Archive for March 6th, 2008

$100 Down Payment on HUD Homes

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Wonderful news was announced with HUD homes for sale
and FHA financing in Michigan.

I’ve spent some time on getting the details on this new program rolled out by HUD.

In Michigan you can purchase a HUD home for $100 down
and if you are using an FHA mortgage HUD will also gift you with $2500
that you may use towards your closing costs or to pay for repairs. 

One area that I spent some time on was getting clarification
from FHA on whether this $2500 is above and beyond the 3% in
sellers concessions that HUD currently allows to be paid on a buyers
behalf if so requested. After many hours spent talking with the HUD
marketing team for our state, with FHA, and with underwriting supervisors
it was revealed that both sellers concessions from HUD and the “incentive”
of $2500 could be used on the buyers behalf.

HUD still hasn’t waived it’s minimum good faith deposit of $1000 for an
offer to purchase, but that initial $1000 may be all most buyers need out
of pocket to purchase a home once the FHA incentive and HUD sellers
concessions are used.

If you are going to take advantage of this program be sure that
your real estate agent and your mortgage lender know how to draw up
the contract so that both the gift from HUD and the sellers concessions are
applied in your purchase agreement.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about this wonderful home buyers program and to see if
it fits your current home buying needs. I would also be happy to refer you to one of my real estate agent partners who knows how to find many HUD homes currently on the market for sale.

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Good Old Sears…

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

 

The Way It Used To Be

 

The New York Times had a nice article over the weekend regarding Sears kit homes. These were houses you could buy from a catalog. You’d place your order and then a kit would show up ready for assembly. Between 1908 and 1940, says the article, more than 100,000 kit homes were sold.

The part in the article that jumped out, however, had very little to do with wooden parts or windows. The paper interviewed Amy R. Pappas, co-curator of the New Castle Historical Society, and here’s what was reported:

“In the 1930s, during the Depression, the housing market took a sharp downturn, and by 1940, Sears stopped selling kit homes, as many people had lost their jobs and defaulted on their loans. In 1934, Sears liquidated more than $11 million in mortgages and stopped financing kit purchases.

“’Because Sears did not want to be known as a heartless corporation that took people’s homes from them,’” said Ms. Pappas, the curator in New Castle, “’it absorbed most of the losses.’”

Imagine that! A lender that absorbed losses rather than ruin its reputation — even though the lender was not the source of bad loans, bizarre terms or toxic clauses.

Whatever happened to such lenders?

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