Counseling keeping homeowners in their homes

Study: Nearly 70 percent who sought counseling before becoming delinquent were current 18 months later

BY STEVE BERGSMAN, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012 Inman News®

Home sweet home image via Shutterstock.

Since the onset of Great Recession and the subsequent housing crisis, hundreds of thousands of homeowners have lost their residences.
However, there were also thousands of other homeowners who were close to the desperate edge but managed to make it through those trying times because they were counseled by professionals who steered them past the economic shoals.
While it looks like the worst is over for homeowners, there's still much trouble in paradise and organizations that do counseling have begun to pick up the pace.
In August, Fannie Mae announced it opened an extension of its Los Angeles Mortgage Help Center in the Inland Empire region to provide free education and counseling services to struggling California homeowners. Fannie Mae now has 12 Mortgage Help Centers around the country.

Meanwhile, earlier in the summer, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) launched a telephone counseling program aimed at helping homeowners in six states who are facing foreclosure.

4 tools to increase your value as a real estate agent

New tech from Real Estate Connect

BY BERNICE ROSS, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2012 Inman News®

A packed session, "Video is for Closers," at Real Estate Connect San Francisco. Photo credit: Inman News.

Editor's note: This is the second of a three-part series. Read Part 1.

What were the latest technology innovations making their debut at this summer's Real Estate Connect? While agent ratings, mobile apps and video were all hot at Start-Up Alley, some of the less trendy tools and services may be exactly what you need to kick your business up a notch.

Early adopters have a definite advantage over those who fail to keep pace with technology. Many younger clients love agents who have the latest tech tools. On the other hand, incorporating a new tool into your business only to see the company disappear a few months later can be a costly mistake.

While almost everyone acknowledges that being an early adopter is a way to stay ahead of the competition, the question is which set of tools and services will be the best fit for the way you do business? The list below contains a number of apps and services that are definitely worth considering.

The social network Nextdoor

Nextdoor is dedicated to maintaining online privacy. For example, if your neighborhood wasn't on Nextdoor, you could add it to the system. The process requires nine neighbors to sign up within 21 days. Each individual must accept a phone call on their landline or verify their address with a credit card. This level of privacy is what allows participants to feel safe about sharing personal information, including pictures and names of their children.Nextdoor was the most talked new social network at this year's Connect. Facebook lets you connect with friends and relatives, LinkedIn allows you to connect with other professionals, and Twitter focuses on what is happening in the moment. In contrast, Nextdoor is a free private social network that allows people to connect who live in local neighborhoods. Rather than having to knock on doors to meet your neighbors, Nextdoor is a powerful alternative. Nextdoor allows people in a given neighborhood to complete profiles about themselves and their family members. It's a great way to get to know others who live in your subdivision or condo building.

Agents: Just say no to overpriced listings

Sellers often have unrealistic expectations about value of upgrades

BY BERNICE ROSS, THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 2012.

Inman News®

House of dollars image via Shutterstock.

Overpriced listings have always been the bane of the real estate business. Given the tough lending environment, there is no longer any wiggle room when it comes to pricing. If your sellers aren't willing to be realistic, even if they do get into contract, there's a high probability they will never close.

It used to be that placing a property under contract was the toughest part of the transaction. Tight credit and major changes in the appraisal process have made it exceedingly difficult for agents to close transactions. In fact, when it comes to the appraisal process, many agents are finding themselves in an entirely new world.

For example, in the past, if a property had high-quality upgrades such as granite countertops, custom wood cabinets, hardwood or marble floors, appraisers would normally upgrade the value of the property. Today, that is almost never the case.

FHA rehab loans ideal for distressed homes | Rolling purchase price, fix-up costs into 1 loan is next best thing to new construction

BY STEVE BERGSMAN, FRIDAY, JUNE 22, 2012 Inman News®

Handyman special image via Shutterstock.

Foreclosures and short sales always look so enticing, but these kinds of deals are not for the faint-hearted or those on slim resources.

