All About New Hampshire Real Estate!

Current Real Estate News

(Today!) New Hampshire- Welcome to ALLABOUTNHRE.COM - Articles pertaining to New Hampshire Real Estate will be posted frequently. Included will be both articles authored by John R. Fisher, Realtor, of Prudential Verani Realty and links to articles published elsewhere. New data will be added weekly for sales and market conditions. Everyone wants to know "what's going on" and this site will tell you! Suggestions welcomed.

The 2007/2008/2009/2010 Mortgage and Foreclosure Crisis! Give me a call if you'd like a list of foreclosures in your area. I know the market and how to buy these successfully. I've bought and rehabbed some myself! (603) 674-4675. If you want to sell it can be done but you need someone that is all over this market, its trends and what buyers are thinking and doing! Call me at (603) 674-4675- New new new! I've added graphs from TrendData to give you "insiders" stats on what the market is doing! Click on the "Sales Data" button to the right and check them out.

Read all past archived news articles by clicking here. See how I predicted all of this mortgage mess! (well at least before most everyone else:)

(07/22/2010) Predictions form the Pros in 2007! Ready for a laugh? This is pretty funny. Five "experts", including Ben Stein, make predictions on the housing market in 2007. 2 of them said the market would recover and go up 10%, two said it would crash and burn and the 5th, Ben Stein, said " I dunno"! Watch these two guys argue how the market would go up 10% and note how they laugh at and ridicule the guys predicting the crash. Bet they are not called on to join many discussion on the market these days!

(07/21/2010) Thinking about refinancing? With interest rates at an all time low many people are refinancing and/or calling me to ask about it. A good mortgage broker will give you all the facts and items to think about but more often than not I'm hearing from people that are not thinking about the WHOLE picture. I'm sure you've heard the conventional wisdom asking 'are you going to stay in the home long enough to recoup your closing costs' etc. For me the biggest impact to consider should be the amount of time you have left on your current loan and for what term (how many years) your new loan is. If you took out a 30 yr loan last year and have 29 years left on it and are considering refinancing into a new 30 yr this is not much of a consideration regarding how long the loan is. But lets say you have a 30 year loan with 15 yrs left on it. Does it make sense to refinance it into another 30 year loan to save a couple of hundred dollars a month? If that couple of hundred dollars is the difference between keeping and losing your home well then that's a no brainer. But if it isn't consider the big picture. You're saving $200 a month but you are adding 15 years of interest to your debt load! Way more money over the long run than you'll save monthly. Now if you're 80 yrs old maybe this is not an issue but lets say you are 50 years old in this situation. Keeping your loan at a 15 year pay off would have you owning your home free and clear when you retire vs having another 15 years of payments! In a case like this lets say you have a 30 yr loan with 25 yrs left on it...you may want to consider a refinance of that 30 year loan to a 15 year loan. This may actually raise your monthly payment (and of course don't do this if you can't afford it) but if you can significantly reduce the length of your loan you'll save a boat load of interest in the long run. . Take these numbers: a loan of $100K for 30 years at 4.5% will have you paying about $82K in interest whereas a 15 year loan for the same amount/interest will cost you $37K. Here's a real life example for myself- one of my buildings has a 15 yr loan with 6 years left on it but at a 7% interest rate. With 6 years left until PAYOFF there's no way I'm going to touch this one as its on a rental and I've got it covered. That mortgage free rental property is going to help finance my retirement so I'm not refinancing it. As my frequent readers know I like to encourage everyone to think outside of the box sometimes. Don't just think "reduce my payments" when you are considering a refi. If you want to play around with these numbers for your circumstances visit my mortgage calculator . Ignore the income part of it at the top and you can then try different combo's of loan amounts, interest and length of the loan and it will calculate for you the monthly payment and the total payments over the life of the loan.

