Market Trends and Condition

A recent article directed to real estate agents and brokers should also hold interest for real estate investors who market for buyers and sellers. It’s titled “Prospecting is dead -- long live ‘target networking!”

The entrenched methods used by most real estate agents to drum up business, collectively called “prospecting,” include everything from cold calling to door knocking. Other prospecting activities would be joining organizations and meeting people, handing out business cards everywhere and to everyone. All of these still have a place, but this article recommends some new approaches, called target networking or “pull marketing.”

It’s all over the media, how the housing market is emerging from the doldrums and beginning to recover from the six-year downturn that’s done a lot of harm to the economy. However, if we consider the market crash to be a drunken night, the “recovery” might be considered to be the morning hangover that lasts well into the day. Sure, the worst is over, but there is still a massive headache and Ibuprofen in mega doses is still going to take some time for a full recovery.

You always have to be careful when you are involved with"hot money" as it can change on a dime.

From the article at NBC News:

It’s also turning out to be harder to lure back first-time home buyers, typically one of the strongest sources of demand in a recovery. After the historic, late-2000s price slide, many younger buyers are skeptical of the longstanding conventional wisdom that housing is a surefire long-term investment.

That’s meant that investors, lured by bargain prices, have become a much larger share of buyers than in past recoveries. But it remains to be seen how durable that “hot money” demand will be, said Pinto, the former Fannie Mae executive.

Six-year housing hangover tough to shake off

Read entire article here:

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economywatch/six-year-housing-hangover-t...

Be careful out there

We’re not recommending passive real estate investing through stocks, bonds, mutual funds or REITS, Real Estate Investment Trusts. However, active real estate investors can gain some great insight into the markets and even improve their investment decisions if they watch those other markets and the market trends moving them.

In an article this week at CNNMoney.com, various ways for investors to play the improving housing market for profits were outlined for readers. Housing stocks, for several years seeming to be worse investments than a lottery ticket, are now hot commodities. Home prices in October were up 6% from a year earlier, and new home construction reached a four-year high. As a result, housing stocks led the market in 2012.

Here's an interesting article....

FHA mortgage premium to rise on April 1
Kathleen Pender

Borrowers who want to get a mortgage insured by the Federal Housing Administration should act quickly to avoid changes the agency is making to shore up its faltering insurance fund.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Administration announced the changes on Wednesday but didn't announce the effective dates until Thursday.

Here's the timing: FHA will raise the annual mortgage insurance premium on most loans that have a case number starting April 1 or later. To get a case number before the April 1 deadline and avoid the increase, borrowers should apply with a lender no later than March 25, says Julian Hebron, vice president with RPM Mortgage in San Francisco.

“Housing has turned the corner...” is a popular headline across the country these days. Most economists agree that the housing market has turned the corner and is on the rebound; however a great many homeowners aren’t seeing that improvement in their situations.

Here are some of the economic numbers and impressions that contribute to the positive sentiment from economists:

• starts of new single-family homes are up.
• sales of existing homes are up.
• current forecasts are for 5 million existing home sales and 500,000 new home starts this year.

Another Hike in Mortgage Premiums from FHA

The FHA, the largest insurer of low-down-payment mortgages, just announced that it will raise mortgage insurance premiums by 10 basis points, or 0.1% on most new mortgages it insures. As an example, a borrower choosing a 30-year fixed rate mortgage and puts 5% down will now pay an annual insurance premium of 1.3% of their outstanding mortgage balance. It they put down less than 5%, the rate will be 1.35%. Premiums for jumbo loans will also be rising, but only by 0.5% or 5 basis points.

FHA says that it will require most borrowers to pay insurance premiums for the life of their loans, canceling a program put in place in 2001 that allowed the cessation of premium payments once their debt fell below 78% of the original balance.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/04/investing/housing-market/index.html?iid=...

http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/04/retirement/real-estate-investing.moneyma...