Buying a residence that is not newly built usually requires immediate rehabilitation and remodeling to be followed by regular maintenance. Taking on a foreclosure or short-sale property only ratchets up the process with more intensive rehabbing and certainly a lot more maintenance.

Websites that depend on agent dollars are doomed | Realtor Notebook

BY TERESA BOARDMAN, THURSDAY, JUNE 14, 2012 Inman News®

Dinosaur image via Shutterstock.

A couple of months ago I was contacted by the editor for a local news website. They syndicate some of my real estate content and we have had an ongoing relationship for many years.

They wanted to talk about having neighborhood pages with real estate listings on their website, and they wanted to get local agents to pay to sponsor the pages and to pay to advertise real estate listings on them.

Mortgage lenders: New regs could derail real estate recovery Industry groups pushing for legal 'safe harbor'

BY KEN HARNEY, TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2012 Inman News®

Big bad wolf image via Shutterstock.

At a meeting attended by top economic and housing policymakers in the West Wing of the White House last Thursday, the Obama administration heard these grave warnings on housing:

• If you force overly stringent home loan standards and legal liabilities down the throats of the mortgage and real estate industries this summer, many lenders will squeeze underwriting requirements on loans even tighter than they are today, cut back on originations and tack on additional "overlay" fees. All that, in turn, will suck the air out of the housing recovery, with punitive impacts on jobs, new home building and resales of existing homes.

• The consumers who get hit the hardest if excessive standards are adopted by the administration will be homebuyers and refinancers who are on economic tightropes already, especially first-time homebuyers, and lower and moderate-income African Americans and Latinos. Why make things even tougher for them?

Use your knowledge to close real estate sales No two deals go wrong in exactly the same way

BY BERNICE ROSS, THURSDAY, APRIL 19, 2012 Inman News®

Handshake image via Shutterstock.

Real estate practitioners, as well as the companies and people who support them, are grappling with a problem that continues to elude their ability to solve it. We argue about who owns the data, whether we're worth the commissions we receive, and whether the boards, companies and associations are really "worth it." The underlying issues, however, are simply not being addressed.

When real estate professionals are ranked lower than used-car salespeople, it's clear that we are doing a poor job in articulating the value we bring to the people we serve, whether it's at the association, board, brokerage or agent level.

I recently attended a leadership training event designed to prepare the group to assume leadership roles at their board. Most of the people in the room had at least 10 years of experience. When the trainer asked, "What differentiates a Realtor from other agents who merely hold licenses?" half the room couldn't come up with anything.

7 cool apps for real estate agents Change the way you post videos, digitize contacts and location-share

BY BERNICE ROSS, THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2012 Inman News®

Tablet PC image via Shutterstock.

A popular pastime among smartphone and tablet users is to share the apps they love. Perhaps you will find some of your favorites in the list below or fall in love with an app you haven't seen before that's a good fit for your business.

Most smartphone and tablet users have quite a few apps on their devices, but use only a handful. Here are seven cool apps that can help your business:

1. Camera Plus (Android, iPhone, iPad) At 99 cents, this app makes your photos look as if they were shot by a pro. It goes way beyond what programs like iPhoto provide. Camera Plus is amazingly simple to use. You can create dozens of special effects such as putting a blue or yellow filter on the photo, creating custom borders, watermarking the photo itself, or adding comments, all with just a tap of your finger.

With more than 7 million apps sold, Camera Plus was named one of the top 50 apps for 2011 by Time magazine, as well as being voted the best photography app by the "Best App Ever Awards."

2. CardMunch (available for iPhone, with Android app coming soon) Business cards are a fact of life and can be a real nuisance to enter into your computer. LinkedIn has created an app called "CardMunch" that not only scans your business cards and enters them into a database, it works with your LinkedIn profile as well.

Once you scan the card with your phone and the card is uploaded, "LinkedIn will map the information with the contact's LinkedIn profile and augment it with photos, common connections, past work experience, and education. It makes it a lot easier to match a face to a name, and the number of cards scanned saved workers an estimated four tons of card stock that would have otherwise weighed down their pockets."

