Real Estate Info & FAQ

People will come up with just about anything

I read this article on RealBlogging.com. This builder was just a little overanxious to get some business.

Take a look...

posted by jkballentine @ 3:30 PM 0 comments

HIstorical home values

I got this chart from the His Move Blog. It is a chart of historical home values. Very Interesting.

posted by jkballentine @ 5:58 AM 0 comments

This weeks mortgage impacts

Check out this blog for some very good information on IMPACTS TO RATES THIS WEEK.

posted by jkballentine @ 8:51 AM 0 comments

Top 5 Renovations?

What are the top 5 areas of your home that you can renovate and see a return on your investment? According to an article on Bankrate.com, the areas are the siding on the exterior, the bathroom, the kitchen and the attic space.

Check out the article if you are considering doing some changes around the house.

posted by jkballentine @ 1:23 PM 0 comments

South Carolina stacks up well in foreclosures

According to data from RealtyTrac.com, South Carolina ranks 27th nationally in the number of homes per foreclosure. For Q2 of 2006, SC had one foreclosure for every 958 households. This is higher than the national average (425) but it does represent a 28% drop from 1Q2006.

All of this to say, some predicted that the foreclosures would skyrocket this year. There is a still a chance for that to pan out, but so far this year, the number of foreclosures for SC have been good.

posted by jkballentine @ 1:56 PM 0 comments

Homeowners who fall behind on mortgage can find help

Homeowners who fall behind on mortgage can find help: "Whether it's from a job loss, medical emergency, mortgage-payment hike or simply personal-finance mismanagement, a small but growing number of homeowners is falling into foreclosure every year."

posted by jkballentine @ 6:44 AM 0 comments

Home Builders offering incentives on SC Coast

Print on www.thestate.com

Special deals aim to pick up sales among wary buyers in shaky market
By JENNY BURNS
jeburns@thesunnews.com

MYRTLE BEACH — Big builders, taking cues from the auto industry to sell their oversupply of homes, are offering big incentives along the S.C. coast.
Buyers can get 4.25 percent financing, no payments until 2007 or free homeowners association fees for a year.
The deals are aimed at making cautious buyers during this real estate slowdown take the plunge and buy.
“(National builders) are seeing sales falling in general, seeing cancellation rates pick up, and they’re using the incentives to help drive sales and use it to sell inventory that they didn’t plan on having,” said Todd Vencil, analyst for BB&T Capital Markets, who covers eight publicly traded home builders.
For consumers, the payoff is in lower monthly payments and less upfront cash to get into a new home.
While incentives are normal, Vencil said this summer’s incentives go beyond the typical appliance upgrade and free closing.
“They’ve clearly picked up,” he said.
One example is Centex Homes, the Grand Strand’s largest builder. The company is offering 4.25 percent financing with an adjustable rate mortgage. On a $150,000 home, that would make monthly payments about $738 before insurance and taxes are figured in.
That rate is only on spec homes that close by Oct. 31 in most Centex neighborhoods, said Ken Balogh, Myrtle Beach division president.
For a 30-year fixed mortgage, that rate jumps to 6.5 percent.
Balogh said Centex wants to take rates down to last year’s level to help buyers fight rising rates.
The builder is seeing an uptick in cancellations compared with last year, especially in condos, he said.
Builders also are looking at ways to ease the pain of skyrocketing insurance rates along the Grand Strand.
For instance, Centex is paying homeowners association fees between $3,000 and $9,000 in most of its condo and town home projects.
Some Strand condo complexes have seen double and triple increases in their fees because of insurance hikes.
“We can’t fix the insurance challenges but we can help our customers to overcome a year or two of that increase,” Balogh said.
Builders aren’t saying how long they’ll be touting incentives, but analysts expect the enticements to stick around a while.
Jenny Burns is a reporter for The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News, a McClatchy newspaper.

posted by jkballentine @ 7:21 AM 0 comments

Mortgages are cooling off

I have noticed that in July, mortgage applications really cooled down. This is right on track with national trends. See the Business Week article. This is what usually happens in a cooling market. People will still move, but they will simply adjust the size of their purchase to match with the available monthly cash flow.

