Here was an idea I had: Pack a list of the most important things consumers need to know about buying real estate, as packed into the words I can say in sixty seconds without sounding like an over-clocked squirrel.
Here goes:
Spend some time making your property shine before you put it on the market. Doing it yourself is better than giving an allowance. Spend the effort to find a good listing agent, and sign a listing agreement at least a week before you want people to know your property is for sale. Consult the agent as to what can be done to make the property more attractive before anyone sees it. Agree to pay your listing agent for the good they do, and offer buyer’s agents at least an average commission – you don’t want them trying to sell someone else’s instead property to the people who like yours.
The property is only worth what someone will pay. Price it correctly from day one. You’ll end up with more money, faster, than if you start too high and reduce the price. Not all goods are in the form of cash – decide what’s important to you, what’s not, and how much money it’s worth, before you have an offer.
Once the property hits the market, make the property as available for showing as you possibly can. If you don’t show it when people want to see it, they might not come back. If you possibly can, don’t be there when your prospective buyers are.
Negotiations are give and take. You shouldn’t expect to get unless you’re willing to give, and a stubborn attitude can sabotage your sale. Remember, you have a property and you want cash. There are lots of other properties out there
How’s that?
PS: You might want to give this guy a chance to earn your business!
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I’ve been saying this for a long time: Short sales are poison for buyers. I don’t know why people encourage buyers to look at short sales, because there is no advantage for buyers that I am aware of. In fact, there are several decided disadvantages. I’d much rather make offers on lender owned property, or anything else for that matter. Short sales are the absolute bottom of the barrel as far as buyer desirability.
For those sellers who desperately need to sell, which is pretty much every short sale, I really am sorry. But I have a fiduciary responsibility to my buyer clients, who come to me wanting a better property for less money, and less hassle. The facts of life in short sales work against getting a bargain, while sabotaging our (mine and my clients) ability to control the transaction. Therefore, I advise against. Much better for buyers to look for lender-owned or other property.
The main issues lie with the lenders, who are in denial of the situation. I’ve never come across anyone in any lender’s short sale department who didn’t have their head stuck in cloud-cuckoo land. Instead of making a prompt approval or disapproval of an offer, they sit and delay and hope for a better one. Most often, I’ve got the purchase financing ready to go in about two and a half weeks from the date of the purchase contract. For any other property, it’s pretty trivial for the listing agent to be ready to close by then. We’re done, and my client is happy.
For short sales, we usually won’t get word as to what the lender is going to do for at least a month after that. I’ve literally never had an approval from a short sale lender within what used to be a normal escrow period of thirty days. This has implications for the buyer’s loan. Mortgage Loan Rate Locks are more expensive for longer periods. Pulling a rate sheet at random, a 45 day rate lock adds a sixth of a point to the costs for a thirty day lock, while a sixty day lock adds four tenths of a point. On a $400,000 loan, this works out to roughly $667 and $1600, respectively. If you need an extension, a tenth of a point (roughly $400) buys five calendar days. Some lenders aren’t extending locks at all for loans above the conforming limits. Or buyers can float the rate, leaving themselves at the mercy of the financial markets as to the loan they might eventually get. None of these is an optimal situation from a buyer’s point of view.
When they do respond, the short sale lender will always try to squeeze more money out of the transaction. They’re in denial about their loss, with the practical effect of making that loss worse. The property is only worth what it’s worth. The first few days on the market are the best time to get the highest offer. If you didn’t get an offer then, you’re not likely to get more money later, as I said in How to Sell Your Home Quickly and For The Best Possible Price. But loss mitigation departments are congenitally clueless about this – and they will forget whatever you manage to teach them within 4.3 nanoseconds. They are structured towards shaking the most possible money out of the transaction, and seem completely unable to learn that all this does is result in a failed transaction, no matter how many times it happens. What’s that definition of insanity again?
