purchase of real estate, usually with specified payment periods and interest rates.
Mortgage broker: Is a professional who works for a firm that originates and processes loans for a number of lenders.
Mortgage banker: Is a company that originates loans and resells them to secondary mortgage lenders such as:Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac."Who????", you ask. Just, read on.
Fannie Mae: Is a sort of acronym which stands for Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA); a federally-chartered enterprise owned by private stockholder. This enterprise purchases residential mortgages and converts them into securities for sale to investors;by purchasing mortgages, Fannie Mae supplies funds that lenders may loan to potential home buyers.
Freddie Mac: Is another acronym of sorts is the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLM); a federally-chartered corporation that purchases residential mortgages, coverts them into securities,and sells them to investors, providing lenders with funds for new home buyers.
Mortgage insurance: Is a policy that protects lenders against some or most of the losses that can occur when a borrower defaults on a mortgage loan. Mortgage insurance is required primarily for borrowers with a down payment of less than 20% of the home's purchase price.
ARM: Adjustable Rate Mortgage is a mortgage loan subject to changes in interest rates. When rates adjust, ARM monthly payments increase or decrease at intervals determined by the lender. The change in monthly -payment amount, however, is usually subject to a Cap. "What is Cap in this case?", you ponder. Again, just read on...
Cap: Is a limit, such as that placed on an adjustable rate mortgage, on how much a monthly payment or interest rate can increase or decrease.
Assumable mortgage: Is a mortgage that can be transferred from a seller to a buyer; once the loan is assumed by the buyer the seller is no longer responsible for repaying it; there may be a fee and/or a credit package involved in the transfer of an assumable mortgage.
Amortization: Is the repayment of a mortgage loan through monthly installments of principal and interest. The monthly payment amount is based on a schedule that will allow you to own your home at the end of a specific time period.
Appraisal: Is a document that gives an estimate of a property's fair market value; an appraisal is generally required by a lender before loan approval to ensure that the mortgage loan amount is not more than the value of the property.
Balloon Mortgage: Is a mortgage that typically offers low rates for an initial period of time, after the said time period elapses, the balance is due or is refinanced by the borrower.
Bankruptcy: Is a federal law whereby a person's assets are turned over to a trustee and used to pay off outstanding debts. This typically occurs when someone owes more than they have the ability to repay.
Building code: Is based on a set of agreed upon safety standards within a specific area. A building code is a regulation that determines the design,construction, and materials used in building.
Credit bureau score: a number representing the likelihood a borrower may default. This number is based upon credit history and is used to determine ability to qualify for a mortgage loan.
Debt-to-income ratio: a comparison of gross income to housing and non-housing expenses. With the FHA, the-monthly mortgage payment should be no more than 29% of monthly gross income (before taxes) and the mortgage payment combined with non-housing debts should not exceed 41% of income.
EEM: Is short for an Energy Efficient Mortgage. This is an FHA program that helps home buyers save money on utility bills by enabling them to finance the cost of adding energy efficiency features to a new or existing home as part of the home purchase
Fair Housing Act: Is a law that prohibits discrimination in all facets of the home buying process on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or disability.
Home Inspection: Is an examination of the structure and mechanical systems to determine a home's safety; makes the potential home buyer aware of any repairs that may be needed.
Interest rate: Is the amount of interest charged on a monthly loan payment. This is usually expressed as a percentage.
Lease purchase: This exits to assist low- to moderate-income home buyers in purchasing a home. It allows them to lease a home with an option to buy. The rent payment is made up of the monthly rental payment plus an additional amount that is credited to an account for use as a down payment.
Lien: Is a legal claim against property that must be satisfied When the property is sold
PITI: Principal, Interest, Taxes, and Insurance. These are the four elements of a monthly mortgage payment. The payments of principal and interest go directly towards repaying the loan while the portion that covers taxes and insurance goes into an escrow account to cover the fees when they are due.
Pre-qualify: This is when a lender informally determines the maximum amount an individual is eligible to borrow.
Pre-payment: This is a payment of the mortgage loan before the scheduled due date; maybe Subject to a prepayment penalty.
Principal: The amount borrowed from a lender. The principal doesn't include interest or additional fees.
Real estate agent: Is an individual who is licensed to negotiate and arrange real estate sales; works for a real estate broker.
REALTOR ®: Is a real estate agent or broker who is a member of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATIONOF REALTORS, and its local and state associations.
Refinancing: Means paying off one loan by obtaining another. refinancing is generally done to secure better loan terms such as a lower interest rate on a loan.
Rehabilitation mortgage: Is a mortgage that covers the costs of rehabilitating (repairing or Improving) a property. Some rehabilitation mortgages, allow a borrower to roll the costs of rehabilitation and home purchase into one mortgage loan.
Sweat equity: Using your own labor to build or improve a property as part of the down payment
Title insurance: This is insurance that protects the lender against any claims that arise from arguments about ownership of the property;also available for home buyers.
Title search: Is a check of public records to be sure that the seller is the recognized owner of the real estate and that there are no unsettled liens or other claims against the property.
Of course, there are many more terms and different types of mortgage situations to explore and educate yourself on. But, the above definitions are a good start toward becoming acquainted with the language, lingo and important concepts in real estate.

