A few months ago, back in December of 2012, I wrote about how it was the best time to buy a home* (and it turns out that I was more right than I thought!).
Unfortunately, at the time, I didn’t give enough fair warning and it was hard to actually find a suitable property to purchase in such short notice.
So today I’m giving you fair warning:
When you were a kid in school, do you remember acting out the Thanksgiving story? Or building a “real” volcano?
The CETA – Changing Education Through the Arts program enhances children’s education.
Of course you remember, because you had a chance to live them, rather than simply read (or be told) about them. That’s the power of multi-sensorial learning strategies.
Thankfully, the well-known Kennedy Center, based in Washington, D.C., offers an in-depth program to incorporate multi-sensorial learning strategies into schools. Their program is called Changing Education Through the Arts (CETA)
You can best see CETA in action in this very cool video, shot at Abingdon Elementary School in Arlington County (Arlington is adjacent to Fairfax County): Continue Reading…
Last weekend, I was helping a buyer make an offer on a lovely home.
The only problem was that it was a multiple offer situation and we had to have the strongest offer possible.
The buyer, Ana, was very excited about making an offer and she was ready to make an offer for a higher amount than the list price, in order to out-bid other potential purchasers.
But when we started looking at the details, we realized that Ana’s lender’s pre-approval letter was dated four weeks earlier.
Mortgage Interest Rates affect your buying power
Normally, a 4-week old lender letter wouldn’t have been such a big issue, but since the mortgage interest rates have been going up in the last two weeks, this could be a real factor.
The Lender letter indicated that Ana was pre-approved for a sales price up to $400,000, with an interest rate of 3.50%. That would have given Ana a monthly payment of $1,436.
But now that the interest rates were at 4.50%, to keep the same payment of $1,436, Ana’s pre-approved purchase price would have to be about $355,000.
Ana and I promptly got on the phone with her mortgage lender to review her options and to get her pre-approval letter updated reflecting the new interest rates.
Recently, there was a bit of a scandal in the local real estate scene. A few individuals figured out a scheme to sell vacant properties to unsuspecting buyers.
The problem was that these people weren’t the rightful owners of the vacant properties. Instead, they faked death certificates of the real owners, and even appeared at settlement to sign as if they were the rightful sellers of these homes.
Title Insurance is the way to protect yourself from hidden title issues on a home
The good news is that these “enterprisers” got caught and are now facing several years in jail for fraud.
Well, to start with, the homes went back to their rightful owners. So the buyers ended up with no home.
Losing the home they thought was theirs is bad enough… but surely they might have gotten their money back?
Maybe.
An Owner’s Title Insurance policy would have covered the buyers for an issue like this one.
In the mid-2000’s, the Fairfax County Real Estate Market was going up, up, up – until the housing market bubble burst.
The Fairfax County Real Estate Market is back! (like Tiger Woods’s career)
Like the real estate market, at one point, Tiger Woods was at the top of his game, having won 78 official PGA tour events in only 12 years.
And then? Boom!
Disaster happened… and Tiger had to take a couple of years off from competing.
But after his time off, he came back and is now at the top of his game again.
Like Tiger, after a couple of years of a correction, the real estate market prices in Fairfax County have returned to a steady climb.
Everybody is welcome to find a home by school boundary. A school boundary
is simply a geographical area, just like a zip code or a postal city.
Does anything on this website bug you? Nothing is too small or too big. If there is something we can fix, we'd love to know.
Marina Brito
Realtor®, RE/MAX Premier,Home by School Specialist
[email protected]
(703) 480-6575
RE/MAX Premier
13135 Lee Jackson Hwy #115
