Real Estate Survival Guide with Terry Story

May 18th - Home Sales And Prices Spring Forward

Home Sales And Prices Spring Forward In March 2017

Today’s talk with Terry Story begins with good news for the housing market, especially for sellers: home sales jumped 4.4% in March 2017 to a 10-year high.   This figure is all the more remarkable because inventories are still low and sellers relatively scarce; it’s difficult to find a home to buy right now.  As for median home prices, they’re up nearly 7% year-over-year, an equally impressive gain, particularly given how long the market has been rising.  Steve mentions a report he recently read suggesting a strong demographic trend behind this growth as a result of millennials leaving home, forming families, and looking for homes.  The breadth and depth of this trend could be auspicious for continued gains in housing prices.  Terry agrees, noting that millennials accounted for 32% of all sales in March, a very strong showing.

May 10th - How To Guarantee A Return On Your Home Improvement Investment

Home Improvement Return On Investment

Let’s say I’m thinking about selling my home and want to fix it up first, or perhaps I’m just looking to take on a new home improvement project for my own enjoyment, what kind of return on investment can I expect for different projects?

Terry, referencing a study by the Appraisal Institute, says that smaller projects offer the best “cost to value” ratios.  Many projects fail to meet the criteria because they’re too expensive—a full kitchen remodeling where you replace all the cabinetry, for example, is both costly and may not even be desirable to prospective buyers.  On the other hand, not all expensive improvements are a bad investment.  Attic installation, for example, is seen as a good source of ROI, at least in parts of the country where attics are still considered a near essential.  But the majority of improvements they suggest are on a smaller scale, though they may have an outsized impact on the design and use of space in a property.  Examples given include replacing wooden doors with steel doors, adding manufactured stone veneer, minor kitchen remodels, garage door replacement, and siding replacements.

May 3rd - What To Do When Your HOA Goes Rogue

What To Do With A Rogue Condo Board President

The last topic Steve brings up is from Terry’s “Survival Guide”—“is it worth suing a rogue condo board president?”  The question comes from someone who lives in a community association where the president of the board is violating multiple statutory provisions and rules.  When challenged by a homeowner at a board meeting, the president invited the owner to just deal with it or sue him.  Terry says that the president of the board can’t just tweak the rules to whatever he wants them to be for himself.  The best course of action would be to try to talk with other owners about exactly which rules are being broken and if they are truly harmful to the community, you should consider taking legal action.   Determining whether a behavior is harmful or merely technical is the important question to ask because seeking a legal recourse will probably be expensive and time-consuming.  It’s always better to try to find another way to work out the problem, like convincing this board president to change their rule-bending ways for the betterment of all.  If all else fails, you can try to vote the jerk out in the next board election!

April 26th - What Do Bankruptcy And Your IRS Refund Have In Common?

“Bankruptcy Season” And When To File For Bankruptcy

Today’s chat with Boca Raton real estate agent Terry Story begins with an article she gave to Steve titled “Distressed Homeowners: It’s Bankruptcy Season.”  Terry says she’d never heard of such a thing as “bankruptcy season” and was baffled at first to learn that it occurs “at the same time as March Madness.”  It turns out that many people in dire financial straits wait until this time of year because they plan to use their tax refunds to hire an attorney to help them file bankruptcy.  While acknowledging that some folks really can’t afford an attorney without a windfall (tax fund or otherwise), Terry feels that this is probably not a great reason in itself to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy and that, instead, it should be considered when someone is struggling badly and overwhelmed by debt.  To put some numbers to this situation, Terry argues that if your debts—whether medical, credit card, or high-interest loans—are equal to or more than 50% of your annual income, or you can’t see any way of paying off all your debts within the next 5 years, or your debts are interfering with other parts of life like the need for a new car or to save for retirement, you should seek professional guidance from an accountant or attorney.

April 19th - The Home Affordability Crisis: Are You Being Priced Out Of The Real Estate Market?

Unaffordability Rising In Hot Markets, Going Down In Others

In today’s interview with Terry Story, we talk about rising affordability problems in certain local housing markets, reasons why the market is not generating more sales turnover, and understanding deed restrictions before buying a home. 
Affordability comes down to the ratio of home prices to wages, and the stats have been heading in the wrong direction—towards unaffordability—in roughly 25% of national markets.  Wage growth isn’t keeping pace with rising home prices, and the result is that would-be buyers, especially on the lower end, are being priced out.  Offsetting this trend to some degree is an uptick in wages in 50% of markets.  This silver lining is mitigated by the fact that the wage growth is occurring in places that aren’t seeing a lot of interest from people looking to relocate: Wayne County in Michigan, Trumbull County, parts of Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, and New York state, for example.  The deteriorating affordability problem, meanwhile, is affecting more sought after locales like California, Hawaii, Manhattan, and Brooklyn.  The number of people who are willing to bail on Maui or San Francisco or NYC to start over in Clayton County, Georgia is very finite, if not negligible. Expect these discrepancies between increasingly unaffordable markets and cheaper ones with gradually improving economics to persist and widen for the foreseeable future.

