The Home Equity Conversion Mortgage is  a  product created by Congress in 2008 to provide some liquidity to the struggling home market. The amount you can borrow depends on age, current interest rates, and the appraised value of your home or FHA’s mortgage limits,whichever is less. Generally, the more valuable your home is, the older you are and the lower the interest, the more you can borrow.

1. No payments are necessary as long as the house is your principal residence.
2. No need to repay the loan as long as you or one of the borrowers continues to live in the house
3. You can never owe more than the value of your home at the time you or your heirs sell the home.
4. When you sell your home, you or your estate will repay the cash you received from the reverse mortgage plus interest and fees.
5. The rest is yours.

The Rules Just Changed

More seniors are turning to reverse mortgages to supplement their retirement savings, which have been decimated by market losses. Continue reading this post

Mortgage rates, prior to June, were stabilizing after a volatile first quarter.  Potential home buyers and existing homeowners were settling in to the fact that a 4.5% conventional mortgage rate could be had; some days you had to pay a couple of points, some days only one.  FHA and VA loans were about an eighth of a percentage point higher.

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As we rapidly progress toward tax time, April 15, in an atmosphere of economic doom and gloom, there are still some positive situations from which a homeowner can benefit in dealing with homeownership. This article offers a variety of suggestions on tax deductions for homeowners over the 2008 and 2009 tax seasons that you may want to pass along to your clients.

Due to the current economy, homeowners will want to be aware of these important tips, and know whether they qualify for specific deductions, when it is time to submit their tax return.

These tips will provide a focus for current year taxes as well as years going forward.

1. New Home Due to Relocation Tax Deductions

If you purchased a home due to a transfer or new job, you may also have some deductions based on the following requirements: the new location must be 50 miles (one way) or further from your new job than if you had not moved. So, you cannot take this deduction if you are moving within the same city or neighborhood.

The move has to have occurred within a year of starting the new job. You must have worked full time (for any employer) for 39 weeks during the year following the move as long as the location of your new employer is in the general neighborhood of your new home.

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Here’s a unique co-marketing business model that combines RateWindow, the wholesale mortgage rate engine and HomeGain’s AgentView to give teams of mortgage brokers and Realtors an innovative online marketing presence. Using RateWindow and AgentView together will help position the Realtor and mortgage broker as a team solution for their local client base.

Please let me know what you think about the new marketing model.

Are you using VA loans properly in your real estate brokerage business?  Most agents don’t fully understand them and their customers are suffering because of it. 

Here are four myths, truths and action items, about VA home loans, that could help you serve your home buying customers better:

LOAN MYTH 1:  You have to be on active duty, in the military service, to use a VA home loan.
FACT:  Eligibility is determined by current and past service.  Essentially, if a veteran served for at least six months, from 1964 to today, they most likely have VA home loan eligibility.  There are 15 million veterans under the age of 65 today; most of them should be eligible.
ACTION ITEM: Ask every new homebuyer, regardless of their age if they served.  Don’t rule out the gals; about 10% of those vets are women.

LOAN MYTH 2:  Sellers have to pay for the veteran’s closing costs.
FACT:  The VA doesn’t allow for certain loan-related fees to be paid by the veteran.  Those fees are usually about $1,200.  The loan originator or REALTOR can pay those fees.  THE VA allows the seller to contribute up to 4$ of the selling price towards ANY loan-related costs but the seller does NOT have “mandatory” fees.
ACTION ITEM:  Write “seller not responsible for any allowable or non-allowable VA loan-related costs” and call the listing agent to explain this when presenting an offer.

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Mortgage rates have been very volatile this past month.  If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll note that the Fed is trying to drive fixed-rate conventional loans down to a 4.5% rate.  Last week, The Fed announced it would purchase mortgage-backed securities, in the open market, in order to drive down mortgage rates to 4.5%.

The preponderance of the Government intervention is being perceived as inflationary.  In short, investors believe that the Government has created so much money in the past eighteen months that it could render our currency as worthless as a Banana Republic.  This should drive mortgage rates much higher in 12-18 months. Continue reading this post