New rules coming down from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke aim to prevent the current mortgage lending crisis from happening again in the future. The rules will require stricter requirements for proving income of borrowers, limiting or eliminating pre-payment penalties. The changes will also require lenders to consider the borrowers ability to repay from sources other than the home’s value.
Interesting article.
It appears that more and more cities are seeing banks delay the foreclosure process when the occupant abandons the property. There can be many reasons but the article speculates that the banks are trying to minimize losses on their books which may catch the eye of regulators. Others presume it’s to avoid costly maintenance fees, taxes, and increased liability.
Nevertheless, it’s happening on a large scale. Neighborhoods of all flavors are seeing often smelly over-grown eye sores sitting detracting from the value of their surrounding properties.
What can one do? Little without trespassing.
City and county officials (according to the article) have spent millions on cleaning up such properties with little recourse to banks and prior owners. At the end of the day, the tax payers are footing the bill.
Just another added benefit of a changing market.
Comparison of 3 markets. Post Falls, Coeur d’Alene and Spokane.
I think you’ll be interested in what you see.
For other Idaho Cities - shoot me a note.
The residential numbers are in… and they look good.
June proved successful. The average closed sale price jumped over $6,000 to $219,829.47 the largest jump since March to April. Is this a sign of things to come for the rest of the summer season?
Transactions are also up 123 to 750 for the month of June.
The only number that slipped was the Sold to List % dropped 8/100ths of a percent making June the third best month for sellers behind April & May 2008.
I recently decided to tear down the builder supplied deck that was virtually falling off of my house and erect a much larger composite deck. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the handyman around the house, and my skills are better used cleaning up the debris from construction rather than actually constructing, but I decided to take this one on myself.
I did a little research. Code has changed a lot in the 7 years since my home was built and the deck originally fastened so I thought I’d find out the right way to do it.
Spokane County has a great resource that helps even a novice handyman (like myself) determine the materials and support methods needed for a basic deck. Simple diagrams and charts (yes, they had to draw me a picture) made it easy for me to determin what I needed.
Take a peek here.
I’d like to give a shout out to Steve Pirtle of Foundations and Up Home Inspections (509) 954-5922 for spending a weekend helping me build my new desk.
Looking at the data from Closed Sales January through May, I’m seeing that prices are holding firm and sellers on average are getting between 97% and 98.5% of their asking price. Granted, this does not account for any price reductions and time on market, but what it does tell us is that when a property is priced correctly, Spokane buyers will pay the price. Pricing is very important.
Our best month for closed transactions (Jan-May) was March with 978 closed transactions, but March was also the lowest average price per transaction at just over 200k. Since then the transactions have leveled out to between 559 and 627 and the average transaction price has climbed between 209k and 213k.
Sellers gave up more in January and March taking home between 97.12% and 97.6% of their asking price. May was considerably better with 98.39% (a couple thousand dollars based on the average sale price).
For a graphical review of this report, click here.
Who Am I?