If you are thinking about buying a property in Sonoma County, don’t you think it would be a good idea to find out what it will cost you. I can give you access to my mortgage calculator that has todays rates already imbedded in the program so that all you really need to do is plug in a purchase price and down payment and you can find out what your payments are going to be along with you cash to close including closing costs and Pre-paid items. What is nice about the program is that you can be looking at a home in Healdsburg offered for sale at 450,000$ and plug in the numbers. Maybe it is more expensive than that what you are Pre-approved for (becasue you have already been to my website and been pre-approved for a mortgage) so you drop the sale price to 400,000$ and see if you can afford that price. While the payments are important, often the “cash to close” is often a bigger stumbling block. Knowing exactly what dollar amount it is going to take to close your Mortgage loan is critical to your Sonoma county home buying success.

Visit the Real Estate Mortgage Calcualtor just clink on this link…

You can also save it as an app on your phone and take it with you while you look for a Home. Good Luck House hunting. “Hunt for your Loan”. If you have any questions please call or email me.

If you are planning to buy Sonoma County real estate in the next year the first thing you need to do is you have to get pre-approved for a Real Estate Mortgage. It really does you no good to wander the internet or check out open houses with out the knowledge and advantages that being pre-approved for home loan can provide you. Many Sonoma County Realtors won’t even talk with you until you have filled out an applicaton and rightly so. they don’t want you wasting there time. Your appetite could be for a 300,000$ house and your finacnial reality is that you can only afford a 250,000$. The opposite is true as well. You could be looking at 250,000$ houses and really be able to buy something more expensive. There are so many prgrams out there that I can tailor your loan to, you just will never know until you get pre-approved for the mortgage. Filling out a Real Estate mortgage aplication is so easy. It will take you all of about 10 minutes. Just go to my website and Get Pre-Qualified. Call or email me with questions…”Hunt for your Loan”! I am here to make your home buying easy and fun!

The Rating agency that dropped the credit rating from AAA to AA+ is Standard and Poor’s and is only one of three of the rating agencies. It takes two out of the three to actually effect the credit rating of the country’s debt. In addition my opinion of these agencies is not really very high because they are the same ones that rated AAA the tranches that were at the bottom of all the trouble we now face. In additon many believe that the rating drop was done to send a political message to the politicians
That said, we have all expected Sonoma County Real estate mortgage rates to rise by now. We fully expected that we would be experiencing a certain amount of inflation putting pressure on rates but that has just not been the case. In fact what has happened is that we are seeing a flight to safety to the US bond market pushing the yields down to their third lowest level ever. Obviously, every investor out there believes that the likely hood of America defaulting on their debt is lower than any other available option out there.

So today, the effect of the drop by S&P’s mortgage rating I think has little to do with the mortgage rates but the global economic worries are causing rates to drop because of the dramatic interest in the US bond market. Right now we are in a very low real estate mortgage rate cycle that most likely won’t last very long. I would expect rates to rise very moderately over the next couple of weeks but overall stay low through the end of the next quarter. For whatever that is worth.

I still think that Sonoma County Real Estate is the best long term protection against inflation.

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I just don’t know if they can. Rates as low as 4% for a 30 year fixed loan are virtually unprecedented in our life time. If you are waiting for rates to go lower I just don’t think they are going to. I reveiwed the history of the ten year bond recently and over the last 60 years there has been only one other time the yeilds have been this low and that was during the economic freefall we experienced in 2008. If you look at the average values of real estate in 2006 coupled with the 2 percent higher interest rates and look at the demand then, one can only assume we are at the bottom looking up. Call me with questions or concerns. Happy to help all of Sonoma County home owners. “Hunt for your loan”.

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The Real Estate Mortgage Apprasial process is really tough on everybody these days. The biggest problem is that as a Sonoma county lender I have seen as much as a 30% decline in some area values over the last 2 years. The perceived “mental equity” makes it tough on sellers to come to grips with the reality that, if they want to sell their homes, they are going to have to make a serious concesion to what they think there house is worth because the comps out there will not support what they want. Refinances also are experiencing great scrutiny by lenders because of the declining value.

As a first time home buyer, you are probably looking at homes in the lower price range and because of the strong foreclosure market, there have been a lot of sales and comps for apprasialers to use. But that won’t stop a lender from asking for a second or reveiw apprasial. This appraisal is usually done on a computer by some one not local or familiar with the area of the subject property. Having relationships in the past with appraisers was a great benefit to the borrowers and the entire real estate industry but regulators spurred on by ignorant politicians have imposed a new layer of separation, asking us mortgage lenders to use complete strangers not only to us, but to the area. This has created an apprasial process that is inaccurate in general and disfunctional at best.
There are no real safe guards against a “bad” apprasial but as a Sonoma County Mortgage lender for 20 years I can have a few things I can do that can protect a borrower from an unexpected apprasial value. An internet lender can’t possibly see the problems coming but I can. Give me a call to see how I can make your appraisal and entire mortgage loan process be a smooth and effective one especially in these turbulent times. 707-431-9715. hunt.conrad@prospectmtg.com

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