San Francisco Real Estate - Janice Lee

When consumed with searching for your new home, it's easy to forget one of the most important steps in the home buying process: arming yourself with a pre-approved mortgage loan. It's a commitment from a lender to lend to you with specifications on the exact loan amount you'll receive and it provides you with several advantages when purchasing a house, including: Establishing an advantage in a competitive market: Having a pre-approval letter provides you with an edge in a multi-offer situation. Sellers often prefer working with potential buyers who are pre-approved in order to avoid the threat of a deal falling through because the purchaser cannot get sufficient financing. In fact, a seller might accept an offer from a pre-approved buyer over a higher offer from a buyer who has not been pre-approved.

If you're in the market for a new house, you're probably in the market for a new mortgage. When considering your financing options, you'll want to review many different things about the loans offered to you. There are many different kinds of home loans available and understanding what you are offered by a lender is critical to knowing whether or not that financing option will work for you.

Should I pay down my mortgage every month and try to pay off my mortgage? There are different schools of thought and the right decision depends on your financial situation. It used to be that your parents would tell you to pay down your mortgage as fast as possible.  You can be debt free and no longer have monthly payments. It’s more complicated than that.  With today’s low mortgage interest rates, you may get a higher return on your money in other investments or perhaps you need a tax write off or you can use your money to leverage to buy other properties.

Do You Understand Your Mortgage Fees? In a recently released study, one third of homebuyers believed the law required that everyone pay the same fees. Most people don’t realize that the fees vary with the lender and most are negotiable. Unfortunately, most first time homebuyers are ill-prepared for the biggest purchase of their lives. They tend to sign up with what they believe is the cheapest option without understanding how to truly compare mortgages and evaluate it for their situation. We’re in homebuying season right now. Buyers focus on the price of the home rather on looking at the overall cost including the right mortgage. What Is APR? Whether you’re getting a home loan or an auto loan, most people don’t understand the difference between interest rate versus annual percentage rate. This is also why many people get in credit card trouble. Three lenders with identical information may still calculate different APRs. The calculations can be quite complex and...

  There was some welcome news for the housing market this week, both here in the Bay Area and nationally. The biggest headlines came on Thursday when the Federal Reserve, as expected, announced plans for further stimulus for the sluggish economy. And here at home, the local housing market continued to gain strength with luxury home sales improving once again last month (more on that later). The Fed surprised no one when it said it plans more economic stimulus. But what did take some by surprise was the approach Chairman Ben Bernanke and fellow governors chose. With its new quantitative easing, or QE3 effort, the Fed said it plans to begin an open-ended program to purchase mortgage-backed securities – a move aimed at bolstering the housing recovery and the overall economy as well. The Fed will buy $40 billion of mortgage debt each month until job growth picks up, a move that was greeted with enthusiasm by the financial markets Thursday with the Dow rallying ...