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We were lucky in that the appraised value of the home came in at exactly what we were going to be paying for it. Still have to wait nearly 2 more months until closing.
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# ? May 19, 2016 15:51 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 09:27 |
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Thoguh posted:In a industry full of bullshitters appraisers seem to be at the peak of bullshit mountain. Basically this. After every single person in the real estate industry makes their buck repeating location location location, location does not change appraised value. Shrug.
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# ? May 19, 2016 16:19 |
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I refied recently and my new loan company sent in my property tax to the county at time of closing. The day before I closed, my old loan company sent in the property tax. I have a property tax check floating around somewhere and I don't know where it went. Where is it?
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# ? May 19, 2016 16:37 |
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FCKGW posted:I refied recently and my new loan company sent in my property tax to the county at time of closing. Well you could call the county and they will tell you what payments they received. Chances are they applied it to your account and your escrow amount is going to be screwed for the next 2 years.
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# ? May 19, 2016 16:44 |
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antiga posted:Has anyone ever fought an appraisal successfully? My refi appraiser pulled positively awful comps, and when I gently explained why they were awful and suggested better ones his reply included gems like 'data suggests that home values in this area don't vary based on location' (but will not provide said data, perhaps because he made it up) and claimed that extremely awful 80's carpet was a style choice that didn't contribute to value or merit adjustment vs 3 yr old hardwood flooring. Also wasn't willing to adjust for original 1990 kitchen vs 2014 kitchen. You could maybe make the argument based on Census Block Groups, since we are able to pull Price/GLA data off of that measurable unit. I review appraisals, and typically I'll ask based on if a "neighborhood" adjustment is warranted (and then input whatever the relevant parameters are for the cbg). Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't, YMMV. If your home got rated as a "C4" and you have done some recent updating (like the hardwood floors), you can attempt to dispute that your home was miss classified, and should be a "C3", which in theory should generate potentially new comps (or at least positive adjusting). Hard to know without knowing the depth of work you have done vs Shag Carpet over there, but a good way to check and see if the appraiser really even bothered to address condition is to look at the stock commentary provided on your first page. If you get the whole "No updates in 15 years", when you clearly have done updating...that's a point you can push on as well.
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# ? May 19, 2016 18:00 |
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antiga posted:Has anyone ever fought an appraisal successfully? My refi appraiser pulled positively awful comps, and when I gently explained why they were awful and suggested better ones his reply included gems like 'data suggests that home values in this area don't vary based on location' (but will not provide said data, perhaps because he made it up) and claimed that extremely awful 80's carpet was a style choice that didn't contribute to value or merit adjustment vs 3 yr old hardwood flooring. Also wasn't willing to adjust for original 1990 kitchen vs 2014 kitchen. When I complained to the lendor, he said, "Now that you mention it, all our borrowers complain about that." gently caress that.
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# ? May 20, 2016 02:22 |
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I haven't posted in this thread this time around, but my wife in I are currently in contract on a house in a hot market (Seattle suburbs, although not in the truly insane locations). Love the house and really excited to live there, but there are some things that are truly annoying me about this process. We had an offer accepted two weeks ago. Unfortunately our agent had left in all the financing details from the last offer (mortgage broker he works with a lot) rather than the institution we planned on using (USAA, with a cheaper rate). I didn't think this was a big deal, but when USAA initially told us they wouldn't be able to meet our 30 day closing timeline everything kind of went sideways. The sellers had been in the house since it was built in the late 1980s, so I figured they probably weren't in a hurry and we should see if they'd be okay moving the closing date back and with us amending lenders. Our agent was against this and wouldn't even consider calling their agent to get a feel for what their preferred timeline was like lest we spook them. Whatever.. USAA ended up telling us they would be able to do our closing date, but we ended going with the mortgage broker for reasons that I really can't justify here. Anyway, today our agent is talking to their agent about some general questions we had in preparation for moving and he emails us and asks if we'd consider renting them the property to them for another three weeks after closing. gently caress! You mean they not only don't care about an additional couple days before closing, but they actually would prefer three loving weeks? I don't plan on buying another house for a long time (we plan on being here for twenty years at least), but I will not be using this realtor again. I'm pretty sure we don't want to rent to them since we really need to get out of our current house and prep it to sell/rent ASAP and the whole thing seems sketchy (who's responsible for damage incurred post close and how would we know if it happened prior to that?), but are there any guides for what you would ask for, etc. in a situation like that?