Gordon Pate is a 5th generation resident of Bryan-College Station, his extensive knowledge of the area and its culture helps you get acquainted with Bryan-College Station Real Estate. He offers various homes for sale college station properties that satisfy what you need and what you want.




Thursday, August 30, 2012

Real Estate Lesson Learned: Is Big Better?


Copyright 2006 National Real Estate Network LLC
At one time in my life I was buying 7-8 Houses a month, fixing them up and then reselling them. Then I got the bright Idea that if I can buy and sell 7-8 a month, I can buy and sell 80. This was a choice that eventually led me to bankruptcy. This has not been that long ago. Twice in my life I have made a lot of money and then took on a large growth spurt and got a large learning experience in business failure. The last one resulted in bankruptcy.
It is hard when things are going well to not be seduced by more is better. When you have something working for you, it is easy to become overconfident and start to think of multiplying it. As with most things in life, you want to be sure when you take on something, that you complete it. Pumping up the volume puts you at risk of not having the structures and being set up to deliver on what you are committed to. You naturally encounter problems that were not present on a smaller scale. It is hard when things are going well to not be seduced by more is better. I had to learn personally that pride Goethe before the fall. The bottom line is that there are always good deals in Real Estate! I say measure your success one house at a time. Buy investor property, fix it up, resell it, rent, do a lease-option, but do it one house at a time.
Multiple Purchases?
One of the most common mistakes I see in business is where investors come into the business and think they need to do multiple houses at a time. Try this on: Try doubling the cost you think it will take to fix the property, doubling the time you think it will take to rehab the property and figure your holding costs doubled (insurance, mortgage payments, taxes, lights, gas, rehab cost).
Great deals in Real Estate don’t come in houses fixed and ready to sell. The great buys come from houses that need work. If you are just getting started, stick to cosmetic rehabs (paint and carpet), Don’t take on major rehabs. It will take time to develop rehab crew. The most successful people I see in Real Estate do one house at a time. Failures are great; if you look at them and ask what action was missing that would have made a difference?
Hard moneylenders?
One pitfall is using very expensive money. For years I ran a business financed on money from Real Estate Investors who are called hard moneylenders. They look at collateral and loan money based on receiving interest can be 18% or higher when you figure in the closing costs. When you get multiple properties in this condition, you will have interest payments that are going to be double and triple what conventional financing is in Real Estate.
Now combine this with the common lie we tell ourselves that we can repair the house and put it back on the market for sale or rent in a short time. Your overhead will rise because you will need a staff to manage and rehab everything. Can you see this is a recipe for disaster for everyone? Now if you are doing one house at a time, your overhead will probably stay very low, with very little staff. Therefore you have limited your expenditure of time, money and aggravation.
At one time, my overhead was in excess of $50,000.00 per month. I had to depend on other people to do everything, including checking the work. A hundred percent of the monies I was making went paying down my debts and I kept telling myself I would turn it around tomorrow. I found myself with houses that were not finished and houses being lost in foreclosure and for taxes. That left me a very motivated seller and bankruptcy was looming large. With my overhead still there, I attempted to wholesale deals. I decided I would no longer find, repair and resell homes. Instead I would find great buys and sell them to other investors.
