Today I would like to talk to you about something many new buyers find confusing. Here in Nevada we call it an Earnest Money Deposit, or EMD. In some areas of the country it’s called a Good Faith Deposit. Let’s start off with Investopedia’s definition: An earnest money deposit shows the seller that a buyer [...]
May the Fourth be with you? Um, maybe. Thanks for joining me for Friday Figures! All information from the GLVAR MLS system. It’s exactly what you and your REALTOR really need to know before touring, making an offer, or preparing a listing in the Las Vegas Valley this weekend. Summary: The number just keeps sliding: there [...]
By some measures home prices still look lousy. In fact, here’s somebody who went to a lot of effort to show that adjusted for inflation, prices are where they were in 1985 — which by the way means that buying a house in 1985 was still a better deal than a modern savings account, but [...]
Almost once a week, I end up talking to somebody about low price properties: a home for $45,000, or $35,000, or even $20,000. There are three things I always explain: first, there is a lot of competition to buy those properties; second, they all need thousands of dollars of repairs to be inhabitable; and finally, [...]
There’s an accepted purchase offer. Great! That doesn’t mean your transaction is a done deal. This is not a comprehensive list, but rather some of the problems you may encounter: Bank Addendum has unacceptable terms: If you are buying a foreclosure, the bank that owns the property will send you a big addendum with terms [...]
Believe it or not, somebody lives in each of these 9 homes.
Hi folks! Once you get a property under contract, you have a period of time where you find out everything you can about the property. That’s called “Due Diligence.” One document you’ll see at this time is called a Preliminary Title Report. It’s dry reading — a list of all the public documents like purchases [...]
Alert the media! Bank of America — one of the Too Big To Fail instutuions that helped bring terms like “robosigning” into our vocabulary –has made an important announcement: the housing crash is over. Of course, the analyst who appeared on Bloomberg did have to hedge her bets just a little: We do think that home [...]
I’ve been talking for months now about how this is the Year of the Short Sale. I’ve pointed out that tax rules on short sales change at the end of this year, and anybody who has a short sale approved in 2013 could potentially owe the IRS thousands of dollars (that they probably don’t have). [...]
