Plantation Lakes Blog!

Whenever an unplanned and unwelcome financial situation develops, a Myrtle Beach mortgage-holder can find himself or herself in the onerous position of being unable to keep up with the monthly home loan payments. If the unhappy situation continues long enough, the likely result is a foreclosure or short sale. In addition to losing the property, the impact on personal credit then takes years to undo. That means it takes that much longer for a consumer to acquire a new home and start to build equity again.

Here as elsewhere, there were a raft of such Myrtle Beach mortgage defaults following the global financial meltdown. Even those who had no trouble servicing their area mortgages could have suffered when they found that falling property values prevented them from refinancing—even when the purpose was to improve their property. Although those events happened years ago, it’s only now that their aftereffects are finally working their way out of the system.

A recent article in NMP—the national Mortgage Professional’s magazine—delved into the changing status of those who lost homes in the turndown. The details they researched are interesting in themselves—details that are bound to have an impact on Myrtle Beach residential sales.

First off is the fact that enough time has elapsed for those who weathered a short sale or foreclosure to begin to return to eligibility. They’re called “Boomerang Buyers”—and nationwide, there are estimated to be 7,300,000 of them! In 2016 alone, more than a million will become eligible to return to the home-buying market. According to NMP, “they’re returning to the market in droves.” The hardest-hit states were Nevada, Florida and Illinois—but there are plenty of Boomerang Buyers scattered across the rest of the nation.

The improving mortgage eligibility landscape extends beyond those who suffered the actual loss of their homes. To the more than 7 million “distressed” homeowners whose properties are still underwater (those who owe more than market value), the government’s HARP 2 program is one possible remedy. Its guidelines encourage lenders to relax the loan-to-value caps that had prevented refinancing for many of those homeowners. Reports are that it has already resulted in an increase in such refinances.

Other program combinations are helping loan originators and Realtors® get more bank-owned homes back into homeowners’ hands. These are properties that make up the ‘shadow inventory’ of unsold homes, many of which have fallen into disrepair. Because of that, they’ve been difficult to finance—and therefore difficult to sell. Through FHA 203K and Fannie Mae’s Homestyle® renovation mortgages, more ambitious prospective owners—including investors—are discovering they now have mortgage options that can put those fixer-uppers within reach.

For those who have previously found it problematic to secure a Myrtle Beach mortgage with acceptable terms, it may be worth looking into today’s improved financing alternatives. Especially with mortgage interest rates at the levels we’re seeing this fall, what you find may be a pleasant surprise—one that puts you into the house of your dreams. Call me to discuss first steps!

With fall newly arrived, it’s a time of year when Myrtle Beach homeowners can breathe a sigh of relief; relax and take it easy. With summer behind us, most gardens require less attention. The demands harsh winter weather will make are off in the distant future— or are they?

This year it might be prudent for Myrtle Beach homeowners to mentally remove a month or two from their home maintenance timetables. The reason comes in two familiar words (and they aren’t English): El Niño.

According to the government’s NOAA climate forecasters, there is “an approximately 95% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-2016…” Since that is definitely Myrtle Beach's hemisphere, they’re speaking to us. They answer the question, “How strong is this El Niño now?” with, “it’s pretty strong.” In August, it ranked second all-time (behind August 1997) in the Equatorial Southern Oscillation Index, which is one way of measuring its power. El Niño is the condition where weather shifts occur due to a change in warm ocean currents in the Pacific.

What this means to Myrtle Beach homeowners is as unpredictable as…well, as the weather! What is acknowledged is that normal patterns can be disrupted to varying degrees. The reason we can never get much clarity about how it’s going to affect us is that (unsatisfying though this answer may be), winter could be markedly more—or markedly less—stormy than usual. Since the maximum effect is expected in late fall through December (hence the Christmas allusion of the ‘El Niño’ name), Myrtle Beach homeowners might consider getting on with their winter maintenance preparations earlier rather than later.

