Saturday, May 9, 2009

Northern Virginia Weekend Bits Bucket 5/9-5/10, 2009

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

Posted by Harriet at 11:36 AM

2 comments:

Cara said...

advice, links etc.

I'm trying to advise my mom about refinancing. Which of the closing costs from her origination loan will be repeated when she refinances and which won't occur? Specifically (she's in MA) she's looking at $3,500 in state and county taxes and fees for the deed. Since she's not buying the house, she already owns it, these won't happen again will they?

I'm hoping she can get a stream-lined refinance through her current mortgage holder and that this will lessen the closing costs (their rates, at least online, are very competitive given the REO counts in that county).

I've already done the calculations on how long it takes for it to pay off for her to refinance at the current rates given her 6.25% APR, which basically ends up with if her total origination costs are less than 2% of her balance it pays off in under 2 years to get down to the 4.967% they seem to be offering...

5/9/09, 1:27 PM  
Cara said...

Okay, so I got tired of clicking and cutting and pasting before getting enough data to make a pretty graph. But the results were clear. The variability between two properties sold in the same year was huge in the bubble years and still is now, but not due to back to woods versus no such view, because there was far greater variability in two properties with the same view than there was between the group with and without a view. And the minimum size in the group of THs I chose to look at 1428 sq ft, could often have the same price as the 1542 sq ft units.

Clearly, at least for the group of desirable THs I chose to look at, having an actual view of the woods out your windows was less important than how much work you'd need to put into the place.

The other thing that surprised me was how many of these THs haven't sold since 1990. There are either a lot of long long term owners, or some of those owners are now landlords, or both. There were quite a few "property exchange" transactions, so some of them are definitely rentals.

I picked a TH community that was close to half and half, view/no view, perhaps in one that had fewer "good" THs with views, the view premium would be more obvious, but I suspect that having a view will be correlated with having fixed the place up, so it would still be hard to tease out.

If anyone has a method for getting the FFX county data in bulk xls format, such that this could be done from a searchable data base rather than copy and paste I'd still be interested to do more follow-through.

5/10/09, 2:48 PM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)