Hartwell Real Estate Tips
Qualifying the Buyer for your Hartwell Property
Either you or your agent will want to weed out potential buyers who cannot afford to purchase your Hartwell home. Items to investigate include the buyer’s debt and credit history, current income and employment, the availability of cash for a down payment, the time the buyer needs before closing on the home and the buyer’s level of interest in your home as compared to other properties.
Hartwell Homebuyers Quandry
Armed with the Comparative Marketing Analysis, it is time to approach your lender to see if you can get financing without selling your current Hartwell. In most cases, financing will be contingent upon selling your home but you may be able to obtain interim financing sometimes known as a Bridge Loan.
Hartwell Homebuyers Quandry
When you find the home you want to buy you may make an offer contingent upon the sale of your existing Hartwell. In a Seller’s Market, offers with such contingencies are not well received because the seller must remove his home from the market while you sell yours. However there are times when this kind of offer is successful, even in the Hartwell market. A backup strategy might be to put in your offer with a very long escrow giving yourself time to sell your home. Very few sellers will accept these kinds of contingencies or long escrows if your house is not already on the market.
Hartwell Real Estate Title Insurance
Buying a new home is the single largest financial investment for most families but there are risks. What if the seller doesn’t really own the home? What if there are mortgages, judgements or liens against the property? What if the property taxes have not been paid for several years? Hartwell real estate Title insurance protects you against these types of risks and against the risks of human error. It is your basic home ownership protection.
Hartwell Title insurance protects you against future losses arising out of events that have happened in the past. Unlike other types of insurance, title insurance is paid when the policy is issued and is good for the life of the policy. The premium required is based on the amount of the sale or the mortgage.
Building Hartwell Home Equity
A popular question from prospective Hartwell homebuyers relates to building home equity. Buyers like to estimate how much a home may increase in value based upon past appreciation. One of the many advantages of home ownership is that appreciation is based on the home’s market value rather than on the actual dollar amount invested or the down payment so that a $100,000.00 home that appreciates 5% is now worth $105,000.00, especially in Hartwell.
With a typical 30-year loan, most of your monthly payment goes toward interest payments with only small amounts going to the principle in the early years. Only half the principle is repaid in the first 23 years of the loan. You can build Hartwell home equity faster by choosing a 15-year loan instead of a 30-year loan.
The Benefits of Selling Hartwell
If your Hartwell holdings consist of both a personal residence and a rental, you can sell your personal residence and exclude up to $250,000 ($500,000 for a married couple) on the gain. Then you move into your rental, live in it as your personal residence for two years and then sell it, again benefiting from the $250,000 or $500,000 exclusion. This is true even though most or all of the increase in value occurred before you converted the property to your personal residence.
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