Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Feb 4, 2012, 6:38 pm
A lender friend who is also an avid alum booster and die hard Terps fan posted this video on his Google+ page and I thought it was so cool that I wanted to post it here, too. After all, I help people buy and sell homes in College Park, MD (and the towns nearby) and I even went to the University for...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Feb 2, 2012, 2:06 pm
In a previous blog post, I wrote about a house that was in good shape, in a good location and priced competitively and received an offer quickly and went to settlement quickly.  I also wrote about another house that went on the market and received an offer in four days and went to settlement in und...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jan 25, 2012, 11:09 am
If you’re anywhere on Facebook (and who isn’t), you’ve probably seen the gazillion quotes that get posted to people’s walls. They’re all very positive and uplifting. They’ve even taken on new life in the form of graphics with different typefaces, sizes, backgrounds.  In fact, the way th...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jan 24, 2012, 10:47 am
(Please note: you may have to click here to see the video for the real estate market trends) In this video provided by Real Estate Business Intelligence (a MRIS company) there is some room for optimism that home prices are finally starting to bottom out.  This will be a good thing for home selle...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jan 19, 2012, 8:41 am
We’ve been dealing with the “foreclosure crisis” for awhile now. The sad part is that it is far from over. Many parts of the MD Suburbs of Washington, DC are still have large numbers of homes that are in foreclosure that still haven’t been sold. Worse still are the large number of short sale...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jan 16, 2012, 8:43 am
Purchasing your first home is always thrilling and buying the second one is equally exciting. Make use of your common sense as well as other strategies to buy the right home at the right value and in the right place for you and your family. In the present economic situation, buying a home is somethi...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jan 13, 2012, 9:20 am
(Note: if you are having trouble viewing the graphs just click here…it’s worth it) Every now and then I like to take a look at market trends in the area.  In this case, I’m going to look at Beltsville, MD in Prince George’s County and the 20904 zip code in Silver Spring, MD located in Mont...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jan 6, 2012, 8:04 am
In a previous blog post, I showed how, even in the dead of winter, homes will sell if: The owner has enough equity to price the house competitively The home is in great condition and Good marketing is in place In this post, I’ll show how another home in the same community — College Park Woods�...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jan 1, 2012, 11:20 am
Woooo! Hooo! Another year. 2012. This is the part where I tell you everything is going t be great.  The real estate market is poised for a big comeback, home prices will stabilize and start to rise, Days on Market will start to get shorter and shorter. Now is the time to buy. Now is the time to se...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Dec 29, 2011, 1:13 pm
There is the conventional wisdom that it is better to wait until the Spring before you put your home on the market.  There are lots of reasons for doing that but the biggest one is “Just Because”.  That’s right.  It’s better to wait until Spring “Just Because” everyone says so or it�...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Dec 24, 2011, 8:49 am
‘Tis the Season. Gift giving and partying. Visiting with family and friends. Decking the halls and fa-la-la-ing. It’s Christmas. Or, to be more inclusive Christmas … Hanukkah … and Kwanzaa. For me, though, it’s Christmas. Lots of stuff going on (it never seems to end) and lots of food ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Dec 20, 2011, 6:12 pm
A little while ago I  wrote a blog post about what people want vs what they actually get when they sell their home. I tried to explain, as best I could, that no matter what good reason a home seller may have for wanting a certain amount of money from the sale of their home, the market is really the...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Dec 13, 2011, 4:45 pm
Back in the day —we’re talking the early 2000s —the time between an offer to purchase a home and the actual date of settlement was pretty short. In fact, the “quick settlement” was part of the inducement to the seller in addition to a huge price and no contingencies for home inspections, a...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Dec 5, 2011, 7:48 am
You wake up one morning and you realize it’s time to sell your home.  You may have been there for five years or fifty but, for any number of reasons, it’s time to sell. When do you do it?  When is it really the best time to sell your home for the maximum benefit — high price and quickly. ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Oct 27, 2011, 8:13 am
This was the year my wife and I decided to put out some money to replace systems in the house that were getting old. Sure.  They were still working but eventually everything needs to be replaced and I’ve seen so many homes that have been neglected for so long that I realize it’s better to do s...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Oct 13, 2011, 9:25 pm
I wanted to call this series, “The Trouble With Real Estate” but then most people know what the “trouble” is: tight lending requirements huge supply of homes in deteriorating condition lack of equity I could go on. But that’s not what I wanted to write about. The Paradox On the one han...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Oct 8, 2011, 10:33 am
There is a lot that goes into a home sale. The home search, the offer and the negotiations, the home inspection and the negotiations about repairs, the appraisal… When Appraisals Come In Low It seems that appraisals are coming in lower than the contract price more and more often. This can be r...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Oct 7, 2011, 8:12 am
