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Buyer's big mistake with agent, repairs

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Friday, August 28, 2009.

Q: I heard that the best way to choose my real estate agent was by getting a reference. So I asked around, and got a referral to a friend of a friend. He's been a great guy to hang around with, but something is wrong. He's late all the time, and one time he even called me at the exact time we were supposed to meet, to say he was sitting down to get his hair cut, so he'd be a couple of hours late! Also, he's showed me a couple of places I like, but for the most part, the homes he shows me have none of the features I asked for.

The last straw was when I got into contract on this house, and after I paid for $5,000 of repairs that the city required to be done before letting us close the deal, he told me my loan "fell through." I don't even really know what that means, but after a year of house hunting, I'm moving on to another agent. What did I do wrong here? more...

Trust agent advice on inspections

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Thursday, August 27, 2009.

Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hansvanrijnberk/2598234846/" target=blank>LiveFromAmsterdam</a>.

As I mentioned last week, there is a pervasive myth afloat that real estate agents are in cahoots with a stable of service providers like mortgage brokers and inspectors. The aim? To bilk unwary buyers out of their hard-earned dollars and dupe them into buying lemon homes and taking lemon loans.

Has such a thing ever happened in real life? I'm sure it has. But I'm also highly certain that these sorts of unholy alliances are the extreme exception rather than the rule.

What's true is that we agents do have a set of professionals we prefer our clients to work with. more...

Construction manager fights for payday

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Wednesday, August 26, 2009.

In the case The Fifth Day LLC v. Bolotin, construction manager The Fifth Day agreed to provide various project and construction management services on property owner James Bolotin's behalf, to facilitate the construction of several commercial buildings on his property. In exchange, Bolotin agreed to pay The Fifth Day a percentage of his profits from the sale of the property, after construction was complete.

After construction was completed, Bolotin paid The Fifth Day a portion of the profits from three of the buildings, but refused to pay any of the profits from the remaining four buildings. The Fifth Day then filed suit. more...

Buyers twisted by design

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Tuesday, August 25, 2009.

Image courtesy of <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307277244" target=blank>Random House Inc.</a>

Recently, I showed a home to a novice house hunter. From what I'd seen of her personality and tastes, I knew this place wouldn't be "it" for her, but she wanted to see it anyway. We went in, and she took it all in: little tiny windows; dark paneled walls; lots of rooms in a home that already had a pretty low square footage; what I like to call insecurity bars on the windows (that's when there are bars on the window in an actually pretty nice/safe neighborhood) -- and my normally chatty and upbeat client looked at me wide-eyed and summed her emotional reaction to the house up in three words: "I would cry."

In "The Architecture of Happiness," writer Alain de Botton explores exactly this phenomenon ... more...

Playing by REO rules a tough sell

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Monday, August 24, 2009.

I got a call from a would-be investor the other day. She had an address and insisted she needed to buy this property, which was bank-owned. The rub? It wasn't listed on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), but it had been previously. I took the address, looked up the title information, and made calls to all my inside contacts with that asset manager and bank -- all of whom very politely asked me to tell this gal to take a flying leap.

This lady was nothing if not tenacious. She'd attended several get-rich real estate seminars, watched a bunch of infomercials touting buying bank-owned homes as the next great real estate investing scheme, and she would not take "no" for an answer. more...

The $4,500 loan mod that couldn't

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Friday, August 21, 2009.

Q: This isn't about a home sale exactly, but I hope you'll look at my situation anyway. I hired a loan modification company that had a very good reputation. (I'm not behind on my mortgage payments, but I wanted to have my lender extend my 5-year adjustable-rate mortgage to a 30-year-fixed.) I was very wary of getting scammed, so I asked my mortgage broker -- who has worked with my family for decades -- to refer me to a company.

The company seemed legitimate. It was associated with a law firm, and offered to give me a full refund if it couldn't get my loan modified. My boyfriend is an attorney, so he made sure my contract stated that the company would put my money in a trust account until they completed the loan modification. more...

Debunking the real estate cartel

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Thursday, August 20, 2009.

Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foreverphoto/2760042027/">KellyB.</a>

The real estate nonfiction book genre should be broken down into two subsets: (a) how-to and (b) who-caused-it bubble-burst reenactments. Books in the latter category aren't pure nonfiction, though, in my experience.

Sprinkled throughout you'll usually find some of the more persistent, pervasive and, in my opinion, fictional (at worst) or exaggerated (at best) tales of real estate industry conspiracies.

I realize that there have been individual instances of agents and mortgage brokers, inspectors and appraisers joining forces in an evil marriage to take advantage of the little guy. more...

'Signature' defense won't stop foreclosure

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Wednesday, August 19, 2009.

Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrobel/281135463/">Gunnar Wrobel</a>.

In the case Karnitz v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., homeowners Joel and Tanya Karnitz built a home with a construction bridge loan in the names of both husband and wife, then refinanced into a permanent home loan with lender Wells Fargo. At close of the refinance mortgage transaction, the lender's documents requested only that Joel Karnitz sign to obtain the loan and mortgage, despite the fact that both Joel and Tanya were on the title and the construction bridge loan for the home.

