Fresh off the press! The incentives keep getting better for first time homebuyers throughout the country. Shaun Donovan, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said that the Federal Housing Administration is going to permit lenders to allow homeowners to use the $8,000 tax credit as a downpayment.

The best part is the $8,000 does not have to be paid back. Secretary Donovan said that important changes, which the National Association of Realtors® has been calling for, will help consumers purchase a home. “We all want to enable FHA consumers to access the home buyer tax credit funds when they close on their home loans so that the cash can be used as a downpayment,” Donovan said. According to Donovan, the FHA’s approved lenders…

For those of you that call expired listings and for sale by owners the most common objections this time of the year from a homeowner is "I want to wait until after the holidays" or "Nobody buys homes during the holidays." We all know this is NOT true. In fact if you look at your MLS statistics homes still sell in November and December, so the homeowners that are on the market actually have a distinct advantage over those that are "sleeping" until spring time. Here is the most compelling reasons if I was a homeowner I would be excited about having my home on the market during the holiday season.

Halloween Is Going To Suck This Year!

This is a funny picture but so true. This tells the tale of what is going on in the real estate market here in Metro Detroit and really throughout most of the entire country now.  Unfortunately kids will have to walk to many more homes to get the same amount of candy because of all the Michigan bank owned foreclosures and empty houses.  Everybody thinks that just because the house is a foreclosure that it is the steal of the century. This is just not true. Banks are in the business to try to recoup as much money as they can and giving houses is not what they want to do. They have their own appraiser go out and tell them what the value of the house is including the repairs needed. Sure they may discount it 3%-5%, but…

I'm very excited about the real estate market that is spreading across the country. While most Realtors think this is the worst possible thing that could ever happen to our industry, I'm looking at all the positive things that will come out of this market. Lets face it, there are a lot of Realtors who are having their best year ever, not to brag but me included. There are a lot of Realtors who have sold more houses than they have ever sold before. There are a lot of Realtors who have done positive things that they have never done during the "great markets."

For all the agents that have figured out ways to still get homes SOLD, they will finally earn the respect they deserve from the general public. Let’s face it, for a long time anybody could sell a home.…

ATTENTION ALL REAL ESTATE AGENTS...

ALL Seller funded Down Payment Assistant Programs such as Nehemiah, HART and AmeriDream or funds from any other interested party (Yes, this includes the seller) to the transaction will be prohibited on all loans where final credit approval has not been established by September 30, 2008. 

This means call all your buyer leads that have been sitting on the fence and tell them the urgency of finding a home within the next two weeks. I say the next two weeks, because we all know it is going to take 30 days to fund the loan, so if you don't have a house picked out and negotiated a signed purchase agreement to have in your lenders hands by September 1, 2008 you are going to be chasing your tail to close by September 30,…

Donald Trump has even decided to jump into the real estate bank foreclosure market. Donald Trump will be soon be Ed McMahon's Landlord. Trump has agreed to buy Ed McMahon's house for an undisclosed price and rent the house back to him.

The Beverly Hills mansion boasts six-bedrooms, five-bathrooms and had been on the market for about two years. At one point, it was listed at more than $7 million but dropped in increments, winding up this weekend at $4.6 million. McMahon purchased the house in 1990 for $2.6 million, according to public records.

Trump said he stepped in because helping McMahon "would be an honor."  According to an exclusive interview with the Times, Trump said "I don't know the man, but I grew up watching him on TV."

McMahon, 85, was about…