So you think that you're ready to buy your own home?

Hopefully you've done a little research online to make your first home buying experience a good one. First of all you should contact a mortgage broker that will preapprove you for your new mortgage. This is now more important than ever. It's also important that once you receive a preapproval you get busy right away looking for your new home. The reasoning for this is that with the mortgage meltdown lenders are changing their lending programs as quickly as Paris Hilton changes her boyfriends. Scary, huh?

At this point you will let the mortgage broker now how much you would like to get preapproved for. The broker will then take a full mortgage loan application. The mortgage broker will also run your credit. With all this information in hand the mortgage broker will see if you have enough income for the price of the home that you would like to purchase. If you can't get approved for the full amount that you wanted the mortgage broker will let you know how much you are approved for on your new home. You will have to chose the term of mortgage that you want such as 30 or 15 yr. Most borrowers these days are staying away from adjustable rate mortgages like the plague. The interest rates on the adjustable rate mortgages are not much lower than fixed rates so these days chose a fixed rate and be done with it. At this point the mortgage broker will also make sure that you have enough funds to close on the loan.

You will not be able to lock in your interest rate until you have found your new property and obtained a signed sales contract.

Once you have found your new home you will fax the signed sales contract to your broker who will submit your loan application to the lender. At this time you will also need to provide 1 months worth of paystubs, last years W-2, bank statements showing funds to close plus at least 2 months of reserves, a copy of your drivers license. Then the package is off to the lender. The lender will approve the loan within 2-3 days depending upon how busy they are. At that time there are usually an item or two more that you may have to provide. These can include an insurance binder for homeowners insurance, flood insurance or anything else that the bank may have a question on.

You should have final approval and a clear to close within 1-2 weeks after submitting your loan to the lender. If it is taking longer than that you may want to check with your broker to see if there are any concerns or issues that you should know about. You really want to be proactive on the purchase of your new home. You don't want to get to the day of closing and have your purchase cancelled.

Follow these tips and you should close your loan and enjoy your beautiful new home.

If you're a renter that missed out on the double digit home price appreciation of the last five years, take heart. Prices have been falling everywhere which means you can still get in on a bargain. Some may say that housing prices will drop even more before they stabilize but I really think that the housing market will recover by mid 2008. The Fed lowering prime rate has given a little confidence to the credit market and the real estate market will follow.

If you live in Las Vegas, Phoenix, anywhere in Florida or California the bargains are everywhere especially for condos. In some areas of Florida there is a 42 month supply of condos. That means that it will take 42 months before they will sell all the condos on the market today. What should you do if you have a home on the market in one of the declining real estate markets and it's not selling? Take it off the market. There are way too many homes on the market. Wait this depreciation market out. It's not going to sell for what you want anyway so you might as well keep it for now. If everyone in your area heeds my advice and takes their home off the market it will lead to a shortage of homes for sale in your area. And what does that mean? It means that homebuyers will be competing for homes again. And that means that the prices will be going up instead of down.

Ok, OK. I got a little off the subject by giving advice to home sellers. Please forgive me. I'll try to stay on track. Let's assume that no one reads this article (that's easy) which means that home prices will stay depressed and all of you renters must run right out and pick up a bargain. But hurry because the market is going to come around again and I don't think it will be that far off. If you haven't purchased your home when real estate starts it's upward trend (as it always does) you will again be left out in the cold.

Go claim your bargain basement priced home now.

Housing prices are dropping almost everywhere especially as investors or homeowners are unable to make the monthly mortgage payment and homes go into foreclosure. Sounds like a great time to get into the market if you missed out on it before, right? Well, not so fast. First of all you have to realize that there many homes available at bargain basement pricing, but most people are not able to qualify to become investors because they don't have enough income to qualify for their current monthly obligations and the new mortgage.

As I stated in a previous post, lenders are not lending stated income/stated asset mortgages on non-owner occupied homes. So what is a wanna be real estate investor to do? Even the hard money lenders (they will lend up to 65% LTV on owner occupied) don't want to lend on non owner occupied residences. So that means that even with a large down payment (35%) investors will be unable to obtain financing to purchase these homes.

I've been selling mortgages for quite a few years and I very seldom see borrowers that AREN'T living at the high end of their debt to income ratios so most wanna be investors will not be able to use their current income to purchase an investment property.

Even investors that are already in the market are going to see their options dry up when trying to purchase these bargains. So...who is going to be buying these properties? I really have no idea. Right now it seems that most people are staying away from purchasing anything at this time because they don't think the market has hit rock bottom.

The credit crunch needs to end before lenders will feel safe lending to investors or these homes are just going to sit and sit and sit. And we know all to well what happens to neighborhoods when homes are left vacant. Money needs to be freed up so that people can purchase these homes.

No buyers in sight and no buyers on the horizon.