Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Five Big Trends in Home Decor!

Five big trends in home decor

Thanks to websites like Houzz and Pinterest and TV networks like HGTV and DIY, it’s easier than ever to keep up with home decorating trends and find inspiration for improving your own home. Here are five of the top current interior design trends.

1.  Screen-free rooms: After a long day of using your smartphone and computer, it can feel amazing to come home and take a technology break. More and more, homeowners are creating specific screen-free rooms—perhaps a library, craft room, or listening room—where you can escape from technology for a while.

2.  Upholstered headboards: What if you could feel like you were sleeping in a luxury hotel bed every night? The bedding and mattress are an important part of that experience, but so is the aesthetic and comfort of an upholstered headboard.

3.  Earth tones: Natural colors have become increasingly popular, especially deep greens. It’s a great way to bring some of nature’s colors indoors, whether as an accent wall, in blankets and pillows, or for furniture.

4.  Black stainless steel: If you want a sleek, contemporary kitchen, black stainless steel is even more of a statement than traditional stainless steel.

5.  Patterned fabrics: While solid upholstery will never go out of style, patterns have become trendy of late. It’s an easy way to make a bold, eye-catching statement in your living space.


With Great Expectations,

Stacey Fiore, Realtor
World Renowned Real Estate
(954) 998-3204

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Thinking of buying a home?

Thinking about buying soon? Make sure your credit is in order.

There’s no more important time to work on your credit score than when you’re about to apply for a mortgage. Improving your credit can save you a ton of money—we’re talking about thousands of dollars over the life of the loan. Here are the actions you can take that will have a notable impact on your score.

Pay down your credit card balances Credit utilization is one of the biggest factors in determining your credit score. Your credit utilization should at least be less than 30 percent of your limit, and it’s even better if you can get it below 15 percent. This rule applies to both individual cards and your overall credit limit.

It may even be worthwhile to use some of the cash funds you were planning to use for a down payment to pay off credit card balances.

Do no harm While you certainly want to improve your score if possible, at the very least you’ll want to keep it steady. Avoid opening new lines of credit if you’re applying for a mortgage in the very near future. This will cause a hard inquiry to show up on your credit report.

Take care of negative items It’s good practice to check your credit report for negative items a few times a year—you can get one free report from each of the three major bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) per year.

If you find any negative items (collections, late payments, etc.), write a letter to the original creditor. Explain the circumstances that led to the negative item, and request that it be removed from your report. It can be surprisingly effective, and removing a negative item will improve your credit score in a hurry. You can find some good templates for a request letter online.


