Yes There's Mortgage Money, Yes Rates Are Good

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I keep hearing from people that they think that the banks have stopped lending money to prospective home buyers.  This is simply not true!  The loan officers I work with regularly have no problems approving my clients, though credit & income is looked at more intently than in the past.

In addition, I’m seeing most loan officers quoting 5.75% – 6% today, which is down from 6.75% a couple days last week.  Rates around 6% have been the norm for the last few months but historically are still extremely low.

If you are a buyer who has been turned down for a loan or worries about qualifying, please give me a call and I will set you up with one of my loan officers to see if we can get you set up.  Not everyone can qualify, but the vast majority of buyers out there can still get loans.

Comments

  1. Patient Buyer says

    Aaron-

    Below the line is a response to your reply to my post over at Teresa’s blog.

    I think that looking for price recovery is less important than sales volume recovery.

    Appreciation is a nice motivator, but for too long it has been overplayed.

    Personally, I think RE agents should not care one whit about appreciation as long as business is brisk at the current market price.

    Anyway, my reply:
    ——————————————–
    Recovery of what? Sales volume or price appreciation?

    Let me be clear – I am only speaking about price appreciation.

    I fully expect sales volume to keep increasing year-over-year from this point forward. The fuel that will drive this is price decreases.

    Each ‘pent-up’ buyer will be slowly lured into the market as prices creep downward. There will probably be an annual year-over-year bump somewhere in the near future (sales volume), but sellers won’t be able to suddenly jack up the price.

    The bottom in sales volume is very likely behind us already. Volume and pricing trends do not track equally. Remember that really slow sales at the pricing peak? When people tried to point out the bubble, the reply was that prices were still up.

    Yeah, but sales volume was approaching a bottom.

    Here is the kicker:

    For the foreseeable future, ‘price appreciation’ will need to be removed as a bullet point on the brochure.

    We are going back to the days when equity was primarily built through payment of principal.

    For decades, paying off the mortgage was a goal, and a means of savings through equity. And RE prices rarely slumped.

    But when the idea that RE rices can’t ever fall became the primary justification for a global financial bubble, then houses began to develop a speculative component that is now collapsing.

    “Equity through payment of principal” needs to be the bullet point that is pushed. Watch and see, that will be what everyone is talking about in a year or two.

    And with prices at such lows, the notion of owning a house debt-free will seem possible, and desirable.

    As agents, I think you will enjoy that market even more than the highly leveraged market of before.