Back in what Realtors called the “good ol’ days” a prospective home buyer would consult with the Realtor first and then act on their Realtor’s recommendations. Most of the time. Yes. There were those times when the savvy home buyer who had bought and sold a few homes and knew the process pr...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Oct 1, 2011, 8:13 am
(note: if you are viewing this via e-mail or RSS feed, you may need to come to the website at www.MDSuburbs.com to see the actual graphs. For some reason the graphing doesn’t move through cyber space the way it ought) Today, I thought I would just go around the area and show some graphs of the me...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Sep 24, 2011, 3:04 pm
You’ve found the house you want to live in. Yay! You’ve been looking for awhile and now you’ve found it. You went in low and asked the Seller to pay all your closing costs.  The Seller came back with the terms he liked. You went back a little higher than you started but still lower than wh...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Sep 21, 2011, 8:45 am
Many people confuse the home appraisal with the home inspection with the assessment that the State provides for property tax purposes. They are three different and distinct processes for three different and distinct purposes. The home appraisal is ordered by the bank or mortgage company to ascertai...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Sep 18, 2011, 11:34 am
At the recent Maryland Association of Realtors Annual Conference, the keynote speaker and subsequent workshop facilitator, Steve Harney, turned me on to an interesting blog. To be sure, it is unfailingly optimistic about home ownership and the reasons people should buy now rather than later. Y...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Sep 13, 2011, 7:41 am
In this short post, I just wanted to share some chart developed by Real Estate Business Intelligence (a MRIS company). These folks are part of our local Multiple Listing Service so the data they gather is highly local and highly accurate. You may hear a lot about “the housing market” on the new...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Sep 13, 2011, 6:53 am
It’s pretty much the same every year. The Sunday after Labor Day in beautiful Ocean City, MD, the Maryland Association of Realtors holds their annual conference.  It’s got a couple of purposes. It’s a place for the leadership of MAR to come together to decide on the direction of the Assoc...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Sep 8, 2011, 11:26 am
In my previous post, I talked about pricing your home to sell regardless of what you might want or “need” in  order to move from your current home to another home. People move for all kinds of reasons: retirement job opportunity divorce illness The important thing to remember is that you want...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Sep 7, 2011, 8:01 am
This post might be a bitter pill to swallow for some folks but I’ve been running into it a lot lately…people overpricing their homes and then complaining about why they doesn’t sell. First, I’d like to say, up front, that there are tons of people out there that can’t sell their homes.  T...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 29, 2011, 7:30 am
I really try to put myself into other people’s shoes. OK. Maybe not always.  But, for the most part, I really try to see life from other people’s perspective. Well, today I just got some news that makes other people’s woes real personal. Not just one or two people. Hundreds of thousands...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 27, 2011, 6:27 pm
As I write this, Irene is still a bit to the south and the weather people keep changing it from a Category 1 Hurricane to a Tropical Storm. Either way, it’s raining like hell and the gusts of wind are a little scary…especially watching the trees sway. Needless to say, the brunt of the storm is ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 25, 2011, 8:57 am
(please note: you may need to visit this post at the website to view the videos if you’re getting this by e-mail or in your RSS reader) In today’s post, I’d like to share two short videos. The first video is produced by Real Estate Business Intelligence (a MRIS company) and looks at overall ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 24, 2011, 9:18 am
Well. OK.  Not that much. The MD Suburbs of DC got a little jolt yesterday from a 5.8 magnitude earthquake centered about 100 miles south in a little town called Mineral, VA. Although, there wasn’t really much damage outside some loose masonry being shaken loose, it created quite a stir in the a...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 22, 2011, 9:09 pm
A lot of home buyers, especially first-time home buyers, tend to be nervous about making the big decision to actually place an offer on a home. I can understand why.  It’s a big decision to make and it may mean a pretty large outlay of money (although, not always). Still, once someone puts thei...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 19, 2011, 6:19 pm
I don’t know why the mainstream media hasn’t latched onto this story because it’s a true populist, everyman story. Luckily for us in the College Park area we have the College Park Patch which is one of he best resources for all things College Park around. It seems that there is a truck drive...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 18, 2011, 8:28 am
Among all this talk about deficit reduction and the US Debt, there is a move afoot to either reduce, eliminate or somehow re-jigger the mortgage interest deduction. There is an interesting article by Kenneth Harney appearing in last Saturday’s Washington Post about this very topic. It seems that ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 13, 2011, 10:09 am
