This Saturday, May 9th  is the semi-annual Live Baltimore Housing Fair “Buying Into Baltimore.”  The fair is from 9am-2pm at Baltimore PolyTech High School on Cold Spring Lane.  If you are planning on purchasing on the Western half of Baltimore City, you can get $3000 from Baltimore City towards closing costs/down payment.  The great thing about the Trolley Tour program is that this is one of the only grants that has NO INCOME LIMIT!  And the money can count towards your required FHA 3.5% and can also be used on a 203k loan. 

Get details and register online at: https://www.livebaltimore.com/events/BuyingIntoBaltimore/index.cfm

I’m also running my monthly Grant Workshop this Saturday, May 9th from 11am-noon, so if you are not looking to buy in Western Baltimore City you can come see me instead!!

Wow!  I’ve been getting a ton of comments lately on by old post about FHLB, and figured it was time to update it.  You can check out the old post HERE

FHLB is a matching forgivable loan grant program.  Basically, for every $1 you put in, FHLB will match with up to $10,000 if you put in $2,000.  This money counts as your FHA required 3.5%!!!  So….you can still get into a house for less than $2000 out of pocket.  For real!

This program is available in all of Maryland, DC, and Virginia, and I’d love to help you get your financing and this money.  Drop  me a line at 443-802-6864 and I will get you started.

Income limits are increased as well,  so for a 1 person household in the Baltimore Metro area, you can make up to a little more than $45,000 and qualify, a 4 person household can make up to about $64,000.  In the DC metro area, income limits are approximately $10,000 higher, contact me to see if you qualify.

Thanks to Ben at asbestos.com  for providing me with this great info!

Regarded as one of the great traditions, the journey to purchasing a home is one of ups, downs and happiness. But it is one that will bring many additional responsibilities. Many older homes could need repairs or additional renovations. Often appearing in roof shingles, popcorn ceilings, piping and insulation, asbestos became one of the most popular building applications of the 20^th century. One of the main things that can go unnoticed is taking simple precautions to avoid asbestos exposure.

Maryland has been an asbestos hot spot due to thriving power plants, paper mills and ship yards. These industries utilized asbestos throughout the 20^th century due to its fire resistant and durable qualities.

Potential Maryland homebuyers should be aware many homes built before 1980 may still contain asbestos. This should by no means make you jump out of your seat because asbestos exposure is easily avoidable by taking simple precautions.  Many green insulation alternatives exist which not only replace the need for asbestos, but evidence has shown it can reduce annual energy costs.

 Keep reading after the break for more info
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This Saturday, come meet me out at the Anne Arundel County Housing Expo at the Village Commons at Waugh Chapel in Gambrills.  Check out the attached flyer for all the details.  The expo runs from 10 am-3 pm and will have reps from CDA, Arundel Community Development, and speakers on a variety of housing topics.

aac_housing_expo_small

Baltimore County’s office of Community Conservation has come up with a new program that both helps home buyer’s get much needed money for closing cost and down payment assistance and reduces the number of vacant houses on the market.  The Neighborhood Stabilization Program (or NSP) gets home buyer’s up to $50,000.  Money becomes available in May, and prospective home buyers MUST complete an approved home buyer education class BEFORE going under contract.

Right now there are 2 approved counseling agencies that are doing home buyer counseling Diversified Housing and Harbel, and the classes are getting booked quick!  In addition, Baltimore County is holding some classes of their own due to the high demand, and if you drop me a line, I can get you set up with this class. 

Some great points about this program:

• You don’t have to be a first time home buyer
• Income limits are higher for this program than many other assistance programs
• The money is forgivable, a little bit is forgiven each year over 15 years
• The funds count as your own funds for FHA…this means you don’t necessarily need 3.5% of your funds!
• The program is only in specific zip codes

It’s important to remember that the $8,000 tax credit is just that… a tax credit. The benefit of a tax credit is that it’s a dollar-for-dollar tax reduction, rather than a reduction in a tax liability that would only save you $1,000 to $1,500 when all was said and done. So, if a homebuyer were to owe $8,000 in income taxes and would qualify for the $8,000 tax credit, they would owe nothing.

Better still, the tax credit is refundable, which means the homebuyer can receive a check for the credit if he or she has little income tax liability. For example, if a homebuyer is liable for $4,000 in income tax, he can offset that $4,000 with half of the tax credit… and still receive a check for the remaining $4,000!

One of the great things about being a home owner is the tax advantages that it offers.  Most of a homeowner’s mortgage payment is tax deductible, all of the interest paid, property taxes, and for many people mortgage insurance.  This can make the $8000 tax credit that much more impactful.  If a homebuyer had no tax deductible housing expenses, now they have plenty, he or she could be seeing a refund from that, and then another $8000 on top of it.

I help people get home loans mostly in Maryland, I also work in Pennsylvania, DC, Virginia, and Deleware.  The great thing about this blog is that so many different people from all over the country can find some great info here.

So in the interest of helping out first time  home buyers all over the country, I want to post some info that I frequently get emailed questions about.  Assistance programs outside the area I serve.  First of all, the Maryland CDA program is administering the Community Development Act, a Federal Act.  It’s just the way Maryland does it.  So if you search in your state you should find similar programs.

The FHLB First Time Home Buyer program is through the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta, they just happen to serve the states I work in.  But there are other branches of the FHLB, and you can find your local one and find their first time home buyer programs.  Then you need to find a member bank of the FHLB system (I’m helpful, but you do need to do some of this legwork yourself!).

For  New York, New Jersey (where I seem to get the most inquiries outside of my area from), and  Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands: http://www.fhlbny.com/community/housing.htm

You can find all the Federal Home Loan Bank’s website on my fave wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Home_Loan_Bank 

So good luck people outside of my service area!

Marvin Gaye may have written that song about war, but it’s lyrics could also be talking about the financial crisis our world is experiencing right now. 

So, I picked a really bad time to go on vacation, as quite a lot has been going on in our economy at large.

A quick run down of what’s happened in the economy in the last month or so:

- Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac collapse, government takes them over

- Many large banks & financial institutions start to fail

- $700 billion bail out plan passes

- The US stock market plunges and makes Patti very sad

- Stock markets around the world plummet

- Interest rates spike to highs for the year, Patti wants to cry

- Interest rates start to come back down

So, with all this, what’s different for buyer’s trying to buy a house?

The answer: Really, not a whole lot.  Many of the changes in mortgage world have been instituted over the last 2 years.   In the housing market, we are seeing people able to get some good deals and bank-owned properties, to me seem to be selling a lot easier than they were a year ago.

There have been some major changes going on with FHA, but I will address that with it’s own post.

More on this crisis after the page jump

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Below is a list of the eligible and ineligible repairs that can be part of a 203k streamline loan.  Also….and this is one of the number one questions I get asked about this, you can’t do the work yourself with a streamline 203k!  Unless you are a licensed general contractor, electrician, etc, you need to leave that work to professionals that can show they can competently complete the work.

To see what they are, read on…

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Back in March  I wrote this article about Baltimore County requiring landlords to register their rental property by July 1st. 
http://mdrealestate.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/is-your-baltimore-county-rental-property-licensed/

Is your property registered yet?  You must get a home inspector to inspect your property and it must pass for you to be able to register it.  I spoken to a number of home inspectors who say that they are  inundated with requests for inspections.  The average price for these inspections seems to be $175-$200. 

Then there is a form which must be turned into the county along with your registration fee.  So, procrastinators, get on this now!  There’s not much time left.