Insigniaresidential - FSBO

You can read this article from the Associated Press yourself for all the details.

But the bottom line is simple.  Oil prices are at record highs.  And the more the Fed lowers interest rates the more it weakens the dollar and sends oil futures higher as a hedge against a currency that used to be worth something and is now headed into permanent second class status against the Euro.

The more Ben Bernanke talks, the more the dollar falls.   It hit another new low against the Euro today and a three-year low against the Asian currencies.   I know Bernanke is stuck in an impossible situation, torn between politicians and market forces he's a guy adrift in a rowboat during Hurricane Katrina.  But like Yogi Berra once said "If you come to a fork in the road then take it."  Bernanke needs to decide what he wants to be.

A shill for Wall Street, the Put-Put-Put machine.

Or an economist who actually supports the dollar and likely makes the inevitable recession a little deeper and a little quicker.

There are no good choices here, only ones more wrong than others.  Unfortunately our Fed chairman has reached the fork in the road and is taking not just both but all.  High oil prices, a falling dollar, a recession, and inflation.  Could Osama Bin Laden do more damage to America than this economic mess?

This summer gasoline prices may hit $4.00 per gallon.  If so, look for suburban real estate development to essentially come to a halt.  The "Drive Until You Qualify" crowd can only drive---and afford---so much and so far.

Robert J.  Abalos, Esq.

investinginland@yahoo.com

• Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs to save money and reduce emissions. Lighting accounts for around 5% of household greenhouse gas emissions, and compact fluros use 75% less energy than an equivalent incandescent bulb. Although the bulbs cost more up-front, you will actually save money through the energy saved and extended life of the bulb.
• Turn appliances off while not in use. Unplug any appliances like mobile phone chargers, TVs, microwaves, MP3 players, which are not being used and are on standby. In Australia, appliances on standby consume up to 10% of your electricity bill.
• Turn off anything that doesn’t need to be on. A good rule is to turn off anything not being used. When you leave a room or leave the house, turn off your lights or appliances like the TV or computer.
• Switch to green power. This is one of the best ways you can make a difference. Contact your electricity provider today and switch to green power, a cleaner, more renewable form of energy that does not contribute to global warming. If all Australians switched to green power today, Australia’s total greenhouse pollution would be cut by 30% in one year. That’s the equivalent of more than 40 million cars!
• Use less hot water. This is not only a good water saving tip, it saves electricity too. Spend one minute less in the shower.

Says Christopher B. Leinberger, writing in The Atlantic:

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

Stolen from Jason Kottke.

I was fortunate enough to see and listen to Senator Clinton speak about her plan to place a moratorium on home foreclosures that are sweeping the nation. www.HillaryClinton.com

Look for more updates later this weekend and on my website, www.JeremiahRunyon.com

Investing in foreclosure property is a great way to set up another stream of income. Many people decide to invest in a foreclosure property so that they will have some additional money coming in each month. But before you start looking for a foreclosure property to invest in, you will want to make sure you know what to look for.

Assessing a foreclosure property can sometimes be the most difficult part of the buying process. It is during this stage that you will decide which property is best for you, and how much money you think you will be able to make. Remember you make your money when you BUY.

When assessing a foreclosure property the first thing that you want to do is find out how much the repairs will be before you can re-sell it, or set it up as a rental property. Every dollar that you have to put into the home will cut back on the amount of profit. If you are not skilled enough to make an accurate assessment in this area, you will want to get a contractor to look at the property. They will be able to give you an estimate of how much the repairs are going to cost.

After assessing the repairs, you will then want to figure out how much profit you think you can make on the home. This may seem difficult, but you should be able to make an educated guess without many problems at all. The first thing that you will need to do is factor in all of the repair costs. After that, if you plan on renting the home, you will want to get an idea of how much rent you can charge per month. This will give you an idea of your monthly cash flow. You can then take this number to calculate the amount of time that you will need to make back your initial investment and start profiting. If you are going to be reselling the house, get an idea of what the market value is on the home. This can be done by checking out similar homes in the area. You can easily get CMA (competitive market analysis) free from myself or your local Realtor. After you have done this, you should be able to calculate your profit.

Investing in a foreclosure property is a great way to make some extra money. Who knows, you may find yourself buying a second property before you know it.

