David Hughes' Blog: Foreclosures

With all the foreclosures going up for sale in the area it is hard not to be overwhelmed in your search for the perfect home, investment property, etc.  Our staff at www.homes-reno has just taken all the difficulty out of it. 

You can now search ALL the foreclosures in the Reno – Sparks area on our website.  We made it simple to search by separating all the foreclosures by price range.  All the foreclosures that are listed within the Reno MLS system are all included in this search. 

If you have any questions regarding any of the foreclosures in the Reno and Sparks area, please feel free to contact me at
1-800-692-1193.
 

About 40% of all evictions in Washoe County are tenants who have done nothing wrong.  They pay their rent and then the sheriff shows up at their door to give them 3 days to move out. The owner of the home did not make the payments and the unsuspecting tenant gets the boot once the foreclosure is final. If you are one of these landlords please contact your tenant and let them know what is going on. Yes, you are mad at the bank, the economy, whatever, there is no reason to possibly put good, hard working people who pay their rents on the street.

Fortunately, there is a bill in the state legislature right now that would notify these tenants as soon as the foreclosure process starts and they would be given 60 days notice to find another place to live. There…

There will be 300 foreclosure that will be sold this week in Nevada, 39 of them will be in Reno and the rest will be in Las Vegas. Banks are increasingly turning to auction companies like Hudson and Marshall to sell their vast inventories of unsold foreclosures. According the National Associaion of Realtors in the fourth quarter of 2008 45% of all real estate transactions were foreclosures. Nevada lead the charge with a 133% increase in sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 over the same period in 2007. At these auctions the properties are sold "as is" and the buyers are required to make a $5000 deposit either in cash or a cashiers check for each successful bid they get.

For more information buyers should go to www.hudsonandmarshall.com or call 866-539-4172…

One of the biggest questions I get when selling real estate is, "Will my property taxes go up when I buy a home". The answer is "No". We are not a prop 13 or market value state like California which puts your tax at 1% of the sales price and stays there until you sell the property. If you bought your property 30 years ago and paid $100,000 your annual taxes are still $1000 per year, where as your neighbor who just paid $700,000 for the house next door is paying $7000 annually for his taxes.  Doesn’t seem fair. The good news is Nevada does not operate this way.

The way the Washoe County tax assessor taxes real property owners can be a little confusing but I am going to give it a shot.

The formula that they use is this:

Taxable value = market value of…

There are some homes in our area that are taking a beating, literally. Some disgruntled homeowners are taking out their frustration on the home as they are going through the foreclosure process as their castles are being taken from them. Appliances, fixtures, windows, door handles, whatever they can pry loose or load in their truck is what some of these unhappy homeowners are taking with them. As their dream of home ownership comes to an end, so does the condition of the home. It does not happen in all cases but as realtors we see it on a daily basis. This not only hurts the bank but it certainly hurts the neighborhoods and neighbors that these homes are in. In this state of disrepair the bank will have to fire sale the home to get it sold, thereby…

In these crazy times you are going to get lots of calls from people wanting to help you with your mortgage troubles.  Be extremely careful as these people will tell you what you want to hear to get you out of trouble. Once there is a notice of default recorded it is public record that you are in trouble. There are people out there who will take advantage of you in this situation.  My policy is that I do not do business with anybody who has come to me via a sales call on the phone. If you need help, "get a referral from somebody you trust". Below I have listed just some of the scams that are currently taking place in our area.

Phantom help: The potential rescuer charges outrageous fees for phone calls that the homeowner could make themselves usually…

From this October to last October sales in Washoe County have increased by 47%, but October of 2007 was a horrible month for sales. In this uncertain market any increase is a good one. There were 348 sales in Washoe County this past October, of which half of them were foreclosures. The other bad news is the median price is down 22% from October of 2007. The median home price in Reno is $274,000 and in Sparks it is $215,000.  Right now approx. 50% of all the homes on the market in Reno and Sparks are either a short sale or a foreclosure.

I did a study of Reno foreclosures and so far this year in our area they are selling at 98% of asking price. That’s a good thing. This means that the agents representing them are doing a decent job of pricing them to…

Ok folks, here it is.  Right now in the greater Reno Sparks and outlying areas there are currently 2817 homes on the market. Of those 18%, or 505, are foreclosures and 33%, or 923, are short sales. Short sales are where the sellers are trying to sell their homes for less than they owe and the bank has to agree to this, which in about 80% of the time, they cannot come to an agreement and the bank ends up foreclosing on the seller anyway (stay away from these whenever possible).

So far this year there have been 2670 homes that have sold and of that number 748 have been foreclosures, 219 have been short sales. So can see there are a lot more foreclosures that are actually closing escrow over the number of short sales that are actually closing. The…