With unemployment still at near record highs, the fear is that many looking for work won’t be able to keep up with their mortgage payments.

This is definitely an unfortunate situation, but it is by no means indicative of the situation we face here in the Fort Mill SC area. We’re very fortunate in that people are continuing to move to the Charlotte area and when they do, they’re quite frequently deciding to move across the border to Fort Mill.

I certainly expect this trend to continue, which means a strong Fort Mil SC real estate market.

clipped from www.politicsdaily.com With continued high unemployment, fears are growing that jobless Americans won’t be able to keep up with mortgage payments, leading to a new wave of home foreclosures. Those fears are compounded by the fact that a federal program aimed at keeping people in their houses hasn’t been as effective as hoped, the Los Angeles Times reported. The goal of the $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program, introduced last February, was to help banks make temporarily reduced mortgage payments permanent. But Obama administration officials concede the program has been slow to take off and they are considering revisions to make it more effective. By the end of the year, economists predict 2.4 million borrowers could lose their homes, according to the Times. That would be an increase from 2.1 million foreclosures and short sales in 2009.

]]> http://sharonsellscarolina.com/654/foreclosure-rates-still-a-big-concern/feed/ 0 http://sharonsellscarolina.com/650/lakeside-housing-market-highly-competitive/ http://sharonsellscarolina.com/650/lakeside-housing-market-highly-competitive/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:12:48 +0000 SSCadmin http://sharonsellscarolina.com/?p=650 If you’re looking to buy a lakeside home at a huge discount, right now might just be the time to act!  Of course, that’s if you don’t mind living in north Charlotte NC on Lake Norman.

A recent story run by WCNC news station talked about the glut of lakeside homes that are available in Lake Norman, and many of them are listed at steep discounts. For example and as quoted in the Charlotte Observer,

“It’s 7,000 square-feet,” said broker Jason Noblitt as he looked at pictures of a waterfront foreclosure in Mooresville. “It was on the market for approximately $1.7 million.”

The 5-bedroom, 4 1/2-bath house is under contract now and Noblitt thinks it’ll sell for under $1 million. That’s a $700,000 discount.

“In our current market you absolutely are not going to get what you did in 2006 or even 2007. We need to look at where prices were in 2004 and 2005,” he said.”

And it’s not as if there isn’t competition either.  An MLS search showed 470 lakeside homes listed in the Lake Norman area, which means it’s a highly competitive housing market.

Of course on the flip side, if you’re looking to purchase a lakeside home, now is certainly a great time to act!

Down here in the Fort Mill SC area, it’s still most definitely a buyer’s market, but as I’ve always said, if your home is marketed and priced correctly, there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t expect to get a fair value for your home.

To learn more about the Fort Mill SC or Rock Hill SC housing market, contact me today and I’d be more than happy to show you exactly what the Fort Mill SC real estate market looks like.

Scammers absolutely love to prey on the weak so it’s no surprise to see that as the number of foreclosures rise, so too does the number of foreclosure scams.

According to Stella Hopkins of the Charlotte Observer,

“The N.C. Attorney General’s Office handled 448 foreclosure-scam complaints last year, a jaw-dropping jump from 82 the previous year. In 2007, there were just seven.”

The majority of these scams appear to be in the area of firms charging upfront fees for so-called ‘foreclosure prevention help, a practice which has been illegal in NC since 2005. Last year, the NC Attorney General handed out 166 cease and desist orders to firms charging these upfront fees.

Again, according to Ms. Hopkins:

“Working out a loan modification is time-consuming and frustrating. The main federal program is cumbersome. But there’s a lot of free help. See www.fightncforeclosure.org to find a free foreclosure prevention counselor in your area. The site has contacts for other resources, too.

And remember: If you’re facing foreclosure, we want to hear from you. We’re looking this year at whether the $75 billion federal foreclosure-prevention program is really helping people. E-mail me at shopkins@charlotteobserver.com or call direct, 704-358-5173.”

Typically, most road construction projects follow a ‘design-build’ process whereby contractors are responsible only for designing and building the roadway.  In this scenario, they would also join in the financing of the project as well.

This new process supposedly offers a streamlined method for completing the project that has been a hot topic since Gov. Purdue took office last year.