So here—a bit earlier than usual—are some regular fall maintenance heads-ups:

• Check and fill the exterior gaps where critters, bugs, and cold air might enter
• Chimney maintenance: if you sweep once a year, schedule now
• Rain gutter check: even though leaves haven’t begun to fall in earnest, cleaning out the mucky old debris now will make later leaf removal a breeze
• Inspect the roof: if damage has happened, now is the time to schedule repair
• Ditto the driveway: fill cracks before winter
• Now is the perfect time to clean and stain the deck. Depending on how much sunlight it gets, it may need to be renewed annually (no matter what the stain can says!)
• Replace worn weather stripping around doors and windows—your winter heating bills will reward the effort.

As a check of comments on the weather sites confirms, local homeowners have differing memories of how previous El Niños have affected them. But since we are now officially in an El Niño year—it can’t be a bad idea to prepare ahead of time (and if you have Myrtle Beach real estate plans in the offing, now would also be a good time to give me a call)!

At the beginning of any month, Myrtle Beach onlookers can find batches of fresh reports about national real estate market activity. Take October, for instance. We’ve just learned a bunch about what happened across the country. September’s numbers won’t be collected and analyzed for a while, but the fresh real estate market data for August is out, as well as July revisions. Since earlier findings are always being tinkered with as estimates are replaced with hard results, we also get improved readings from the earlier month.

This latest batch of real estate market news was upbeat, downbeat, and, uh…sideways. Thursday was the first day in October, which was when CNN Money came out with some good old-fashioned cheerleading. “Americans went shopping for homes in August,” they headlined. The reason cited was for new home sales: they notched the highest volume since early in 2008: 552,000. It was a nice way to get the month’s data reports started.

Home prices, on the other hand, were not yet available for the August timeframe—but July’s Case-Shiller Home Price Index had pointed upward. It showed a 4.7% rise in prices paid for homes from a year earlier. This made for “moderate, but still above average, price appreciation,” according to Realtor.com’s chief economist. The prices were seen to have edged up just 0.7% from June, which was “barely higher” yet “much higher than last year.” If that summary had been illustrated, it would have merited both a frowny face and a smiley face.

There were other preliminary soundings about what the August price information was likely to be, and they were just as equivocal.

The National Association of Realtors® tracks pending home sales data (homes under contract but not yet closed), and by that measure, there was a slight retreat from July’s level. Yet although the preliminary number showed a 1.4% drop, that was still more than 6% higher than August 2014’s had been. Which was more compelling? Altogether, the news for sellers was deemed to be stronger. “Demand continues to outpace supply,” according to the NAR. “Shed no tears for sellers.”

If that sentiment is shared by Myrtle Beach homeowners, it might nudge some into listing their home now rather than waiting for the next truly robust real estate market—traditionally not expected until next spring. Although fall and winter usually find fewer buyers on the prowl for new digs, those who do surface are generally regarded as serious shoppers. And since the number of Myrtle Beach listings usually declines as the holidays approach, there’s a good argument to be made that less competition tilts in favor of sellers.

We have to wait until next month to get a read on how September activity fared; but for anyone who sees the advantages this fall’s Myrtle Beach real estate market offers, I share your opinion! It’s definitely worth giving me a call.

The outlook for owners of Myrtle Beach rental properties has been buoyant for some time, but last month a widely-publicized report added to the long range outlook. The study presented multiple scenarios in which demand is likely to outpace the supply of rental properties in the U.S., creating a market bound to reward their owners. Not such good news for tenants, though—or, as The Wall Street Journal summarized, “Renting is unlikely to get easier anytime soon.”

The report, which was issued by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and the affordable-housing organization Enterprise Community Partners, focused on the growing number of U.S. households for whom rent payments present a ‘growing burden’ in terms of the percentage of income they comprise.

According to the study, nationwide, rents have continued to grow faster than incomes over the last 15 years, hindering affordability. Added to that, many federal housing subsidies have been cut in recent years. One result is that the number of households who pay more than half their income to rent is estimated at 11.8 million—three million more than in 2000.

