Divorce Real Estate

Going through a divorce can by a very traumatic experience. With ex's, kids, money, and real estate involved, it's no wonder that it's difficult to think straight. And that doesn't even include the pressure associated with the cause of the divorce. The real estate portion is what I’d like to focus on here today. There are so many items that come into play that it’s important to stay focused on MOVING FORWARD WITH MORE. Here’s the roadmap: Make sure you talk to your attorney and an RCS-D Realtor (Real Estate Collaboration Specialist – Divorce). If you agree to an MSA (Marital Separation Agreement) before you adequately assess the value of your home, you could be in for a big surprise. Ladies, it’s you who most often get the short end of the stick. Let me explain.

It is typically the ladies that are more emotionally attached to the home. If you have kids and they’re in school, you don’t want to move because you don’t want to add changing schools to the list of issues the kids will deal with. Very admirable. Often times, the attorney will suggest you do an appraisal in the home, subtract the mortgage and split the equity. There’s large risk to taking that approach. If you get an appraisal on your home, take that value and subtract the mortgage owed, that DOES NOT equal the remaining equity for you to split. Here’s why. An appraisal typically does not include value adjustments for the condition of your home. An appraiser is not a licensed inspector and cannot make a highly accurate assessment of the value. Let’s assume that you have a termite problem that you can’t see and an aged roof that’s about ready to give, but that you don’t know about because it hasn’t become a problem yet. Let’s also assume your toilet has a leak coming from the seal between the toilet and the floor that you can’t see. And under your bathroom tile, the leak has caused the subfloor to rot. By the way, these are things that many of the homeowners I work with are surprised to learn when we do inspections prior to putting their home on the market. Being an astute homeowner who takes good care of your home does not make you immune to the unknown. In this scenario, there are tens of thousands of dollars of repairs that will be needed sooner…or later. Whoever stays in the home gets stuck paying the bill. Oh, and we didn’t talk about closing costs. When you sell your home, there are closing costs that are paid. Often times, the unsuspecting remaining resident doesn’t consider that these costs will need to be paid when the home is ultimately sold and that it should be deducted from the equity before the money is split. Sometimes, as hard as it seems, it’s better to Move Forward with More. Right-size your residence to a rental if need be and stay in the same school district. Stay tuned for future recommendations.
- Gary Nobile RCS-D Realtor

Is the Bottom Here?

Everyone says that you won't know the bottom of the real estate market until you passed it, which I suppose is true. But a better question to ask is how do you know when it starts to take shape so you can be amongst the first to respond? One might consider that the cheapest proeprties on the market right now are bank owned foreclosed homes. The condition of these properties range from very good to horrible. My personal opinion has been that when we start seeing multiple offers on these homes that it would be a good indicator that inventory is shrinking and these low prices will start to be bid up. That, in my opinion, is a first signal of the bottom. Of course, more foreclosures could go on the market, the economy this, that, and the other, etc. Just for the record, 2 weeks ago our office had 6 bank owned homes sell that had been on the market for several months. Many of them had multiple offers. Oh, and while I was at a title company yesterday (signing documents with one of my investor clients) I learned that the title company was struggling to keep up with the sales of bank owned homes because a convoy of investors from China came this passed week-end buying as many bank owned properties they could. This was after we had already sold 6 in our office. Is this the bottom..... stay tuned.

Who's Bailing Out Who?

Opinion:
I never did agree with the thought of the U.S. Governement bailing out private companies. That's not the American Dream I was brought up to believe in (wow, I sound like my dad). I was taught that if you worked hard, managed money properly and took excellent care of your customers that you had a good chance to succeed. But success was never gauranteed. If, however, you failed in any one of these areas your business was gauranteed to fail. If a company ever fails to serve their customers properly, well, the customers SHOULD stop doing business with that company. I was also taught that if you did all the right things running a business and things went sideways anyway, you had to create a new way to succeed or find another line of business to be in. That's much the same way I feel about Big Banking. The government has approved Billions in bail out money to Big Banking. Will they bail out You or me when things don't go well? I don't think so. And what's Big Banking doing with the Billions they've been given? It's a mystery. Now they say they don't have to disclose what they're doing with it. I know what they're NOT doing with it. I know they're NOT lending to businesses that need it. Which begs the question, where's it going? If you're as fed up as I am. Please leave a comment. If you're tired of working hard and paying taxes only to see it go to Big Banking who squanders it and overpays their executives, leave a comment. If you'd like to shed some light on this for me and others, leave a comment. Sorry for the rant, come Monday I'll return to your regularly scheduled programing. Then you'll see the facts of the 4th quarter real estate market in San Jose and I'll show you where the "hot spots" are. Bye for now, I'm going to go watch some football and try to not think of this mess for a couple of hours. -Gary