If you’ve been paying attention to the hoopla about mortgage rates you’ll know that a few days ago the mortgage interest rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 3.875%.  Now that’s a low rate. Of course, it really depended on what kind of mortgage you wanted.  FHA or Conventional or VA. ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 12, 2011, 8:49 am
Every time I turn around I keep hear “interest rates are at historic lows” and “now is the time to buy or refinance”. To be sure, what I am hearing from mortgage people is that it is time to refinance…not necessarily the time to buy.  Why? It seems pretty self evident to me but, then, I...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 7, 2011, 2:19 pm
If you’re really in the market to buy a house you may have been looking at mortgage interest rates lately.  The interest rates, which had been going up on the uncertainty surrounding the US Debt ceiling debate, all of a sudden started to take a dip.  According to the Wells Fargo Mortgage website...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Aug 4, 2011, 10:45 am
Buying a home is no picnic. You have to do a little research for the types of homes you might want to live in, You have to qualify for the mortgage You have to actually go out and visit some homes You (and your Realtor) make the offer and negotiate the terms, You then go through the whole home insp...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jul 30, 2011, 7:37 pm
As Congress continues to dither about whether or not to raise the debt ceiling, lots of people, including the President of the United States are predicting pretty much a collapse of the economy.  Others say that it will indeed, be very, very bad but that we would somehow muddle through with somew...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jul 20, 2011, 7:51 am
The Post-Settlement Occupancy Agreement is the first cousin to the Pre-Settlement Occupancy Agreement I wrote about in my previous post. The big difference is in the name…Post-Settlement Occupancy. This is used when, for any number of reasons, the Seller either wants or needs to stay in the house...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jul 17, 2011, 9:12 am
The house you’ve just bought is empty.  The Sellers have moved out or, maybe, it was empty when you bought it. The inspections have been done. Repairs (if any) have been completed. The appraisal has come back and the bank says you’re good to go. Now, it’s just a matter of waiting a week…m...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jul 7, 2011, 7:24 pm
One of the most important aspects of purchasing a home is making sure that you have financing that is right for you. Is a low monthly payment important? Or, maybe, it’s more important to pay off the mortgage more quickly with a 15 year mortgage or larger down payment. Maybe you need to get financ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jul 5, 2011, 9:00 am
The process of buying a house in every country is slightly different. We’ve put together a guide to help all those people who are considering buying a house in the United Kingdom. The Deposit Unless you are a cash buyer you are going to need to secure a mortgage from a UK bank. Lenders typicall...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jul 1, 2011, 9:22 pm
Of course, your Buyer’s Agent really won’t be working for free if you end up buying a home and getting all the way to settlement.  That can be a big if. More to the point, though, are all those time when the buyer’s agent is out there running his car, using his gas, taking up his time…and ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jun 25, 2011, 10:46 am
Every house will sell at the right price. But what if the price is really, really good and the house still isn’t getting any offers or even any showings? Location Many times you could have a really nice house but the neighborhood has a little “reputation issue” or maybe the school district ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jun 21, 2011, 11:00 am
Below is a short video put together by Real Estate Business Intelligence (a MRIS compnay) that shows trends in the Montgomery County and Prince George’s County suburbs of Washington, DC. As always, this puts a nice positive spin on the market while trying to remain realistic about the current mar...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jun 19, 2011, 2:33 pm
It’s kind of amazing, in a way.  No matter how much time goes by, “the market” never seems to pick up much speed.  Home prices are down, mortgage interest rates are waaaaaay down.  You would think that this would be the time to buy, buy, buy and, conversely, time to sell, sell, sell. Yet, ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jun 10, 2011, 2:05 pm
Stop me, if you’ve heard this before: “I think we should start a little high so if someone comes in with a lower offer, we can have a little wiggle room to negotiate.” It’s like that with almost everything — cars, boats…houses. No matter how much I might try to convince a home seller ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jun 7, 2011, 7:38 pm
Here is a short video put together by Real Estate Business Intelligence (an MRIS company) that shows some trends from April 2011.  Yeah.  I know it’s June.  Unfortunately, the group that puts this together needs a little time to put the data together and put it out. Since this video, we have ...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - Jun 2, 2011, 8:23 am
Let’s play “Pretend”. Let’s pretend that you’re ready to buy a house. Really serious. You have a compelling reason. Maybe you… saved up enough money for a down payment on your first home are relocating to this area because of job opportunity or military transfer are downsizing for y...
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Ken M. posted an article on The MD Suburbs of DC - May 28, 2011, 1:12 pm
Knowing the value of your home is very important, especially if you are looking to sell it. For those that do not know how to value a home, it can be a very complicated process. However, valuing your home is not an exact science only known by real estate agents. If you follow the  5 steps below yo...
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