So what usually happens (after 45 to 60 days – weeks after my buyer clients could be living in any other property) is that the lender wants two things: A higher price out of my buyers, and a commission reduction on my part. I’m not going to say that I’m in love with commission reductions, but I’ll agree in order to make clients happy. But the deal-killer is that they want the buyer to make a higher offer. Ladies and gentlemen, I went out and negotiated a good deal that my client is willing to accept with the seller, despite all of the delays and problems in short sales, and here’s this third party essentially vetoing the purchase contract. If I did get a heck of a deal, it’s now gone. In any case, my clients are going to be unhappy, being presented with what amounts to an ultimatum: Pay more money or lose the property. Show of hands, please: Is there anybody reading this that would be happy to get such an ultimatum? Unilaterally attempting to alter the purchase contract is forbidden with any other transaction. Why in the world would a rational buyer want to subject themselves to that? Why would any but the most clueless of agents not discourage them from doing so? I’m not going to say it’s impossible to get a great bargain on a short sale, but it is highly unlikely.
I do consider my clients being willing to deal with a short sale to be worth some serious concessions in the purchase contract, as does every other agent with any experience in dealing with them. So it’s not difficult to negotiate a pretty good bargain initially – but it’s extremely difficult to keep that contract intact when the short sale lender gets involved, because their priority, the only thing that’s on their radar screen, is shaking as much money as possible out of all the participants.
Nor is there anything I can do as a buyer’s agent that’s going to make the transaction fly faster, or prevent the short sale lender from sabotaging it. I can argue until I’m blue in the face. They’re not going to listen to me. They might listen to the listing agent, but not the buyer’s agent. I can help the other agent with what to say, but I’m still relying upon someone else to convince that short sale lender. Whatever they do, they’re going to take their own sweet time responding, hoping for a better offer.
The cold hard statistics is over eighty percent of all short sales fall apart, and most often it doesn’t even get as far as whether the buyer is qualified. The short sale lender wants more out of the buyer, wants the seller to come up with more money than they’ve got, the buyer gets tired of waiting and moves on – something. No matter what is is, my buyer isn’t going to be happy. Quite often, I get the blame, at least in my client’s mind, for the transaction failing – even if I warned them as to why this was a bad idea in the first place.
If you do get an approval from a short sale lender, quite often they’re written on a ridiculously short deadline. Given all of the facts above, I’m not going to advise my buyer clients to spend their money on appraisal, inspector, etcetera until we do have an approval. That’s just money thrown away if the short sale lender doesn’t approve it. But waiting on them means it’s likely to take more than a week to get the loan done once we do have an approval – and dealing with a one week deadline was an actual experience I had once. Not to mention the effects of waiting for such an approval on the buyer’s due diligence period, and possible exposure to loss of my client’s deposit (at the very least, it’s sitting there tied up in escrow while everything gets sorted out).
Seller paid closing costs, integral to most transactions currently is also extremely difficult to get approved. These are money out of the lender’s pocket, and they’re going to require a higher than what they consider “market” price in order to compensate them. This is intelligent and reasonable, but if you’re looking for a bargain due to them not understanding their bottom line, it’s not going to happen, and in fact, when one or both of these things are part of most transactions, the “market” is priced to include them. Result: The buyer who needs one or both of these is likely to have to pay more for a short sale than any other property they might fix their eye upon. And those buyers are wanting me to find them a better property, cheaper. Are you still in doubt as to why I advise buyers against short sales?
Since I originally wrote this article, another category of problems has become endemic as well. Listing agents are playing “bait and switch” on the price – advertising prices far lower than any offer the lender will likely accept. Such a sale isn’t going to happen, and the agent knows it – but that’s sure a good way to get prospective buyer clients to call, giving the listing agent an opportunity to gain a new client! Furthermore, because there are so many of them and they are time intensive, many brokerages are delegating the negotiations with the lender and asking prospective buyers to pay for it.
