Peter Tamura's Blog

One of the advantages of owning a new home is that it may have energy efficient features that won't be available on older homes. Simmons hosted a great event on June 9th for realtors that featured and explained the new energy efficient amenities being built into some new homes.  It is also very ...

There are a lot of people right now with the following predicament, they want to buy a bigger/smaller home but they have a house that is not selling on the market. Two of my clients had the creative idea of renting out their current home and then buying another home.  The issue that they ran into...

  ....it took eight months during which time the seller made mortgage payments, utility payments and lawnmowing and maintenance on a vacant house. It's a reminder that we are just not serving the client to agree to a higher list price just to get the listing and have it sit on the market for mont...

Here's what Mortgage Insurance is costing you now, and here's what the increase will cost.   Let's look at an example of a $200,000, here in Tulsa, Oklahoma you can get a nice home for this amount. *Note that PMI costs more with conventional financing which means that you are paying a below marke...

This was the heading of an article in the New York Times on April 10th, the average 30 yr fixed rate around that time was 4.875% according to mortgage-X.com.  It's interesting that interest rates did indeed go down further, the average rate from the same source now is 4.25% with brief forays belo...

It happened again. This time to a different short sale and not in Sacramento. This short sale is in Roseville. High demand neighborhood -- such high demand that I received more than a dozen calls within 24 hours of putting this short sale on the market. Several months later, I'm still receiving p...

Here's a great blog by Cari Anderson that explains the new changes.How Will the New FHA Mortgage Insurance Structure Affect Your Buying Power? Earlier this month, HUD announced that there would be some forthcoming changes to its FHA mortgage insurance program on October 4th of this year. Since FH...

When you have made a decision to buy a home, it can be helpful to understand the cognitive biases, or shortcuts your mind uses when sorting information to make decisions.  Sometimes, these will lead to poor decisions, let's take a look at some to see if we can avoid some common pitfalls. *Short t...

  If you are planning to sell a home, in Tulsa it is acceptable to use the courthouse records as the basis for your home square footage or an appraisal.  So you may not have to change the courthouse records.  It is quite common for the courthouse records to be off by several hundred feet, the hom...

Long dryer vents are less effective, but the trend is for utility rooms to be in the middle of the house making the venting  system for the dryer problematic.  Dryer vent installation requires understanding the purpose and function of your dryer vent system.  Forced heat produced by natural gas o...