Even though several large banks froze their foreclosure process in September, there are still plenty of foreclosures coming on the market in Miami.
There are currently 827 single family homes that are listed as REO on the MLS. 423 of them were listed since October 1.
There are 1116 condos listed as REO. 640 of those have been added since October 1.
CNN came out with their most recent ranking of most (and least) affordable cities to buy a home. The good news is that no city in Florida made the least affordable list. The bad news is that no city in Florida made the most affordable either.
Okay, so the Miami Heat have won two in a row after their disappointing loss in Boston. With so much fanfare around the team, condos in the immediate area have decided to latch on to the Heat as a way to increase sales in buildings that are currently mostly occupied by renters. Other than the Heat, these buildings have a lot to offer location wise. Although there is still infrastructure in the immediate area missing (shopping and restaurants) outside of Bayside Marketplace, there is a lot the area has to offer. It is a quick drive to South Beach, located across from the future Museum Park and a stroll under I-395 to the Arsht Center for Perfoming Arts. So are you enough of a Heat fan to be compelled to buy in one of these new buildings?
There are currently 16 short sales, single family homes, listed on the MLS in Pinecrest. They range in price from $2.5 million down to $349,000.
I read a blog today that seems to defy the thought that Fall is not a great time to list your home for sale. Conventional wisdom says that once a new school year starts, the sale of single family homes slows significantly. Students are settled into school, parents into their work schedules, and holidays are right around the corner. As such, most sellers wait until Spring to list their homes for sale.
Since the time a house sits on the market affects its sale, timing the market right is extremely important and is probably second only to price. The fact that inventories decrease in the Fall and Winter, is one of the reasons the KCM blog recommends listing your home now. It also suggests that buyers are more serious now and, that with interest rates at historic lows, more motivated.
What do you think? Would you be more likely to sell or buy in the Fall or late Spring/early Summer?
I received a list of comparables from an agent that was making an offer on one of my commercial listings. The comps resulted in a significantly lower price than what the sellers were looking for and my knowledge of the market told me something was wrong with his research. I went through the table he had prepared and compared his square footage to the square footage in the tax rolls and realized that the program that he was using did not always have the same square footage as that in the tax rolls. Since the discrepancy between the square footage of the subject property between one program and the tax rolls was almost 12,000 square feet, I recalculated the average price per square foot, which he was using to come up with his price, based on the tax rolls. The average was $30 per square foot higher than the one he had used, which resulted in a $400,000 difference in price in the sellers favor.
Now the tax rolls don’t always have the correct square footage, but if square footage is being used to arrive at a price, make sure all of the square footages come from the same source. If he had used his original average price per square foot but multiplied it by the subject property’s square footage from the program that had the higher square footage, the price difference would have been $700,000 in the seller’s favor. That is why it is important to compare apples to apples.
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According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, new record low mortgage rates caused refinancing activity to increase by 21% last week. Applications for new mortgages were down 8.5%, mainly due to the more stringent requirements for FHA mortgages that took effect on October 4.
Yesterday was my tech meltdown day. I am a people person, but I have been buying all of the latest gadgets to simplify my life. I use my iPhone 4G for giving “live” walk-throughs of properties for my customers; an iPad to show comparable properties to buyers and sellers and make presentations on the fly; and a computer for e-mailing, blogging, preparing mailers and flyers etc. Yesterday, my phone froze up completely and wouldn’t hold a charge and my e-mail was so full it would not let me send e-mails out and actually required my contacting tech support (of course it was after 6 pm). So, for what I needed yesterday, all of my technology was useless.
After a brief freak-out on how dependent I have become on technology, I went back to the basics and printed out hard copies of the lease and sale and purchase contract I was preparing and hand-delivered them to my customers. I really like what technology can do to help me make my job easier, but nothing beats the face-to-face meeting and conversations!
The new “AS IS” contract has changed to clarify areas that were vague in the previous contract. These clarifications include, but are not limited to:
Overall, these changes help both the Buyer and Seller by setting the expectations for each party. Let me know if you would like a copy of the new “AS-IS” contract. For clarification of the contract and legal opinions, please contact your attorney.