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There has been a really disturbing trend over the last couple of years. We've all read about it and I've posted about it several times here. Foreclosure. Very foreboding word. The thing is I have really been noticing it in my area over the last year or so. My next door neighbors sold their house to a younger woman and when her boyfriend flaked out she almost had to sell the house or have her house taken away from her. She ended up not having too but she has rented it out now and is living someplace cheaper. Hated to see her go. My other neighbor on the other side ended up being foreclosed on about four years ago. The bank finally sold the house and the owner rented it out for about a year. Now it's back on the market again.

There is a pretty high percentage of homes in my subdivision that are currently owned by banks and on the market for sale. That's one of the reasons that I am going to have such a hard time selling the house should I get promoted.

Now if you are an experience investor that has the money, this is a great time. Home prices are down and if you are buying pieces of property that have been foreclosed on sometimes you can get them at a steal. Nobody likes taking advantage of other people's misery (well, most of us don't) but it is a good time to be involved with the buying end of real estate.

I sent in my application for promotion a couple of months ago. When I left our corporate office back in 2003 I had every intention of opening the store in Temple and retiring out of it in twenty years. It's funny how things change. I've already taken one promotion after turning it down five times prior and I finally just decided that the money was too good to turn down, not to mention the fact that it might mean retiring even earlier.

One of the possible markets that I might end up taking is in the Wilmington area. I've spent a good bit of time looking at Wilmington real estate lately just trying to get a handle on the nicer areas how much we are looking at. The big problem is selling my house in Georgia. It might take a year and I really don't want to end up with two house payments. The raise just wouldn't be worth it. Most likely we'll end renting a place wherever I go until we can sell the house.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that in some areas of Florida high-end home prices are starting to slide, in some cases by several hundred thousand dollars. If you are a real estate investor now is certainly the time to become involved.

Normally even when the real estate market slides the high-end luxury homes retain most of their value so this is certainly indicative of what's been going on all over the country.

As volatile as the lending market has been for the last year it's pretty important that if you haven't refinanced into a lower mortgage rate at some point over the last year you need to go ahead and get it done. Just the savings alone on a refinance could help offset what you are paying in gas prices right now.

4MortgageRateQuotes.Com has quite a bit of useful information, whether you are are looking to refinance second mortgage and get better terms or just take out a second mortgage. You can also lock in a low rate by getting a mortgage rate quote for free right now. Just check out the links on the main page over there.

My Aunt moved back to Georgia a few years back and one of the things she found that was really amazing was the cost of real estate here versus that of California, where she had loved before. Real Estate out west is so much more expensive than where I live. Even the financing terms seem better. Had she had to refinance California mortgage terms for her house out there it would have been much more expensive than what she's currently paying.

Anyway, while you are over there check out the learning center. It has quite a bit of useful information whether you want to compare Mortgage Lenders, get a free credit report, use mortgage calculators, get a home equity line of credit or maybe you are a first time buyer just looking for information. They have it all for you.

Zillow.com's newest report shows that home values dropped nationally by 3%. CFO Spencer Rascof discusses in the video the results of the newest survey as well as which cities saw the largest declines in value.

With the housing market in the tank right now there are actually some really good opportunities to refinance right now. Rates on 15 year fixed loans are actually under 5% if your credit is decent. Even if it's not you are bound to be able to work something out with a lender to actually get a good rate. Refinance.Com has some really good information on refinancing and getting a low rate mortgage  even if you are looking at a bad credit mortgage refinance.

There are also some pretty good tools at the web site in order to see if you qualify for a home refinance bad credit notwithstanding. There is an easy refinance calculator, an amortization calculator, bi-weekly payment calculator and one just to see how much of a loan you can afford. Don't be fooled by your lender with the bi-weekly scam they try and pull though. Some lenders will let you set up a bi-weekly plan but often there are service fees tucked in that you aren't aware. Generally if you just send them a payment every two weeks, or tack on an extra $100 a month onto your mortgage payment you can pay the loan off several years early and avoid quite a bit of interest just by making one extra payment a year spread out over twelve of them.

If you are interested in refinancing, even if it's a bad credit home refinance you owe it to yourself to get as much information as possible. Go check out Refinance.Com and see what kind of info you can gain.

 

It's amazing to me how fast time can fly when you are busy. It's been almost a year since the subprime meltdown occurred in February of last year. At that point in time HSBC holdings announced that they had seen a pretty large increase in the provision for loan losses as far as mortgage service operations. Due to the fact that people making late payments and losing their home was increasing all over the United States their charge for bad debts in 2006 was $10.5 billion.

The 'meltdown' wasn't something that happened overnight. It's been heading in that direction for a few years now but the announcement by HSBC was sort of a wakeup call to the entire industry. I've posted about the subprime going south several times over the last year and it seems like it's just going to continue getting worse. There is some pretty good information about the subprime meltdown at the link for you to check out as well.

So what happened? Part of it was the fact that many lenders loosened up their requirements and banks were making their lending decisions based on builder's requirements rather than good lending requirements. A couple of my customers work in the building industry and their has been more than one occasion where the lender was told to go ahead and give a loan based on the fact that they had to move houses, even though the borrower was on shaky ground or it was beyond their means. When I bought my house back in 2000 my lender even approved me for a loan around twice what I though I could afford. I went ahead and stuck with a house that would fit my budget, but a lot of people just take the word of the lender. They are the bank after all, shouldn't they know what they are talking about?

On the heels of Senator Durbin's plan for the mortgage crisis, Senator Hillary Clinton says that Wall Street should share some of the blame for the widespread foreclosure crisis because as we all know, politicians want to spread the blame around. During a visit to NASDAQ she outlines her plan to fix the problem.

Bankruptcy judges would be allowed to come to the aid of homeowners facing mortgage foreclosure under a proposal pushed by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin earlier today.

For someone who might be interested in promoting their online business and web site you want to make sure that the person or company that is going to handle your search engine optimization or SEO needs is at least somewhat familiar with the technology or line of business that you are in. For instance, If I run a company that sells Jam I wouldn't want someone trying to market my web site or company that wasn't familiar with my product and didn't know anything about it.

Sure, there are plenty of SEO experts out there and some of them go a great, fantastic job but for someone running a real estate web site such as quite a few of the ones that I link to, I would want to make sure that the company behind my marketing knows something about the terminology and technology used in my product. I wouldn't want a company that specializes in SEO for technology products, for instance, to help me out with my mortgage search engine optimization. While they will probably do a good job I need an expert.

That's where SEM Worldwide comes in. SEM Worldwide is a fairly new company that specializes in SEO for Real Estate, Mortgages and Lawyer SEO. They provide a complete line of SEO products and solutions for businesses all over the world and through many years of working with PayPerClick marketing and SEO have developed a complete understanding of how the SEO industry works and how to fully utilize keywords and advertising for a successful SEO solution. It's all about traffic and return traffic when you are trying to make money online and you need the best to make the most. Real Estate SEO is a burgeoning field and when you want people to find your site, don't you want the best in the business serving your needs?