real estate

Who controls the closing date on a home purchase — the buyer or seller?

When you place an offer to buy a property, you sign a purchase agreement with the seller. This document is legally binding and spells out the events that must take place before your escrow can close. There should be a place to fill in the date of closing. The buyer will fill it in when making an offer. The seller can counter with another date prior to accepting the offer.

Make sure that you put down a date. We went along with a “the lender didn’t exactly know when we could close as it is contingent on the appraisal, so let’s just put that we must close sometime within the next 90 days.”

That really stunk. We were promised week after week that we would close. Then we were given a set closing date to close on, verbally. It would give us plenty of time to have our first baby before having to move. Nope, the buyer called while we were in the hospital and said that we must close and move within four days as he had to be out of his house. Not a happy closing. There was some tears and my husband made a long speech on having the first few days of his daughter’s life ruined by the buyer. And we had planned on the verbal closing date, so we were homeless (with friends) for several weeks until our new house was ready.

Don’t let that ever happen to you. Agree on a closing date which seems reasonable. Sometime in ninety days is a long time. Go ahead and set that closing date, in writing, for ninety days if necessary. If you both agreeably want to change the date later on, you should do so in writing.

Typically most closings will occur within 30 to 45 days of the signing of the contract. This allows plenty of time to make property inspections, review the title report or deal with any other complications which might call for legal assistance.

Both parties should know what they are responsible for in the closing. If the property happens to have a cloud on the title or need repairs before purchase, it shouldn’t hold up the closing. If it does, it shouldn’t be more than a day or two.

For instance, when we purchased our new property, the title report wasn’t ready until a few days before closing. There was a small glitch with the title, which pushed back closing by five days. Reasonable setbacks are acceptable.

If there is a change in your closing date for any reason, make sure that all parties are aware of it. Keep your escrow or closing officer informed of exact dates, as she or he will be prorating and calculating certain expenses and credits, such as interest, taxes and insurance. These are calculated right up to the day of the closing.

The lender will also have an important role in the closing date. To avoid any delays in closing by the lender, make sure that you are pre-approved for your mortgage in advance of signing a purchase contract. The closing agent will also need ample time to prepare title reports and closing documents.

Martin Lukac, represents http://www.RateEmpire.com, a finance web-company specializing in real estate/mortgage market. We specialize in daily updates, rate predictions, mortgage rates and more. Find low home loan mortgage interest rates from hundreds of mortgage companies! Visit http://www.RateEmpire.com today.

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Lofts vary in price depending on what city you are in, units in the Chicago area start around A $200, 800 square feet and top $1 million for 2,500 square feet.

A true loft for is a conversion of a vintage factory or warehouse, having a harder edge of either concrete construction, or “mill” construction of exposed brick and original wood posts, beams and floors. Ceilings should be over ten feet high at least. This is increasingly very important for loft purchasers, as developers are now building condos with slightly higher ceilings than in the past. It is the height that helps give a loft the feeling of air and space. Larger windows and open concept layouts also help. Ceilings are unfinished and pipes and heating ducts are exposed. Do not expect to find a 1,000 square foot loft divided up into two bedrooms and a den. It will much more likely have a kitchen and a bathroom with the rest of the space left as one large open room, which you can work with and use according to your own functions and needs. Some people think a loft means you have a second mezzanine level overlooking the floor below, but this is simply one style of loft.

Beware of another type of loft — the newly constructed loft (or “soft lofts”), which are for the most part “Condos With High Ceilings”, and are examples of Chicago condo developers trying to cash in on the popularity of lofts. They are still great units, just not “true” lofts.

Less traditional lofts have a kitchen and living room on the lower floor and an open second floor for bedrooms.

Chicago, Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Tampa have strong loft markets. The public cannot get enough of them. “Atlanta’s loft supply and demand has increased so much that there’s a separate listing for lofts in the newspaper.”

Christine Hancock
http://www.getanewhome.net

Christine began her real estate career proving herself a top producer on a new high rise development. This experience gave her valuable knowledge of construction as well as the buying process and resulted in 4-million dollars in sales during her first year.

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During my years of foreclosure investing I’ve identified four key principles that have led to my success. This article describes those principles–do you have them?

1. You need to make a commitment to succeed. Real estate investing is simple, but it is not easy. Many, many long hours–punching in numbers, looking at houses, evaluating deals, talking to people, constructing deals, seeing where your profits will come from–are going to have to be spent in order to become proficient at buying and selling real estate.

You need to have a plan and execute your plan to succeed. Remember, those who fail to plan are planning to fail. The investors I know around the country who are wildly successful have overcome challenges, stuck with it when times were tough, never gave up, and had a true belief in themselves that they would succeed and that failure was not an option.

2. You need capital or a way to raise capital. You can buy real estate with little or nothing down, as many people have indicated over the years. However, the person that has capital at the ready is the person that is able to pull the trigger quickly and potentially reap very large rewards. So you need to have money for your real estate transactions in some way, shape, or form.

You might think that your resources are extremely limited. Through perseverance, ingenuity, creativity and enthusiasm, though, you can find all the capital you need through what is known as “private funding”. Private funding is the use of individual investors’ money to fund your deals. These individuals are far less critical than banks when it comes to funding deals. Private investors look for a lower loan to value ratio than lending institutions do. Of course, it’s easier to find willing private investors when you have a solid track record of success in real estate. But there are proven ways to find private investors as a beginner, too.

3. You need to leverage your resources. Real estate creates wonderful leverage for the investor, allowing them to parlay their investment into bigger and better real estate transactions each and every time, through shrewd research and prudent investing.

4. You need to take massive action. This means doing whatever it takes to make tons of offers and create massive activity that drives your investing business forward. If you do not create massive amounts of action in the first six months to get your property funnel filled with deals, you more than likely are going to lose your initial start-up money.

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Paul Wells has been investing in foreclosures full-time for more than 5 years. For more foreclosure investing secrets like the one in this article, subscribe to Paul’s Free Foreclosure Investing course here: http://www.FreeForeclosureInvesting.com.

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