Blogging Real Estate in NoVa

Merry Christmas And Happy Holidays To ALL!!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all! 

Enjoy this rocking Video!!!

 

Serving all of your Ashburn, Leesburg, Mclean and Loudoun County area Real Estate needs!

 Take care,

 Chuck

Top Ten Tiger Woods One Liners Written on Twitter (because we all need a little comedy first thing Monday morning;0))

        

 1.           1.      Headline: “ Angry Wife Chases Tiger into the Woods”

2.           2.  I didn’t know a 4 Iron can be used as the Jaws of life

3.           3.  Mrs. Tiger Woods just did her Tweet Cloud for past four days. Most popular words are Kill, Castrate and 50%.

4.      4.  Tiger Woods must have been fading when he hit that tree and fire hydrant!

5.      5.  Lucky for Tiger Woods, his wife has a hook in her swing and not a slice.

6.            6. The new EA Game Tiger Woods will involve dodging the angry wife in nightdress swinging at you? Must avoid the fire hydrants and trees while driving backwards.

7.            7. First time Tiger couldn’t drive 300 yards.

8.            8. Difference between Tiger Woods hitting a wedge and driving an Escalade? He can back up the wedge....

9.        9. Breaking News: Tiger Woods has just signed on to be spokesman for Safelite Auto Glass...

10    10. Cadillac brings out the black in Tiger, Asian in him caused him to hit the tree--- Wanda Sykes

Bonus ( We all need a little bonus every now and then)    
  

I Insert your Joke HERE"................................."

    Enjoy!

    Chuck 

Step by Step Instructions on How to Buy a Foreclosure

We finally have step by step instructions on how to buy and win a foreclosure. This video will explain in detail just how to win when bidding on a entry level foreclosed home. 

Now I must go and show an entry level foreclosure to my client. Wish me luck!

Special Thanks to Neal Greene for digging this up!!

Serving all of your Ashburn, Leesburg, Mclean and Loudoun County area Real Estate needs!

Take care,

Chuck

The Washington Post Gets It Wrong On the $8,000 Buyers Tax Credit

I know shocker right; I’m downing the Washington Post again??? It looks like the Post this time outsourced its latest Real Estate related article to writer Martha White who writes for the Slate Group on a variety of financial matters including Real Estate. Although, I read Slate regularly and find there content refreshing I found Martha’s latest article “Prolonging Home Buyers Tax Credit Will Prolong Recovery” simply uninformed and filled with funny math strung along by the thinnest of strings. 

One of the numbers Martha quoted off of a blog site she states in her article is that the actual cost of the $8,000 Tax Credit program is $43,000 per buyer because some buyers would have brought anyway. All I can say is; Wow really! There is actually a mathematical formula on a website that will tell me exactly what buyers intend to do before and after they buy? Is this like Nostradamus stuff? You know, after everything is said and done some "expert" will  come out and says “you see this was predicted 500 years ago…duh”? Great, where were these experts say 2 years ago when the markets melted down? Can I use that same formula in Vegas? Or how’s about predicting what my 7 year old will do next on a soccer field?

 

Here’s the bottom line, buyers and especially first time home buyers are moved by emotions and perceived opportunities. Physiology plays a huge part in the purchase of a home. Buyers want to know that the market is moving in the right direction and that they are not going rouge by buying to early( unlike Palin of course). It has also been my experience that one of the biggest barriers to home ownership is the down payment. This $8,000 tax credit gives those buyers on the fence an option and a carrot to jump in. So, I think saying that they would have signed on the dotted line regardless of the Tax Credit is a bit of a stretch and would require at least a call to a Psychic hot-line. Btw, is Clara still in business? I need lotto numbers for this week.

The second point that was missed in this article was what buyers were using the $8,000 Tax Credit to buy. If you ask just about any Realtor working with a first time buyer he or she will tell you that these buyers were most likely buying up foreclosures! This is just not helping my local Loudoun County housing market but the Northern Va region as a whole.

 

Martha continued to throw out just about every number she could think of throughout her article in hopes that the reader will simply give up and take her word for it that the $8,000 Buyers Tax credit must be bad to have this many numbers against it. The fact of the matter is that this program is great for buyers and our economy for many reasons.

 

1.  It targets those who need it the most! First Time home buyers and those making less then $75,000 a year (which is below average household income for Loudoun County)  
2. The buyers are either buying foreclosed homes (which are shrinking inventory levels) or are buying lower priced townhouses and condos which are allowing sellers to move up or move out. How many stories have we heard about people that are turning down jobs because they can’t sell their home? 
3. As the article pointed out over 1.8 million buyers have used this program to buy homes. That’s 1.8 million homes that are no longer on the market! I would further add that this number would be higher if it wasn’t for the lack of lower priced inventory in our region. As a matter of fact we currently are at 3 year lows for most of the Loudoun, Fairfax and Metro DC areas!

 

 

I think we can all agree that the Real Estate market in Loudoun County as well as all of Northern Va is not totally out of the woods yet. The best help the Federal Government can give us to keep the market going in the right direction is to keep the $8,000 tax credit alive for another year. As long as the jobless numbers remain high foreclosures and distressed Real Estate will continue to be a challenge to the full economic recovery of our region.  

 

What do you think?

