Real Estate Deeds Made Easy Since 1997
You or someone you know may be one of the generation of people aged 55+. And you might be thinking about downsizing or moving to a 55+ community.
Here, we orient curious readers with the pros and cons, and go over the deed restrictions to understand before and after buying in.
Continue reading “Is Moving to a 55+ Community a Good Decision?”
Well, it’s one way to transfer property deeds between people! Yet trading homes with someone else isn’t your typical deed transaction.
In a prolonged tight market, deed exchanges are drawing growing numbers of curious and creative homeowners. Here’s a bit more about the concept.
Continue reading “Could a Home Swap Turn Out to Be a Win-Win? Here’s How It Works.”
Blockchain, the underlying technology of cryptocurrency, is a digital recording system, leading innovators to wonder if it could solve challenges in deed recording.
The U.S. deed recording system is tried and true. At the same time, title defects and tangled titles are much too common. Additionally, deed fraud harms vulnerable homeowners..
What if our title system moved to the blockchain? A “blocktitle” system, as Dawson Sanders at the University of Southern California calls it, would transform real estate transactions.
Continue reading “Can We Record Deeds on the Blockchain?”
This month, 150,000+ people received emails that say some of their student loan debt will be forgiven. The latest $1.2 billion worth of debt forgiveness is a ray of sunshine for many potential first-time homebuyers. It impacts a person’s access to mortgage loans, and therefore the ability to acquire property deeds.
But what about the student debt that the borrowers still have to pay? Some graduates pay off their loans, and must (or choose to) delay home buying to do that.
Others say: Forget waiting. If it’s possible, let’s buy a home today. Yes, having the student loan done and gone would be great — but there’s a lot to be said for putting a foot on the homeownership ladder now.
Each person has to do what’s best in their circumstances. But looking at some specific parts of this question can help readers come to their own sound decisions.
Continue reading “Do I Have to Pay Off My Student Loans Before Buying a Home?”
Seasonal trends have an impact on home selling and buying success. Whether you’re receiving a real estate deed for the first time, or conveying your deed to a new buyer, having a sense of the market is helpful for planning.
The housing market stalled in 2023. Can this new Spring season reactivate it? Anything can happen. But one thing is already clear. Home buyers are back. And sellers are there to meet them.
Continue reading “Ready, Set…Here Comes a Real Spring Home Buying Rush”
Some interesting findings came out this year:
Leaf Home, a company focused on accessibility and upgrades, together with market researchers at Morning Consult, warn of a looming burden for younger generations. Our aging U.S. housing stock will depend on buyers to carry out repairs.
The silver lining for these put-upon home buyers? At least fixer-upper homes create low-cost entry points for hopeful buyers.
Continue reading “A New Generation of Renovators? Boomer Sellers Are Putting Younger Buyers to Work.”
Ever heard the term wraparound mortgage? Because this is actually a set of two mortgages for the same home, it’s more complicated than a regular mortgage. It can present special risks, and it’s less commonly seen in the world of real estate.
That said, some have used it to be able to get a home deed in their own name.
Is that considered a good idea? Maybe. And how is it done? There are two main ways: through a seller, and through a professional lender.
Let’s take a walkaround through wraparounds!
Continue reading “Wraparound Mortgages: When They’re Used and How They Can Help”
Receiving the deed to a home is a major milestone. Typically, it depends on an earlier milestone: the mortgage approval.
Apply for a mortgage, and lenders will consider your debt-to-income ratio (DTI). Why the DTI? Essentially, the lender wants to know how much of your earnings you spend, using credit. A low DTI suggests that you can comfortably make payments.
If your existing debt load is light, you’ll be able to borrow more and spend more on a home. But even if you’re not getting ready to buy a home right now, a lower debt-to-income ratio can unlock financial opportunities. This matters to every one of us.
Let’s see what goes into the ratio, and how to optimize your DTI.
Continue reading “All About DTI: How Much Debt Is Too Much If I Want to Buy a Home?”
With everything that’s happening in the world, maybe more needs to be said about what the Pennsylvania Senate did in December. Every senator agreed to pass state Rep. Justin Fleming’s H.B. 1289, enabling homeowners to publicly condemn offensive language in deed covenants. The new law 1289 makes it cheap or free, and very simple to do.
This law had already passed in the House, of course – in June 2023. It just needed the governor to sign it into law. And the governor did.
It’s a new Pennsylvania law that we all need to know about.
Continue reading “Facing Up to Discriminatory Deed Language: What Pennsylvania Did”
Remember that Halloween cyberattack on Mr. Cooper? Hackers got customers’ names and birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and phone numbers. They even got access to people’s banking details.
Some customers — new and longtime — tried to log in and could not access their accounts. They could not make payments. Even worse, the breach derailed some home buyers’ closing days.
Some people just recently received letters about the breach, and realized that the Mr. Cooper Group must have touched their mortgages at some point. Some of the exposed customer information came from households financed or serviced by Nationstar Mortgage — Mr. Cooper’s previous name. Their past information was still stored in the system. According toTechCrunch, nearly 14.7 million people had their data stolen.
But there’s more. Mr. Cooper wasn’t the only mortgage firm dealing with security breaches.
A spate of recent cyberattacks hit three more big mortgage and title companies: National Financial (FNF®), First American Financial, and loanDepot®. All in the past four months. The fallout is ongoing.
Continue reading “The Hacks Keep Coming: Private Customer Data Exposed at Four Major Mortgage Companies”