Numbers are always extremely important to consider when buying, selling and financing a home.  Each week, I recieve a weekly market watch update providing the breakdown of the activity from last week.  The report is provided by Heather Barglof at Peoples Company. As I continue to get them, I will continue to post them (with […]

I’ve spent days pondering how to make this as funny as Stephen Colbert’s hilarious segment ‘Better Know a District’.  Very quickly, I realized that his humor is in his interviewing… so I guess I’m out of luck in that respect. However, I do know that too often terminology is used in the mortgage industry (much […]

 On Thursday of last week, President Bush announced the new Federal Stimulus Package.  In a market that sort of needs a bone thrown, government is trying to step in and do what they can.  The package includes mortgage reform targeted at pushing more liquidity into the real estate market. 
In the spirit of being an educator, […]

Numbers are extremely important to consider when buying, selling and financing a home. Imagine what it would be like if there was simply a national weather forecast. Crazy thought huh? (Especially since it was 6 below on my drive into work today) It is also tough to have a comprehensive national real estate market report […]

Big news this morning!  The Fed announced a 3/4% CUT to the Fed Funds Rate reducing it to 3.5%.  The discount rate was also reduced .75% to 4%.  I personally suspect this was a move the react to the global stock-market sell off.   Look at the numbers across the world overnight:

Honk Kong was down 8.7%
Australia […]

It’s super stereotypical that car salespeople are shady.  I wish after a weekend of looking at new vehicles for my girlfriend, that I could say that I had an opinion changing experience.  Unfortunately - I did not.  In fact, I left the dealership more frustrated than I was going there in the first place.  After […]

If you know me very well, you probably already know that I hate talking about specific programs and rates.  It’s often suprising for clients to find that all lenders tend to offer the exact same products and usually are within an .125 in interest rate from day to day.   With that said, I feel it […]

Let’s face it, when you are looking to buy or sell real estate, you have PLENTY of options on who to work with (1,700 or so in Des Moines.. no, I’m NOT kidding!).  This is why I think this is a post that is extremely important.  If you dig deeper, you’ll find a lot of […]

I want to put a stop to the wait and see mentality (not being reckless, but being strategic). Here’s my beef - there is always a reason not to do something.  The thing most of us miss is measuring the risk of the downside opposed to the upside.  Specifically I’m talking about pulling the trigger […]

Numbers are extremely important to consider when buying, selling and financing a home.  Each week I receive a summary of the market activity in my email and I find these statistics very valuable.  Even though I cannot personally sell or help you purchase a home (I’m a money guy.. not a house guy). I can […]