(07/13/2010) Fannie Mae does something that makes sense! Stop the presses! This article may get a bit technical and this is stuff you won't see in the lame street media because it can be tedious but trust me when I tell you this is a BIG step in the right direction! If you get into discussion with friends and co-workers about the real estate market read this and dazzle them with something they never heard about but that is of critical importance moving forward. Regular readers will remember that I've been ranting about changes they made to the appraising part of the mortgage process last year. Good intentioned changes done by the likes of Bwarney Fwank and Chris Dodd (Do we need to start using Scott Brown's name in the same line with these two? Tell me it ain't so...more on that tomorrow) created a whole new host of appraising issues while fixing NADA! The short version is that lenders started to take the signals they got from regulators and lawmakers that it was their job to become appraisers themselves by "correcting" appraisals they saw as wrong. This whole problem started when they forced lenders to pick appraisers out of a "pool" that could have an appraiser from Weymouth Mass coming into a property he was going to appraise in Hampton Beach NH laughing that he's not been to that town in 20 years! Then lenders started using these totally bogus house value systems that take recent sales in the area, calculate a value per sq ft and simply use that to determine value. Now that may work fine in someplace like Phoenix where you may have a subdivision with 100's of identical houses but when you get to states like NH with mobile homes within a mile of 4000 sq ft estate properties these calculations become useless. What has been happening is that lending underwriters have been taking on site appraisals, often done now by someone that doesn't even know the local market, is being rushed and underpaid, and then looking at these bogus calculations for value and they've been "LOWERING" the appraisal on there own! Fannie has told them to stop, that they can't make changes like that (ummm duh they're not qualified).

The article states: Pat Turner, an appraiser in Richmond, Va., said the new requirement "is great news for consumers" because loan underwriters hundreds of miles from the property "no longer will be able to change the appraiser's valuation" simply because they pulled a lower number off a computer.

Fannie's letter attempts to clarify its "appraiser selection" standards. Tops on the list: Appraisers should be experienced and "have the requisite knowledge" about local market conditions, plus access to all local data sources. Fannie also emphasized that the demonstrated experience of an appraiser should always trump fees or turnaround times.

Its a step in the right direction. Not sure how they implement it without dismantling the "pool" system they set up last year but maybe this will get us one step closer to getting rid of that pig! From toldedoblade.com

(07/06/2010) Inspectapedia Came across this great web site. They seem to have an article with good info on just about every problem you can and will run into with home ownership. Based upon the one's I've read the info looks good but of course always consult a trusted professional first! From Inspectapedia.com.com

(07/04/2010) Happy 4th!

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

(06/28/2010) A Housing Shortage?! Are they loosing their minds over at CNN/Money? Well I concluded that CNN has no mind to loose so..... so much for that! Just watch Wolf Ditzer and anything else on that network. But this is some interesting out of the box thinking. Population growth is outpacing home building. People moving back with parents, roommates and other effects of this nasty economy have reduced demand. What happens when we remove Obama from office in 2012 and the economy gets moving again? (Ok ok of course CNN doesn't ask THAT question but I do!) The article also notes that we are effectively building ZERO rental housing right now. That makes me feel good about the ones I've bought. I guess my short answer/comment to this is bring it on. I'll cope! From Money/CNN.com

(06/26/2010) Did You Know? There is a street in Salem NH called "WRECK AVENUE"? Now maybe that's a family name (got to look that up for my book of funny names) but that has to be one of the worse marketing choices in history! But then again I've always thought someone should do an entire subdivision with all humorous names for the streets. If nothing else it would attract fun buyers to work with and weed out the humorless ones! Note: Also noticed Pumping Station Road. Nice!

(06/23/2010) A dubious distinction! I've always wanted to write a short story with that title! "A Dubious Distinction" by John R. Fisher. I like the ring to that. But...back to the subject at hand. News today shows some parts of the country are still looking good sales wise for May but the Northeast derailed that freight train! I think its a blip for the rest of the country and their numbers will be revised downwards in the coming week. Have you noticed this new trend (well not new but significantly pronounced in the age of Obamanation) where rosy numbers get readjusted into not so rosy and sometimes just plain stinking territory after the press is no longer looking? This is all typical for how the Obamanation works. Just lie for today, then adjust and/or come up with a different lie for tomorrow. Its like they think we are like dogs as the Dog Whisperer describes them... they live in the moment. Obamanation thinks we're all like that. Vote November 2010! From newsok.com

(06/21/2010) What is a Reverse Mortgage? I've seen a lot of TV ads for this type of loan recently and its not something I usually get involved with so I can't comment much about them but here's a link to what reads like a good article on the subject. From Today's Seniors.com