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# ? May 20, 2016 02:51 |
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Look up the most expensive hotel in your area and add 50% to their nightly rate, then offer that.
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# ? May 20, 2016 03:16 |
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BeastOfExmoor posted:I haven't posted in this thread this time around, but my wife in I are currently in contract on a house in a hot market (Seattle suburbs, although not in the truly insane locations). Love the house and really excited to live there, but there are some things that are truly annoying me about this process. In my very limited experience with realtors, I've found if they are unwilling to do what you ask of them, you can ask them to reconsider or walk away from representing you. Since you're under contract already, I dunno the implications of that or if it's even possible, though. My parents were on the other side, their sellers' agent refused to convey their counter offer to the buyers because she thought it was an insult, so she willingly walked and let them out of her representation contract. They got another agent the next day that submitted the counter offer to the same buyers, they accepted gladly, then that agent got a nice commission check for doing practically nothing.
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# ? May 20, 2016 03:30 |
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Dik Hz posted:Some Refi groups intentionally use lowball appraisers to hedge risk. We refi'ed our house, paid $400 for the appraisal, and had some shithead lady tell us that although all the direct comps, including the houses next door on either side that sold for full price in under a week less than 2 months before the appraisal, sold for $205k, our house was worth $179k. I appealed it, but nothing came of it. Cost me $400 in PMI because we only had 85% LTP with the poo poo appraisal so it wouldn't even have been worth it to get a fair appraisal. The whole experience leaves me pissed off, even though it's only a couple hundred bucks. It was complete poo poo, like "Your house has one fewer garage spot than House A, so we're dinging you $20k." "Your house has 1 more garage spot than house B so we're giving you a $250 bump in value." gently caress that poo poo. Basically this. It's going to cost me about $1000 in PMI but re-appraising costs half that and risks the rate lock and wouldn't necessarily be any better. Just scares me because I am 100% positive I could sell tomorrow for substantially more than appraised value if I wanted to and this process could haunt me again then.
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# ? May 20, 2016 13:45 |
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Bastard Tetris posted:E: One more thing, can I use a trust to obscure our names from county records? I have some insanely lovely relatives that love hitting up the non-lovely relatives for money and I really don't want them to have my address. I realize I'll probably need to be more involved with the purchase personally so the seller won't think I'm the REIT blowing out the neighborhood.
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# ? May 21, 2016 04:21 |
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Doing a home inspection right now and apparently the sewer line is part cast iron and then root-invaded ceramic out by the street. "You might have maybe a year before you start seeing major problems." Do always check the sewer line.
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# ? May 23, 2016 16:45 |
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So I'm in the inspection phase on a house and the seller did a bunch of landscaping that wasn't pre-approved by the HOA (in violation of the CC&Rs). I haven't spoken to the seller about a potential remedy yet, but the CC&Rs do allow for fines for not getting HOA approval for modifications. To my knowledge, he hasn't been fined (or even served notice of his violation), but legally the HOA does have the power to fine him (or me, after closing) until the situation is corrected. I don't know if it's reasonable to ask for retroactive approval, so how would I go about covering my rear end on this? The likelihood of a major issue coming from this is small, but it's still a liability that I'd be assuming after closing...
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# ? May 23, 2016 19:19 |
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chupacabraTERROR posted:So I'm in the inspection phase on a house and the seller did a bunch of landscaping that wasn't pre-approved by the HOA (in violation of the CC&Rs). I haven't spoken to the seller about a potential remedy yet, but the CC&Rs do allow for fines for not getting HOA approval for modifications. To my knowledge, he hasn't been fined (or even served notice of his violation), but legally the HOA does have the power to fine him (or me, after closing) until the situation is corrected. Unless it is bad enough that you have good reason to think the HOA is going to come down on you once they figure it out I'd probably let this one pass. You're going to be taking on a ton of uncovered liability with the house to begin with and it'll be pretty hard to negotiate anything that you can't specifically enumerate and lump into closing costs.
