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What do you think: Require 20% Down?
Friends,
We pass this along to you in an effort to keep you informed. This article was forwarded to us this week from various sources, especially the Realtor Action Center.
We’d love to hear from you. Comments are open for your opinion on the proposed 20% Down Payment requirement.
Proposed QRM Regulations Could Stifle Housing Market
The National Association of REALTORS is encouraging its members to contact Congress about the proposed regulations governing Qualified Residential Mortgages (QRM). If approved, all homebuyers would be required to pay a 20% down payment when buying a home. This would have a detrimental impact on the real estate industry and the overall economy. Economic recovery depends largely on a housing market recovery; therefore implementing a new rule requiring a 20% or higher down-payment would stop the housing recovery in its tracks.
NAR asks that you consider contacting Congress today and ask them to please make it clear to the regulators that this was not their legislative intent and to instead implement a more reasonable Qualified Residential Mortgage (QRM) that will keep credit-worthy buyers in the market and able to acquire a loan.
It’s very easy to do; just go to the REALTOR Action Center and the website does everything else for you.
Real estate: It’s time to buy again
Forget stocks. Don’t bet on gold. After four years of plunging home prices, the most attractive asset class in America is housing.
Castleman is in a unique position to know. As the founder and CEO of a company called Metrostudy, he’s spent more than three decades tracking real-time data on the country’s inventory of new homes….
…Today Castleman is witnessing an extraordinary reversal of the new-home glut that helped sink prices just a few years ago. In the 41 cities Metrostudy covers, a total of 78,000 houses are now either vacant and for sale, or under construction. That’s less than one-fourth of the 343,000 units in those two categories at the peak of the frenzy in mid-2006, and well below the level of a decade ago. “If we had anything like normal levels of buying, those houses would sell in 2½ months,” says Castleman. “We’d see an incredible shortage. And that’s where we’re heading.”
To see where real estate is truly headed, it’s critical to keep your eye firmly on the fundamentals that, over time, always determine the course of prices and construction. During the last decade’s historic run-up in prices, Fortune repeatedly warned that things were moving too fast. In a cover story titled “Is the Housing Boom Over?,” this writer’s analysis found that the basic forces that govern the market — the cost of owning vs. renting and the level of new construction — were in bubble territory. Eventually reality set in, and prices plummeted. Our current view focuses on those same fundamentals — only now they’re pointing in the opposite direction.
So let’s state it simply and forcibly: Housing is back.
Excerpted from
Real estate: It’s time to buy again
Read the full article:
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/28/real-estate-its-time-to-buy-again/
For more information on New Construction in North Idaho, visit Our Listings page.
