Sandy's Blog

During the past two days I have been contacted by five potential real estate buyers, one of them was through ActiveRain:) so I have been busy emailing listings and information.

I have also been working on my web site and this morning I added the ability to search for Foreclosures through the official MLS.  You have to bring up the MLS Search page, click "Stipulation of Sale List" to add Foreclosures to your search criteria but my search is real-time directly from the Coastal Carolina Association of Realtors (CCAR) official MLS system and not a feed through a third party.  Later today I went into my Google webmaster dashboard and created a Google Base where you can be found by search engines even if you don't have a web site. 

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If you have even seen a hamster on a wheel in its cage you'll know that they run as hard as they can but they stay in the same place.  I'm beginning to think some portions of our real estate market don't know how to get off the wheel and out of the cage. 

Many of us that have applied for a mortgage may have heard the word "underwriters".  They are the ones who actually approve or disapprove the loan, prepare the lending package, and send it to the place where the closing (settlement) takes place.  Some lenders have "in-house underwriters" which may help a bit but lately we're hearing the word "underwriters" days before the scheduled closing as the entire mortgage loan is cancelled.  The reason has nothing to do with the people applying for the mortgage, it has to do with the lender not accepting the appraisal done by the appraiser they hired or the lender only allowing comparables that had sold and closed within the past year in the same neighborhood.  Comparables within a couple of miles radius would not be acceptable.   Those examples were from national mortgage lenders.

"Appraisers" had become a bad word because appraisals can be much lower then the true value since appraisers got into trouble during the "boom" and they are using foreclosures as the comparables.  "Underwriters" following the lender's requirements or their own may take over the bad word status as people remember who started the problems in the real estate market. 

Myrtle Beach Real Estate