It is far more fruitful for most buyers to focus on properties in other categories. For this particular property, better to wait until is is lender owned, at which point the bank is on the hook, paying money out of their pocket, and usually the money tied up in this non-performing asset costs that lender heavily in leverage on their working capital. Lender owned properties get turned over to different employees, with different performance incentives, with the instruction of getting that property off the lender’s books! The money this costs the lender is their own management’s fault.
For any lenders reading this and not liking it: The responsible party is you. If you don’t want them to become lender owned and cost you much more money, get real about your short sales! Publicize your criteria so buyers and their agents will know they’re not getting into a “black hole” situation, and respond in a timely and reasonable fashion without trying to leave people who weren’t involved (the prospective buyer and both agents) holding the bag for your mistake. It will save you money by dealing with the situation before it goes to Trustee’s Sale.
As far as writing this article goes, the only one I have any sympathy for is the current owner, who really does need to sell. No matter what past sins they may or may not have committed, that owner is currently trying to face reality and deal with it. As the buyer, however, unless you believe that seller’s plight is worth wasting several tens of thousands of your dollars, there’s nothing you can do. Buyers should avoid short sales. They’re not likely to end up happy.
Caveat Emptor
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I am giving serious thought to retiring this carnival. Few people are reading it, and the amount of dross I have to shift through to get the few nuggets we have is getting larger. I have had to take the carnival bi-monthly the last couple go-arounds to get enough qualified entries to make it worth visiting. I am going to schedule a carnival for January 30, 2010, but be advised that it may never see the light of day.
The guidelines for this carnival.
As always, I arranged the entries that met guidelines into three levels, based upon originality, usefulness to the consumer, and how much thought and effort and research went into an entry.
STRONGLY RECOMMENDED
We have an Editor’s Choice!
Consumers, Brokers and Mortgage Credit Reporting Agencies All Lose as National Credit Bureaus Cash In The item under discussion is “reissue” fees for credit reports, something originators have gotten used to over the past several years, but some consumers are outraged about. I would definitely rather pay more for a credit report and not have to worry about reissue fees that can eat as much again as the original report.
RECOMMENDED
Kitchen Renovation Design Ideas does have direct solicitation, but the bulk of it is a good basic primer on what to consider before you start a remodeling project.
How To Fix A Foreclosure should more properly be titled “How to deal with a foreclosure situation” because nobody can fix a foreclosure. All you can do is deal with the situation as it exists.
Bob or Jim? The Final Chapter doesn’t really discuss assumptions like assumed rate of return on investments but it’s good for examination of basic concepts. All of the scenarios I’ve run have convinced me that in general there are better options for your money than paying off your mortgage early.
Renting is for mental patients
10 Facts About Buying and Selling A House of Horrors
A Canadian entry with What is CMHC Mortgage Insurance?
Last Minute Preparations Before a Real Estate Showing
MET GUIDELINES
How To Avoid Foreclosure is very basic information.
Consumer Focused Carnival of Real Estate may return in two months on January 30, 2010, here at Searchlight Crusade, unless someone else wants to host. Deadline for submissions will be Midnight January 28th.
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Tweet ThisOr: Please don’t believe everything you read on the internet!
Rarely a week passes by that I don’t get a request from someone to link to their website or article. I’m happy to link to good sites and good articles with real consumer information. Unfortunately, this is not the majority of what’s out there.
I got three requests in the last day. Two were obvious spam sites, one didn’t even address me by name. The third was a little harder, an article that claimed to be written for consumer benefit. Unfortunately, its five main paragraphs were wrong on every point of substance, and so vague as to be useless on everything else. But when I sent them an e-mail suggesting they improve it, I got a three letter response: LOL.
For those of you who may not understand geek speak, this stands for “Laugh Out Loud.” In other words, my request was laughable to them. They wanted free links to the site, and were willing to research email addresses and such, but weren’t willing to produce actually informative correct content. My primary hypothesis, which I’m not going to bother to test as it involves motivations I don’t care about, is what they did write fit their own agenda better than something closer to verifiably correct. I see people writing – or who have written and are flogging – articles with similar points to that one every day.
