Bill McCord's Blog

The Federal Reserve (the Fed) took aggressive steps during 2009 and early 2010 to drive mortgage interest rates down in order to encourage more people to buy homes and revive the real estate industry.

To understand how they did this we need to know what actually controls mortgage interest rates for the home buyer.

 It is the price of Mortgage Backed Bonds (MMB’s)and NOTHING else. The bulk of these are created by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac who buy your mortgage from the Bank or Mortgage Broker who originally made it. They then package hundreds of mortgages together as a Bond and sell it off to private investors (Pension and Insurance companies are typical buyers). The proceeds from the sale are used to buy new mortgages from the Banks and Brokers. This virtuous circle is the motor that drives the Real Estate market.

The Private Investors stopped buying when they realized that a lot of the individual mortgages inside the Bonds were badly designed (Sub-Prime) and payments from were less reliable than they had been told.

When investors stop buying MMB’s the Mortgage Lenders have no money to lend and the Real Estate Market freezes up.

One solution would have been to increase the interest rate on new mortgages in order to offer a higher rate to the investors to compensate for the higher risk. In normal times this is how the market works. In the current circumstances the Investors were not going to buy at any price.

In early 2009 the Fed came to the rescue to avoid a total shut down of the housing market. They began buying these MMB’s in huge numbers and aaccepted very low interest rates. This restored the supply of money available to make new mortgages at historically low rates, and stabilized the whole residential real estate industry.

These Fed purchases have been completed and the challenge now is to attract Private Investors back as buyers for MBB’s. They are there, but will not accept the low rates that the Fed did. Therefore the interest rates paid to get a mortgage will have to go up.

Potential Buyers need to be getting serious if they want to take advantage of these historically low rates.

 

Rep. Maxine Waters [D-CA35] recently introduced H.R. 5072,The FHA Reform Act of 2010 which would impose hugely increased monthly payments on anyone buying a home with an FHA insured loan. This is a large majority of all 1st Time Buyers.

Already, effective from April 5th, the upfront Mortgage Insurance Premium was increased from 1.75% to 2.25%, (a 29% increase).

Now, in a further attack on the 1st Time Buyer, this misguided lady proposes a 300% increase on the ongoing monthly Mortgage Insurance payment.

To understand the impact of this consider a new $300,000 purchase with a 30 year fixed FHA loan.at 5.5% interest rate. The monthly payment will go from $1,804 up to $2,051. An increase of 12%.

Put another way; If the maximum you could qualify for was $300,000 before, it would now be only $270,000.

At one fell stroke this bill would eliminate an enormous number of willing buyers at the bottom end of the market.

When you consider that each 1st Time Buyer potentially creates a move up Buyer we can’t afford  this kind of interference in this very fragile recovery.

Here is another dynamite program for 1st time home buyers.

Details here are for Santa Clara County but other Counties and Cities also operatate these programs.

The County of Santa Clara has been awarded a new MCC Allocation in the amount of $3,031,944.

This award should serve approximately 70 Households.

MCC Applications will be accepted beginning February 12, 2010, until the allocation is depleted.

MCC PROGRAM: The Mortgage Credit Certificate Program is available for first-time home-buyer’s purchasing their first home in participating cities in Santa Clara County. The Mortgage Credit Certificate Program gives first-time home-buyer’s a federal income tax credit of up to 15% of the interest paid on their first mortgage loan each year the home-buyer keeps the same mortgage loan and lives in the same property as their primary residence.

The Maximum Income Limits for 2010:

Effective February 12, 2010:

1 or 2 person household = $102,500

3 or more person household = $117,875

The Maximum Purchase Price Limits are:

Resale/Existing Units = $570,000 and for,

Newly Constructed Units= $630,000

FICO scores measure the risk that an individual will default by evaluating their history of credit management. The exact formulas used are top secret but FICO has given the following components and the approximate importance of each:

35%- Payment History. Late payment bills such as Mortgage, Credit Cards, Car loans etc will lower a person’s FICO score to drop. Paying bill as agreed over time will improve the score.

30% – Credit Utilization. The ratio of current revolving debt (Credit Card and Charge Account balances) to the total available credit (Credit Limits). Consumers can improve their FICO scores by paying off debt and reducing balances to less than 50% of the available credit. Closing existing revolving charge accounts can have a negative effect on this ratio and lower your score. Before closing accounts be sure to do some more research, or get qualified advice.