SC is still below the national average in mortgage rates. Since the Fed meeting recently where they held the line on the Fed Funds rate, SC rates dropped. 30-year fixed rates for a 30-day lock are in the low 6's now. As recently as the end of June or early July, they were in the 6.5 to 6.6 range.

posted by jkballentine @ 2:28 PM 0 comments

Bankrate not really the best

You can find a lot of very good information on the Internet. Unfortunately, the interest rate information can be very misleading. There are so many factors that ultimately determine what interest rate you receive when applying for a loan. These factors include the loan amount, whether you are proving your income or you are stating your income and the level of the down payment.

Some people start their shopping on the Internet. Unfortunately, quite often the rates you see are teaser rates, designed to get you in the door. I found an article about some issues that Bankrate.com has had recently.

A good rule of thumb is usually if it looks to good to be true...it is.

John Ballentine

posted by jkballentine @ 5:46 PM 0 comments

Check your insurance policy!

From New York Times Online

Small Clause, Big Problem

By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
Published: August 4, 2006
Marilyn Haverty, whose house in Waveland, Miss., was buffeted by wind and surging water in Hurricane Katrina, thought her homeowner’s insurance would cover at least the wind damage. But it never paid her a penny.

As it turns out, Ms. Haverty’s insurance policy, like nearly every one around the country, said, essentially, that if the house was damaged by a flood or earthquake or something else not covered, it did not matter that she had coverage for wind damage. There was no coverage at all.
Since at least the mid-1980’s, insurers have been putting into their home insurance policies “anti-concurrent causation’’ clauses that effectively eliminate coverage that insurers promise to provide when selling their policies. But most people skip over the legalistic language — if they read their policies at all. And until Katrina, there had never been such an outpouring of challenges.
“There’s no question that the anti-concurrent clause is bad for policyholders,’’ said Adam F. Scales, an associate professor who teaches insurance law at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, in Lexington, Va. “It’s not fair because it defeats policyholders’ reasonable expectations.’’
Insurers counter that they need the clause to protect themselves from being drawn into paying for floods, earthquakes or mudslides and other widespread calamities that are beyond their scope and that they specifically refuse to cover.
The insurance companies say they expect to pay out $17.6 billion for homes damaged in Katrina and $20.8 billion to businesses — the most insurers have ever paid out in a catastrophe. But lawyers for homeowners say the insurers would have had to pay out perhaps billions more had it not been for the anti-concurrent clause. Industry officials said they had no comprehensive data, but acknowledged that a substantial amount of money was at stake.
The provision has become one of the central issues in the thousands of lawsuits that have been filed against insurance companies since Hurricane Katrina hit last August.
In the first trial, which began in July and is now awaiting a federal court judge’s verdict, the homeowner’s lawyer, Richard F. Scruggs, argued that the storm surge in Katrina was not a flood — as defined by the insurance companies — but an inseparable part of the hurricane. Mr. Scruggs also argued that his client, Paul Leonard, a police lieutenant, was told by his agent that he did not need to buy flood insurance. Mr. Scruggs contended that the anti-causation clause should be voided.
The insurance companies say they paid for damage to homes in areas where there was no flooding. Where there was flooding, they say, they paid for damage that could have come only from wind, like the loss of a roof and broken upper-story windows — above the highest marks left by flood waters. But they have generally refused to pay for damage to houses, or parts of houses, that were hit by both wind and flood water.
“They are sitting on this idea that the water washed everything away and whether there was any wind damage or not, they don’t feel they have to provide any coverage,’’ said Zach Butterworth, a lawyer in Bay St. Louis, Miss., who, with Mr. Scruggs, is representing Ms. Haverty and dozens of other storm victims.
Courts around the country have been divided on whether the provision may be used to deny coverage. Many have backed the insurers. But other courts have sided with policyholders, concluding that the clause was ambiguous or ran counter to reasonable expectations of what was covered.
“It is not a settled issue,’’ said E. Farish Percy, a law professor and insurance expert at the University of Mississippi. “Courts that have decided in favor of plaintiffs are saying, ‘It may be perfectly clear to an insurance lawyer, but it’s not that clear to a policyholder.’ ’’