Basically, I started my business over. It takes a great amount of time to cultivate a list of investors interested in buying deals. This business is built on the concept you can borrow you way out of debt, but it just does not work. You have family, friends, and business associates that may get hurt or destroyed. I’m not saying this to tell you a sad story, but rather in the hopes that by sharing it, someone else can avoid the pain of my mistakes. Take from this what you can learn for yourself. I am 53 years old and starting over. I now have the knowledge to build a business with the proper foundation. I teach Real Estate Investing class now that look for pitfalls and what is needed to do a successful deal one at a time.
My advice to you on handling real estate transactions is: Use Title Companies What can happen to you when you fail to get title insurance? We had a participant in one of our seminars, who purchased a house to fix it up. He invested over $40,000 into the home in both repairs and purchase price. When he went to refinance, he found out the person he purchased the house from was not in the chain of title. In other words, he did not have a clear title. Whenever you purchase a home, always close through a title company with title insurance on the property. Title insurance is protection that insures the borrower or lender that they get the property with marketable title. They will only insure the property for the purchase price or for the amount of the mortgage.
Use a reputable lender
Interview lenders. Go to Real Estate Investor Clubs to find out from other investors which companies are doing the best job. Are you at risk when you use a lender that wants to cross collateralize loans or wants personal guarantees? One lender I know will get one-two year mortgages and demand a right to lien all the properties you own to procure the loan you are getting. Just beware, if you are buying the property to fix up and resell, there are things that you don’t always plan on like: twice as much rehab cost as you planned for, longer marketing time than you initially thought, resulting in added holding costs, or maybe the market moves the wrong direction and you can’t sell the property, so you rent it. Now one of your other properties or even your personal residence needs to be refinanced. You now have a lien showing against the property. Now what do you do? Think before you jump. If you have purchased the property right, you should be able to borrow money based on the equity of that property - not you’re home and other properties.
This same lender will ask for a personal guarantee signed by you, your wife and your partner. This personal guarantee allows his mortgage company to lien anything the partner and wife own. Not only that, but this particular lender demands that you use a Title Company he owns. Now when you want to sell another one of your houses and this same cross collateral loan will show up on any property you are selling. Now you are faced with using his title company or he won’t release his loan. Beware of putting yourself in a situation where you are using a person who controls the lending, title work, the appraiser and the Real Estate Company.
Do you think, if you had your title work placed with a company the Lender had ownership in, you might run into a problem getting the documents released or have a clean closing at the same title company? Why risk letting human emotions drives a stake into your deals? Keep an arms length distance within your dealings. If you are selling homes or wholesaling property, let the buyer find his own lender and make sure you get an independent title company. Make sure there is not a conflict of interest in the Title Company, Mortgage Company, and real estate company. Keep the integrity in the deal. I am sure there are title companies, real estate companies, and mortgage companies, where there is common ownership that run very good businesses and can separate the conflicts of interests and profit centers. However, to protect yourself, make sure you receive proper disclosure of common ownership. You can always look at the volume of business they are doing in each business and check with the state Licensing Dept. for any complaints against the firm.