As a result, Tanya never signed -- and was never asked by Wells Fargo to sign -- the loan or mortgage documents. more...

Fix your relationship with money

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Tuesday, August 18, 2009.

Image courtesy of <a href="http://www.greenleafbookgroup.com/book.cfm?BookID=337" target=blank>Greenleaf Book Group</a>.

Myth-busting is not a brand-new concept. Neither is paradigm-shifting. But Garrett Gunderson's "Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity" is a novel take on paradigm-shifting dressed as myth-busting, relative to its brethren on the personal finance bookstore shelves. "Killing Sacred Cows" is a mindset-expanding vehicle for Gunderson's mission to shatter the foundations of what he sees as counterproductive financial belief systems and replace them with squishy, New Age-y, but potentially powerful, new perspectives.

The book's format -- and message -- is super-simple: Each chapter houses Gunderson's attack-and-rethink on an old-school financial doctrine, like: "Financial Security Means Steady Paychecks and Benefits"; "Money is Power"; "High Risks = High Returns"; and "Avoid Debt Like the Plague." more...

Shrinking the real estate listings universe

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Monday, August 17, 2009.

<a href="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050428.html" target=blank>Credit: NASA and European Space Agency</a>.

I recently heard cable culinary commentator Alton Brown quote Miss Piggy as having said that "(a)fter all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual 'food' out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking 30 or 40 postage stamps." I'm rapidly coming to feel the same way about all the trouble my clients go to house hunting on the Web.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I am not one of those brokers who thinks that putting listings on the Web was the final nail in the coffin of the professional real estate service industry. Rather to the contrary, actually; I'm a buyer's broker, and grew up in the Internet era. So I've always seen having listing data freely available online as an empowerment issue. more...

5 seller mistakes to avoid

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Friday, August 14, 2009.

Q: My home has been on the market for almost a year. My Realtor also sold it to me and also sold my last two homes, and does a lot of sales in my neighborhood. She told me to list it at $599,000, but I really couldn't afford to eat that much of a loss, so I had it listed at $699,000.

Anyhow, I keep reading about how the market is rebounding now. I see other homes getting multiple offers in a fairly short period of time, and I've got nothing. I know my agent spent a lot of money advertising the place, but I'm tired of having conflict with her. So, I just asked my Realtor to cancel the listing and relisted it with another agent who wouldn't take the listing priced any higher than $599,000. What did I do wrong, here? more...

The stigma of FHA financing

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Thursday, August 13, 2009.

Q: I've been looking to take advantage of the lower prices on the market, and have been approved for an FHA-insured loan with a 3.5 percent down payment, though I plan to put down slightly more than that. I have made several offers on homes where mine was not the only offer. More than once, my offer was rejected -- and the listing agent said the reason was that my offer had FHA (Federal Housing Administration) financing. And several other times, I've seen properties that I'm interested in and my Realtor says the confidential remarks say no FHA offers will be looked at.

I don't understand why the seller cares whether my loan is an FHA loan or not -- they're going to get the same amount of money no matter what, right? more...

Toxic mold suit hinges on testing

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Wednesday, August 12, 2009.

In the case Holland v. W.M. Realty Management Inc., the tenant (Holland) lived in an apartment building managed by W.M. Realty Management, and claimed to have become ill due to toxic mold in the apartment. About seven months after first complaining of the mold problem to the property manager, the tenant vacated the apartment.

A couple of weeks after moving out, and after the property manager conducted mold remediation in the unit and building, the tenant's attorney sent an industrial hygienist to collect mold samples from the unit the tenant had previously occupied. Testing of the mold samples indicated contamination. more...

Deconstructing consumerism

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Tuesday, August 11, 2009.

Image courtesy <a href="http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781101047798,00.html?Spent_Geoffrey_Miller#" target=blank>Penguin Group</a>.

The old marketing adage "sex sells" is to "Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior" as your uncle's old 35-millimeter vacation movies are to YouTube.

Rather than looking at how "consumerist capitalism" has evolved over the last few hundred years, "Spent" author Geoffrey Miller zooms way out historically speaking, analyzing the often-detrimental buying behaviors of modern Americans -- from the purchase of a Hummer to the purchase of a McMansion -- from the perspective of Cro-Magnon man (and woman). more...

Desperately seeking real estate status

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Monday, August 10, 2009.

Flickr photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/j242/2788382414/in/photostream/" target=blank>Jessep242</a>.

It is said that marriage is a public statement of two individuals' commitment to each other. (This supposedly explains the need for witnesses -- though in my crowd, nuptial attendees view their job description as limited to eating, drinking and merrily gifting Crate & Barrel place settings.) In terms of life steps and commitments, a close second to getting hitched is getting housed -- buying and owning a home.

This begs the question: What does your house say about you? More importantly, how do buyers and homeowners consider the "public statement" factor, if at all, when they are choosing and customizing their homes? more...

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