Ken Montville -- the MD Suburbs of DC

I recently started working with a couple who have been long time clients and great referrers of other clients. In fact, of my entire list of clients I have helped over the past 10 years these folks get the #1 spot for number of times they have used me personally combined with the number of people they have referred to me that actually bought a home and gotten to settlement.

These are the types of clients I live for!

They're in the military. At least, the wife is. Now they need to move, again, because she's being deployed to another duty station on her way to a post in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the home they bought about 3 years ago has lost some value and they can't really sell it without bringing more money that they have to the closing table.

Fortunately, Uncle Sam is actually trying to do something right by our vets. They have a program called the Homeowner Assistance Program (HAP) that will subsidize the difference in what the house was bought for and what it can be sold for. A good deal. The not so HAPpy part is that the program has not been fully approved yet and the applications are piling up. So that when the program does get the final green light it'll take some time (6-8 months) for applications to work through the process.

So it is very much like a "short sale". Hurry up and wait...and wait...and wait.

However, for vets, this may be a good way to sell your home if you're being moved somewhere and it isn't exactly your choice! Check out.

I recently signed on with a great real estate market research company - Altos Research - that provides real time real estate market data for ten zip codes I know pretty well.

The real beauty of this is that both potential home sellers and home buyers can use this data to answer the question; "How is the market doing?" The data is presented in easy-to-understand graphs and a great sidebar explaining what the graphs mean.

Anyone can sign up to have the reports e-mailed directly to them at absolutely ZERO cost.

So, you don't have to take my word for it (or your cousin's brother-in-law who used to sell real estate). Get the data directly from the pros --

• Beltsville, MD - 20705
• Bethesda, MD - 20817
• Bowie, MD - 20715
• Bowie, MD - 20720
• Burtonsville, MD - 20866
• College Park, MD - 20740
• Greenbelt, MD - 20770
• Laurel, MD - 20707
• Silver Spring, MD - 20901
• Silver Spring, MD - 20904

Just click on the link and go from there!

I mentioned here before that I try to pay attention to my little micro-niche -- Sellers with Equity. These are the folks who are current on their mortgage payment and may have even put a little money down on their home when they bought it. Alternately, they bought their home way before 2000 and, even after recent price declines, they have enough equity in their home to be able to sell it.

I've run across a few clients, recently, that aren't so lucky.

They bought their home sometime during the 2000-2006 frenzy and now, because of the short sales and REOs and general price declines, they don't have enough equity in their home to be able to sell it. It's a real shame. These folks are current with their mortgage and have relatively low debt or zero debt other then their mortgage. They even have some money in the bank to make the down payment on the next home they want to move into.

The challenge comes when they can't get anywhere close to a price they would need just to "break even". To these home sellers "break even" means being able to sell the home with a zero on the net proceeds line of the HUD-1 or as close to it as possible. I even talked to one potential home seller that was willing to bring a bit of money to the table to close. He was banking on the low prices on the buying end of his equation and the really nice, low interest rates. He figured that even if he had to bring a couple of thou to the table he would be ahead in the long run -- a nicer house that he would enjoy, low monthly payments, etc.

Unfortunately, a lot of these home sellers are trapped. They can't sell for anywhere close to what it might be to "break even". The short sales and REOs in the neighborhood are pulling prices down so steeply that their home won't appraise for anywhere close to what they would need to move.

This, to me, is a kind of hidden casualty of the mortgage meltdown and the abdication of personal responsibility by many homeowners. It seems that it is so easy just to send the keys in and walk away from your house and the mortgage. Forget the contract and any sense of responsibility. Rationalize that you are the victim that has been bamboozled.

The decisions of those to walk away from their homes and mortgage not only destroy their own credit and financial health, they help destroy the financial health of their neighbors -- the ones who pay their mortgage on time, every month.

So the home owners that are doing everything right are trapped. They are literally stuck in homes they can't sell in neighborhood that are deteriorating on a daily basis from the blight of vacant homes in various states of disrepair. The "reward" for acting responsibly is to see your home value decline and your neighborhood turn into a ghetto of homes with overgrown lawns and boarded up windows.

Meanwhile, Congress and the banks sit twiddling their thumbs arguing over who gets the next multi-million dollar bonus and who gets the next multi-billion dollar bail out.

It's not right.

I keep hearing that the market is picking up.

• my fellow Realtors are crowing about the multiple offers their listings are getting within days of putting the home on the market.
  
• my fellow Realtors are complaining that they are coming up against multiple offers on properties their buyer clients want to purchase.
  
• can't get mortgage underwriters to move fast enought to get to settlement,
  
• homes inspectors can't get out to inspect properties fast enough,
  
• appraisers taking forever to come out to the home and then send in the appraisal report to the mortgage company.

All I can say is:, "Huh?"

I have four listings on the market (three single family homes and one condo) and

• they are all under $300,000 (a price range right in the "sweet spot" in the MD Suburbs of DC)
• they are all in "move-in" condition
• they are all priced at or below all the comps in their market area
• they all have Sellers that can say "yes" within 24 hours of receiving an offer
• they are all FHA, VA, conventional, CDA, etc. compliant

Yet, they are sitting. They're all over the Internet (should I really advertise them in homes magazines? will print ads really work?), I've done the Open Houses. Yadda, Yadda, Yadda.

Sure. They get showings. Some feedback: "too close to the [moderately busy] road", "smaller than what my clients want", "need additional bedroom on main level", "want a finished basement".

Am I the only one that's running into buyers that have amazingly high expectations? Here's the page where the listings are located -- maybe I'm nuts.

Years ago, I worked with a husband and wife who were buying their first investment home. They had grand dreams (or, at least, the wife did) of buying a house a year until it was time to retire and they'd live off the rental income or sell a few homes to tide them over in the Golden Years.

Luckily, the husband was a pretty handy guy who wasn't afraid to roll of his sleeves and the wife became the Queen of Craigslist finding all kinds of great bargains for appliances and the like. They both went in with their eyes open.

They needed a mortgage for the first house and it took a little doing but we found one. This was back in the days when you culd get a mortgage if you could fog a mirror but even so....

Time went by. They did another deal with a FSBO and didn't call me. Oh well.

Then came this current house. Listed in the MLS and a full blown REO represented by a listing agent. So they gave me a ringy dingy. Not being quite as tightly scheduled as I used to be I came right over to get them into the house to see how bad it really was considering it had been on the market over 400 days.

Believe it or not, it wasn't that bad for an REO. Sure, it was trashed. It was gutted. It was also cheap. I guess the bank had finally decided to unload the sucker and had it "priced right", as we like to say. By this time, my clients could pay C-A-S-H for the house. No lender, no contingencies, no nothing. We'll hand over the money. You hand over the deed.

Even so, the listing agent was a little bit of a pill.

But, check this out. When all the dust settled and we all gathered around the settlement table (the closer, the buyers and me) they were just as tickled as could be and even gave me a gift card to The Olive Garden. It is rare for transactions to go fairly smoothly and easily, number one. And it's usually me giving my clients little thank you acknowledgments for using my services and providing me with a livelihood.

Times like this help me to remember why I love real estate!