The irony of the last few years is that when mortgage rates were high and housing over-valued, customers were lined up around the block to sign on the dotted line. Now, with a 3.88 percent fixed rate on a 30-year mortgage waving in the wind lenders are having trouble finding customers. A deal that good may never come back again, as the economy rebounds, but that doesn’t matter when high unemployment, tighter lending criteria, and just plain homebuyer fear rules the housing market. Gone are the years when a piece of property was seen as a solid investment. Many buyers and banks are seeing it for the risk it can bring also in overleveraged debt and falling prices. However, in the last recession, it has become obvious to the public that they carried more than their fair share of the risk while the banks got a huge bailout and few negative consequences for their actions.
Refinances Also Affected
New home sales have plummeted, but the market for refinancing is also taking a hit for a variety of reasons. E
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We’ve seen the political and financial elites paint lipstick on a pig before. But never anything like this!
Consider the pig in Washington: Uncle Sam continues to run the worst deficits — and borrow the most money — since America’s war for independence.
And yet Congress has virtually given up on any semblance of a long-term solution.
In any other world or time, Uncle Sam would be paying through the nose to borrow money, driving interest up all over the U.S., and causing havoc in the stock market.
The lipstick: The Federal Reserve continues to paper over the disaster with the wildest money printing of all time … PLUS … the most sustained zero-interest policy in U.S. history.
The result:
• Conservative savers are being squashed, earning a pittance for their hard-earned funds.
• Investors are again being herded into highly speculative deals.
• And ne
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Industry experts have pointed out that some homeowners who want to sell their properties and want to try and recoup some of the money lost through falling property prices could actually benefit financially by selling their home online rather than through the traditional and expensive route of using an estate agent. This could be especially beneficial given that estate agents have reported that their sales have slumped to an average of less than one property per week. These days selling your home through an estate agent could mean having your home left unsold on estate agents’ books for ages, and when it does eventually sell having to pay thousands of pounds in commission even though the value of the home may have fallen between when you put it on the market and when it actually sold. However, by selling online homeowners could save themselves a small fortune and enjoy having greater control over the sale of the home.
One industry expert stated: ‘The agent doesn’t really need to be there. For m
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— Caitlyn Bundey @ 8:04 pm — 
February 8, 2012