(06/19/2010) Home improvements for sellers Here's an article I basically don't agree with. My reason for posting this is two fold. First, sellers DO need to think about what they can do to make their home a better product when they want to sell. Second, sellers should not be afraid of "scaring" an agent away with a less than perfect home as this article suggests. When I meet with a seller I use the term product a lot when referring to their home- until you list it with me its your home- once you list you need to think of it as a product that you want to turn into someone else's home. The Realtor quoted in this article states that he only recommends sellers paint if needed but to avoid other improvements. I'll agree, painting is key, with the caveat that "MOST" repairs/improvements only pay off if you do them yourself. The old saying in the business is you can turn a $15 can of paint into $1500 at resale. But then this article goes on to say the return on investment (ROI) for most upgrades such as kitchens, adding a room etc is only about 80%. Sorry my contractor friends but that is about right. Big upgrades should be done by professionals if you plan to stay in the home for a period of time and enjoy them. I've often been asked questions such as "should I finish the basement"? According to this article the answer is no. According to me..... "it depends". If you already have 3000 sq ft of finished space adding another 600 in the basement is not going to do anything for you. If you have an 800 sq ft bungalow and can add another 600 sq ft in a day light walkout basement and do all the work yourself......of course it is! The important concept is to do the things that will overcome buyers objections. I once looked at the home for a seller that had been on the market for a long time....great place. Updated high end kitchen with high quality cabs, granite counter tops, center island with a new 6 burner Jenn-Air stove top and then for some reason they left the 30+ year old dbl wall oven in place. As soon as you walked into the kitchen that was all you saw. And this was a high end home all around. Spending $1500 or so to replace that oven would have been money well spent. And keep in mind that in a declining market how quickly you find a buyer is so important. If values are dropping 8% a year and you have a $400K home you'll loose $32K if it takes a year to sell but if you could invest $2 or $3K and cut the selling time to 3 months...well you see the math and the point. So....don't do what this article says. Don't do all your improvements first so you don't "scare away the Realtor" as they say. You may do the wrong ones! Call me. Its a big part of the service, talent and skills I offer is to be able to walk around your home with you and come up with a total marketing plan that includes both what I am going to do to get your home sold for maximum price in minimum time and what YOU need to do the help us achieve that together. But...if you have a fixer upper and don't want to do any work just let me know and we'll come up with a marketing plan for your situation. I certainly know and understand many folks would love to invest some money in their resale but don't have money and/or time. If you are thinking about selling CALL me at (604) 674-4675 and I'll give you the facts and you can make the best decisions for you and your family. From Yahoo

(06/13/2010) Possible extension on Tax Credit! Looks like lawmakers are working on extending the tax credit for an extra 3 months for people that already have a property under contract and have to close by the end of June as it now stands. According to the National Association of Realtors over 180K buyers will not close by the current deadline. Well, first, if you read this regularly you know how I rail against the NAR for mis-reporting numbers so I will take the 180K number as a maybe. Currently these buyers have, worse case, 2 months to close from when they first went under agreement. That should not be a problem for a typical purchase but may be if it was either a foreclosure or new construction it may take longer. But....1) wasn't the point of this credit to spur sales (and this extension will not)? and 2) wouldn't buyers that entered into contracts have mostly known if they would be able to close on time, thus meaning that they didn't expect the credit anyway? and 3) I'm completely sick of these politicians giving away money we don't have! Harsh, I know, but someone's got to get some guts and say this stuff. Isn't a redistribution of wealth an anathema to the American way! Vote Nov 2010! From Newsvine.com

(06/13/2010) General stuff OK the Youtube link to Bwarny Fwank is a big hit so I'll keep looking for little gems like it! I've started adding individual town sales data in the "Sales Data" section. Click the button in the upper right and you will find data by county and the beginnings of data by town. I've started with Hillsboro county and will add towns daily until I get all the towns listed. Its automatically updated monthly so no more waiting for me to do updates! It has average selling and listing prices per month, Avg selling price per sq ft, Number of homes on the market and how many months of inventory is on the market. I'll post an article later in the week explaining why those 4 numbers are important for any new readers of this blog. The good news is the number of months of inventory has dropped significantly since the beginning of the year. The reason, though, is perhaps part of the bad news. It primarily dropped due to the tax credit that expired last month. Pending sales in May were down between 30 to 60% by county from April 2010 to May 2010, showing how much the tax credit helped the market along. Now we have to see if it falls right back down into the ditch or not. Stay tuned.