Tuesday, August 9, 2016

FHA to Lighten Up On It's Condo Financing Regulation



Congressional Democrats and Republicans haven’t agreed on much lately, but they’re together on one issue that affects condominium buyers and sellers across the country: The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has bungled its condo finance program.
In a rare moment of bipartisanship before heading home for the summer, the Senate unanimously passed legislation that will require the FHA to lighten up on its condo financing regulations and make low down payment FHA loans more available to the people they are supposed to serve — moderate-income buyers, many of them minorities and first-time purchasers, who turn to condominiums as their most affordable option. The vote in the Senate followed a 427-0 vote in the House earlier this session.
Passage of the legislation came after several years of complaints by housing, community association and other groups about FHA’s overly strict requirements. Critics pointed out that FHA once was the go-to source of condo financing for first-time buyers, but since 2010 its role has shrunk drastically. FHA helped finance 80,000 to 90,000 condo mortgages a year during the previous decade and a half, but more recently production has dwindled to barely a quarter of that volume. FHA condo lending in the first three months of this year plunged by 8.6 percent from the previous quarter, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade publication. In the final quarter of last year, volume declined by 20.3 percent from the third quarter.
The agency’s restrictions on condo community eligibility for financing became so onerous — requiring complicated re-certifications of entire developments every two years — that thousands of condo associations abandoned the program. According to the Community Associations Institute, fewer than 14,000 of the 152,000 condo associations in the U.S. are now eligible for FHA loans. Individual units are not eligible for FHA financing unless the entire association’s finances, reserves, insurance, budget and other items have been approved by the government.
The bill (H.R. 3700) aims at correcting a number of key problems by:
— Ordering the FHA to streamline the entire re-certification process for condo associations and make compliance “substantially less burdensome.” Condo experts predict this alone could convince significant numbers of associations to return to the FHA fold, thereby opening up sales and purchases to thousands more condo units.
— Reducing the minimum owner-occupancy ratio from the current 50 percent to 35 percent, unless FHA can provide justification for a higher percentage. Seth Task, a realty agent with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Professional Realty in Solon, Ohio, says the 35 percent ratio will allow “substantial” numbers of developments that can’t quite meet the 50 percent test to get back into the FHA program. In an interview, he cited the case of an elderly condo owner who listed her unit for sale with him recently, but the owner occupancy ratio in her development was 49 percent. Ineligible for buyers using low down payment FHA loans, she tried unsuccessfully to sell and ultimately had to accept an offer $10,000 below what she could have obtained if her building qualified for FHA financing.
— Allowing transfer fees. The legislation directs the FHA to stop rejecting condo communities because they collect small transfer fees when units are sold. The funds collected are used to support association activities — they benefit all residents. FHA will now have to follow the lead of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of whom consider community-benefit transfer fees acceptable.
— Providing more flexibility on the amount of commercial space permitted in condo developments. Some urban condos are designed for mixed-use — residential and commercial combined — because that’s what makes economic sense in their locations. Under current rules, some of these developments are ineligible because FHA considers their commercial component excessive. The legislation directs the agency to be more flexible and to take the local market context into account.
Will these changes be sufficient to revive FHA’s sagging condo program? “We are cautiously optimistic,” said Dawn Bauman, senior vice president at the Community Associations Institute, which represents nearly 34,000 condo communities and management organizations. Rita Tayenaka, past president of the Orange County (Calif.) Association of Realtors, told me the bill “is a good thing but will not be the end-all” in resolving FHA’s condo woes.
Most analysts agree that the actual effects will depend on two things: how quickly FHA puts its revised procedures into the field, and whether thousands of condo associations who’ve fled the program conclude, “OK they’ve cut the red tape, maybe it’s time to jump back in.”

Article by Kenneth R. Harney July 29, 2016 in The Real Deal

Posted by Stacey L Fiore, P.A.
Home Marketing Specialist - World Renowned Real Estate
We provide above average 7 star service!
www.StaceyFiore.com

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Mortgage Rates Near Record Lows




When mortgage interest rates slide close to all-time lows — as they have since the Brexit vote — do you sit on the fence? Or do you ask yourself: Are there financial opportunities today that didn’t exist for me when rates were higher by half a percentage point or more?

Last week, according to Freddie Mac, 30-year fixed rates dropped to an average 3.41 percent, just above the historic low of 3.31 percent set in November 2012. Fifteen-year fixed rates, popular with homeowners seeking to become mortgage-free faster, dropped to a stunning 2.74 percent. Five-year Treasury-indexed “5-1” hybrid adjustables, which carry a fixed rate for the first 60 months then morph into one-year adjustables, hit 2.68 percent.

If you’re a potential first-time buyer or a homeowner considering whether to refinance, or if you’re thinking about trading up or downsizing, rates this low could be worth your attention.
Consider these illustrations of what a half-percentage-point cut in rate can mean. They were provided to me by Mike Fratantoni, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Say you’re buying a home costing $239,700 with a 5 percent down payment. A drop in rate from 4 percent to 3.5 percent would save you nearly $100 a month in principal and interest. If you’re buying a house with the current median-size purchase loan amount of $299,900, a half-percentage-point rate drop would save you about $1,500 a year in principal and interest, or $125 a month.