15% – Length of Credit History. Time improves FICO scores without any action other than paying all bills on time.

10% – Types of Credit Used. FICO scores are improved by having a record of good history of managing multiple types of credit (Installment, Revolving, Consumer finance etc).

10% – Recent Credit Applications. Multiple requests to obtain new credit over a short period of time can hurt an individual’s FICO score. However, individuals shopping for the best rate for a Mortgage or Auto Loan over a short period will not see any negative impact on a FICO score. All such enquiries will be counted as just one.
 http://www.myfico.com/CreditEducation/

There are many different Business Models in the Real Estate Industry. Here’s just a few examples:

1. Buyer Only Brokers.

2. Buyer Rebate (Kick Back) Brokers.

3. Virtual Office Brokers. No physical location.

4. Reduced Commision Brokers.

5. Fixed Price Brokers.

6. Transaction Facilitation Brokers.

Etc, etc.etc ad infinitum.

All of these and many more are proof that we have a lot of competition in our business, and that the Consumer (Buyer or Seller) has lots of choices.

I won’t try to explain the pro’s and con’s of any of these options, but will strongly suggest that whichever of them you choose you  strongly consider working with a REALTOR.

My reason for this specific advice is as follows:

1. There are more than Half a Million Licensed Real Estate Agents in California. This is the minimum required qualification for the job.

2. Only 165,000 of them are REALTORS who have voluntarily agreed to subscribe to a strict Code of Ethics, and are paying members of their Local, State, and National Associations of Realtors.

Amongst many other services Realtors provide to the public is the web site Realtor.com. the most popular of all on-line Real Estate sites. Check out http://www.realtor.com/.

Mortgage interest rate have remainded at historically low levels for longer than we can remember. This has not been an accident. The largest factor has been the Federal Reserve program under which they have bought about $1.25 TRILLION of Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS’s) on the open market.

 MBSs are simply BONDS. Their prices go up and down based on our old friends Supply and Demand. As with all Bonds,  when   pricies go up the Interest Rate on them goes down, and vise-versa.

So in order to see where Mortgage Interest Rates are going we simply track the prices of the Bonds known as MBS’s.

You can safely ignore the uninformed pundits of the media repeating the ridiculous mantra that Mortgage interes rates are driven by the 10 year Treasury. The MBS’s deal only with Mortgages. The 10 year Treasury is an indicator of the entire U.S. financial system and will often point in the opposite direction to the MBS market.

Now let’s come back to the $1.25 Trillion worth of MBS’s bought by the Federal Reserve as part of the Governments Financial Stimulus program. Having this much money looking to buy MBS’s (DEMAND) has artificially kept the price of them up, and as a result kept Mortgage Interest Rates down. As of the last day of March this program is finished. Now there is a reduced demand for MBS’s and an inevitable inrease in Mortgage Interest Rates.

This will begin to happen right away and continue until the market stabilizes at the level dictated by regular market forces. This will be at a higher rate than we are at now.

For an excellent summary of this process check out the following link 

http://www.mortgagesuccesssource.com/ezine.php?ez=1003

The lesson here is that if you want to become a homeowner it’s time to get serious before these rate increases get too far away from what you can afford.

I won’t try to explain the pro’s and con’s of any of these options, but will strongly suggest that whichever of them you choose, you consider working with a REALTOR. My reason for this specific advice is as follows:

 

1. There are more than Half a Million Licensed Real Estate Agents in California. This is the minimum required qualification for the job.

2. Only 165,000 of them are REALTORS who have voluntarily agreed to subscribe to a strict Code of Ethics, and are paying members of their Local, State, and National Associations of Realtors.

Amongst many other services Realtors provide to the public is the web site Realtor.com. the most popular of all on-line Real Estate sites. Check out http://www.realtor.com/.

The IRS will be releasing a new version of Form 5405, the First-Time Homebuyer Credit Form, for homebuyers claiming the extended housing tax credit. Homebuyers eligible for the tax credit must use this new version if they:

1. Purchased their homes on or after November 7, 2009,

OR

2. Will claim the housing tax credit on their 2009 tax returns, regardless of when the property was purchased.

The new form was due to be published last December. The old form (currently the only one available on the IRS website) will not be accepted for claiming the tax credit under the extended rules.