 

 

Take care,

 

Chuck 

Serving all of your Ashburn, Leesburg, Mclean and Loudoun County area Real Estate needs!

Gone Fishing!

As everyone might know I have gone fishing for the week but don't think I've forgotten about all my buddies!

Enjoy a little comic relief while I'm gone.... I sure did!

Take care, Chuck Serving all of your Ashburn, Leesburg, Mclean and Loudoun County area Real Estate needs!

The most amazing thing happened to me today!

The most amazing thing happened to me today! I had a Twitter moment and it was cool! It all happened at a normal run of the mill business social mixer hosted by Middleburg Bank. As I mingled through the crowd I couldn’t help but to talk about social media and how it was changing the way I did business. As always I got a little excited about social media but felt that a few people just didn’t get it. Kind of like trying to explain how good a steak tastes to a vegetarian( or a mac to a windows user). Needless to say this was not going to be an easy sell since most of the participates did not have a Facebook account and had no idea how Twitter and blogging were changing the world. As I sat in the back of the lounge and sipped my red wine I heard my name get called out. “Chuck Rifae you won a $50 gift certificate to Tuskies!” Wow… I have never won a door prize at any of these business mixers! So, I did what all Twitter pioneers do. Ya… you guessed it! I snapped a pic and tweeted about it! Now normally that would be the end of the story but not today, Not in Twitter land! No sooner then I hit send. I got a huge hit from my buddy Doug (thank you Doug I owe you a happy hour drink!). Less then two minutes later I got an additional 2 hits and new followers in the area. All of a sudden the light bulbs went off and my crazy stories of how tweeting can connect you to the world became very real, very quickly. Yes it is good to be King….even if it’s only for a minute and after two glasses of red wine!!!

 

Take care,

 

Chuck

 

And thank you again Steve!

Open Letter to the Washington Post part 2 Re: New Appraisal Rules

Well, the post did it again! I opened up the real estate section to read another article written by Elizabeth that was so thinly written with facts that I almost feel like asking for a refund for the time I spent reading it! I know I shouldn't pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the 50 gallon drum. Oh well, here is my post to Elizabeth's article on her blog. Enjoy the food fight!

"Elizabeth, Another great article…NOT… I am glad to see you are now speaking with more then one bitter agent and you are now also driving around a bit. Good for you!
Here are the issues you left out of your article this morning;
1.    Inexperienced out of the area (sometimes out of state) appraisers are bidding on jobs in areas that they are unfamiliar with. They (out of town appraisers) are now bidding on batches of work (say 70 appraisal in the metro area). The lowest bidder wins even if the bidder has never done an appraisal in our area. Try driving 3 hours any direction and put a value on the first single-family house you see.
2.    The appraiser must use two closed comps and two active comps within 90 days of closing. This is very difficult if the neighborhood doesn’t have a lot of closings. Areas like Great Falls and McLean are very difficult areas to close a deal in because they’re so few recent normal sales (appraisers will use distressed homes as comps!).
3.    Cost and time! It used to cost $300 to $400 and 3 to 5 business days to complete an appraisal. I am now seeing it cost as much as $1,000 and up to 3 weeks to complete.
4.    Banks are now using desktop appraisals as bases for approving loans. If you want to know how accurate a desktop appraisal is just go to zillow and plug in your home address. In my neighborhood alone (I live in Loudoun County) there are houses next to each other that are $100,000 off in price!
5.    Lenders now have the right to do a field spot check on any appraiser. This means that they will send out another appraiser (without the first knowing) to double check the first report. Depending on how much love exists between the first and second appraiser this can become contentious as each is bidding for more jobs! 
6.    Finally, appraisers now have to report if an area is in decline or has over supply. This report can lead to the lender dropping the loan amount down by as much as 10%!
I don’t mean to be too hard on you Elizabeth but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients read your reporting (also the reporting of others) and come away with only half the facts. The Washington Post is a national treasure and one that I’ve been reading regularly for 20 years. Facts Elizabeth more Facts!

Open Letter to the Washington Post

Today I read an article written by the Washington Post in which Elizabeth Razzi decided to go after Realtors who think positively about today's market. In her article titled “Home Team Advantage weigh you own interests against Broker Bossterism” seems to hint that Realtors would say or do anything to get buyers to buy and sellers to sell. Elizabeth likes to interview the same Realtors each time she needs a good negative quote about the Real Estate industry. Here was my response to her article that I posted online.

" Why does the post always interview the same bitter Real Estate Brokers when you need someone to down play the industry? I’ve read two articles in the past month in which you interviewed the same Broker. In each interview the Broker openly spoke about other agencies practices while totting himself as the anti-Realtors Realtor (trust me I’m a Realtor…ha ha). This week you went after Realtors who think positively about today’s market. Wouldn’t it have been better to speak to someone who has been running a successful Real Estate firm or business for then a couple of years? Or who runs a Brokerage with more then say 2 active agents? Or better yet how’s about the many Realtor Associations who can fill your columns with facts and figures? I’ve always been lead to believe that Realtors who constantly down other Realtors to make themselves look better often have little to say about themselves or their services.  Interviewing the same Weird Al Yankovic guy who is always good for a quote is just lazy journalism. I know you weren’t aiming for a Pulitzer or anything but can you at least drive around a little and meet other Realtors??? "

Take care!
Chuck