If you live in a metropolitan area such as Washington, New York, Boston, San Diego, Chicago or Miami, where median prices are much higher, the savings on a refinanced mortgage that flow from a decrease in rate of just a half a percentage point would run substantially higher.
There’s another impact of falling rates: They lower the amount of qualifying income you need to get a loan.

Say you sought to purchase your first home for $241,000 this spring at a rate of 4 percent with a 20 percent down payment. Your application was declined because your income came close to what the lender required but didn’t quite hit the mark. However, at a 3.5 percent rate, you don’t need as much income to qualify. According to Danielle Hale, managing director of housing research for the National Association of Realtors, a half-percentage-point drop in rate reduces the minimum qualifying income to buy a house by roughly $1,000 per $100,000 in home price with a 20 percent down payment. On a $241,000 house, a rate cut from 4 percent to 3.5 percent would lower the qualifying income you need by $2,626.

Savings like that matter not only to first-time buyers with modest incomes but also to the owners of moderate-priced houses and condos who are seeking to sell to those previously locked-out purchasers. A successful sale may then allow the sellers to buy another house — a nice win-win.

Not surprisingly, the rate declines are triggering boomlets in new mortgage applications, which rose by 14.2 percent last week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The association’s refinancing index jumped even more — 21 percent — and the purchase loan index was 23 percent higher than the same week in 2015.

Mike Eastman, vice president and senior loan officer at Washington First Mortgage in Fairfax, Va., told me “the phones are ringing” both for home-purchase loans and refinancings. He described what an applicant with a high credit score in a $600,000 house in Virginia could save by opting for a “5-1” hybrid: $171 a month, or $10,260 less in principal and interest during the first 60 months. That’s real money, he said, and “people should look at these [hybrids]” because they carry low rates and can be useful in a variety of financial planning situations.

How long are mortgage rates likely to remain at or near these levels? Nobody knows. But Sean Becketti, chief economist for Freddie Mac, says post-Brexit capital markets are “skittish,” and “we don’t expect any meaningful, sustained increases in the near term.”

So take a hard look. Describe your situation and goals to one or more competent loan officers. They’ve got computer software that can quickly give you the answers you’re after: How much of a rate decrease do I need to justify doing a refi? How long will it take me to recoup the transaction costs via the monthly savings? Does my income finally qualify me to buy the house I want?

Article by Kenneth R. Harney July 13 @ 7am in the Washington Post

Posted by Stacey L. Fiore, P.A
Home Marketing Specialist - World Renowned Real Estate
We provide above average 7 star service!
www.StaceyFiore.com

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Florida Real Estate

Okay… Work with me here and watch me grow!  I met with a real estate broker in June of 2015 and discussed the options and possibilities of becoming a real estate agent.  Well, FINALLY after some life’s challenges I went to school AND received my real estate license during the last week of December, 2015.

Well, I am not a blogger…yet, but I want to share my growth, ideas and various information as I excel in my new business of real estate!  My goal is to document my journey in becoming a World Renowned Home Marketing Specialist. I love challenges and I love making a difference in the lives of others so lets get started!

Here is a little about me:
As a Native South Floridian, I bring years of paralegal experience to the real estate industry which has translated to an unparalleled buying or selling experience for my clients & colleagues.

I began my career by providing outstanding customer service more than 26 years ago in a local retail company where I gained valuable knowledge of how to interact with various personalities. I later transitioned from retail to law where I spent the last 15 years working for a prestigious law firm.

I enjoy making a positive difference in the lives of other people. Providing a genuine, friendly attitude is a big part of what I enjoy when interacting with someone.

When I am asked about my passion, my reply is, “My passion is simple, that is to put other people first! Listening, caring and sharing is an essential part of being able to provide excellence in service to people. Serving people with honesty and integrity to help other people find their happiness is my philosophy.”

Without a doubt, it is only a matter of time before I am..
Locally Known, Globally Recognized.  Don’t Be Average – Be World Renowned!

Thank you!!  Visit me at www.StaceyFiore.com