3. Glympse: "Share Your Where" (Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Phone 7) Have you ever been late for a meeting or had trouble finding the restaurant where you were meeting your new client? Glympse lets you share your exact location in real time with whomever you want.

You can send your Glympse to your client's mobile device as well as to his Twitter and Facebook accounts. Glympse calculates your exact location and broadcasts it to your client or friends. It also calculates your speed and your estimated arrival time.

4. GroupMe (Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad) Rather than running the risk of going over your data plan's text messaging limits, there's a great app called GroupMe that's now part of the Skype family.

GroupMe allows you to turn your phone into a private chat room. When you send a message, everyone in the chat room receives it. GroupMe also allows photo sharing. Best of all, there's no charge for this service.

5. iScape and HardScape apps (iPad) While virtually staging the interiors of homes has been around for a couple of years, the iScape family of apps lets you stage the landscaping and the hardscapes on your less-than-lovely listings.

Furthermore, iScape is perfect for people who are considering doing major exterior changes to a property. It's a great way to see what you will be getting before paying thousands of dollars in fees.

6. Kik (Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Symbian, Windows Phone 7) Kik is another app that allows you to conduct real-time conversations, much like online chat. You can see when messages are delivered and read, which is great when you need to reach clients with time-sensitive messages.

Additional benefits of Kik include the ability to share photos. Furthermore, Kik works on most phones, so this is a particularly good app for your clients who may not have an Android phone or iPhone.

7. Vid.ly: "The Universal Video URL" (Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad) While shooting video with your phone is pretty simple, posting it online is another issue. Vid.ly lets you upload your video once.

When a user clicks on your video, Vid.ly automatically matches your video to fit the user's video player. No more wasting time trying to save your video into multiple formats so it will play on most devices. Vid.ly also generates a shortened URL so you can post a link to your video virtually anywhere.

While Vid.ly doesn't charge for five or fewer videos per month, there is a storage and a delivery charge. Unless you're shooting a lot of video or have a very high-traffic video, these fees are minimal. Best of all, you don't have to figure out how to get your videos posted in a format that will work on all computers.

The one challenge with all the thousands of apps out there is locating the apps that will work for you. If you get in the habit of trying a new app once or twice a month, you can easily spot which apps you want to keep and which ones to delete.

Agents: Are you an IRS audit target?

Real Estate Tax Talk

BY STEPHEN FISHMAN, FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2012.

Inman News®

Every year, the Internal Revenue Service releases detailed statistics about who got audited the previous year.

The stats for 2011, covering 2010 returns — have recently come out and they paint an unpleasant picture for many real estate professionals — particularly the successful ones.

The percentage of business and nonbusiness returns that got audited in 2011 is shown in the following chart:

IRS Audit Rates (2010)

	Audit Rate
Sole proprietors
Income under $25,000	1.3%
$25,000 to $100,000	2.9%
$100,000 to $200,000	4.3%
$200,000 and more	3.8%
Partnerships	0.4%
S corporations	0.4%
C corporations
Assets under $250,000	0.9%
$250,000 to $1 million	1.6%
$1 million to $5 million	1.9%
$5 million to $10 million	2.6%
Nonbusiness Returns
Under $25,000	1.2%
$25,000 to $50,000	0.7%
$50,000 to $75,000	0.8%
$75,000 to $100,000	0.8%
$100,000 to $200,000	1.0%
$200,000 to $500,000	2.7%
$500,000 to $1 million	5.4%

This chart shows that in 2010, 4.3 percent of sole proprietors earning $100,000 to $200,000 were audited. Not even corporations with assets worth between $5 million and $10 million were audited as often.

Moreover, only 1 percent of taxpayers who did not file a Schedule C form, but earned $100,000 to $200,000, were audited. Thus, self-employed taxpayers were four times as likely to be audited as employees earning the same amount.

