Check out the latest video from Mike Lyon of DoYouConvert.com! He is a very well respected individual within the real estate community and recently recorded this post.
Mike Lyon has accumulated a wealth of “real world” knowledge and first‐hand experience in the realm of online marketing and sales for home builders. He delivers his information from the trenches and draws from his diverse background in online advertising, digital design, and internet sales.
By: Shawn Tully – CNNMoney.com
Forget stocks. Don’t bet on gold. After four years of plunging home prices, the most attractive asset class in America is housing.
From his wide-rimmed cowboy hat to his roper boots, Mike Castleman fits moviedom’s image of the lanky Texas rancher. On a recent March evening, Castleman is feeding cattle biscuits to his two pet longhorn steers, Big Buddy and Little Buddy, on his 460-acre Bar Ten Creek Ranch in Dripping Springs, a hamlet outside Austin in the Texas Hill Country. The spread is a medley of meandering streams, craggy cliffs, and centuries-old oaks. But even in this pastoral setting, his mind keeps returning to a subject he knows as well as any expert around: the housing market. “I’m a dirt-road economist who sees what’s happening on the ground, and in 35 years I’ve never seen a shortage of new construction like the one I’m seeing today,” declares Castleman, 70, now offering a biscuit to his miniature donkey Thumper. “The talking heads who are down on real estate will hate to hear this, but America needs to build a lot more houses. And in most markets the price of new homes is fixin’ to rise, not fall.”
Castleman is in a unique position to know. As the founder and CEO of a company called Metrostudy, he’s spent more than three decades tracking real-time data on the country’s inventory of new homes. Each quarter he dispatches 500 inspectors to literally drive through 45,000 subdivisions from Baltimore to Sacramento. The inspectors examine 5 million finished lots, one at a time, and record whether they contain a house that’s under construction, one that’s finished and for sale, or a home that’s sold. Metrostudy covers 19 states, or around 65% of the U.S. housing market, including all the ones hardest hit by the crash: Florida, California, Arizona, and Nevada. The company’s client list includes virtually every major homebuilder and bank — from Pulte (PHM) and KB Home (KBH) to Bank of America (BAC) and Wells Fargo (WFC).
The key figures that Metrostudy collects, and that those clients prize, are the number of homes that are vacant and for sale in each city, and the number of months it takes to sell all of them. Together those figures measure inventory — the key metric in determining whether a market has a surplus or a shortage of new housing.
Today Castleman is witnessing an extraordinary reversal of the new-home glut that helped sink prices just a few years ago. In the 41 cities Metrostudy covers, a total of 78,000 houses are now either vacant and for sale, or under construction. That’s less than one-fourth of the 343,000 units in those two categories at the peak of the frenzy in mid-2006, and well below the level of a decade ago. “If we had anything like normal levels of buying, those houses would sell in 2½ months,” says Castleman. “We’d see an incredible shortage. And that’s where we’re heading.”
By: Steve Alonso – Academy Mortgage
Buying a new home means considering your options about how you are going to pay for it and in today’s world, most families that buy a new home end up financing that home in one way or another with a mortgage.
And when it comes to buying a home from a new home builder, the process of getting a mortgage is basically the same as if you buy an existing home.
While it is possible to find just the right “spec home”, many people who buy a new home from a new home builder will go through the process of picking the home site, the floorplan, the options that are available in the home and wait eagerly for the home to go from concept to completion.
Because the process of buying a new home can take more than a few weeks, here are a few pitfalls to avoid so that when it comes time to close your mortgage and move into your new home, everything will go as planned.
Don’t run up your credit cards: When you first get approved for a mortgage when you start the process, don’t go out and spend a large amount of money on your credit cards buying things for your new house. It is a good idea to keep your credit card debt at the exact same (or lower) level it was when you were approved for your mortgage in the first place.
Keep working your normal work hours: If you were working 40 hours per week, keep working 40 hours per week. Don’t think that just because you are approved to buy that new house you can cut back on your work hours.
Don’t apply for new credit cards: Or buy a new car. Or apply for any kind of new credit. If you take on new credit, it is going to count into your overall debt-to-income ratio and you want to make sure you keep it exactly what it was when you started the process.
Don’t bounce any checks or have NSF’s at your bank: These can sometimes pop up and cause all kinds of problems. If there was ever a time that an NSF was “okay”, when you are buying a new home that is not a time you want to have one.
Check in with your loan officer regularly: The lending environment is changing all the time (especially lately) and a regular check-in with your loan officer will help keep you informed of anything that you need to be aware of.