“Renters Will Continue to Struggle for the Next Decade, Harvard Study Says” was the headline that topped Laura Kusisto’s WSJ article summarizing the report. Although the study found that some factors contributing to the rise were due to temporary economic conditions that are unlikely to continue, other demographic factors will persist. Growth in groups of those in their mid-20s to mid-30s and in the Hispanic population (both groups “tend to be disproportionately renters”) have added to demand for rental housing. At the same time, the private sector has had difficulty producing profitable housing “that is affordable to lower- and moderate-income families.”

The trend might slow and even reverse should incomes begin to outpace rents—but the overall effect might have marginal results. One expert is quoted as saying that even a full decade of solid income growth would likely produce little change in the number of severely burdened households.

One nay-saying group to challenge that outlook is the Mortgage Bankers Association, which in August concluded that Americans will form “at least” 10 million new owner household in the next decade. Such growth would be expected to ease pressure on rental stocks, lightening demand enough to slow rental price escalation.

Whichever group is right, it’s evident that the owners of Myrtle Beach rental properties currently stand to benefit from some of the economic currents that continue to garner headlines. That’s the kind of incentive that interests the investment-minded—and if that sounds like you, why not give me a call to review some of the rental properties in Myrtle Beach currently listed for sale?

Being able to work within a realistic family budget has become an increasingly important part of modern living for many Myrtle Beach residents. Myrtle Beach’s cost of living may not have been exploding —but most people are keeping an eye on it anyway.

The lingering effects of the last decade’s financial dislocations—combined with the slow-motion recovery from the Great Recession—have made monitoring expenses a practical necessity. The wolf doesn’t actually have to be at the door for that more cautious attitude to have developed. Consumer optimism may be on the rise, but it’s a pretty gentle incline. In any case, it does seem that spending on frivolous knickknacks is becoming a rarer diversion.

Into that general climate comes last week’s news item. It’s one that could bring some of the more frugal Myrtle Beach residents a slight degree of comfort, in that it has to do with the exorbitant cost of living in places other than Myrtle Beach. The news comes by way of global financial services giant UBS—the Swiss multinational which is the largest wealth management firm anywhere, period. It’s also an outfit that is not well known for its modesty: the UBS website’s “About Us” tab points to themselves as being the Best Bank in Switzerland and the Best Global Bank, in that order.

BloombergBusiness quotes them as having announced the statistics for the cost of living in cities across the globe. They emerged with the finding that there are three cities that are clearly at the head of the pack.

No one in Myrtle Beach could be too surprised that two of them are in Switzerland (Zurich and Geneva). The two are said to “top the list of the world’s most costly cities.” Back in January, the Swiss central bank scrapped its currency ceiling, which has since caused its currency, the franc, to leapfrog to record heights against the Euro (and, we are left to assume, the dollar—and all the others).

In a horizontal bar chart “based on the cost of a basket of 122 goods and services” that accompanies the article, we find that Zurich is the most expensive place on Earth, closely followed by Geneva and the third city. But further reading reveals that this presentation is highly suspect. It must be some kind of Swiss pride in being a really really expensive place to live, since City Number Three turns out to be an even more really really expensive place—if you take rent into account! And why wouldn’t you take rent into account?

And the third city is not even in Switzerland!! It’s right here in the good old U.S. of A!

Where else but …The Big Apple! San Franciscans have a legitimate beef with their verdict, but they’d have to take it up with UBS (who apparently doesn’t get out to the West Coast often). All they know is that a two-bedroom apartment in NYC averages $4,320 a month—compared with a paltry $2,390 in Zurich. The basket of goods and services (it runs to about $3,500 per month in each of the three cities) gets drowned by that Manhattan rent tsunami.

It’s almost enough to make any Myrtle Beach resident feel much better about our local cost of living—and our Myrtle Beach real estate bargains, too, of course. Call me for more about those!

The Myrtle Beach real estate listings consist of the lineup of Myrtle Beach homes that are currently “on the market.” They’re for sale. Offered to buyers. Available for purchase. “On the market” is a straightforward real estate term; end of discussion.

