THE arrival of summers brings not only warmer weather, but also buyers and sellers of real estate. In the past, a lot of homeowners who wanted to stay in their homes and were not ready to sell drove the home improvement market up with much upgrades and minor repairs to their homes.
The DIY( Do-it -yourself) home improvement market has seen a 21 percent decline from 2005-2010 according to latest research, and more than a quarter (28 percent) of DIYers say they would like to undertake a major renovation or addition to their home, but they just don’t have the funds.
According to my research, despite their monetary shortcomings, consumers have a positive view of home improvement projects. In fact, 39 percent of DIYers say making a major home improvement is the best long-term investment they can make. Just don’t go crazy and always think about the ROI (Return of Investment).
Research analyst comments: “We forecast growth to accelerate in 2011 and, presuming a stabilization of the housing market, to remain positive through 2015,” adds Bill Patterson. “Pent-up demand, ongoing need for repair and maintenance, retro-fitting, and renovations from Boomers approaching retirement and demand from Millennials should all propel DIY spending.”
Furthermore, 61 percent of consumers say they’ve completed a DIY project in the last 12 months and the average respondent has undertaken a little over four projects.
Now, these homeowners will be important in the RE market, because when they start to sell their homes, they need to buy move-up homes, as I call it. Mostly renovations where not major and just enough to satisfy the owners temporarily, but as their family grows we will be back to our appetite for bigger homes and larger yards. This would at the same time give opportunities for first time buyers to come in and buy these homes for them to move up to their next level. Target date to fully mature is around 2015.
Market is expecting RE inventory to rise due to banks being more aggressive in their foreclosure process. Why is this good you say? Well, if you are a home buyer who has been eyeing on the RE market for the past year, you will be scared to jump into the market thinking that there is still room for the RE market price to come down. But if you know now for example that all of the banks foreclosure numbers are down to a norm, would you start to buy. Would all the builders start to build new homes? Certainly, what will that do to all of us? Job creation in all level that affects our daily lives, people will then have money to spend on everything which will then really jump start the economy. However, if you were at the other side of the coin and are currently not paying your mortgage still in hardship. I think you might want to start to be honest with yourself and be realistic and think that sooner or later you will have to move on. Why should you do that, I know most of us are not the type of person to really want to take advantage of the system, we just feel like we got taken advantage off and we feel cheated. I totally understand that and I sympathize with you 100%. However, I have had homeowners fighting with each other (husband and wife) homeowners stressing, getting high blood pressure, and looking over their shoulders every time they come to their own homes. The fact that you don’t know who will knock on your door every day and night, the fact that you don’t even want to open your mailbox fearing another letter from your bank let alone all the other sharks out there. I would like to ask you if it’s worth it, knowingly its not long term to say the least.
When you are a homeowner in distress, you should find a solution to release that stress and work on getting yourself a new beginning. Especially if you are at your prime working age and has a lot of potential for future opportunities. I believe and strongly suggest if you are one of these homeowners having problems with their mortgage balance and payments to please call me for full understanding of your options.
I actually tried to look for better news about Loan Modification success online and tried to call some of my peers but I honestly was getting the same answer I knew from a couple of years ago. I looked into this great website where it tells you what percentage of banks has actually helped clients in their modification process. It’s too much info to break down, therefore if you don’t mind go to it, here it is:http://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/financial-stability/results/MHA-Reports/Documents/Jan_2011_MHA_Report_FINAL.PDF
Some good news in the mortgage market, come April all mortgage brokers will have pretty much a set type fee structure for their clients. Therefore the process of bait and switch for mortgage brokers will be more difficult to do. However this new ruling does not apply to bank employees and mortgage bankers, so please always get guaranteed rates and fees from your lenders.
The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in Los Angeles County decreased over the month to 12.6 percent in February 2011 from a revised 12.9 percent in January 2011 and was above the rate of 12.3 one year ago. Civilian employment increased by 10,000 to 4,284,000 in February 2011, while unemployment decreased by 15,000 to 617,000 over the month. The civilian labor force decreased by 5,000 over the month to 4,901,000 in February 2011. (All of the above figures are seasonally adjusted.) The unadjusted unemployment rate for the county was 12.3 percent in February 2011.
Enough about these statistics, in layman’s term are we getting our job market back on track? To me, I believe that the job market for experienced college graduates like especially for Hi-Tech market has never dipped below 5.6% which is a norm, again meaning for the IT market it’s still hard to find good people and there are plenty of openings. For our nursing industry, the government healthcare effect will determine hospital hiring’s and jobs added. There are a lot of blue collar jobs that might not be coming back, which is the sad part. But hopefully with government funded educational programs, some technical school programs, with some more solar jobs coming back to California, auto jobs and of course the service jobs. We will start our traction to get the market back to a sustainable rebound level.
With us fighting multiple wars overseas and the unfortunate incident in Japan I hope something good comes out and I pray for them.
I have a request for you to please see this website-- it’s about our mortgage interest write offs, the government is trying to take away our ability to deduct interest paid on our mortgages. Please see this website and if you should agree, please send us support. Please see this site: http://www2.realtoractioncenter.com/site/Advocacy?s_oo=G0VSLXIEZrfRTWBT9--U4g..&id=1372.
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Please call Ken Go of 1st Innovative Finance Group at (562)508-7048 or write to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
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