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# ? May 23, 2016 19:26 |
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Depends on how much it would cost to remediate. If it's expensive hardscape, it would be pretty reasonable to make the sale contingent on the seller getting the approval or remediating it himself ahead of closing. If it's a couple of bushes, who gives a poo poo. It would not be hard to put a price on it - just get a landscaper to look at it and tell you what it would cost to come into compliance.
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# ? May 23, 2016 19:30 |
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It's not that the yard itself is out of compliance necessarily, it's just that it was never approved in the first place. We do plan on redoing it in the short term, and I'm worried that submitting our new proposal will prompt them to look at their records and realize the current design was never approved, thereby triggering fines retroactively (all of which would be legal according to the CC&Rs). This scenario is unlikely of course, but I wonder if there's a way to get the seller to at least acknowledge this issue so I could have some sort of recourse in the event it does happen.
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# ? May 23, 2016 19:35 |
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Could you ask the seller to indemnify you for HOA fines related to his period of ownership, for the next year?
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# ? May 23, 2016 20:36 |
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Subjunctive posted:Could you ask the seller to indemnify you for HOA fines related to his period of ownership, for the next year? That may be the best result here. It still isn't perfect without some sort of holdback (which is just not going to happen in this market), so either way I have to sue them for reimbursement. At least it'd be spelled out in the docs that way.
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# ? May 23, 2016 21:17 |
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I would just ask for like $1k or something personally. That way if I don't get fined I come out ahead, and if I do get caught I can use $200 to buy flowers or scotch for the HOA board and ask for their forgiveness.
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# ? May 23, 2016 21:31 |
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chupacabraTERROR posted:So I'm in the inspection phase on a house and the seller did a bunch of landscaping that wasn't pre-approved by the HOA (in violation of the CC&Rs). I haven't spoken to the seller about a potential remedy yet, but the CC&Rs do allow for fines for not getting HOA approval for modifications. To my knowledge, he hasn't been fined (or even served notice of his violation), but legally the HOA does have the power to fine him (or me, after closing) until the situation is corrected. Landscaping has to be approved by the HOA? Heaven forbid the flowers be the wrong color. This is why I think HOAs are total BS. If I want to paint my house bright blue with an equally bright yellow door, then I'm going to do so because this is America, dammit.
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# ? May 23, 2016 21:43 |
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chupacabraTERROR posted:That may be the best result here. It still isn't perfect without some sort of holdback (which is just not going to happen in this market), so either way I have to sue them for reimbursement. At least it'd be spelled out in the docs that way. It gives him two reasonable choices: either he thinks you won't get fined in which case he shouldn't mind indemnifying, or he thinks you will in which case he should compensate you. You could also ask the seller to go to the HOA and take care of the formalities.
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# ? May 23, 2016 21:44 |
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If he balks, report him to the HOA.
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# ? May 23, 2016 21:51 |
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The carrot and the stick. I like you guys. Thanks for the responses!
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# ? May 23, 2016 21:53 |
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Elephanthead posted:Well you could call the county and they will tell you what payments they received. Chances are they applied it to your account and your escrow amount is going to be screwed for the next 2 years. Nah, I called my country first and they won't even accept tax payments earlier than 90 days when they're due. It's floating around somewhere. I'll just start badgering my new and old mortgage companies I suppose.
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# ? May 23, 2016 22:07 |
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LogisticEarth posted:There is no real market though. We have a load of programs and cheap credit that make oversized mortgages way too easy to get. Every time I've gone through the application process it starts out as "Well, you need at least 3.5% down, unless you're doing [USDA/FHA/whatever], then you can get by with less". What idiot is putting only 3.5% down?. So the flippers seem to get by on poor saps selling their It's me, I borrowed 103% of the home price and had negative points on the loan to offset some of the closing costs. It had to pass the section 1 pest inspection and be on a VA preapproved list of condos. FCKGW posted:I refied recently and my new loan company sent in my property tax to the county at time of closing. I had paid the property tax before the mortgage company did due to a miscommunication. The county refunded the second one back to escrow. You should be able to check with the mortgage companies to see if it is in one of the escrow accounts.
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# ? May 23, 2016 22:38 |
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I was rather impressed to see that the Cook County property tax bill puts "This amount should be paid by your lender. Call them to confirm" in the Amount Due field of my payment stub.
