CRE Lending

If you're buying a home in Contra Costa County, you need to let your REALTOR know that you served our country honorably.  There is a credit crunch going on and the new VA loan limits, for 2009, allow Contra Costa County veterans to purchase a home, with NO MONEY DOWN, up to $1,094,000.  Let me re...

Can’t afford your mortgage?  Call your lender and ask them to modify the loan to a payment you can afford.  The lender representative will ask you for a stack of paperwork and try to get you to keep paying “something…as a sign of good faith”.  After three or four months, you may receive an offer ...

"If you thought REALTORs were behind the learning curve in Web 2.0, you should see the lenders" If you're a loan originator, on Active Rain, congratulations.  There are some 300,000 working loan originators today and I'm guessing that about 1% of us are actively using social media.  Certainly, th...

I was really looking forward to Jeff's post today about "content ownership".  It's obvious that I feel this is an important issue.  I wanted to highlight some of the salient points I made the other day but the Terms of Service forbid me to parse from "Members Only" posts and republish them in a p...

I wrote this about two years ago.  It won a couple of Carnivals:  Carnival of Real Estate, hosted here on Active Rain Carnival of Real Estate Investing, hosted by Agent Shopper It was a lot of fun to write and a pretty good read (if I say so myself). While I've written informational blog posts, o...

I’ve written a ton about Scenius scenes, but, until lately, we’ve kept the scene creation praxis fairly close to our vests. I had documented the process very early for the folks who were involved in the original discussion of the Scenius idea, then shared that video how-to with other folks by em...

Some coverage of the BHBUnchained and Seattle REBar camp Video clips of Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman from the BloodhoundBlog Unchained preview event in Seattle Living that Seattltude: Bloodhounds listening above the Sound The barcamp event this past Friday (2/13/09) in Seattle at Zillow HQ was an ...

Down payment requirements, for mortgage loan programs,  have increased over the past 12-18 months.  Here are some examples: FHA hiked the statutory down payment to 3.5% Piggy-back mortgages, using second liens, are all but dead.  Conventional loans, with down payments of less than 20%, require pr...

Mortgage rates look to trend up in the next week or so.  Ambiguity about the spending/stimulus bill, combined with a massive borrowing effort by the Government, is making it difficult for mortgage rates to stay below 5%.  Economic data are still bleak and that should act as a ceiling for mortgage...

Scott Cowan is taking the lead on this event.Some of my favorite bloggers blog at Bloodhound Blog. Greg Swann and Brian Brady have agreed to come up to Seattle (I'm guessing to stop me from begging them so much) to deliver a FREE seminar. I am heading up the attendance for the event.   This will ...