Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Northern Virginia Bits Bucket 9/9/2008

Please post your local house search updates, MLS finds, on-topic ideas, and links here.

Posted by Harriet at 12:00 AM

7 comments:

wannabuy said...

From the previous days bits bucket:
zeropointzero said...
"The FHA allows down payments of as little as 3 percent, but that will rise to 3.5 percent as of Oct. 1. If you're scraping dollars together for a down payment, try to set your closing for the end of this month....

First, thank you for the tidbit. Do you have a link on the FHA increasing the down payment requirements? We've been reading on the web for a while on how the banks are having trouble securitizing FHA backed mortgages; is this small change an attempt to restart the MBS market?

I'm in shock how dead the MBS market is right now. The buyout will get Fannie/Freddie going again... But until there is an expansion by other lending institutions this downturn will only accelerate.

Got Popcorn?
Neil

9/9/08, 12:29 AM  
MM said...

this $1.28MM 5/4/1 6,349 sf home in Country Club 22207 just went under contract after 40 days on market. there're 50 listings over the 1MM mark, and this is one of the 3 that are under contract. 3/50 is 6% sales chance. not good, but possibly the nature of the high end market.

but, this $640K Country Club 22207 home was re-listed @ 13% higher ($74K more) and went under contract in just 4 days! must be the home improvements? or the market improvements?

lots of activities in the 500K to 800K range, roughly 35% sales chance (16 contracts/46 listings), which is excellent in even the boom days. this range seems on par with the avg income level. perhaps sensible home buying has finally returned?

9/9/08, 10:00 AM  
zeropointzero said...

Neil - that's from the Razzi/Post article that novawatcher linked at the beginning of that thread yesterday -
http://tinyurl.com/56aton

I can't believe an extra half percent added on is anything more than a cosmetic fix, so FHA can can say they "toughened" lending requirements. But maybe I'm just being too cynical here.

9/9/08, 11:13 AM  
John Fontain said...

"this $1.28MM 5/4/1 6,349 sf home in Country Club 22207 just went under contract"

MLS is still showing this as active. maybe i'm missing something.

9/9/08, 5:03 PM  
MM said...

jf:

i drove past it this morning and saw the under contract sign. could be a delay in mls?

9/9/08, 5:39 PM  
lw said...

I made an offer on a house for $232,500 with $5,000 seller subsidy couple weeks ago. It's a bank owned property and the seller rejected my offer.

I just found out that the asking price now is $231,900..

Does anyone know what's going on here? Should I change my real estate agent (I am not locked in)?

9/9/08, 9:19 PM  
edward allen said...

lw: make another offer. You have to understand there are bank clerks handling these matters that don't know what they are doing and are flooded with paperwork. You were lucky to get a response in a couple of weeks.

9/9/08, 10:57 PM  

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