Unfortunately, this attitude is far too common. People build these websites to optimize their chances of getting a relevant search term hit. None of the search engines tests any site for reliability of the information it contains. A search engine referral is not a guarantee or even indicator of reliability – it means they found the relevant search terms there. Testing the veracity, correctness, completeness, and usefulness of the information contained is left as an exercise for the potential reader.
I also get e-mail from consumers. One recently thanked me, saying it’s easy to find real estate information, but it’s difficult to find good loan information. Actually, it’s just as difficult to find correct real estate information. More of what’s out there is somewhere in the general vicinity, but just because it’s apparently closer to the truth does not mean it doesn’t contain deadly traps, made all the more plausible by association. When you’re talking about real estate and mortgage loans, there’s a lot of money at stake. This is all the reason necessary for some people to say whatever it takes. Remember, none of the search engines tests for reliability of the information, and failure to examine everything you read – particularly in an area where few people have competence but many people think they do – can often lead to a situation which appears to be successful until years later. Real Estate is one of those fields. When I originally wrote this, I was going through a transaction where it was more and more challenging not to speak ill of the listing brokerage as a whole. I’ve had the buyer’s end done and there was no termite clearance, no zone disclosure report, none of the other required disclosures, they took the lockbox off without informing me or my clients (itself a violation of MLS rules) so we couldn’t do our walk-through, and that’s not all by any means. That seller is sitting fat dumb and happy – and liable for basically everything in the known universe. Yes, it’s a discounter. Why do you ask? Oh, right. Because I’ve got to do their work so that my client is aware of what they need to know before we actually consummate the transaction. But I don’t have any legal liability to do so as the buyer’s agent. It’s simply my desire to prevent my client from unknowingly walking into a bad situation, and if I didn’t, it could be ten years from now when my client discovers something, and goes to court for a fat settlement from sellers and listing agency, or even forcing them to buy the property back. Apparently successful for years, but in the end a disaster. Not to mention a couple of things that I can’t talk about until the transaction records.
People have various reasons for building websites. In some cases, they’re trying to sell advertisements. In fact, there’s a lot of those sites, where the entire purpose of the website is to collect money from people clicking off of the site to one of their paid advertising links. I’ve got some of those; One direct, a couple more through AdSense and BlogAds. It pays my bandwidth charges, and usually some of my domain renewal. I’m far pickier than most about my ads, and I’d like to get to the point where I can tell AdSense to take a hike, because they don’t allow me any ability to reject individual ads that may be objectionable.
Other people build their website with the explicit intent of selling something specific. I’d like to sell something specific: My services as a real estate agent and loan officer. However, I’m nonetheless doing my best not to write anything that I could not defend in an academic thesis if I were a professor and tenure was at stake. I don’t get offended when people question what I write unless it’s in an obvious shill way. Furthermore, I’d like to think I’m as evenhanded and complete as possible in dealing with the pluses and minuses of everything. Everything I write is designed to be tested for its veracity. In other words, if you check out what I say, whether in an actual transaction or by checking with knowledgeable neutral parties, I would be very surprised if there were substantial points of disagreement. This isn’t to say I can’t make mistakes, but that I try very hard to make everything I say verifiable by independent test makes me highly unusual on the internet. Some people are every bit as careful as I try to be. Others are somewhat less careful. The vast majority do not care so long as it enables them to sell more of whatever they’re selling.
