The St. Louis Home for Sale Team provides a weekly St. Louis County and Monthly  St. Charles County Market and Jefferson County Market Watch Report to review and plug into your home buying or selling scenario.  Your questions and comments are welcome!

 The St. Louis Real Estate Market continues to show good signs of activity, both on the buying side as well as the selling side.  We see increases in active listings, homes accepting contracts and pending ratios in almost all price ranges.  Our average pending ratio has increased by over 1%  from last week.

Tax credits are certainly fueling buyers and sellers in the market right now.  Another reason for this activity should be the pending FHA changes coming as we get closer to spring.  Buyers should definitely try to get in front of those changes, as they will cost you more money, either up-front or monthly, depending on how the changes are structured. 

At this point, we still have no concrete date as to when these changes will take place.   As a refresher, these changes will probably involve Mortgage Insurance Premium increases,  FICO credit score increases for qualifying for an FHA loan, and a decrease in allowable seller concessions to the buyer.  We’ll try to keep you in the loop as to when these will be occurring.

 WHO DO YOU KNOW NOW is facing challenges in our local St. Louis Real Estate Market?? We have unique solutions custom tailored for troubled homeowners, sellers and buyers.  Contact us for more information.

The St. Louis Home for Sale Team provides a weekly St. Louis County and Bi-weekly St. Charles County Market and Jefferson County Market Watch Report to review and plug into your home buying or selling scenario.  Your questions and comments are welcome!

The St. Louis Real Estate Market this week continues to show good signs of positive movement.  Active listings are moving upward, along with the number of homes accepting contracts in the last 30 days (pending) .  This activity has helped the pending ratio move up to 11.49% from 11.34% two weeks ago. 

For the month of January 2010 compared to January 2009, we are about even as far as active listings and our pending ratios.  However,  at the end of January, we are showing almost 500 more homes sold from August 1st 2009 through January 30, 2010 opposed to the same six month time frame one year ago. 

Obviously, First Time Home Buyer Tax Credits and Move-Up Buyer Tax Credits have played a part in this activity.    Other contributing factors are also the low interest rates,  affordability of homes in our market and of course, for those willing and able to fix up a house or a complete re-hab, there are awesome deals on distressed properties in our market. 

 Also worth noting  is that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD has recently announced changes to the FHA guidelines which will affect most anyone in the real estate market planning to finance their purchase through FHA.

There are three major changes coming in the near future:

1.  Mortgage Insurance Premium-MIP- will increase, from 1.75% to 2.25%. This is the part of the mortgage insurance premium that an FHA borrower is required to pay up front at the beginning of the loan. Now, this amount can be “rolled ” into the loan amount, but it has been talked about and proposed that this be dis-allowed at some point in the future.   There is also talk about shifting some of the up-front MIP costs over to the monthly MIP premium payments, thus having a bit less of an impact on the borrower at loan inception, but adding more dollars to the monthly payment. 

2.  Changes in minimum FICO credit scores.  Borrowers with less than a 580 credit score would be required to have a 10% down payment.  Most lenders these days are requring a credit score of at least 620 to qualify for an FHA loan at 3.5% down payment.  

3.  Reduction in amount of allowable seller concessions.  This probably affects us in St. Louis the least, but FHA is proposing to lower the maximum seller concessions from 6% to 3%.  In our market, it is very rare that you see a seller giving a buyer 6% of the purchase price of the home as concessions towards their closing cost, prepaid expenses or loan points.  Our usual in this market has been 3% for some time.   I’m sure you can find exceptions to this here in St. Louis, but this should affect more of the higher priced areas of the country, with higher FHA loan limits. 

All of these changes, and possibly more are likely to occur sometime early this spring.   That April 30th deadline for First Time Home Buyers and Move Up Home Buyers may be much more important now than ever.  And…who knows what the government means by “early spring”.

We’ll keep you up to date as we hear more about the FHA changes and when they will go into effect.   

 WHO DO YOU KNOW NOW is facing challenges in our local St. Louis Real Estate Market?? We have unique solutions custom tailored for troubled homeowners, sellers and buyers.  Contact us for more information.

This time with a new twist thanks to broker/agent Klaus Bank from Keller Williams Realty St. Louis.

We will feature a new school district every week or two. They will be randomly selected. Go ahead and give me a call 314.640.1778, if you want to twist my arm to move your school district to the top of the list.

Lindbergh School District

Click here to view the embedded video.

The St. Louis Home for Sale Team provides a weekly St. Louis County and Bi-weekly St. Charles County Market and Jefferson County Market Watch Report to review and plug into your home buying or selling scenario.  Your questions and comments are welcome!

 The St. Louis Real Estate Market this week is preparing for Christmas with less active listings and less homes accepting contracts, dropping our pending ratio to just over 12 percent.  Our homes sold in the last six months has tapered off a bit, but still remains over 200 more than last year at this time.  Expired listings have increased a bit, as some homeowners will be staying off the market until after the holidays and after the first of the year. 

Those homeowners staying off the market may wish they hadn’t, as there are still a good number of  first time homebuyers in the market. 