(06/12/2010) Can there be a bigger dope in government than Bwarney Fwank? I actually heard someone refer to him as the smartest person in congress a few years back! Wonder if that idiot would say that now and what an insult to the rest of congress! If you don't know about this dolt, or if you want a good laugh, take a look at my first attempt to imbed some YouTube.com video into this site. More next week on why this clown needs to be removed from power. Ya think we can get the moonbats in his district to wake up?

(06/07/2010) Can't put a shine on this sneaker! April's foreclosures were ugly! There may have been spin the last few months with some nice sales numbers, mostly skewed by the tax credit, but the foreclosure market is as ugly as ever. If you're looking to grab a deal this summer, as long as you don't plan to sell in the next couple of years, it's a good time to be a buyer. I do pre-foreclosure work for banks to fill in the gap this market has thrown at me and I can tell you that business is busier than ever! Until we fix this economy (i.e the government gets out of the way!) housing and the rest are not going anywhere. And PLLLEEEASSSEEE do not buy that total pile of poop Obama and his thugs tried to push on us last week with that 400K plus job increases. Stone faced lies. Most of those jobs were temporary Census workers that they hire, train for 40 hours, put on the streets on Friday for 6 hours, lay them off at the end of the day and then hire them back on Monday and train them again etc etc. They are cooking the books though the grill is rancid and the food is Obama road kill! Plus, we really only added 15K private sector jobs but over 300K dropped off the unemployment rolls, not because they found a job but because they gave up or were no longer qualified. So.... you'll hear this more and more from me ..... Vote Vote Vote Nov 2010! Here's an article from the Nashua Tele on the foreclosure news.

(06/01/2010) May's numbers! Looks like the home buyer tax credit is the gift that keeps on giving! While contracts had to be written before May properties can close up to the end of June. May 2009 had 434 closings in Rockingham and Hillsboro counties for single family homes. May 2010 had 490 closings for a nice increase. The real test of what this market is going to do will be seen in the July closing numbers. Our MLS is still messed up from a software update last week so I can't do a pending sales comparison for May 2009 and 2010 but there are currently 270 SF homes under agreement in the month of May so if that stat is accurate its indicating even June will have less sales than last year. I'll just update this posting as the numbers become available to me.

(05/28/2010) Its been a mess with the MLS! If you've noticed problems this week with my search site or others its because our MLS had a major update involving merging the Vermont MLS with our NH and Maine MLS. They're working on it and expect fixes "soon" though the update they have given use does not mention if they are working thru the holiday weekend on it or not. But....patience young Jedi is my best advice. If you need something specific give me a call at 6036744675 and I should be able to find what you need as our internal MLS is working much better than the web sites.

(05/24/2010) Summary of the market this month Inventory has been holding steady in the mid 5000 single family homes for sale in Hillsboro and Rockingham counties. That's a long way from the 7000+ we had in 2007 when this mess started and also a long way from the low 4000 number I would call "normal". The good news is that we had 5564 homes sold in the past year so at this point it looks like we are down to a 1 year supply of homes on the market as opposed to the 3 to 5 year supply we have been seeing over the past year. If we look at the number of homes listed during the past year it is a bit over 10,000 to we have a 2:1 ratio there, which is not bad. Remember though that we had the $8000 tax credit for 1st time buyers that expired in April. Not to be a pessimist but my concern is that all that positive activity is not going to continue. About 20% of the past years sales happened in the 2 month period before the expiration of the tax credit. If you look at the graphs in the sales data section you will see prices have risen some in Hillsboro county and stayed flat in Rockingham over the past year. Cheshire county saw a large increase in sales prices but I believe that is due more to a lack of sales the year before and limited data. So....its not as bad as it was. Its getting better slowly. My concern is what happens this summer with so many buyers having made the decision to buy already to get the tax credit. Stay tuned.