What I’m trying to say is that you should make every attempt to test everything you see on the internet, including my stuff, before you bet large amounts of money on whether we’re right by conducting a real estate transaction in accordance with what we say (Although if I’m your agent or loan officer I become responsible for what I say financially and professionally). That’s one of the reasons why I’m not hesitant to drag out a calculator or spreadsheet and show you the numbers. If it cannot be expressed in mathematics, it’s not fact – it’s opinion (Thank You Mr. Heinlein for teaching me that while I was still young enough to absorb it. This isn’t to say that if it can be or is expressed in mathematical terms that it is true. You’ve got to “crank the problem” and see if everything matches). Try to debunk it if you can. Does the evidence – independently gathered – confirm directly, confirm circumstantially or tangentially, confirm with exceptions, partially confirm, fail to confirm, contradict tangentially, contradict circumstantially, or contradict directly what is said? In the absence of substantial contradiction, is what we say at least internally consistent? If there is contradiction, how far does said contradiction unravel the claims? It’s very different if it contradicts the central point or points and causes everything to fall apart, versus if it only contradicts some tossed off side track. Logic and the scientific method are always your friends.
Another trick is to observe whether the source admits things that bolster an opposing case, or something against the point they’re trying to make. The more opposing viewpoints or evidence against their point they entertain, the more likely they’re honest. Especially if they’re scrupulous in the way they handle to evidence against them. None of this helps if the central tenet of what they’re telling you is flatly contradicted by a known and verified fact, but in the absence of such, honest treatment of the merits of alternate explanations is a very good sign.
The quality of the confirmation or contradiction – how credible and detailed the piece of information you use to check it – is also important. You could find yourself having to check out many different interpretations before you’re certain where the truth really lies.
Absolute truth can be a difficult thing to attain, there is often room for differences of opinion, and there are many logical fallacies to which even people of good intent can fall prey. The difference between a valid and invalid argument or statement can be very fine. Please, do not take anything you read on the internet as gospel truth without thoroughly vetting it for incorrect information, false premises, and false inferences. I don’t believe I’m infallible. I do see stuff on the internet every day which is thorough nonsense even though it may appear credible on the surface. Sometimes it’s with malice aforethought, sometimes it’s an honest mistake, sometimes it’s a simple misunderstanding of source material, and sometimes it’s even just viewing source material from a viewpoint that distorts the answer. For my part, I try very hard to get it right and to cover information that might disagree with what I’m saying, but there’s a reason why I end every single article here with
Caveat Emptor
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Tweet ThisOne of the things that sticks out about buyer’s markets is that there are two sorts of listings: Those who are willing to do whatever it takes, anything it takes, to get the property sold, and the other who apparently just likes having the property in MLS.
Many listing agents have made a habit of telling people that they can get more for the property than the next person over. Well, some can. But there really is no secret as to how they do it. They have the discussion to price the property correctly in the first place, and if the listing price isn’t appropriate, they will not take the listing. I don’t list many, but if someone is insistent upon a listing price that is too high for the market, I am better off not being part of that listing. Even if it does sell after two major price reductions for less than I likely would have gotten straight off, that client is going to be angry, not happy, and tell everyone it’s my fault.
Indeed, if there ever is a market where listing agents can reliably get more than the value of the property, something I am pretty sure doesn’t exist, the buyer’s market is the furthest thing from it. What a good listing agent can get you is the full value of the property, but that’s a very different value, and a very different mindset, in a buyer’s market than it is in the seller’s market San Diego had for most of the last decade.
Now, you need to ask yourself, “Why is this a buyer’s market?” The answer is as simple as supply and demand. High supply and Low demand. Many people who want to sell, not very many at all who want to buy. Result: Those few buyers who are willing to be out there have all of the power. If this particular seller won’t take the offer they make, the next one over, or the one after that, will.
Most sellers would agree that this is a challenge. Buyers think it’s great. When I originally wrote this, sellers outnumbered buyers 44 to one. It’s a real challenge to have a successful sale in such an environment.