This grand old home known as "Cobble Court" sits on 9 rolling acres. It has 9 bedrooms and 8 baths, and it's on the market for $8.7 million. It was built in 1933 to look like a French Norman country estate and definitely looks European. Surprisingly, though, it's not really French--it's right here in Ohio, just a few miles away from my house (no, we don't all live like this in the Buckeye State, I'm sorry to say).

I already showed you the grand staircase with the red carpet (Staircases That Would Make Scarlett Swoon). Now here, as promised, are pictures from the rest of the house.

To take a look inside this great estate, click "more" below:

Read the rest of this entry »

We are moving some of our online real estate video trends and vidlisting specific content over to http://blog.vidlisting.com beginning today.  There are a number of other branding changes that we'll be making over the next few days.  More to come in a blog post with full explanations tomorrow.

The price of food worldwide is exploding, due to rising demand, the high price of oil, and soaring speculation by investors in everything agricultural from farmland, futures, and food stocks. Investments in ethanol, for example, drive up the price of corn, a basic staple of the world's poor.

Here is an excellent article from TIME magazine on the subject, mostly focusing on food prices in the Third World and how politically unstable this can be. Hungry people have nothing to lose when they riot. They are slowly dying anyway.

But soaring food prices are squeezing the American middle class. I shop in Wal-Mart too, unlike our elected Mandarins in Washington who hire illegal aliens to do it for them. I can see the price of the things I eat like peanut butter, cottage cheese, milk, and meat rising far beyond what the Department of Commerce says is the official inflation rate.

You only need two things more urgently than food to survive. Air and water. There is the old saying you can't go two minutes without air, two days without water, and two weeks without food. So when you have a raging bull market in something no person can live without for fourteen days you easily see the investment opportunity of the ages.

A chance to handsomely profit while feeding humanity.  Making money while filling bellies.   More food for the hungry, more profits for the ambitious and shrewd.  Everyone wins because everyone gets what they want, or more accurately, need.

I will be posting a whole lot more on this subject in the days ahead. But for right now understand that the price of farmland in the middle of Iowa and Argentina is rising faster than apartments in New York City or London.

Think about it---and why.

Robert J. Abalos, Esq.

investinginland@yahoo.com

Lets face it, homes these days are sitting longer and selling for less.  Why the big change?  The banks were too greedy and now most of them are in a world of hurt.  Lets take a look at what the banks did or didn’t do to create such a problem.

One of the big problems is that banks and credit score companies try to make understanding credit so difficult and mysterious.  I want to know how they come up with those numbers and I know everyone else does too!  The reason why banks want to make credit scores so difficult is to make sure that your credit stays low so that they can charge you more interest every month.  Greedy banks.

Then they lightened up the credit score requirements and let just about anyone qualify for a loan.  That is ok in my opinion.  Then the greedy banks had to throw in another element that was a big trap.  Make ARM loans, interest only on 100% loans, and negative amortization loans.

Then markets around the country started to lose their momentum and leveled off or dropped slightly.  Consumers with 100% loans were upside down.  Then ARM loans started to adjust up and homeowners couldn’t afford the payments.  So they started to go into default.  Which created even more problems.  The media started to get involved and created a panic that real estate was going down.

That is what started the snowball effect that spun out of control and became what we know today as the mortgage meltdown.

What are the after affects of the mortgage meltdown? 

Now your credit has to be so high that 2/3 of potential buyers were eliminated from getting the chance to get a mortgage.  That was a lot of buyers done in overnight.  That meant the inventory of homes in most markets were too high due to lack of buyers. 

The media then really started to get everyone in a huge nationwide panic that real estate was dropping like it had never dropped before.  Which may or may not be true depending on your market.

What should have happened to prevent us from the mortgage meltdown?  Banks should have explained credit, not made it impossible to understand.  They should have kept lending guidelines somewhere in the middle of the credit scoring and never tricked buyers into doing loans that were such high risk.

What can you do about it?

Forget about selling if you don’t have to.  Don’t let the media or any one else tell you that the market is going to tank.  They don’t know!  No one knows what tomorrow will bring.

If you need to sell, find creative alternatives to selling.  The best one that I know about is Seller Financing.  Why choose seller financing?  Because you become the bank!  You then can decide who can buy your house and who cannot.

For more information on Seller Financing or any other real estate question contact:

The Bronson Barber Real Estate Team

801-712-1607

bronsonbarber@gmail.com