In fact, employees earning as much as $500,000 were less likely to be audited than self-employed taxpayers earning as little as $100,000.

These statistics undoubtedly reflect the IRS’s belief that sole proprietors habitually underreport their income, take deductions to which they are not entitled, or otherwise cheat on their taxes.

Employees have less opportunity to cheat because their income tax is withheld by their employers and income reported directly to the IRS by them.

Unfortunately, most real estate professionals fall into the high-audit category: They are self-employed businesspeople who file Schedule C. The lesson these numbers teach is that you need to take the IRS seriously.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take all the deductions you’re legally entitled to take, but you should understand the rules and be able to back up the deductions you do take with proper records.

If you’re really worried about getting audited, think about forming a business entity to operate your real estate business. This could be a pass-through entity, such as a limited liability company taxed as a partnership or an S corporation.

Such entities don’t pay taxes themselves, but do file returns with the IRS. Both have extremely low audit rates: only 0.4 percent of such entities were audited in 2011. Regular C corporations also have relatively low audit rates.

Real estate professionals optimistic about home values

From AOL Real Estate

BY INMAN NEWS, MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012.

Editor's note: The following item is republished with permission of AOL Real Estate. See the original article: Home Value Survey Sees Sharp Rise in Realtor Optimism. By Teke Wiggan

With signs that a real estate recovery may be kicking into gear, a new survey shows a sharp increase in optimism among real estate professionals about the direction of home values.

A survey conducted by home valuation website HomeGain found that the number of real estate professionals who expect home values to increase has more than doubled over just one quarter. Thirty-seven percent of respondents surveyed so far in 2012 said they anticipate that home values will rise in the next six months, up from 15 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011.

"The trend has been staying the same or decreasing. And here it flipped for the first time," HomeGain General Manager Louis Cammarosano told AOL Real Estate.

He added that since HomeGain began administering the survey in the second quarter of 2009, the percentage of respondents who have expressed a bullish outlook on the market has never risen above 25 percent, and, for much of the time, has sputtered around 15 percent.

The spike in optimism about home values follows recent reports that corroborate the view that the housing market is stabilizing. Home sales are trending upward and homebuilders are reportedly more optimistic than they've been in many years. Home prices continue to fall, but a number of industry observers say that price direction isn't necessarily the most important bellwether of a recovery.

Budge Huskey, president and chief operating officer of Coldwell Banker Real Estate, says he sees confidence among real estate agents that he hasn't observed since the housing meltdown. "What is consistently being represented out there today is that there is a sense of optimism in the real estate business that has not been seen in the last five to six years," he told AOL Real Estate.

While cautioning that real estate agents "tend to always be optimists," Huskey stressed that "this time it's based on what we believe to be some clear trends."

Prominent among the hopeful signs, Huskey says, is the state of the housing inventory, which had fallen to 2.3 million homes, or approximately a six-month supply of for-sale homes, as of January. That's the lowest level of inventory since March 2005, according to the National Association of Realtors, which released the statistic.

Meanwhile, total home sales have risen by 13 percent in the last six months, according to Capital Economics. And while construction of new homes dropped marginally in February, they still were at the second-highest level since October 2008, the National Association of Homebuilders says.

A last sign, much ballyhooed by industry optimists, is the state of homebuilders' confidence: The National Association of Home Builders sentiment indexreached 28 in February and remained at that level in March. Not since 2007 have homebuilders expressed such confidence in the housing industry.

Despite sprouting green shoots in the market, home prices continue to slide, and even when they do eventually trend upward, many economists say, the increase will be gradual.

That fact has led some industry observers to call for a rethinking of what actually constitutes a housing recovery, and to avoid treating price movement as the all-important indicator of a recover.

Capital Economics, for instance, recently revealed that even though prices declined last year (around 4 percent according to various estimates) and mortgage rates are finally ticking up, the economic analysis firm still believes that the real estate market is making inroads.

But CoreLogic senior economist Sam Khater advises against buying too much into the hype. "I would be cautious about folks getting too optimistic," he says.

