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Very nice turn key Tri-Level home on 15 park like acres, has hard wood and tile floors fwith granite Counter tops in the kitchen, and goregeous oak cabinets, has 35 X 48 shop with 12 foot RV doors and 12 foot tip out, plus 2 car detached garage completely private with mini orchard and 40 foot deck with hot tub with CD system, Plus outdoor paito with fire pit for additional entertaining.
Category : Feature &Properties
This beautiful home with awesome views of the Selkirk Mountains, on ten gorgeous acres, with guest home, granite counter tops, three stall car/shop, also has two car attached garage with Hwydronics system, has large maste bedroom with gas fire place. This Home has all the privacy you desire. Horse enthusiasts you’ll Love this one !
Category : Feature &Properties
This beautiful 3 bedroom 3 bathroom home next to accessible forest service land with lots onature trails, where you can horseback ride hike and backpack right from home and has beautiful territorial views, with year round creek, property is fenced and cross fenced for livestock, property can be split into two 10 acre parcels. This is a must see !
Category : Feature &Properties
A variety of measures are available for selling your home more easily. Continue reading for tips on how to apply them. . . 1. Remain open to negotiating a lower price for your home in exchange for other more favorable terms, such as including fewer items with the home. 2. If the home needs any major repairs that you cannot afford right now, offer to finish them upon selling the property. However, it is better to do this beforehand when possible. First impressions are always important, so try to make you home look it’s best before you put it on the market. 3. Provide your realtor with a duplicate key to the house, or access to a key via a lock box; this will enable him or her to show the home to potential buyers at times when it isn’t convenient for you to be present. 4. Select an asking price which allows for at least a slightly lower offer you can accept. However, don’t make the price so high that it intimidates the home buyers capable of offering an acceptable sum. 5. Consider holding an open house. Individuals who are reluctant to schedule a showing can easily visit, potentially becoming interested in the home. 6. Review your home’s listing(s) on the MLS and real estate agency web sites, and report any significant inaccuracies to your realtor. Be sure your listing has great pictures of your home, to draw potential new buyers in! Following these tips should make selling your house more easily possible, while saving time and money.
Category : Sandpoint Articles
The employment market just doesn’t warrant cost of homes in North Idaho at all. Newer stick built homes are in the 190 to 225,000 range for less then 1500 square feet. Las Vegas had better quality, more square footage during their boom when employment and wages were at their peak and the average couple earned 80,000 + not 30,000 like I see in Idaho.
Category : Sandpoint Questions
I’m purchasing my own home and in about 4 or 5 years I hope to be able to purchase one or two more – and grow from there.
What do I need to know to begin a real estate career? Is it better to rent houses out OR try to sell them for a profit?
What are some of the best resources (especially online) for real estate beginners?
Category : Real Estate Questions
Can most real estate agents help their clients with foreclosed properties, or do they usually just stick to listings with home owners? We’re looking into buying, but are on a limited budget, and want to look more closely into foreclosures. Thanks.
Category : Real Estate Questions
I purchased a home in October, 2007. My monthly mortgage payment includes my county, state, and school taxes (they are placed in Escrow).
Apparently my tax payments will be paid out of escrow in April, May and August of 2008.
Does that mean that I can not claim real estate for my 2007 return?
(At closing, I did have to reimburse the seller for real estate taxes he had already paid up to Dec. 31.)
Category : Real Estate Questions
Another spring, another dormant season in real estate?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
In 2008 alone, the housing bust wiped out an estimated $2 trillion in home values. But for the first time in a long time, we are finally seeing an upside.
The same falling home prices that wreaked so much havoc in the economy are queuing up as the solution to the bust.
With prices down about 25% from their 2006 peaks, homes and buying incentives are tempting bargain hunters once again. Many economists agree that we’ve seen the bottom of the market and can see a faint but discernible light at the end of the long, dark tunnel. Sale volumes are up in many parts of the country, but prices aren’t.
In early April, the average 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage loan dropped under 4.8% to historic lows, according to Freddie Mac, prompting some qualified buyers to buy and others to refinance.
At a spring speech, Harvey Rosenblum, executive vice president and director of research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said the economy will improve markedly in 2010 and should be back on track by 2011. Housing, which led the country into this economic mess, could well lead it out, he said, partially because of the Obama administration’s $75 billion mortgage relief plan.
The stimulus plan, in part, is offering first-time homebuyers a tax credit up to $8,000, plus a refinancing program that gives much-needed help to owners who are struggling with mortgages and incentive to their lenders.