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# ? May 23, 2016 23:51 |
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Looked at a two unit place last Friday. Both units are marked low income for the next 13 years so it's priced at a discount but the rents are actually higher than I would actually project for the free market. There was a lawsuit involving all the units that were built with it concerning the siding. The seller says the siding had been replaced within the last two years but the stuff on there is garbage and is showing some serious warping/bubbles. The fins on the AC unit have also corroded and the coils might need help. Otherwise everything else just has some rental wear and tear, nothing too major or unexpected. I wouldn't be able to move in but considering prices and competition in the area and the fact that I have a long investment time line it will probably work out well so I think we are going to go for it. It's priced at 470k which is 100k below what the other units are selling for. lightpole fucked around with this message at 08:29 on May 24, 2016 |
# ? May 24, 2016 08:24 |
Low income/affordable housing properties tend to have strict rules about what you can sell or use them for, which makes them absolutely terrible choices to buy since you'll never get any appreciation. When you have little or zero appreciation the rent vs. buy choice calculations become so skewed towards renting that purchasing is one of the worst financial decisions you can make. There's a lot of young people (around here at least) who buy those "affordable" places around here and get absolutely screwed financially as a result, they would have been far better off renting & investing instead. It's one of those well intentioned programs that in actuality makes poor people poorer, for the dubious prestige of being an owner. Your specific area may have different rules that make this more or less of a problem, but generally it's a terrible idea to buy one of these, especially if you're not well off. *edit I mean there is some upside in that it forces you to pay a mortgage and build some amount of equity, and many normal (ie clueless about personal finance) people will just blow the entire disposable portion of their paycheck on weed and video games otherwise, so that's a good small bit of forced savings over the long term. It's still usually a mistake to buy affordable units. Pryor on Fire fucked around with this message at 13:45 on May 24, 2016 |
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# ? May 24, 2016 13:30 |
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Well the income restrictions are only in place for 13 years, so at the end there will be an increase in value. It won't be like one of those income restricted condos in New York where you basically have to be retired or inherit a pile of money to be able to afford since they are still in NYC. It also sounds like the cap on rental rates is above the market level, so it won't lose out on the income side, but may have more administrative expenses to comply with the affordable program. Can you comment on the specifics of the affordable housing program that encumbers the property? There are a ton of federal, state and local programs out there, each with its own rules that would affect how the property operates.
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# ? May 24, 2016 14:36 |
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crazypeltast52 posted:Well the income restrictions are only in place for 13 years, so at the end there will be an increase in value. It won't be like one of those income restricted condos in New York where you basically have to be retired or inherit a pile of money to be able to afford since they are still in NYC. That's how I see it. In 13 years it should rise up at least 100k if the market stays flat. I pay less in rent than I would charge so not being able to move in isn't a big deal. It's a local agreement the city made with the developer, they had to make three units low income and two of them are in this unit. There's nothing really complicated about it, I think the city and the tenant splits rent and I have to have tenants approved by the city, notice of rent increase, some other small details (I know, the Devils in the details but it's pretty straightforward). They each are renting for $1350 which is at least 100$ above market rate. If I was renting them on the open market I would charge maybe $1100-1200. Rent increase would be minimal at around 1% a year or something. The layout isn't great as they are 2/1 and the bathroom is in the master. They were built cheaply but the only thing that really matters to me is the foundation and framing. When the low income portion goes away I can rip out the carpet and kitchen. Nicer units at or a tiny bit under market usually can find decent long term tenants. lightpole fucked around with this message at 19:09 on May 24, 2016 |
# ? May 24, 2016 19:05 |
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One thing to keep in mind is that lenders tend to be pretty adverse to affordable housing programs. Your mileage will vary quite a bit, but I know deed restrictions or similar things of that ilk that can impact how marketable the property is, tend to be deal stoppers for a lot of larger lenders. No one has any idea what the lending environment will be like 13 years from now, so it shouldn't necessarily weigh a ton on your mind, but there may be a pool of future buyers to that property who are shut out by lenders basically turning up their noses at the property. Sorry, this is a bit of a miscommunication on my (and perhaps the other poster part). In short, it doesn't matter to lenders one bit that the restriction is gone, they only care that it was on there in the first place. Basically once a home has marketability restrictions, it always does in the eyes of lenders. It won't help that if someone does a search of tax records or deeds, they will see the restrictions were on the property. Long story short, we don't know what the lending environment will be like in 13 years. But if it was today's lending environment, if many of our lenders looked at that loan, you couldn't sell it to a buyer, because of the prior (now expired) affordable housing restriction. gtkor fucked around with this message at 20:40 on May 24, 2016 |
# ? May 24, 2016 20:17 |
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In 13 years there won't be any restrictions so it's not a worry.