(12/28/2009) An open letter the President Obama...... Dear Mr. President, forgive the lack of formal formatting for this letter- its a blog and I'm not as good at HTML code as I am at real estate. Fair enough. I've taken a week or so to calm down after your week long tirade against "Fat Cat Bankers" that started on "60 Minutes" and continued with the press thru out the week blaming them for the economic crisis that you so fondly keep telling us you "inherited from Bush". I'll be the first one to give you the point that you inherited a mess so I'm really confused by your continuing to belabor that point? I remember an interview you did with "60 Minutes", perhaps it was after your first 100 days in office, when you were asked your biggest frustration and you said it was the "banks would not do what you wanted"? What's up with this? You are terribly naive if you think like this but what scares me more is that you don't actually believe it but that you are taking a page out of histories playbook (say like that guy you have on a Xmas bulb on the White House Xmas tree??) and you are creating a villain to allow you to implement certain political strategies? Forgive me but I digress. Here's how we triggered a global economic crisis and how we can fix it. Pretentious of me to think I can advise you on these things? Well as citizens we still have that right and I'll put myself and most other citizens up higher in the "good advise" bracket than the tax cheat you have advising you now.

The problem was caused by the housing collapse. Not by fat cats, not by robber barons, not by greed or anything else. It was a perfect storm of a mess and if you will not recognize the facts you cannot fix the problem and you are doomed to repeat them. So if we agree that it was the housing crisis that precipitated it (lets throw in the huge rapid increase in fuel costs as a secondary cause but I know you have already said you think high fuel prices are a good thing so I'll not go there any further) lets talk about what happened there. Again its not fat cats, skinny dogs or any such thing. I had a front row seat, watching the mess unfold, so pay attention here please Mr. President. Beginning in about 2000 housing prices in my area, and much of the country, started increasing 10+% a year..this continued right thru 2006. Obviously wages did not rise that fast. Pretty simple looking back on it but of course we all have excellent rear view mirrors when it comes to economics. So...why did prices increase that fast? Primarily because money became fast and easy! It seemed like overnight that we in the real estate agent business went from counseling buyers to save up for their down payment before they could find a lender to qualify them to zero percent down, no doc, no closing costs etc... just buy a house for almost no money out of your pocket type loans for anyone that wants them! If we had a slow movement towards those types of loans we might have been ok but the SUDDEN influx of fast and easy money and the millions of new buyers outpaced the availability of homes. Supply and demand. We should have seen this coming but no one did. Fair enough. Why the sudden availability of money? Well, you see, this is a dirty little secret no one wants to own up too. Was it greedy fat cats? No it wasn't. Don't be silly, naive or Maoist and try to blame the rich for all our problems. Was it you? Was it me? Was it Bwarney Fwank? Chris Dodd? You Betcha! We all wanted to make home ownership more available for more and more people. I thought it was a great concept. You did too. Clowns like Fwank and Dodd went overboard with threatening lenders to loan in areas they did not previously loan too because they were bad areas=high risk. Again the goal is noble, get money into run down areas and improve them...but whenever you have a Fat Cat Politician driving things brains at best and usually also accountability will go right out the window. That's what happened Mr. President. Do you know that lenders were required to count welfare income when qualifying someone for a home loan! DOES THAT NOT JUST SOUND LIKE THE DUMBEST THING YOU EVER HEARD? Probably not but it is sir. So... now we are in the opposite situation where money for homes is too hard to get. The way they are setting credit scores is nuts and if you really want to regulate something tackle that. How to fix this mess? And this isn't the fat cats... its regulators. Loosen up the money to consumers. A little. Slowly. Don't allow welfare recipients to get a loan. Do allow producers with jobs to get a loan they can pay back. And now here's one NO ONE has addressed, no one will and you are all cowards for it. I don't have any numbers or solid facts for this but it seems pretty obvious to me. No one has talked about the impact of illegal immigration on the housing market. I think everyone agrees we've added around 30 million people to our country in say the last 30 years? Sound right? And while yes most of them rent (and the scary thing is some got loans!) that is still a large burden on our housing market in general. This is why we need our government to enforce our immigration laws. This is why our laws are set to control how many people come into our country each year in order to avoid economic chaos. Now I'm NOT blaming the housing crisis on illegal immigration. I'm just pointing out that adding that many people to the housing market has to have an impact. Certainly it has driven rental prices up. It has to. And of course now we are in the position where if all the illegals left the country the rental and housing market would collapse again. See what a mess this creates? So... get off the "fat cat" kick, its unbecoming of a President of the United States of America. Get the money loosened up slowly. Get an immigration policy in place and enforce it. And PLEASE remove that bulb on the White House Xmas tree with Chairmen Mao's face on it. Smash it. My wife is Chinese sir. I could bring tears to your eyes telling you stories of what that man did to her father's family. He was evil and its a disgrace that you have his likeness anywhere in our White House. Shame on you.