NOTE: At this time the IRS requires that owners claiming this tax credit 0n their 2009 tax returns must file on paper. Be sure to check this beforehand if planning to file electronically. It may have changed by then.

In the world of smoke and mirrors called “The Finance System” the word PRIME has two very different meanings.

One is PRIME RATE (the interest rate banks charge their best clients. Normally 3% above Fed Funds Rate.

The other is SUB-PRIME to describe a mortgage (SUB-PRIME MORTGAGE) that should never have made. Hence the “The Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis“.

In the real world occupied by most of us “Ordinary Folk” the term Sub-Prime should not be linked to a Mortgage; It actually refers to the Borrower of the Mortgage i.e. The person whose Credit, Income, and/or Cash for down payment is not good enough to get a ”Prime” Mortgage. Hereafter referred to as The Sub-Prime Borrower.

This person has always been with us. Until the unbridled greed and avarice of Banks and Wall St intervened with their “No Possible Homebuyer Left behind” programs these folks rented until such time as their financial situation allowed them to qualify for a sensible mortgage.

Let’s be clear on this. The Sub-Prime Mortgages were and are High Risk loans made to High Risk people. These loans could only be made if the Bank knew it could sell them on to a 3rd party before the inevitable late payments started. This way the Banks got their profit with effectively no responsibility for the future performance of the flakey loan.

It was effectively a game of “Pass the Parcel in a Bagdad Pub”.

By the time these loans started going bad they had spread throughout the Worlds Financial systems leading to the current situation so often referred to as the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis.

At the end of the day we have a large number of Banks and other Wall Street hot shots who  made enormous profits by selling what they all knew to be an unstable product to an undereducated public.

This is a recurring story in our history.

If you don’t want to become a victim of the next wave then you need to get educated in how the system really works before you meet the next Bernie Madoff.

For some thoughts on how you might do this check out my posts from 04/25/2008 “Kick Start the Kids”.

An increasing number of Listings are stating that they will not accept offers from FHA or V/A Buyers.

When questioned the Agents usually claim that these loans impose additional costs on the Seller. This was true up till a few years ago, but no longer. In fact, they have a huge advantage in today’s world.

 When questioned they claim that these loan impose additional costs on the Seller. This was true up till a few years ago, but no longer. In fact, these loans have a huge advantage in today’s world.

The following explains why this is so:

First a little clarification regarding current appraisal procedures is required.

1. As of July 2009,  for all Conventional loans, the selection of the appraiser is governed by the much despised HVCC (Home Valuation Code of Conduct) guidelines from Fannie Mae. These require that no-one involved in the transaction has any control over the appraiser chosen. This must be done by a 3rd party Appraisal Management Company (A.M.A.) who will collect the full cost of the appraisal plus some profit for themselves. There are no requirements regarding the qualifications of the chosen appraiser except for having the required state license. As the A.M.A. gets to keep the full amount of the appraisal fee, they have a strong interest in giving the job to the lowest bidder regardless of where they live and work, or whether they have any knowledge of the market conditions where the property is located. In recent times I have had one appraiser come from Tracy to value a property in the Hayward Hills, and another come in from Benicia to Tracy. In both cases they brought in a valuation 20% lower than the agreed purchase price and blew the deal away. Both prpoerties went back on the market and closed with FHA Loans using a local appraisor.

2. For Government Loans (FHA, V/A) the appraiser can still be selected by the Lender, The agent, or the Buyer as has always been the case. This ensures that the appraiser will be local to the property and therefore have current knowledge of the neighborhood in which the property is located.

Result is that the appraiser can be selected on their merits and qualifications, rather than based on how cheaply they agree to do the job.

NOTE: There are a limited number of circumstance where FHA & V/A loans cannot be used due to the short time between the last time the property sold and the current date. These a typically “Flippers” bought at foreclosure sales, quickly updated, and put back on the market for an easy profit.

This situation is currently the subject of Bills in both houses of Congress and will most certainly result in new guidelines resulting from law, not in response to pressure from one politicslly motivated State Attorney running for Govenor.