April 12th - Worried About Thin Credit? Get Back On The Grid!

Thin Credit? Get Back On the Grid!

People who pay for everything with cash are at a major disadvantage when it comes to getting a bank mortgage. Banks make loans based on borrowers’ credit history, which helps determine lending rates and other parameters of those loans. Those folks who refuse to use credit cards or other forms of borrowed (and re-paid) money are essentially invisible—“off the grid” as Steve puts it—and therefore are unknown risks to lenders. Most banks will simply balk at offering mortgages to thin-credit individuals.  The irony is that many thin-credit individuals are probably in healthy financial shape and may be more responsible than others when it comes to managing their money.

Breaking out from thin-credit status to become someone whom lenders would be willing to work with is not terribly complicated.  Opening credit cards and establishing a track record of both using and paying them down can provide a fairly quick fix. But even folks who can’t abide the idea of credit cards have options: paying and documenting rent and other bills and routine expenses (utilities, child care, insurance, cell phone, and cable bills, etc.) with checks can go a long way towards establishing the kind of credit identity that lenders require.  One of the main reasons people are drawn to the cash-only lifestyle is the anonymity and privacy it provides, but these benefits must be abandoned if you want to take out a mortgage.  Steve and Terry’s bottom line: get back “on the grid” with credit cards and/or checks two or three years before you plan to buy a home.

April 5th - Real Estate Prices Are Higher Because Of Millennials Buying Homes

Millennials Buying Homes 

One of the main effects of this consumer exuberance is that people are more apt to make bigger purchases like buying a home. There are other trends playing into that confidence and pushing home prices higher including an expectation of rising interest rates and a surge in millennials buying their first homes. Millennials are moving out of their parents’ homes in record numbers, creating a wave of new household formations. Terry remarks that rising interest rates should cool down home price appreciation, preventing a replay of the early 2000s housing bubble. Steve cautions that there may be some parallels between the current stock market and the housing market, namely that prices are very high. Buying stocks or a home near a market peak entails a risk that prices could drop modestly or even significantly below peak levels.

March 29th - How To Buy A Home When You Already Own A Home

Buy When You Own

What options does a current home owner have if they decide they really want to buy a new home but are unable to come up with the money before selling the home they’re living in?  Terry talks with Steve about the ins and outs of what is called a “sale contingency,” in which a prospective buyer enters into a contract with a home seller that gives them the option to buy the new home if they sell their existing home by a certain date. Terry admits that these deals are often difficult to negotiate because they can delay the sale and add another layer of complexity from the seller’s perspective. Moreover, they always come at a cost to the buyer, who, of course, wants to minimize those costs.

June 21st - How Will Eliminating The Property Tax Deduction Affect You?

Possible Changes To Tax Deductions For Home Owners

On today’s “Real Estate Round-Up” talk with Terry Story, topics include possible changes to mortgage tax deduction laws, saving up for a down payment on the new home you want to buy, and the limitations of online home value estimator tools.  There has been rampant speculation in the real estate industry and elsewhere over comments from the Trump administration about nearly doubling the standard deduction for mortgage and interest payments (from $12,600 to $24,000) while simultaneously eliminating deductions for state and local taxes including property taxes.  It’s the latter issue, canceling the ability to deduct costly state and local taxes from your federal income taxes, that is generating a lot of heat and angst.  The rationale for the deduction has been that the government can’t “double tax” you on the value of your property but, evidently, that may be rolled back.

Aug. 9th - Think Outside The Box To Win In Today’s Tight Housing Market

Think Outside The Box

Steve comments that financing creativity has always been a hallmark of real estate deals, with seller financing in vogue when interest rates were ridiculously high and freebies such as cars and boats being offered to motivate buyers.  He talks about a neighbor who was moving and needed to buy a house but knew she was competing against another buyer.  So, she wrote a very nice letter to the seller and had her offer accepted.  Terry talks of sellers becoming emotionally attached to the home because they have lived in that house for years, have raised families there, have fond memories in most cases, and are emotionally attached to the home.  As a result, they’d like to sell it to someone who appreciates the home and will care for it. Steve urges buyers to understand a seller’s history with the house and see if there are ways in which your offer can get an edge through simple things such as the letter his neighbor wrote—a classy case of thinking out of the box and turning a competitive situation to your advantage in a warm way.