Credit is finally starting to flow again, and prudent families with a reasonable down payment are for the most part getting the go-ahead to buy. Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, noted this spring that falling housing prices are likely to slow heading into the summer months and possibly show improvement, cautioning that “foreclosures are weighing heavily on prices.”
A history lesson
There are some important lessons to learn from the bust, lest we be doomed to repeat our mistakes. In a nutshell, here’s what happened:
Years of robust health in the housing market prompted overinvesting, quick flipping, overbuilding and credit overextension, enabled by cheap financing. Homes began to exceed their brick-and-mortar and land values vastly, and owners started borrowing against hoped-for run-ups in future values. Meanwhile, builders cranked into high gear to accommodate zealous investors and builders.
Caught up in the frothy market, lenders and buyers alike bucked basic risk-management principles by implementing unsustainable mortgage arrangements, zero-down deals and other dubious lending programs, many with upward-adjusting ARMs — adjustable-rate mortgages that would later cut the legs out from under them.
Meanwhile, some financiers read aggressive federal anti-redlining guidelines as a green light to lend to everyone with a pulse. Lenders pushed these and other mortgage risks onto institutional investors the world over via mortgage-backed securities and bonds, which even some of the world’s best financial minds failed to identify as ticking time bombs.
The last wave of investment homes was sold abruptly at big losses, and values started dropping across the board, especially in places such as Florida, California and Nevada. ARMs reset and foreclosures continued to spiral. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of people owed more on their homes than they were worth and had nowhere to turn. Soon, the stock market tanked, the values of retirement plans were slashed and millions of jobs were lost.
The net result: Real estate has been repriced. The rest is history — a history we should not soon forget.
The repricing of home values almost everywhere in the country brings with it a whole new real-estate reality, one that marks a return to some of the real-estate “rules” of the past. It’s a reversion to many tried-and-true fundamentals you should recognize and comprehend:
- Save smart for a down payment. It’s true that tying up all your equity in a mortgage can take away your emergency cash buffer in a downturn. But with the market starting to stabilize, the benefits of a large down payment — from 15% to 20% — will pay off in the form of higher equity, lower payments, better interest rates and more readily available refinancing.
- Borrow within your means. Just because you’re approved by a lender for a specific mortgage amount doesn’t mean you can really afford the home. The wholesale defaults that occurred on tens of thousands of too-lenient loans carry a strong message: Live within your budget. Lenders grew more complacent with underwriting and appraisal standards because double-digit annual price appreciation lulled them into believing their collateral was safe. In their gamble, they abandoned the three C’s of mortgage lending — credit, capacity and collateral — and everyone lost. Until the run-up in values, a safe mortgage on a home was considered no more than three times a buyer’s annual family income. Some old-school traditions need to become new-school traditions.
- Buy for the long term. This isn’t the time to try to make a fast buck in real estate. There’s still some market pain left, and it’s unclear when prices will rebound. If you’re buying this year, plan on staying put for the long haul.
- Your market is unique. National housing trends don’t mean anything. Understand your market’s dynamics, which include the health of the local job market, local foreclosure statistics, price movements, a home’s average time on the sales block, the lack — or abundance — of newly built homes coming upstream and the prices of comparable sales in your specific neighborhood of interest.
- Watch for the pricing warning signs in the next cycle. Continued home-price run-ups year after year should raise a big, bright, red flag in your castle. From 2000 to 2005, U.S. housing prices increased by an average of 53%, with many markets far exceeding that, including California at 109%, Nevada at 94% and Florida at 90%. That party ended abruptly, and nearly everyone suffered a hangover.
This article was written by Steve McLinden for Bankrate.com.
Category : Tips
I’m 3rd gen. So Cal and Ron(husband)is from W VA, well he’s been in CA since 2 yrs old, but definitely W VA guy We’ve been married 35 yrs and Ron was VERY lucky cause he retired 1/1/07 with full benefits at 57 yrs old!! We are actually young enough to enjoy this! We’re very much in love and we’re best friends. I’ll be happy anywhere as long as I’m with Ron. We looked for 12 yrs in/around Idaho and found our land 2 yrs ago! I spent much of my childhood in Lake Arrowhead, CA & Clark Fork, ID is way like that 40 yrs ago. Even tho it’s a done deal, I’d love any and all pros & cons you all have about northern ID – Sandpoint, Coeur d’Alene, Spirit Lake or any other town you know of. I would like to know all I can about my new ‘home town’ before the fact. I’d like to thank you in advance for any help you may give me. We’ve lived in OC in the same home for 33+ yrs….but packing is a totally different question….lol!
Category : Sandpoint Questions