I for one am curious to see how well this process plays out.  Call me a bit of a skeptic, but I don’t have a whole lot of faith in a government that’s already operating in the red and current projections don’t look very promising either.

While I do believe in allowing private enterprise to help us correct many of the problems we now face, I’ll be curious to see how the back-end financing portion works out for the participating contractors.

Regardless, I think it’ll be a good thing to have the project completed, now projected to occur around 2014. This 1-485 project has dragged on for waaaaaay too long already and it will certainly help the entire Charlotte area as it continues to grow and expand.

It appears as if Senators have agreed on the idea of extending the credit, but they haven’t quite nailed down all the logistics of the extension.  And while the extension would prolong the $8,000 tax credit enjoyed by first-time home buyers that purchase a new home, it looks as though it might go beyond that to include those that aren’t first-time home buyers.

The new provision of the extension would provide up to $6,500 in assistance to those that have lived in their current residence for at least 5 years.

Again, as of right now most of this is still talk, but as we all know, anytime we can get both political parties in Washington to agree on something, it’s got to be a good sign!

If you’re still in the market to purchase a new home or you’d like to sell your current home, the market is still very warm and there are plenty of homes available for purchase and willing buyers looking to buy.

Contact me and let’s discuss your real estate options!

Now, although this is certainly some encouraging news, home prices overall are still down roughly 33% from the numbers from mid-July 2006. So while we are starting to see some improvements in the housing market overall, there’s still a very long way to go before things are completely back.

The report shows that with the exception of the Las Vegas, Detroit, and Seattle areas home prices are rising across the country and I would say that that’s the trend I’m seeing here in the Fort Mill SC and Rock Hill SC area.

Yes, it’s still very much a buyer’s market, but you can slowly see home prices starting to increase ever so slightly.  We’ve been very fortunate in that home prices never really took the nose dive experienced by other markets, but home buyer confidence is certainly returning which in turn means homes are selling closer to asking price than previously.

Hopefully this trend will continue, not just in the Fort Mill SC area, but nationwide as well.  Home sales has always been a bit of a barometer of how well the economy is doing so the better the home market is, the better off our economy is!

According to Bloomberg,

“Sales of existing U.S. homes jumped more than forecast in July to the highest level in almost two years. Purchases climbed 7.2 percent to a 5.24 million annual rate, the most since August 2007, the National Association of Realtors said today in Washington. The gain was the biggest since records began in 1999. The median price fell 15 percent.”

As I’ve said all along, the Rock Hill SC and Fort Mill SC housing markets haven’t been hit as badly as other areas of the country, but we’ve certainly felt the reprocutions.  Now with the national housing market appearing to rebound, I would expect that we’ll continue to see an increase in existing home sales.

There’s still quite a lot of homes for sale, but the pace at which homes are selling has slowly picked up the past few months.  And now with the $8K tax credit coming to it’s end on November 1st many home buyers are scrambling around, trying to find their dream home in order to take advantage of this credit.

So, if you’ve been thinking about selling your home, now’s a GREAT time to put it on the market!

“The number of initial unemployment-insurance claims fell last month, and the year-to-year increase was just 5 percent – compared with a 76 percent year-to-year jump in June, according to N.C. Employment Security Commission figures released Monday.”

While this is certainly good news to use locally in the Charlotte NC area, it mirrors information from across the country that the recession does appear to be slowing down. While there were still some 274,000 jobs lost in July, the unemployment percentage actually fell by .1% from June, which is the first time that number fell since April of 2008.

Obviously, this informatio boads well for the Rock Hill SC and Fort Mill SC areas as well as people continue to look to York County for an alternative to Charlotte NC and seeing the number of job losses slow down certainly helps our real estate market.

And in spite of all the bad news nationally, we’ve always enjoyed a relatively strong real estate market here in the Rock Hill SC – Fort Mill SC area and I don’t expect that to change any time soon!

These important changes, which the National Association of Realtors® has been calling for, are a step towards trying to help stabilize a struggling housing market in many parts of the country. The $8K tax credit will be monetized through short-term bridge loans through FHA approved lenders, thus allowing potenial home buyers to gain access to the funds quicker.

This is certainly welcome news for home buyers and I’m certain that home sellers will be excited to know that this added incentive has been made available to those interested in purchasing their home!