LAS VEGAS MORTGAGE SHOPPERS COMPARE HOME LOAN DETAILS
For Las Vegas home shoppers who anticipate taking advantage of today’s low mortgage interest rates, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a few words of interest. The CFPB thinks it has found a way for consumers to get the best home loan deals. The way they recommend is to shop around. Now, it may seem as if everybody in Las Vegas would know that without needing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to clue them in, but the CFPB has evidence to the contrary. The last time they looked, nearly half of mortgage borrowers hadn’t shopped around before they signed up for their loan (47% of them, to be precise). That is rather surprising since even an eighth of a percentage point difference in the interest rate works out to a lot more than spare change. Why more home buyers don’t compare mortgage deals may be due to a number of factors. For one thing, anyone who has spent much time on the internet has had the unfortunate experience of being promised that they can “see today’s rate” with no strings attached, only to eventually discover (after entering a lot more information than seems relevant) that they will be contacted (phone number, please) by what is likely to be a high pressure salesman. You get the feeling that you may have shared too much information to web denizens you don’t really know. Another reason might be concern about qualifying. If you’ve had credit rejections in the past, the good news that comes with receiving any offer might make some folks accept it out of sheer relief. Yet another reason might be especially true in today’s Las Vegas market. Especially if you have earlier familiarity with the much higher rates from previous eras, the first mortgage rate you hear may be so low that you are delighted to accept it. There is also the fact that if you are offered several options for different loan types, terms, and point-rate tradeoffs, the act of choosing between them can satisfy the natural inclination to shop around. The CFPB would like to encourage the more aggressive consumerist behavior. To accomplish that—to make everyone “feel comfortable shopping in the mortgage market”—their web site has various educational tools. Their staff produced a number of charts. The one that shows interest rates from 1990 to 2014 slopes delightfully downward. Less informative is another chart that shows how borrowers who feel “confidence in their knowledge of available interest rates” are almost twice as likely to shop around as those who say they are “unfamiliar with available interest rates.” That doesn’t seem to be much of a revelation—it’s like saying that learning to read price tags increases your ability to comparison shop… For those who do expend the effort to do mortgage comparisons, there is also agreement that having a professional in your corner leads to the most satisfactory results. It’s another good reason why, on the way to acquiring your Las Vegas dream home, giving me a call is an excellent idea!
SPRINGTIME IN LAS VEGAS CAN PROMPT HOME DCOR DECISIONS
There is something about spring that gets everybody, at least, thinking about fixing up the house, and it’s that time of year again. Throughout the length and breadth of the Las Vegas, home décor decisions are being pondered. Ambitious landscaping and fix-up plans are being laid, budgets drawn, and troops assembled (the troops will be armed with paint brushes and rollers, hedge clippers and rakes). Perhaps it’s the weather; perhaps the angle of the sun—or maybe even last Sunday’s clock-adjusting exercise—for whatever the reason, this time of year is when we look at the house and decide changes will be made!! It’s also the time of year when occasional disagreements between our Las Vegas’s husbands and wives have been known to crop up. The Home Improvement section of the realtor® web site just ran a feature titled “When Couples Disagree About Home Décor,” which promised to tell who the winner is in such arguments. It pointed out that women have different priorities than men (women: “leather makes those embarrassing noises each time you sit or stand” vs. men: “but you’re going to freak out each time someone sits on [the linen cushions] with a drink”). The woman who wrote the article says that she won the argument—but admits that now she freaks out every time someone sits on her sofa with a drink (it’s already freckled with water marks). So maybe the man won in the long run… If your home décor efforts are getting special attention this season because you plan to add your home to the Las Vegas listings, “what’s hot” might suddenly be more of a consideration. But a different home décor impasse can come about when the fashion zeitgeist points in one direction while your personal taste pulls in another. Even worse, you may find that the fashion world is arguing amongst themselves! The Realty Skinny says, for instance, that gray is about to overtake white in popularity (simultaneously also “pushing out the beige era”). That’s not a problem for The Washington Post, which agrees that “gray makes all your possessions pop out” (except, I have to believe, the gray ones). On the other hand, the Pantone Color Institute, which practically wrote the book on color, couldn’t disagree more. They think that pinkish Rose Quartz (“warm, embracing”) and faintly bluish Serenity (“calm-inducing”) are what’s happening right now. In fact, it/they are its Color[/s] of the Year. That is because “the pairing…brings a feeling of calm and relaxation into the home environment.” That would be welcome—especially when you’re freaked out about the water marks on the sofa. You don’t have to be selling your home for home décor tweaks and garden renewal to occupy your thoughts, but if you do, I hope you will give me a call. My free, no-obligation consultation will let you in on the latest Las Vegas market information. I think you’ll agree that knowing exactly what’s happening has a definite serenity-producing effect!
LAS VEGAS HOUSING MARKET SHARES SOME WELCOME TRENDS
This spring’s Las Vegas housing market continues to reflect most of the trends that have held sway across much of the nation. There is good news, not-so-good news, and (happy to report) no really bad news at all. In fact, it’s the absence of threatening factors that make our housing market a welcoming one for those looking to buy or sell in Las Vegas this spring or summer. Here’s the brief run-down: Prices: look as if they will continue to trend higher, but more slowly than they have for the past couple of years. The consensus of expert opinion calls national average residential prices to climb 4%+, which is about 1%-2% more slowly than in 2015. Of course, every Las Vegas property (and neighborhood, for that matter) fares slightly differently, so those generalities are only helpful in the context of the actual Las Vegas “comps” (the comparables). Rents: where Las Vegas rentals sustain the kind of vacancy rates that are being seen just about everywhere in the U.S., rates have nowhere to go but up. Property managers are reporting that they’ve raised rents in 88% of Las Vegas ties, which has had a push-pull effect on housing markets. On one hand, every increase nudges renters to more seriously consider the not-so-abstract monetary advantage home ownership produces. When owning is actually cheaper than renting in monthly cash flow terms (not even counting the long-term investment aspect), every month’s rent check is a new spur to investigate that option. That’s the push. The pull is that those expensive rental dollars spent make it that much harder to save for even a nominal down payment. Mortgages. No news here: mortgage interest rates just don’t seem to want to rise—no matter how certain the financial experts are that they have to do so. Actual recent history has chastened those forecasts, though, so at this point, most Las Vegas borrowers probably expect that rates will stay below the 5% mark throughout 2016. Still, with many quotes for last week’s 30-year fixed to hover in the high 3%s, the incentive to take advantage of today’s rates remains a strong point. Inventories. With few exceptions, the reason why all those incentives to buy have not created an explosion of real estate activity is the shortage of homes on the market—the inventories. That is an additional incentive for Las Vegas owners to list, since it means limited competition channels more potential buyers to their own property. As the spring selling season gets going in earnest, we’ll see if the Las Vegas’s housing market behaves the same way the broader national real estate trends indicate. For an immediate micro-update, just give me a call anytime!
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