What’s a seller to do about this? Quite simply, ask yourself if you have to sell or if you have other options. If you have to sell, make up your mind that you are going to do whatever is required to make a transaction happen. This can be a lot: cleaning your house up, making it attractive, pricing it better than the competition, and not kidding yourself. The offer you are going to get still won’t be anything like what you might have gotten when the market was hot, but that was when the ratio of sellers to buyers was about three to one, often less. You will be much more likely to get an offer, and remember, you decided that you need to sell.
Lest you think you aren’t competing with other sellers, go find a real expert in your area to help you right now. In the entire history of United States real estate, no buyer ever bought a property because it was that seller’s “turn.” You are always competing against other sellers, but a buyer’s market makes it far more obvious. Buyers make offers on your property because something is attractive to them where other properties are not. This can be features, this can be location, this can be willingness to do what other sellers are not, or this can be price. Usually it’s a mixture. In the sort of market like when I originally wrote this – remember that 44 to 1 ratio of sellers to buyers – it’s likely to be all four in great heaping gobs.
If you don’t need to sell in a buyer’s market, get it off the market! If you are not going to accept a much lower price than it might have gotten when the market was hot, you are wasting your time. Those few buyers who are willing to get off the sidelines are bottom feeding and bargain hunting. If you have a better choice than feeding the bargain hunting and bottom feeding buyers, take it. If your property sits on the market, then when the market does turn back, the fact it sat on the market is going to count heavily against you. The agents in the area know that it sat, believe me. I was in a half day class the day I originally wrote with several hundred other agents. Everybody I talked to agreed that the only transactions that were happening in that market were all happening completely on the buyer’s terms. If you are not willing to meet those terms, you are not merely wasting your time, but actually sabotaging your future prospects of selling for a price that you would like.
If you are not willing to do what it takes to sell, get it off the market. Not only are you sabotaging your own future plans, you are adding to all of the excess inventory that’s out there as a glut on the market. Indeed, for every additional property for sale in the neighborhood, people who are willing to do what it takes to sell the property are going to have to do a little bit more. Most often, this means “settle for a lower price than they might have gotten otherwise.” Just the fact that there are 238 three bedroom houses listed in the same zip code gives buyers substantially more leverage than if there were fifty, or twenty. This drops the market that you are hoping you can use to sell the property two or five years from now, and gives it further to come back, which means that the pricing level will be lower when you go to sell your property for real. Individually, extra properties on the market may not make much of a difference, but collectively, they certainly do.
If you do need to sell in a buyer’s market, get all traces of the “they’ll do what I want” mindset out of your head. This isn’t about pride, this isn’t about profit, this isn’t even about breaking even. This is about getting out with the least practical amount of damage. We have established that if you do not need to sell, you shouldn’t have your property on the market in this environment. But you do need to sell, which makes the alternative of taking less than you think the property might be worth better than the alternative of losing it completely. And make no mistake, for as long as buyer’s markets last, that is the attitude I (or any good buyer’s agent) am cultivating in my buyer clients. If you won’t sell, I’ll talk to your lender after the foreclosure – if someone else has not already sold to me by then. When I wrote this, in San Diego, the only power sellers really had was the power to say, “no,” and if your alternative is losing the property to foreclosure, a rational, informed person will pay thousands of dollars out of their own pocket instead, accepting offers way below what they owe on the property. And if that or something similar is not your alternative, then why is your property on the market at all? Why are you contributing to the apparent glut of supply to no good purpose?
(The market is much better now. Properties where all the ducks are in a row from day one – price, condition, staging etcetera – are not merely selling, they are seeing heavy action and multiple offers. Last summer things got really ridiculous again for a while, but that has largely gone away now and we’re back in a more balanced market again)
Caveat Emptor
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Tweet This(This is a reprint from December 2006, with a few updates. It is instructive in the wake of a certain new mortgage quote service, launched with great fanfare. The negative amortization loan is gone, but I’m seeing lots of other fairy tales being told there – deliberate low-balling on costs and payment being most common. Heck, their automated property tax quotes are about half the real number, and there’s no ability to change them.)
I got a question about what I think about those online quote services.