From our partners at Gorman and Gorman Home Loans comes this real estate news update:

Last week the Federal Reserve kept the Fed Funds Rate at the 0.0% to 0.25% range and reiterated that interest rates will remain low for an “extended period.” The Fed did say that economic activity picked up since the last meeting in November. The statement went on to say that deterioration in the labor markets is abating.

One very important note – the Fed took the time to reiterate that their Mortgage Backed Security purchase program will end on March 31, 2010 as previously stated. There had been some speculation that the program might continue beyond the March 31st date, but the inclusion of this reiteration in the Fed’s Policy Statement leads us to believe that the Fed is trying to make it clear that this program will terminate as scheduled. Source: CNN/Money

The inventory of completed but unsold new houses fell to 239,000 at the end of October, according to the National Association of Home Builders. That’s the fewest since May 1971, when the inventory stood at 236,000. The months’ supply — that is, the amount of time it would take to sell the current inventory at October’s sales rate — fell to 6.7 months, which the NAHB says is “respectable.” The historic high was set in January, when the supply topped out at 12.4 months. Meanwhile, the inventory of unsold existing houses fell in October to 3 million, and the month’s supply dipped to 6.8 months. The supply of resale houses hit its cyclical peak in June 2008, when it reached 11 months. Source: National Mortgage News

Note:  Our Market Watch Report will not be published next weekend.

   WHO DO YOU KNOW NOW is facing challenges in our local St. Louis Real Estate Market?? We have unique solutions custom tailored for troubled homeowners, sellers and buyers.  Contact us for more information.

After months of speculation, discussion and planning by the legislature and Congress,  the much hoped for vote today on extending the First Time Home Buyers Tax Credit has been delayed by the U.S. Senate.

The U.S. Senate won’t vote until next week at the earliest on proposals to extend the tax credit along with a vote on unemployment benefits for the nations jobless.

The Senate’s vote was delayed by a Republican demand that a vote be allowed on an amendment to to end the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program-TARP-at the end of this year.  You can read more about this action at Bloomberg.com.

For all of you keeping tabs on what’s happening with the Tax Credit, here’s where we are as of today- a brief outline of the major points:

The credit would be extended until April 30th, 2010.  It would include $8000 dollars for first time homebuyers AND $6500 dollars for “move up buyers” (from December 1st, 2009 through April 30, 2010)

Move up buyers would be eligible as long as they have lived in their current home for the last 5 years or more. 

The Tax Credit would expire on April 30th, 2010, BUT…if a buyer had a contract as of April 30th, they would still qualify for the credit as long as they closed the transaction within 60 days following April 30th.

Income limits for both classes of qualifying buyers would be $125,000 for single taxpayers and $225,000 for joint taxpayers. 

Purchases made in 2010 could be claimed on their 2009 income tax returns.

Home buyers would not have to repay the credit, as long as they lived in the new home for at least 36 months after the purchase date.

The amendmemt also includes provisions for a military waiver,  including a provision that the “re-capture” provision would not apply to a member of the Armed Forces, military intellegence or Foreign Service who is on qualified official extended duty. Also, members of the Military who have been deployed overseas for 90 days or more in 2008 or 2009 would have until April 30th, 2011 to claim the home buyer tax credit.

Sounds pretty good to me; now if we can just get everyone “On the Hill” to act on this and get it voted before too long. 

Our suspicion is that the Senate is waiting until as close as possible to November 30th to act on this.  No one wants to see the activity that the tax credit has produced to date falter now or slow down due to an extended deadline.   Whether that would happen or not is a 50-50 debate, but it seems like no one is willing to take that chance.

So for now,  we keep telling all our buyer clients that they still need to close their deals before Thanksgiving to make sure they will qualify for the tax credit. 

We’ll keep you posted on any other developements as they happen in the next several weeks.

Waxman-Markey. . . it’s that Cap and Trade thingy!

Waxman-Markey’s intended or unintended consequences, will bring the Real Estate recovery to it’s knees.

“That bill contains 397 new regulations. One of them would affect almost everyone who buys or sells a home. If Waxman-Markey becomes law, homes for sale that qualify as “federally related transactions” — which is almost all of them — would be required to undergo an environmental inspection.”  read more - Politico

How’s that Hope and Change thing working out for you?

I would love to hear from you!

Anybody get excited when the news came out that there were 5 million mortgages in default because loans were issued to illegal aliens?

So the media does its thing. . . something like shouting “FIRE” in a theater and fear takes over.

That was last week. Today, last week is just a memory to the media . . . however . . .

I’m a fan of  John Hussman, President, Hussman Investment Trust, I think his news letter this week is worth sharing with you. Here are a few excerpts with a link to the entire article.

“The only thing we have to fear is the fearmongering of Wall Street itself.”

“Look – a few weeks ago, there was a $700 billion pile of money on the table, but the only way for Wall Street and bureaucrats to get their paws on it was to scare the public out of its collective gourd. They succeeded, but created the psychology that the U.S. was on the verge of depression if the bailout wasn’t passed. Having created that psychology, the crisis took on a life of its own. ”

“Property appreciation should be traded for mortgage reductions.”

