Financing the buying of a home in the Salem Oregon metro area.

It’s a GIFT!

One of the most common frustrations I hear from Salem Oregon home buyers is that they are using GIFT funds for their down payment and they don’t understand why we have to pick apart the documentation…or even document it at all. This seems like a great place to shed some light on the whole gift…

Got Money? Prove it!

I’ve been wanting to have some Salem Oregon  mortgage brokers do some guest posts for me because lending is so asinine these days, I thought it best if they could help explain the new and crazy process to you all. True to form, an underwriter is nit picking a transaction about the “paper trail.”    The…

HVCC, HERA, HOEPA, Huh?

Each business has it’s acronyms.  Real estate, I think,  has more than any other business.  I think we like speaking in code to sound important and impressive or something. I can just see an agent with a Salem Oregon home buyer. “Hey that’s an REO over there. It has HDW, FR, LR, DR, and DLB.”…

Down Payment Assistance-sort of…

You may remember I wrote a post about how you could use the $8,000 tax credit as a down payment for a Salem Oregon home with a “new plan” that was announced, only to retract it 24 hours later. So…in order to make things “easy”…cough, cough… for first-time homebuyers the government had an announcement about…

Back to the beginning

Down payment assistance programs, lovingly called DAP’s by we in the real estate industry, were nixed as of Oct 2008.  Between asking sellers to pay for closing costs and then having the seller’s “gift” them down payment monies, many home buyers were getting into FHA home loans for nothing out of their pocket. The backlash…

The state of things…

Amy left this comment on one of my posts about the Salem Oregon real estate market and it seemed like it would be a good post.  Amy asked: What’s the state of the financing market? We hear so much bad news in the media, but I see people buying homes, cars, etc. What is the…

New financing rules for condos

The Wall Street Journal had an article recently about the increase in lending guidelines for purchasing a condo. Now, normally you wouldn’t think that would be such a big deal here in Salem Oregon because we don’t have a lot of condos, but…here is what the article stated. The government-backed mortgage-finance company stopped guaranteeing mortgages…

Calling all vets

  Oregon vets are fortunate to have a great home loan program here.  The Oregon Department of Veteran’s Affairs…okay, say that 10 times fast…has a wonderful program: the ORVEThome loan program.   I can say this from personal experience, since I had several veteran buyers here in the Salem Oregon area  last year who used…