So, you’d think that “off the market” should be equally unequivocal, and it would be, if it weren’t for “off-market,” with which it’s easily confused. And then there’s the fact that what actually happens after a formerly listed property goes off the market can result in a several different outcomes.

Sounds like a dose of contradictory Myrtle Beach real estate jargon—but it can be sorted out with a little determined effort. Here goes:

In real estate, off the market denotes a property that was listed in the past but currently pulled from the market. It no longer appears in the updated Myrtle Beach real estate listings, either because the owner has decided not to sell, or because the property is now in the process of being purchased (so more buyers don’t need to be recruited). When phrases like ‘under contract’ appear in a listing, it has the effect of being off the market at the moment, though interested buyers might keep an eye on it in case the sale doesn’t go through. An owner might withdraw a home if they now believe the market is not active enough to warrant more effort at this time, or because some event has caused them to decide to keep the house.

Off the market, in today’s web-centric real estate reality, is not quite as cut-and-dried as in former eras. Because the Internet never seems to forget anything, an off-the-market property may still pop up onscreen when buyers search for new Myrtle Beach homes for sale (particularly when some of the national sites don’t promptly remove outdated listings). Your Myrtle Beach Realtor® can keep you up-to-date on the current status of any local property.

On the other hand, Off-market is sometimes used as a synonym for “off the market,” but can be used by some national websites for upcoming properties that are being marketed, but have not yet been listed. More often, off-market is used to denote a property that is for sale but will not be advertised publicly. Since such a property isn’t entered into the Myrtle Beach listings at all, most potential buyers will be unaware that it’s available. You might think this is a nutty way to try to sell a home, but there can be good reasons. Celebrity owners may be in a constant battle to stay out of the public limelight, and therefore resort to an arrangement (formal or informal) with a broker to discreetly market their home. Later news will say something like, “Janet Showbiz sold her 18 bedroom Bel-Air estate off-market for $11 million.” Some extremely high-end real estate offerings are offered quietly to other brokers. This is sometimes called a ‘pocket listing.’ When successful, it results in an off market sale.

You don’t have to be a celebrity to want to discreetly search for—or sell—an area home. If you are beginning to think over your area real estate options, whenever you call me for a no-obligation consultation, it will always be treated with complete confidentiality.

Back at the beginning of 2012 there came a ‘pinch me, I must be dreaming’ moment. This was back in what seemed to be the Bad Old Days, when Myrtle Beach homeowners who dared to check the latest in neighborhood home values were apt to spend a sleepless night as a result. Myrtle Beach home values had only just begun to creep upward, but the bottom line was still, as truck drivers used to say, ‘negatory.’

The Rip Van Winkle ‘pinch me’ moment was a single piece of polling information that, by itself, seemed to register a hard-to-swallow phenomenon. If believed, it would have the first glimmer of light at the end of a very dark tunnel. It came in the form of a Rasmussen poll reporting some of what people in America were thinking. In part, Rasmussen summarized “Belief among homeowners that home values will increase during the next few years is the strongest it has been in a year, as is confidence that their homes are worth more than what they still owe.”

That poll might not have been as concrete as any of the hard numbers trickling in from the gatherers of residential sales volumes and prices, but in the long run it was probably more significant. As long as home values continued to plunge (as they had done for what seemed forever), there had been a good reason for home buyers to resist the impulse to buy a Myrtle Beach home. It’s the same reason that local supermarkets don’t send out circulars that tell you, “BIG SALE—BUT NOT JUST YET!” Myrtle Beach home values didn’t have to actually fall in order to discourage market activity, either. Just flat-lining would do the trick. Recent history had been all downward, and nobody seemed too confident that the next movement wouldn’t be a continuation of the plunge.

For prospective first-time buyers who had ample lifestyle reasons for wishing to buy a new Myrtle Beach home, it just seemed more prudent to keep their home-buying powder dry. But renting forever wasn’t going to get them anywhere—and rental affordability had been headed the wrong way since 2001...

