Posted on 04/16/2011 8:02:08 AM PDT by dawn53
Magan Landsiedel and Jeff Smolinski just bought a $133,000 home in Largo. Their down payment: $100.
A typical government-insured mortgage would have required $4,700 down; a conventional lender might have demanded more than $26,000.
But Landsiedel and Smolinski took advantage of a little-known U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program that lets people buy government-owned foreclosed homes for just $100 down.
Uncle Sam is looking for buyers for 3,451 homes like this in Florida.
(Excerpt) Read more at tampabay.com ...
The catch is you have a house funded at 100%, probably at market value for bank owned homes in the area. Probably picked up for a lot less than it was a few years ago. Might be much more that it was - in a few years time.
As they say in real estate - Location, Location, Location.
The problem is many of the owners buy the bank owned home which area the only ones they can afford. They live in them a while - fix they up a bit and then refinance at the market value for owner occupied homes - which they can’t afford.
Well my property assessment (in Florida) has gone down, but my taxes have gone up. Reason, we’ve owned the home for lots of years and under SOH (save our homes), the state has only been allowed to increase the value, for tax purposes, a small amount each year. So we were way undervalued for tax purposes.
IMO, it’s the insurance that’s going to kill us. No matter that we haven’t had a hurricane in our area in 5 years...State Farm just got the go ahead for a 20% increase in rates (not that we use State Farm, but I imagine they’re the harbinger of what’s to come.)
Going around in circles. The government solving a mess it created.
$100 down?
Sounds like a used car sale.
BUT, are these properties with unsubstantiated titles? Suspect many are. MERS??
“What’s the catch?”
The catch is you have to have decent credit and income. In places like florida a lot of this HUD stuff is racial. It’s about moving blacks into white suburban neighborhoods.
The catch is if they default the taxpayer is on the hook.
“Seems like we’ve been down this road before.”
Uh yeah...
Here’s Bush pushing home loans for totally unqualified minorities.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqR15H0gNBU
HUD homes have been around for a long time; when we lived in Hoboken we investigated.
The catch is that HUD properties are usually trashed. These are fixer-uppers - extremely so, in many cases. If they weren’t being sold for $100 down, they’d have to be demolished. Or, more likely, remain empty, abandoned eyesores.
Also, they tend to be in sketchy neighborhoods. If you’re an aspiring slumlord with a crew of illegal alien carpenters, or a brave, brave urban homsteader, HUD homes might be for you. :)
Yeah but can’t they save up all those premiums from the years they didn’t have to pay out to help buffer the costs for the year they finally have to pay :) We were with State Farm for 20 years (till they dropped us because we live within 2 miles of the coast) and never made a claim...and it was expensive, close to $3500 per year at the time we were dropped.
That is true but my son just found one in a nice neighborhood and in good shape but he looked at a lot that weren’t.
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