Insurers and other insurance experts say the only way policyholders can protect themselves is to take on the additional expense of buying special government policies that cover floods and earthquakes. But that is only a partial remedy for more expensive homes that are flooded, because the federal government limits coverage for floods to $250,000. Earthquake insurance sold by California carries a high deductible.
Robert P. Hartwig, the chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group in New York, said the insurers priced their policies in the expectation that they would not be paying for damage in combination with flooding. Otherwise, Mr. Hartwig said, premiums would be much higher and some insurers might decide not to offer coverage on homes at all in certain areas.
Without the provision, he said, “if a home is destroyed by an excluded peril like flood, but the damage occurred in connection with another peril like wind, you’d effectively be saying that, in effect, flood coverage is provided.’’
In papers filed in the first trial in Mississippi, the Nationwide Insurance Company said the anti-causation clause “relieves insurers of the untenable task of proving a negative,’’ that is, “eliminating wind as a potential partial cause of the loss.’’
Even homeowners who say they fully understood that flood coverage was provided only by the government and had to be bought separately say they expected to receive at least some compensation for wind damage since both wind and water harmed their homes.
“I thought I would get something,’’ said Ms. Haverty, who retired in January as the assistant branch manager of a bank. During the storm, Ms. Haverty said, pine trees near her house were snapped off high above the ground by strong winds.
But, she said, State Farm told her: “No, we’re not paying you anything on the wind. It was water.” State Farm declined to discuss the case. Ms. Haverty was one of the relative few in Mississippi who had federal flood insurance, and she received $93,900 on that policy. Like many others whose insurers did not pay, she has applied for a federal grant. Congress has committed $15 billion to help with rebuilding for people who had no flood insurance or not enough and who received partial or no payment from their insurers.
The insurers say they spell out their terms of coverage in their policies. But even lawyers representing insurance companies say customers do not always understand the limits of their coverage.
“When you look at anti-causation language, it just doesn’t look that important,’’ said Randy J. Maniloff, a lawyer at White & Williams in Philadelphia who represents commercial insurance companies but is following insurance developments along the Gulf Coast. “They don’t appear to be words of substance. But they’re actually enormously important.’’
In the Nationwide Insurance Company’s home insurance policy, which is being debated in the Mississippi trial, the anti-concurrent language precedes a list of things not covered. “We do not cover loss to any property resulting directly or indirectly from any of the following,’’ the passage begins. “Such a loss is excluded even if another peril or event contributed concurrently or in any sequence to cause the loss.’’
The insurers point out that in most states, insurance regulators approve the language in their policies.
But insurance experts said that was not necessarily a test for fairness or consumer protection. “The regulators look a lot more carefully at rates than they do at policy terms,’’ said Gary S. Thompson, a lawyer at Reed Smith in Washington who represents commercial policyholders but also follows home insurance issues. “It’s really the courts that cause insurance companies to go back and re-examine their coverage terms.’’
In questions about the anti-concurrent clause at the Mississippi trial, John Griffin Jones, a colleague of Mr. Scruggs, raised the prospect of a tree theoretically crashing through the roof of a house and rain water pouring in. If nothing else happened, all the damage would be covered. But, Mr. Jones asked, if a storm surge came two hours later and flooded the house, would everything below the water line be excluded from coverage?
“Yes, sir,” Jeffrey Kline Gilbert, an executive in charge of Katrina claims at Nationwide, replied.
“Under the anti-concurrent clause provision, right?’’ Mr. Jones asked.
“Yes, sir.’’
Then, Mr. Jones asked: “How is a guy like Paul Leonard going to know that when he is buying one of these policies? How is he going to know it is going to get that technical that you have an anti-concurrent clause provision that if any water touches the property, he is on his own?’’
“First,’’ Mr. Gilbert said, “by reading the policy.’’

posted by jkballentine @ 7:52 AM 0 comments

Real Estate Agent commissions

I found the transcript of testimony from Geoffrey Lewis to a Congressional Sub Committee on RISMEDIA.COM. Mr. Lewis is the chief Legal Officer for REMAX International. In the testimony he discussed competition, commissions and the MLS, which are all very hot topics right now regarding Real Estate Agents.

posted by jkballentine @ 7:56 AM 0 comments

Yield Curve Info

I found this information on the current yield curve to be very interesting.

John

posted by jkballentine @ 5:41 PM 0 comments