That was why Rasmussen’s report on the turnaround in homeowner optimism had been such a ‘pinch me; I must be dreaming’ moment. The idea that people finally were expecting home values to rise was a change in psychology that could fire the market, irrespective of what the numbers could yet confirm. And that’s exactly what happened.

Fast-forward to the fall of 2015. The bottom was in. U.S. (and Myrtle Beach) home values were about to embark on the welcome momentum shift that’s now in the record books. Pinching turned out to be unnecessary; and it was no dream. In fact, you can take advantage of this fall’s healthy Myrtle Beach residential home market. Just shoot me an email or a phone call!

If you ask anyone doing serious house hunting in Myrtle Beach how they are going about it, there are few who won’t point to the web (nationally, 88% use it) as at least one of the top two most useful tools (their Myrtle Beach Realtor® is the other one: 87%).

Yes, yard signs are helpful, and its first cousin, the Open House, is another (they’re related since it’s hard to imagine an Open House without a yard sign or two). Both come into the house hunting picture a little less than half the time, according to NAR® statistics. A quarter of house hunting expeditions also rely on one or more online video sites, but I think that’s just because online listings frequently link to those to display virtual tours. To a prospective buyer, it may not even be evident that a different site has been used. In fact, who cares?

What is important—and what shoppers who are actively embarked on a Myrtle Beach house hunting foray do care about—is what is the best way to find the Myrtle Beach homes for sale that best fit their requirements. Along with size and price guidelines, usually location turns out to be a leading specification—sometimes the leading spec. Most of the online search tools let you enter location in a form that allows “city, state, neighborhood, or zip code.” Sometimes, “county” is allowed.

Especially for anyone planning to move to an area that is largely unfamiliar, it’s here that assumptions can be misleading. Of course, house hunting using a sizeable “City” is likely to deliver unwieldy results. If you entered “Los Angeles,” for instance, the difference between a nice little parcel on Mount Lukens (elevation 5,000+ feet) and one by Point Dume (elevation zero) makes such an entry all but useless. “Neighborhood” will usually yield much more meaningful results—but only for those who are already familiar with the area.

This is where entering a “Zip Code” might seem to be the most likely way to get the house hunting results you’re looking for. Sometimes it might. Yet a word of caution is in order—this is where a little practical zip code knowledge could come in handy. A zip isn’t always as cozy an area as you might think. For instance:

• Towns and cities sport different zip code “overlays.” More than one town name may be in a single zip (but that zip might not cover the entirety of any of them).
• Many zips can share the same town name (for instance, Austin has 78).
• If commute time and/or fuel economy is an issue, entering 89049 (Tonopah, NV) might not be helpful. It covers 10,000 square miles, which makes it slightly larger than Maryland.
• On the other hand, some zips cover just one building.

But if you do decide to use the zip code to specify a search area, steer clear of “48222.” It’s the one that delivers mail to passing ships. Also, if you’re interested in Centralia PA, don’t bother looking for its zip; just enter ‘Centralia.’ (It’s the only town that has no zip code).

No matter what online search method you use, when the house hunting destination is in the Myrtle Beach vicinity, there won’t be any more foolproof way to locate the home you’re looking for than to give me a call. I’ll put together a list that takes all your specifications into account…after which we can set out for a real-life, non-virtual tour!

When your family needs more or less elbow room, or a neighborhood change is in order, it’s time to start combing the listings for the right Myrtle Beach house for sale. At the same time, though, now that prices have been steadily rising for so long, it’s not unreasonable to ask yourself if this a good time to be looking? The question arises from the investment side of a home purchase; so it’s logical to ask what the investors are doing…

Those who looked upon any Myrtle Beach house for sale only as an investment rather than a place to live tend to fall into one of two groups. The first live by the buy low, sell high school of investing. It’s a philosophy that makes perfect sense—it’s been around since before Wall Street was even paved, and its logic is unarguable. Back when U.S. real estate prices took the express elevator down to street level (and below), this group looked at the chart that showed median house prices, noted the cliff they had just gone over, and started looking for the nearest house for sale to scoop up. Their assumption was that these prices had to go up…eventually—no matter how bleak the future looked. Because that’s always the case.

