Just a brief note on mortgage rates – they’re holding steady this week. 30 Year Fixed Rate: 4.75% (unchanged) 30 Year FHA Fixed Rate: 4.625% (Down 0.125%) 15 Year Fixed Rate: 4.375% (unchanged) Look for rates to stay in the high 4′s and low 5′s for the next few months and perhaps even into Q3 [...]

This year we’re rolling out a new program of providing real estate reviews to the friends of our business as part of our ongoing service program.  In the coming months we’ll be calling you to set up a short in-person or phone meeting to discuss any questions you have about the market, your neighborhood and [...]

A Federal program aimed at helping distressed homeowner’s with avoiding foreclosure was amended at the end of the year to improve it’s ability to help owner’s avoid foreclosure, as well as speed up the processing of short sales.  From the National Association of Realtors: On December 28, 2010, the Treasury Department released an update to [...]

We were asked by a client recently “how do different cities compare for property tax rates?”  Funny enough, while the assumption is that they’re all pretty close… there isn’t a great immediate source to clearly compare them… so we’ve created it and here are the surprising results. Here’s a look at the major cities in [...]

Looking Back… Anyone remember the riding the ‘sleigh-ride’ at Fun Forest at the Seattle Center?  For those who don’t, it was the roller coaster alternative for those of us that were too young, too short, or too frightened, to pony up the real coaster… Anyhow, that’s how we’d describe 2010’s market – much more a [...]

Condo owner’s take note… FHA has dramatically changed it’s approval process and associations need to be sure to be keeping up with these new changes in order to stay on the ‘approved’ list and keep their right to refinance using FHA and sell to FHA buyers. Here’s a great article summarizing the issue. If you [...]

So I just got the latest statistics for closed sales for 2010, which has allowed the completion of an analysis looking at how market activity and prices have been effected by the peak and the downturn. The clear conclusion here is that we’ve appear to have hit a bottom plateau and are primed for a [...]

Yep… you read that right.  Home sales were up in December – traditionally the second slowest month for closed sales. This is great news as it shows strength in the housing market and the 3rd straight month of improvement after the expiration of tax credits, as well as being in spite of the winter weather [...]

In 2010, we arguably hit the bottom of the distressed market – though it should be clearly stated we aren’t out of the woods – just perhaps out of the worst of it.  From 2009 to 2010, we saw the nature of the distress problem change from misfortune based distress (loss of job, tragedy, badly [...]

After the holiday rush, we’re getting back into posting with a series of posts that look back at 2010 and forward into 2011 from several Real Estate perspectives… we’ll be posting one each day this week.  Today it’s: mortgages and interest rates…. Mortgage Rates in 2010 What an interesting ride 2010 was for mortgages… when [...]