Gordon Pate is a 5th generation resident of Bryan-College Station, his extensive knowledge of the area and its culture helps you get acquainted with Bryan-College Station Real Estate. He offers various homes for sale college station properties that satisfy what you need and what you want.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Real Estate Investor Question: Rehab and Sell, or Rehab and Keep?


Here's another awesome question I received from my discussion board.  The question; Why bother keeping property after it's rehabbed?  Why not sell it after the rehab and GET PAID!
Of course, the first questions that you must answer is how emergent is your need for quick cash?  You can likely generate the most SHORT TERM cash by selling a freshly rehabbed house.  But, you will give much of it away in taxes come next April.
If you keep it, you stand to make more!  You will also enjoy some great benefits while you own it such as cash flow, a tax break, and MORE cash with the future appreciation.  You can still pull some nice cash a few months after buying it when you refinance (post rehab) the property from your hard money (at 70% loan to value) to long term financing (at 85% or 90% loan to value).
The short answer is an investor is going to make considerably more money by hanging onto a property after it's rehabbed.  There is a downside to it.  You have to be a landlord, and you have to decide if you want to do that.  I don't think it's too bad as long the landlording is done correctly.
Let me illustrate the difference in overall money between rehab and sell, and rehab and rent investing with this example;
Let's say appreciation rates are 5% in your town and the average price of a freshly rehabbed property in the neighborhoods investors buy in is $100,000. Let's also say there is Bill and Fred.
Bill sells his properties after rehabbing and makes $15-18,000 per house. Good boy Bill!
Fred keeps his rehab projects and cash-out refinances, pulling out around $10,000 per house within 3-6 months of ownership.  (Fred trades his 70% loan-to-value (LTV) ratio hard money for long term, 30-year mortgages at a lower interest rate with an 85-90% loan to value ratio.  He pockets the difference between what it costs to pay off the hard money and the new mortgage less closing costs.  This works out to about $10,000 per property.)
Bill (rehab and sell) makes a great living. Ten houses per year is $150,000-$180,000 per year...nice jingle! The downside is that Bill has to keep rehabbing to keep making that living year-after-year and pays taxes on all that money as regular income (ouch!).  So his $150,000 per year is in reality somewhat less.
Fred (the rehabber) also makes a great living. Ten houses per year makes him $100,000 or so in tax free, spendable cash. But, Fred controls a million dollars in real estate and it's going up in value year after year.  Also, Fred pays no taxes on that money he gets from the cash-out refinances.  It's part of a mortgage, so must be paid back, therefore is not income!  I love that part!
Let's look at what Fred's doing more closely.
Let's say Fred bought 10 houses valued at $100,000 each, owes $90,000 on each one (after the 90% cash out refinance), so he controls $1,000,000 in property. If he keeps them 5 years (assuming a low appreciation rate...which is pretty conservative):
Purchase year - 10 houses x $100,000 = $1,000,000
Year 1 - Same 10 houses X $105,000 = $1,050,000
Year 2 - Same 10 houses X $110,250 = $1,102,500
Year 3 - Same 10 houses X $115,762 = $1,157,620
Year 4 - Same 10 houses X $121,550 = $1,215,500
Year 5 - Same 10 houses X $127,627 = $1,276,270
Essentially, Fred makes an extra $50,000 per year for keeping 10 properties. After owning them 5 years, if he sells, he puts $276,000 in his pocket.
Remember
- Some parts of the country will appreciate much faster than 5%.  Heck some places properties will double in value in 5 years.
- No tax benefits of keeping the property is included here. That equates to thousands of dollars in real income.
- This is ONE ten-house year. Let's say you want to "top out" at owning 30 houses. Well, in just a couple of years your buying will slow down to a trickle and you'll start selling and cashing out of properties. I mean, how many ten-house years to you need to string together before you are set for life?
- What if you hold these houses 10 years?  The numbers get pretty exciting.
If you're like me and you don't want to do this for too many years, then holding properties for a few years makes a lot of sense, especially if you don't have much personal money invested in them.
So what of poor old Bill?  Chances are, Bill will satisfy his need for short term cash, then start holding property.  What do you think?
Contact or visit Gordon Pate for more details.


Thursday, August 23, 2012

Real Estate Investments’ Guideline



Investing in real estate can be profitable if you know the correct ways to do business in this field. As real estate investment experts say there are several keys to making significant profits in real estate investment deals. And when the deals are profitable, you will certainly be well on your way to success.
For real estate investment neophytes, don’t be afraid of the challenges and pitfalls you may encounter along the way. There is definitely a lot to learn, but in the long run after you have gained some experience, you’ll hopefully become a master at closing profitable real estate deals.
There are 5 core skills that are necessary for building a real estate investment business. These will be the key factors in creating a profitable real estate investment portfolio. These are the 5 core skills of real estate investment:
1) You should totally understand the meaning and concept of investing in real estate, including all of the financial risks and benefits.
2) You must learn when and where to find the right kind of sellers.
3) You must become an expert in all areas of real estate investment and understand such terms as lease options, cash sales, wrap mortgages, short sales and other terminology common in the real estate investment trade.
4) You must be able to quickly and accurately analyze each real estate investment deal so you’ll know exactly when to proceed and when to pull the plug.
5) You must learn the art of being a master negotiator when it comes to closing your real estate investment deals.
After considering these five skills, it is time to consider investing in real estate. There are great potential rewards and the effort you put forth can yield enormous monetary returns on your investment. Your confidence level will grow when you’ve gained some experience and closed on your first few real estate deals. But, don't stop there... You should continue to learn about real estate investing and to develop your investment skills. In a short time you may find yourself managing a profitable and growing portfolio of investment properties.
Moreover, you should also continue to follow your real estate investment "game plan" and always keep an eye out for the hidden investment opportunities. The opportunities are definitely out there and with a little knowledge and desire can be yours for the taking. So, why not get started in what might be a new and exciting (and profitable) career today?
Contact or visit Gordon Pate for more details.