But that group of canny local investors soon found themselves with unexpected competition. Big investment conglomerates started showing up, suddenly looking for houses for sale at bargain prices. The result was a strange kind of bidding war, where the ‘buy low’ investors who spotted a Myrtle Beach house for sale at a fire sale price had to compete with institutional bidders (and they had unlimited budgets!). A lot of all-cash sales were made, at a few dollars higher than would have been the case if strictly local investors had had the market to themselves.

Although the second kind of investors may have agreed that there is unarguable arithmetic underlying the ‘buy low, sell high’ philosophy, they are unimpressed by it. Buying low and then selling high is a fine abstraction, but since you never know when the lowest price has been reached, nor when the peak high prices have arrived, they ignore the whole price roller coaster phenomenon. Whenever they have accumulated the right amount of money to invest, their single concern is to find a quality Myrtle Beach house for sale, buy it at a fair current comparable price, and then hold on to it. They have confidence that markets rise and fall, but in the long run, a quality residence will appreciate in value. So these are the buy and hold investors.

Now, most of us consider a Myrtle Beach house for sale primarily as a place to live rather than as an investment vehicle. Nonetheless, we don’t offer to pay more than its current market value because we don’t want to lose financially should we decide to sell. But in most cases, we plan to live in the home long enough that we consider a loss unlikely. In other words, we fall into the buy and hold group.

So what does that suggest about whether it’s wise to be looking at Myrtle Beach houses for sale when prices have risen as they have? I may be a bit prejudiced, but a ‘yes’ isn’t hard to come by. For the ‘buy low, sell high’ folks, we haven’t even hit the previous high water mark when you take inflation into account. For the buy and hold adherents, it’s always the right time to buy a quality home at a fair price—especially when mortgage rates are low. Which means that now is also the right time to give me a call!

For anyone who has never participated in a serious house-hunting effort, their mental image of how the experience will unfold may be a little off. They might imagine that, after narrowing down their requirements for a Myrtle Beach home (size, price range, and the like) they will agree on a day and time, then just climb into their Myrtle Beach agent’s car and settle back to have the likely prospect properties exposed before them.

In fact, the house-hunting procedure is almost like that, except for one major detail:

A property search is a participation sport!

Experienced Myrtle Beach property searchers have learned to husband their energy on any day that includes home showings. Especially when their property search doesn’t immediately yield a find that fits their target criteria, they know that it may take a while—and more than a few house-hunting outings—before they identify a suitable house.

What takes so much energy? Sophisticated home buyers know that every showing holds the possibility that they could be setting foot in what might just become their future home. Every showing is literally the only time they will ever have a valid ‘first impression’ of the place that might become a major purchase. And each of those first impressions often come as part of a day that includes multiple showings—one that can easily result in a jumble of impressions, where homes with similar features are easily confused in memory. Since second and subsequent showings should be reserved for properties that qualify as serious contenders, wasted time and effort (not to mention inconvenience to the homeowners) can be avoided by alert, sharp-eyed property searchers. It takes stamina!

That’s why more experienced prospects know from the outset that a home showing isn’t a passive experience. It’s not a bad idea to have a pen handy for jotting notes on the listing sheets the Myrtle Beach agent provides—notes about distinguishing features (good and bad!) that will help with comparisons at the end of the day.

For those who are veterans of previous property searches, this is old news: they remember reviewing sessions that include, “No – that was the one with the bay windows, not the one with the [fill in the blank].” For first-timers, it’s good to know in advance: a property search is a participation sport. And you’re the team captain!

If you are about to embark on the search for a Myrtle Beach property, or have one that’s soon to be listed, do give me a call. Properly arranging efficient home tours is only part of my track record of helping successful home sales happen!