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July 14, 2008
Rates on 30-year mortgages rise, other rates mixed
South Florida Real Estate Information
WASHINGTON – Rates on 30-year mortgages edged up this week, while rates on other home loans were a mixed bag.
Freddie Mac, the mortgage company, reported Thursday that 30-year fixed-rate mortgages averaged 6.37 percent this week. That was up from 6.35 percent last week.
Rates on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, a popular choice for refinancing, dipped to 5.91 percent this week, compared with 5.92 percent last week.
Meanwhile, five-year adjustable-rate mortgages rose to 5.82 percent this week, up from 5.78 percent last week. Rates on one-year adjustable-rate mortgages held steady at 5.17 percent, unchanged from the previous week.
South Florida Real Estate Information
Earlier this week, there were fresh signs that the painful housing slump was likely to drag on. The National Association of Realtors’ pending home sales index slipped 4.7 percent in May to the third-lowest reading on record.
“Pending home sales fell more than expected,” said Freddie Mac’s chief economist Frank Nothaft.
Home foreclosures have hit record highs as sagging home values have left some borrowers owning more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. With more empty homes being dumped on an already glutted market, prices are being pulled lower. Buyers, however, have become harder to find as credit has gotten harder to secure.
Congress is moving ahead on a package to help distressed homeowners. It would allow the Federal Housing Administration to provide them with more affordable, fixed-rate mortgages.
The mortgage rates do not include add-on fees known as points. The nationwide fee for 30-year, 15-year and five-year mortgages all averaged 0.6 point this week. The fee on one-year mortgages averaged 0.5 point.
A year ago, rates on 30-year mortgages stood at 6.73 percent, 15-year mortgage rates averaged 6.39 percent, five-year adjustable-rate mortgages were at 6.35 percent and one-year adjustable-rate mortgages averaged 5.71 percent.
On the Net: Freddie Mac: http://Freddiemac.com
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South Florida Real Estate Information
Posted by South Florida Realtor at 09:48 AM
E-mail backlash moves workers to text
ORLANDO, Fla. – Got Florida.Com – A couple of years ago, Rob Nunzieta sat on a plane staring in amazement as a high-school girl fired off a cell phone text message.
“I was watching her thumbs moving at this incredible pace; it looked like she was writing a story,” said Nunzieta, 36, the president of FBC Mortgage in Orlando. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that must be cumbersome.’ “
Now, Nunzieta is one of an increasing number of adults text messaging for business. Like the teenagers who preceded them, corporate users favor texting for its immediacy and ease.
“It’s definitely habit-forming,” said Nunzieta, who sends about 20 text messages a day. “For an immediate quick answer, it seems to be better than e-mail.”
Adults have an additional reason for turning to texting: e-mail burnout.
Heavy corporate texters say even though they can send and receive e-mails on their cell phones, they’re so overloaded with e-mail that a new message no longer catches their attention the way it used to.
“The e-mail goes off all day long – it’s a noise I am used to hearing,” said Chris Gent, 44, the spokesman for the Kissimmee Utility Authority, who carries a Palm Treo. “So when a text comes in and it has a different sound, it gets my attention every time. I treat it more immediately than when I get an e-mail.”
Texting in Florida has more than doubled since last year, according to Verizon Wireless, the nation’s second-largest cell-phone carrier. Each month, about 1 billion texts are sent on the company’s network statewide.
A recent study from marketing and communications company Universal McCann found that 78 percent of adults ages 18 to 34 reported sending a text message in the past week, up from 62 percent in 2007.
2 txt or not 2 txt?
Michael Slone, co-owner of Slone Brothers Furniture Store in Longwood, started texting about a year ago when he got a new BlackBerry Curve. He sends about four or five texts a day, mainly to his brother, who is also his business partner.
Slone, 40, and other text-messaging adults said the new medium means they must navigate a new realm of etiquette issues. For instance, sending someone a text message to a receiver who doesn’t have text messages built into their cell plan might cause them to incur a fee.
Others worry about overstepping the personal/professional boundary when sending a text to someone for the first time.
“It’s a little more personal [than other forms of communication] and, quite honestly, there are still enough people who don’t use it, so if I send them a text message, all of a sudden I am costing them money because I assume they are on the same technology level as I am,” said Wendy Kurtz, 42, president of a Central Florida marketing and communications company.
Kurtz recently upped her plan to unlimited text messaging after she had to pay a $11 fee for exceeding her 300 allotted text messages.
Speeding things up
Kurtz has picked up some pointers on texting from her kids, and she often decides to text even when she’s sitting at her computer and could send an e-mail. For instance, she was recently on a conference call with one of her clients and an organization that wanted to hire the client. An idea popped into Kurtz’s head, and she wanted to run it by her client before bringing it up in the conference call, so she sent a text.
“Text messaging is just so much quicker because sometimes the e-mails don’t go through right away because of her server or my server,” Kurtz said.
Nunzieta, president of FBC Mortgage in Orlando, relies on texting so much that he once text-messaged someone who was standing in front of him giving a sales pitch. Nunzieta and his associates had already decided they were going to do business with the company.
So Nunzieta sent her a text message that said, “Hey, go ahead and close the deal, we are ready to sign.” The woman checked the message, laughed and closed the deal.
For more information regarding the above web blog, please call Dean or Bonnie Isenberg at 305-936-2489 / 800-819-5466 or visit us on-line at A-Realtor.Com
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Posted by South Florida Realtor at 09:40 AM
July 01, 2008
10 best places for house bargains. (800) 819-5466 Aventura, Florida
AVENTURA - HOMES .COM Fla. – The best place to get a bargain on a home is an area where there is healthy job growth and more houses available than people to buy them.
These are markets “where you have high inventories but pliable borrowers, with lenders willing to deal,” says Anthony Sanders, a professor of finance at Arizona State University.
Forbes magazine went looking for markets where the damage from risky lending hasn’t been as dramatic as in some parts of the country and where employment growth will burn off an over-abundance of inventory quickly.
Here are the magazine’s 10 best cities for bargain house hunters.
1. Salt Lake City, Utah. Developers have gotten ahead of the demand, but the city is adding jobs more quickly than practically any place else in the country.
2. Raleigh, N.C. Another place where building got ahead of the curve, but the economy is expanding quickly.
3. Orlando, Fla. This part of the state had fewer speculators than Miami and Tampa, and it’s adding jobs faster than those cities as well.
4. Charlotte, N.C. The financial industry is moving here, adding jobs, but the inventory of unsold homes is still significant.
5. Phoenix. This city had a high foreclosure rate, but the economy is growing and people are still moving here in large numbers.
6. Seattle. The city’s port has profited from the weak dollar, but the housing price growth has slowed.
7. Las Vegas. This market was hit hard by foreclosures, but the growing economy makes the huge inventory less toxic than it is many places.
8. Jacksonville, Fla. The foreclosure rate is slower than the rest of the Florida cities, making the large inventory likely to improve.
9. Richmond, Va. There is only one foreclosure per 1,103 households here (compared to 1 in 33 in Detroit). Still, there are plenty of homes on the market.
10. Houston. Homes in Houston have long been a bargain. While there have been plenty of foreclosures, the population and the economy are expanding.
For more information regarding the above web blog, please call Dean or Bonnie Isenberg at 305-936-2489 / 800-819-5466 or visit us on-line at A-Realtor.Com
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Posted by South Florida Realtor at 11:01 AM