The answer is that they vary from okay to putrid.
There are two sorts of online quote sources. The first is where mortgage companies have their rates online, and people come along and browse. Those are pretty much a waste of your time. Here’s why: Those companies have absolutely no hold and no real tracking on the people who come to browse. They might put a cookie on your machine, but it’s hard to parlay those into contact information, which is their whole entire goal: Getting loans out of it. Unless they have some way of contacting you, which they don’t, they need to use that forum to get you to contact them. They do this by low-balling their quotes, making it look like they are offering something nobody else has. Unfortunately for consumers, that’s not even an estimate. Here in California, the one caveat is that the rate must exist, but the real costs of getting that rate can be many times the costs they quote. This suffers from all of the limitations that a Good Faith Estimate does, plus more. They can say that they’ve got a 3.625% rate, and as long as they have a 3.625% loan, they are in the clear. Never mind that it costs a full six points and adjusts every month, that sounds like a great loan to the uninformed. Furthermore, many places will quote the nominal (“in name only”) as opposed to real interest rate on the negative amortization loan. When there are people apparently offering you 0.5%, that’s who most consumers will call, ignoring the people who have and can really do 5.5% thirty year fixed rate loans, more so on those forums where they include a payment quote as well. I’ve got the same 0.5% nominal rate forty year amortization loan available to me, but it will always be a putrid loan, as the real rate is a little over 8% and the rate is subject to change every month. I should note that lenders pay a lot of yield spread to brokers who do those loans: How often do people sign on the dotted lines for mortgage rates in excess of 8% (with a three year prepayment penalty!) when rates under 5% are available on a thirty year fixed rate mortgage with no prepayment penalty at all? I’ll tell you how often: Whenever people aren’t smart enough to realize that that $960 payment on a $417,000 loan isn’t the real rate. Indeed, they’d have to pay $2794 per month just to pay the interest – while the fully amortized payment on a thirty year fixed rate loan is hundreds less. But there are an awful lot of people who aren’t smart enough right now.
Furthermore, those online forums are supposed to enforce their quotations policies. I’ve never heard of one that enforces real concrete penalties for violators. On two separate forums, I went straight down the line contacting every listed company, using a loan scenario that was close enough to what they were supposed to be quoting to that I should have gotten the same quote or a little bit better, if they could really do those loans. Not once did I get a rate that was within half a percent of the rate listed online, and most of them were over a full percent off, and with negative amortization loans, most are not even in the correct ballpark. When I contacted the forums themselves, neither of them was interested in enforcement.
In short, those online quote forums tend very strongly to get business for the company that tells the biggest, most boldfaced lie. Often, the consumers are lulled by the existence of the forums into thinking they’re getting a deal, and they don’t bother going through the necessary steps to shop their loan around. Meanwhile, the companies that will advertise honest rates quit those forums in disgust. Since there are a lot more companies playing games with their quotes than honest ones, the forum wins by not enforcing their rules. However, since the consumer wants to find companies that really will deliver the loans they advertise, consumers lose. Matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real rate on a loan I would be willing to sign up for advertised in any forum: online, newspaper, or otherwise.
The second type of online quote forum work like the advertisements plastered all over the internet. “$510,000 loan for $1698 per month!” (to use the first I found just now). They show a couple dancing happily, having a party because their mortgage payments are reduced, or so they think. Another shows a guy jumping for joy. What they don’t show is those same people when they figure out all of the downsides to the negative amortization loan that they signed up for. “This is Jack calling his lawyer again, only to be told there’s nothing the lawyer can do again. This is John and Jane losing their home to foreclosure.”