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# ? May 24, 2016 20:25 |
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gtkor posted:It won't help that if someone does a search of tax records or deeds, they will see the restrictions were on the property. Long story short, we don't know what the lending environment will be like in 13 years. But if it was today's lending environment, if many of our lenders looked at that loan, you couldn't sell it to a buyer, because of the prior (now expired) affordable housing restriction. Why in the world would it matter that there is an expired affordable housing restriction? What is the rationale there?
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# ? May 24, 2016 21:33 |
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The lingering stench of poverty. I'm sure you can figure out many possible rationales. They don't have to be logical.
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# ? May 24, 2016 21:44 |
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novamute posted:Why in the world would it matter that there is an expired affordable housing restriction? What is the rationale there? I am not sure I have a good answer on that one. I just feel like guidelines tend to be pretty restrictive when it deals with something a lender wouldn't like. Probably a similar scenario where a lender doesn't care about what has changed would be if someone converted a mobile home. Once it has that distinction, pretty much no lender is going to touch it. You could permanently affix it, get permits from your county for additions, do pretty much everything you could possibly ever think of to make it not a mobile home, but once they get a whiff of the fact that at one point in time it wasn't marketable...dead. While this isn't the same situation of course, its an example of a similar type of marketability driven guideline that gives lender's anxiety. If I had to guess, it deals with lenders wanting overlays to protect themselves from buybacks from Fannie Mae, or Ginnie Mae. Doesn't help the consumer at all, but makes the performance of their loan portfolios improve. TLDR - lenders don't care a ton about people. News at 11.
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# ? May 24, 2016 23:51 |
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gtkor posted:I am not sure I have a good answer on that one. I just feel like guidelines tend to be pretty restrictive when it deals with something a lender wouldn't like. So if I buy 5 acres of land, put a mobile home on it for cheap, then in the future build my dream home on the land, lenders will still treat it as a mobile home? Guess I need to make sure I take this route I never tell the Lender about the Mobile home.
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# ? May 25, 2016 17:43 |
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The lender would find it on a public record search anyway. I'd assume pretty much everyone has access to accurint and similar tools at this point. If you took out a lien and used a manufactured home as the collateral, you would have sticking points in the future. In the scenario you described, I bet you would be able to get away with it since a brand new structure was built on the property, but I bet you would still end up with headaches and the lender asking for stuff that seems pretty absurd given that you could easily point them to the fact that you built a new home on the tax id.
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# ? May 25, 2016 17:57 |
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lampey posted:I had paid the property tax before the mortgage company did due to a miscommunication. The county refunded the second one back to escrow. You should be able to check with the mortgage companies to see if it is in one of the escrow accounts. Finally got word back from the county and they told me that the new escrow payment got there first so the second payment from old escrow would be going back. They are planning on mailing payment back to them in 3 weeks and then I need to contact them and get a refund sent to me. We closed out refi 2 months ago and hopefully we'll get this floating check back before August. Do Never Escrow. As a side note, should I just close out my escrow account anyways? I have a bi-weekly payment going from my checking into a Cap360 account that the escrow pulls from so it's just going from one escrow to another really.
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# ? May 26, 2016 00:50 |
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gtkor posted:Probably a similar scenario where a lender doesn't care about what has changed would be if someone converted a mobile home. Once it has that distinction, pretty much no lender is going to touch it. You could permanently affix it, get permits from your county for additions, do pretty much everything you could possibly ever think of to make it not a mobile home, but once they get a whiff of the fact that at one point in time it wasn't marketable...dead.
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# ? May 26, 2016 01:16 |
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# ? May 30, 2024 09:27 |
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FCKGW posted:As a side note, should I just close out my escrow account anyways? I have a bi-weekly payment going from my checking into a Cap360 account that the escrow pulls from so it's just going from one escrow to another really.
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# ? May 26, 2016 02:41 |