Vince Hoehn of CENTURY 21 Pierce Realty LLC, Manitowish Waters, WI

"Freddie Sees Mortgage Rates Hitting 6 Percent in 2010" Washington Post (12/26/09) P. A12; ElBoghdady, Dina As reported in the Washington Post, mortgage rates could increase to six percent by the end of 2010, or even sooner, according to Freddie Mac.  (Freddie Mac is a GSE, or government sposored enterprise, that purchases ...

For those sitting on the fence about whether to make the "buy" decison or not, or for those afflicted with "paralysis by analysis" and are looking at every property on the market and thus cannot make a decision, consider this:If interest rates rise from today's lows to an entirely plausible 7.5%, sale prices would have ...

Nationally, as well as in our local market, most residential real estate activity is centered on lower end of the real estate market.  There are a number of reasons why this is true, not the least of which, at least on the national level, is the sales activity driven by buyers taking advantage of price-distressed foreclosed homes and short ...

Day 2 of the GRI Course 3 in Green Bay, WI. A lot of good stuff to digest. First we discussed the benefits of using one’s retirement account to invest in real estate. If you sell your investment property, unless you do a delayed exchange (one type of a 1031 exchange), your gain on the sale is taxable. If your retirement account owns the ...

Day One at GRI Course 3 (see my previous post) has proven to be most interesting. The subject today and tomorrow is “Investment Real Estate and Exchanging”, and our instructor assures us that if we master what he is illustrating for us, we will be able to do something 99% of other real estate agents can’t -- properly and ...

I have never, ever been real conversant in the ways and means of the world of high finance - was never really that interested - but the sad state we now find ourselves in, financially speaking, has resulted in me paying more attention to such matters. An article in the January 19th issue of Time Magazine authored by Justin Fox introduced me to a ...

I commented on the new Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) rules on a previous blog post. I now read that two lawsuits have been filed seeking to reverse or eliminate several rule changes contained in the re-written rules. The lawsuits have been brought by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the National Association of ...

More fall-out from the sub-prime mortgage mess: HUD has issued new Real Estate Settlement Procedure Act (RESPA) rules. In recognition of the fact that at times consumers didn't understand the consequences or just simply didn't realize that their mortgages could result in large payment increases after just two or three years, or that other ...

As reported in the October 13th edition of Fortune Magazine, household debt (credit cards, mortgages, home equity lines of credit, and auto loans) in the U.S. has risen to about $14.5 trillion dollars, an amount roughly equal to the country’s gross domestic product, or GDP. (By comparison, as late as 2000 household debt was only about 2/3 of ...

I had a mortgage loan officer from a local bank stop in today to pesonally pass the word that her bank has money available for jumbo loans at 6.87% with no points.  This is way better than rates have been (8+% with 2 points) since the collapse of the secondary market some months back.  (Jumbo loans are loans over ...