The 1.6 million homes that are in a state of foreclosure are about to hit the market at a faster pace in the wake of an agreement reached between the government and major mortgage servicers over acceptable foreclosure practices, Khater says. That'll drive down prices, he says, as banks begin to push through foreclosures that they previously halted during negotiations of the $25 billion settlement reached last month.

"There's going to be a really long tail to this," he cautions. Still, Khater says that rising sales and the fact that fewer homes are flowing into the "shadow inventory" -- homes in a state of foreclosure -- are positive signs for the real estate market.

Huskey says the next healthy housing era will be a more "traditional market" that will stand in stark contrast to what he calls the "steroid years," when prices rose at an unsustainable pace.

As CNNMoney recently put it, "If you're waiting for home prices to go up, then you're missing signs the troubled housing market has finally turned around."

Real estate professionals also stress that a housing recovery should not be judged from a bird's-eye view, since market conditions vary dramatically from state to state and city to city. In states walloped by the real estate market collapse, real estate agents are significantly more optimistic that home prices will rise in the next six months.

Eighty percent of Arizona real estate agents and homeowners, 75 percent of Nevada agents and homeowners and 51 percent of Florida agents and homeowners told HomeGain that they believe home values will rise in the next six months. The optimism in Florida dovetails with dramatic price gains recently reported by Realtor.com.

The online marketplace reports that out of the 10 metropolitan areas that saw the highest price increases in their database in February of 2012, seven were in Florida. Miami median home prices increased by 26.19 percent, the listing service says.

Meanwhile, in states that weathered the housing crisis relatively well, a much higher percentage of real estate agents and homeowners believe that prices will drop. In Connecticut, 60 percent of agents surveyed said that they thought prices would continue to fall.

10 U.S. real estate markets drawing international buyers

Inman News report features data trends, analysis, commentary on popular areas

BY INMAN NEWS, FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2012.

Inman News®

Affluent international buyers, attracted by fire-sale prices, are snapping up real estate in some U.S. markets. In a report released today, Inman News identifies 10 markets where public records indicate foreign buyers make up the biggest share of overall buyers.

Most of the markets are located in sunny Florida, though areas in Nevada, Arizona, New York and Hawaii are also on the list. The report highlights the economic and personal factors that drive foreign buyers to buy; their preferred property types; top countries of origin; how they find the real estate professionals they work with; why the selected markets appeal to them; and relevant demographic and housing-related characteristics for the markets, including share of foreign-born population, distressed property footprint, home-price trends, and vacancy rates.

Among the findings in this report, researched and written by Inman News reporter Andrea V. Brambila:

• Population levels in the markets range from about 600,000 in Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla., to nearly 5.6 million in Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, Fla.
• Seven out of 10 markets had foreign-born populations above the national rate of 13.1 percent in 2010. The Miami metro had the highest share born abroad, at 39.2 percent.
• In six of the 10 markets, area inhabitants who were foreign-born and moved from abroad accounted for a higher-than-average share of overall inhabitants who reported moving in the previous year in 2010. New York County (Manhattan) had the highest share: 7.7 percent of the people who moved in that county were both foreign-born and hailing from abroad.
• In seven out of 10 markets, the median sales price for an existing, single-family home was lower than the national median of $163,500 in fourth-quarter 2011. In eight out of 10 markets, the median sales price for a condo was lower than the national median of $160,800 for that same quarter.
• Condo prices fell on an annual basis in the fourth quarter in seven out of 10 markets. All seven saw their prices decline by more than the national rate of -1.7 percent.
• Seven of the 10 markets had a higher share of distressed sales in fourth-quarter 2011 than the national rate of 23.7 percent. Eight of the 10 markets had higher foreclosure activity rates in fourth-quarter 2011 compared to the national rate.
• Nine of the 10 markets, except for Honolulu, had higher vacancy rates in 2010 than the national rate of 13.1 percent. Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., had the highest rate, at 37 percent.