5 Steps To Save The Home of Your Dreams

What do you do when the appraisal on the dream home you want to buy comes in below the price in the offer the seller has accepted? I’m talking 10 to as much as 20 percent below. Chances are raising the additional cash above and beyond your initial down payment and closing costs to cover the difference between the offered price and the appraisal price will not happen! We’ll you are not alone. Some 16 percent of all sales are failing due to low appraisals. 16 Percent! Some real estate professionals and economist say that these low ball appraisals are pushing home values down further. Did you know you can fight back? That’s right you have options. And chances are you can find a way to make the deal work without increasing your down payment. I found a great article featuring 5 steps you can take to save your dream home. To get this article simply click here.

Six Reasons Why Mortgage Applications Are Rejected

1. Income issues. Most failed applications falling into this category have income too low for the mortgage amount they are seeking; often, a spouse's credit issues can create this problem, too, as the income the spouse plans to actually chip in toward the mortgage cannot be considered by a lender. But increasingly, the recent vagaries of the job market are also causing this issue, as people who have changed their line of work or have changed from salaried employee to freelancer over the last couple of years can also have their home loan applications rejected based on income.

2. Muddled money matters. If the mortgage for which you're applying plus your monthly payments on credit card, car and student loan debts will comprise more than 45 percent of your total income, you could have problems qualifying for a home loan. You might also run into problems if you rely too heavily on bonuses, overtime, cash wages or rental income -- all of these can be difficult or impossible to get a mortgage bank to consider, and if they do, they might not take all of it into account.

3. Credit issues. Today, the mortgage-qualifying FICO score cutoff falls somewhere between 620 and 660, depending on which lender and which loan type you seek. More than one-third of Americans, by some numbers, have credit scores too low to qualify for a home loan. Even if your credit score is high enough to qualify, if you have any late mortgage payments, a short sale, a foreclosure or a bankruptcy in the last two years, loan qualifying could be difficult to impossible.

4. Property didn't appraise. Since the whole industry had its hand (among other things) smacked for allowing home values to skyrocket in a very short time, appraisal guidelines have tightened up -- some would say, even more than overall mortgage guidelines. So, it is increasingly common to have the property appraise for a price lower than the sale price negotiated between the buyer and seller.

5. Condition problems. With all the distressed properties on the market, and with most nondistressed sellers barely breaking even, more home-sale transactions than ever are falling apart due to condition problems with the property. Many lenders will not extend financing on homes where the appraiser points out problems like cracked or broken windows, missing kitchen appliances, electrical problems, or wood rot.

And in the world of condos and other units that belong to a homeowners association, if more than 25 percent of units are rented (rather than owner-occupied) or more than 15 percent are delinquent on their HOA dues, new applications for refinance or purchase mortgages on units in the development are likely to be rejected.

6. Technical difficulties with application. The days when lenders just took your word for it are long, long gone. Applications with incomplete or unverifiable information are doomed.

Half of refinance applications are abandoned or rejected, as are 30 percent of purchase mortgage applications, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. All told, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) says that well over 2 million mortgage applications were rejected last year.

Want to avoid falling into that number? It's tough -- However, there are many ways to get advice about mortgage applications in the future. Don't go in unprepared. With the right counsel or access to the right piece of software, you can know whether or not the mortgage application will be approved before you ever submit it.

Banks are just using calculations based on pretty well-established formulae, and a professional or a professional tool with the right training can often approximate their decision based on current market trends very well.

What do you think about Google +, are you going to give it a try or are you already well on your way?

While I was purusing my company website I read this great article by, John Passerini Vice President, Interactive Marketing Sotheby's International Realty Affiliates LLC...and wanted to pass the information along.

On the web or in person, staying connected to others is a basic need and what affirms that idea more emphatically than the 750 million Facebook users and the 200 Million tweets per day from Twitter. From letting everyone know what you made for dinner to organizing protests that lead to toppling governments, the rise of Social Networking has been astounding shifting how humans interact with each other, governments and corporations forever.

Google, for all it’s amazing technical innovations and ability to harness the power of networked computers to serve humans, when it comes to the people part of the internet equation they’ve been on the outside looking in trying to figure out how to be invited, sidle or crash the social networking party.

So now we have Google +, not Google’s first attempt at becoming more social (see Google Buzz) but it’s most all encompassing attempt. Per Larry Page, CEO of Google – “Our goal with Google+ is to make sharing on the web like sharing in real life, as well as to improve the overall Google experience.” With the recent invite only public trial launch of Google + on June 28th and with over 25 Million accounts already, Google + can lay claim as the fastest growing social networking site in the short history of social networking.

But is Google + different enough to make you want to leave the Facebook bash, do you have to even leave can you, should you do both and why would you? Nobody knows at this point so instead of trying to predict its place in the world, let me try to define what it is and has.

No new technology comes without its own vocabulary and Google+ has got it share of words they hope will be as familiar as “Wall” or “Like” or “Friending.” Streams, Sparks, Circles, Hangouts and the Huddle are the buzzwords of late.

Both Streams and Sparks are similar to Facebook’s Top News or Most Recent feeds of your social connections and interests but instead of a combined feed, the Stream and the Spark allows you to separate the information. The Stream focuses on you and your friends’ social interactions of personal posts of pictures, links and comments. While Sparks, based on Google Search, focus on feeds of information about your interests created by you with for example, updates on your favorite sports team, actors, musicians, technology, cooking or even your favorite real estate company. Sparks can spark a conversation topic.

The Stream can be controlled by the main differentiator between Facebook and Google +, the Circle. Think about when you first jumped on Facebook probably “friending” or accepting friend requests from everyone and anyone you may have come in contact with only to end up with an unrealistic amount of friends and a bunch of surprising pictures from your past. With Google +, not only do you get a friend-reset opportunity but you can organize your peeps of influence so your boss or clients or even mother doesn’t have to see that photo of you or your friend from “back in the day” or even late last night if you don’t want them to. Instead of having the largest group of friends on the block and sharing everything with everyone and their friends, you can start over and invite people to be part of your work, friend or family circles and post and receive posts to focused groups of friends, family, coworkers or acquaintances. Facebook has similar security and sharing options but I think the way Google + controls who you share with is a bit simpler and intuitive and the most alluring part of Google +.

The Hangout is simply a quick way to setup a live multi person video chat with people in your Circles. A Huddle is a real time group-messaging tool that can get everyone in your circle involved in a conversation.

So those are the basics, now what to do with Google +, well the best thing to do is try it and in order to try it you’ll need an invite because it’s still in trial, invite only mode. But if you know someone who has Google+ ask them to send you an invite and you’re in the party. Or you may also submit a request for an invite by going to the learn more about Google + at https://www.google.com/+/learnmore/.

Finally, here are some great sources of information on the topic including the official Google + blog and this article from the June edition of Wired Magazine, Inside Google + by Wired plus the latest from Website Magazine

What do you think about Google +, are you going to give it a try or are you already well on your way?