When you bid on a home, you usually open negotiations with a deliberately low offer.
Short sales are different.
Lenders must approve any deal that allows a home to be sold for less than what’s owed on the mortgage, and it can take weeks, sometimes months, for them to evaluate and approve (or reject) each offer.
That [...]

Lenders are offering traditional fixed-rate mortgages for less than 5% in nine of the 10 major cities we surveyed this month.

That’s quite an improvement from July when only one of the 10 cities we looked at had those loans available for less than 5%.
It’s nearly as good as what we found in November, when average [...]

Within three days of applying for a loan, you’ll get a “Good Faith Estimate” that lays out all of the terms and fees for the mortgage you want.

But are you getting the best possible deal?
On Jan. 1 the government required lenders to start using a new, standardized GFE that can help you decide.
On the last [...]

Lenders are offering traditional 30-year mortgages for 4.875% in all but one of the 10 cities we checked in our January home loan survey.

Although that’s a little higher than we found in our November survey, it’s substantially less than you would have paid to buy or refinance a home last summer.
In June you couldn’t find [...]

Home prices are going to decline another 5% to 10% in 2010, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s economy.com.
That’s because Zandi expects another 2.4 million foreclosures will continue to flood the market with cut-rate inventory at the same time high-unemployment will limit the number of potential buyers.
The four states with the biggest foreclosure [...]

Making your home bigger, or nicer, always makes it more valuable. But some projects payoff better than others.
The average return on improvements has fallen for four straight years, slumping to 63.8% in 2009, which means every dollar spent now boosts a home’s value by an average of 63.8 cents
To determine which projects provide the best [...]

Mortgage rates are at their lowest levels in decades, which makes it a great time to buy a home. But it could be an even better time to refinance.
The average 15-year fixed-rate mortgage, a popular term for refinancing, is 4.46% APR — more than a half-point less than the average cost of a 30-year mortgage.

If [...]

Rates on home equity lines of credit haven’t changed much since mid-October — and that’s a good thing.

Homeowners with pretty good credit and a chuck of equity in their homes should be able to get a HELOC for 5% or less in most parts of the country.
While that isn’t as cheap as they were last [...]

If you have good credit and a down payment (or some equity if you’re refinancing) there’s no reason to pay 5% or more for your mortgage.
The best deals we could find on 30-year, fixed-rate loans in 10 major cities now range from 4.875% to 4.625%.

This the first month that every single city we’ve looked at [...]