Their come on is that you’re supposed to get four competitive loan quotes. The company advertises negative amortization loan payments because more people will click on them and sign up for the service if they think they might get something so great that anyone would want it. Unfortunately, just like every other negative amortization loan out there, the payment or interest rate they quote to get you to click their ad and complete their form online is not the real payment and it is not the real rate. Yes, they will accept that as a monthly payment. But the interest you are being charged is based upon a rate of 7.87%, and you have to pay $3345 per month just to break even on the interest – that other $1647 gets added to your loan, so that next month you owe $511,647. Doesn’t seem like a lot of extra, but go along for three years until the pre-payment penalty expires, and even if your rate doesn’t adjust upwards, your balance is now $576,600. If you go the full five years that the minimum payments last, you owe $630,000, and now your payment jumps to $4813, and you can’t refinance because you are upside-down on your mortgage, and your credit score is 100 points lower!
The games don’t stop here, by any means. You’ll be told that there are “no costs out of your pocket,” and even though they’ll be rolling $23,000 in costs and points into your loan, they give you a quote based upon the amount of money you tell them you need. No, $23,000 doesn’t make that much difference at half a percent forty year amortization, but it lets them quote that payment just a few dollars lower, even though they know that you want the $23,000 rolled into your loan. Nor is what they’re telling you about a good loan in any way shape or form, but most people shop mortgage loans based upon payment.
Furthermore, they aren’t telling the truth about four mortgage providers calling you. They may sell the lead to four different places, but those four places turn around and sell them to four others each, and each of those sells them to four more. There may be as many as six levels of this going on, and the average person who does fill out their form will be called by at least fifty providers in the first week, with others trailing out for potentially years. The lead seller doesn’t care – they made their money, and they don’t give refunds simply because the loan they talked about is toxic. Nor does it matter to them that the loan they talked about puts the loan providers paying them for leads in the position of either telling people – honestly – that the loan that was used to get you to sign up is a piece of garbage that causes people to lose their homes, or just selling you one of the abominations. They don’t get refunds from the lead seller in the first case; they’re just out the money. In the second case, they get paid roughly 3.75% of the loan amount by the bank ($19,125 on a $510,000 loan), plus whatever points of origination that they can con you out of. Finally, if they don’t, they know that one of the fifty or more other companies that will be calling you will sell you one of those loans. So their motivations are not on the side of telling you the downsides of their loan. Matter of fact, their motivations are never aligned with telling you the downsides of the loan, so if you find someone willing to talk frankly about good and bad, they are a treasure and it is worth keeping their contact information, and making a habit of talking to them first about future loans.
Once upon a time, if you could cut through the morass of fifty or more companies calling, those “competitive quotes” ads were a great way to find a good loan provider. Ethical low cost loan providers could make a very good living buying those leads. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. First off, ninety-nine percent of the leads you pay for were lured in with the promise of a negative amortization loan. You don’t get refunds for those. You are just out the money, time, and phone expense of calling those folks – unless you make a habit of selling negative amortization loans, which low cost ethical providers do not. Furthermore, even on the few leads that are not lured in by Negative Amortization payments, just because you don’t try and sell them a negative amortization loan doesn’t mean that one of the other fifty companies won’t. Having been there and done that, I can tell you from experience that trying to talk people out of negative amortization loans is usually a waste of breath – the competing company will use conspiratorial tactics like, “That’s because this mortgage is too good – they don’t want you to have it!” People want to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Negative Amortization Loans. Bottom line for ethical loan providers: paying these services for leads no longer works. You cannot make any money at it. Since making money is what you’re about, and the payoff is too low to survive on the thin margins of good providers, you are driven elsewhere for your business leads. Since that’s the type of loan provider consumers want, it’s a waste of time to go to either sort of online mortgage quote service.
at this update, negative amortization loans are now long gone, but all of the old standby games are still being played. “Forgetting” about adjusters that apply, lowballing the actual rate/cost, quoting rates for a loan there is no way the people will qualify for, (there’s quite a divergence currently), quoting conforming rates when the loan should be Jumbo Conforming or non-conforming, and forgetting to add the costs to the loan balance when quoting payment. Anything to get you to call.
Caveat Emptor
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