“The proper way to address homeowner distress is not for the government to buy troubled mortgages and simply reduce the principal. That idea is utterly insane. If that policy was enacted, every homeowner in America would have an incentive to immediately go delinquent on their mortgage. Rather, Congress should provide for a relatively modest alteration in bankruptcy laws, allowing judges to write down mortgage principal but at the same time provide the mortgage lender with what I’d call a “Property Appreciation Right” (PAR) that would give the lender a claim on some amount of future price appreciation of property owned by the borrower. In that way, the mortgage lender would have the prospect of being made whole over time, homeowners who have faithfully made payments on their own mortgages would not be discriminated against, and homeowners in trouble would surrender some future price appreciation for immediate reduction in their monthly payment burden. ”

Read the entire article Four Magic Words: “We Are Providing Capital”

“Too weird for words”…

As a result, Chicken Little is running wild!  And he is providing fuel for every single media outlet in this country.  “The sky is falling, the sky is falling…”  Well, unless you’re willing to live in a bomb shelter that your grandparents or great grandparents built and eat canned goods for the next 12-18 months, you would do well to be calm in the face of this storm that we’re in today.   Because let’s face it, the storm’s hit and the fan is blowing at high speed.

So let’s talk reality about the financial marketplace.  What are some fundamental truths that most people aren’t aware of today?  Consider that historical studies show that the Dow Jones typically experiences a sharp and sudden drop every 4.3 years.  The last one we had in the US was in 2001, so we are 2.7 years overdue.  The S&P 500 historically experiences a sudden drop of similar magnitude as we’re seeing every 10 years.  We haven’t had one since the crash of 1987, making us 10 years overdue.  What we are experiencing, while painful and frustrating, is not unexpected for those who understand the marketplace.  What IS unexpected is the fact that it this occurrence coincides with all of the backlash of the real estate failures we are seeing.

I will not waste time pointing fingers or laying blame.  There aren’t many who are without responsibility in this mess.  However, what I will highlight is the element at the HEART of our circumstance that can have the most effect at an individual level.  That is, unequivocally, consumer sentiment.  This is the only thing that we as individuals can affect personally…put our minds on the positive and move forward with life.  While unemployment has risen, it is still nowhere near the 9.0 and 10.8 percent levels of our worst recessions as a nation.  Nor is it at the average recession level of 7.6 percent.  We are at 6.2 percent in the St. Louis metro area.  That means that 93.8 percent of us do have work and we can continue to give 100% when we are fortunate to be able to go.

In the long run, if consumer sentiment continues to drop and panic continues to rise in our hearts and minds, we as individuals will only perpetuate what has befallen us.  Spending tightens up because people are afraid-afraid to lose their jobs, afraid to run out of gas (which is at a new low of $80/barrel by the way, eyes on the pumps), afraid to lose their houses.

Panic is infectious and it is paralyzing. The media has done a fine job of spreading the virus.  But let’s face it, no matter how the fat cats on Wall Street have squandered or mismanaged, we as individuals still have work to do, mortgages to pay, families to raise and nurture.  No matter what gas costs, we have to buy it to do the things in life we need to accomplish each day.  No matter what milk and eggs cost, we have to buy them to feed our children.  And we will.  Because that’s what we do.  I’m not playing Pollyanna; I have the same worries and concerns, the same bills to cover each month.  Yet I say that we are resilient.  The United States has had 10 recessions throughout history and, on average, they’ve lasted 10 months, on one occasion it lasted as long as 14 months.

What to do?  No sense complaining, losing sleep, worrying.  Know that the nation will take care of itself.  We have more resources and opportunities to restructure and rebound from the financial situation of today than in any other era in which such tribulations occurred.  Be concerned for yourself.  Take actions to make sure your future is secure.  Review your financials with your financial planner (or your spouse/partner) and create a strategy for rebuilding.  Give 110% at work and make yourself so valuable if a staff cut should come down the pike, you’re not on the short list.  Eat well, perhaps just less extravagantly.  Your health is important.  Spend normally, just more wisely.  It will stimulate the economy and support your communities.  Love your children and teach them courage and faith, not fear and scarcity.  It will be your legacy to them and their future.  The rest is all temporary.

Successfully pricing homes in the Mehlville Missouri Real Estate market. by Doug Aegerter, Keller Williams Realty Southwest.

The St. Louis Home For Sale Team is resuming neighborhood snapshot reports and this is the sixth in the current series, featuring Mehlville, MO.

The Mehlville MO Market Snapshot reviews the Mehlville Missouri Real Estate market during the past six months and touches upon the complete spectrum of property that was listed and sold.

If you want to drill down deeper into an area, maybe a subdivision or your street. . .fill out a free CMA request and we will be happy to accommodate you. This service is absolutely free and without obligation.

To learn more about Mehlville MO visit the Mehlville WIKI.

Doug Aegerter can be reached at doug@stlouisrealestatevoice.com

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