Sullivan County Real Estate

Some Current Favorites

I'm always struck by how few great houses or great deals are on the market at any given time. Most buyers I work with have the idea that, no matter what type of place they're looking for, there must be at least a dozen on the market to pick from — whether they're looking for a little lakefront cottage, a renovated farmhouse, a vacation chalet style house on a hilltop with views, a cabin tucked into the woods or a hobby farm with plenty of open fields for large gardens. After all, it's a buyers' market, right? There should be loads of great houses at great prices on the market. Buyers are often very surprised when I tell them I may only have two or three houses to show them that probably fit what they're looking for. And seldom do I have more than 5 or 6.

It's been a while since I've posted some "Favorites" on this blog. It's not because I was lazy over the winter. Rather, there haven't been a lot of houses that I've been that excited about.

The spring is bringing some new inventory to market, and there are a handful of new listings that aree quite interesting. Right now, though, there are about 15 houses in the affordable to moderate range that I like and are pretty good values, in terms of the tradeoffs between house size, style, setting and price. There are also a few with asking prices above $400K that are very interesting, but I haven't included them here. There are a number of other houses in the $200's and $300's that I keep my eye on as interesting houses, but just want to see their asking prices drop a bit before I'd also see them as interesting values. That may happen, though, over the next couple of months. I'd love nothing better than to post up two or three dozen "favorites."

Note: the houses in the slideshow at the left are courtesy of the broker reciprocity program of the Sullivan MLS. If you click on any photo as it scrolls through, it will take you to the listing for the property. Or click on this link and it will open a new page with all of the houses.

Financing a Vacation Home Article in the Times

In Friday NY Times', reporter Maryann Haggerty wrote an articlle on "Financing a Vacation Home", or more specifically, the increasing difficulty in financing one. Maryann, who writes regularly about mortgages, got the gist right, but like many newspaper articles with space constraints, it isn't quite the whole picture. (And yes, I'm quoted in the article. And she got did get my sound bites pretty on target.)

She spoke with a lender in the Hamptons who said most buyers were facing 25% or 30% down payments. That's for "jumbo" loans, that don't fall under the conventional, qualifying loan limits. Jumbo loans have always had higher down payment requirements, even during the go-go, throw-money-at-everybody years. And a real estate broker on the Jersey Shore indicated that interest rates were tough to pin down for second home loans, and that interest rates were often 1/8 to 1/4 point higher than for a primary home. That, too, was always historically the case.

One of the quotes from me was that 50% of my clients in the past year paid all cash for their houses. That's also true, but it wasn't because they were unable to get financing. There's just a lot of cash sitting on the sidelines, and buyers are putting it into real estate.

Taken together, the overall impression is that it's very hard to get financing for a second home, and that buyers better have a lot of cash. But that's not quite he right picture. I have clients regularly getting second home mortgages with 20% down, and haven't had one instance of a lender requiring 25% or more. But then houses here are certainly lower priced than the Hamptons, and all of my clients have been buying homes under the conventional conforming loan limits. True, you likely won't find a lender willing to lend on a second home with only 1%, 3% or 5% down like during the go-go years. But 20% is not an unreasonable threshold. Remember, for decades that's been the historic baseline down payment.

And, yes, you do need good credit to get a mortgage. But if you have lousy credit, and can't make your car payments on time, you shouldn't be stretching to buy a second home. You should be taking that time you'd be coming up to the country to stay at home and pay your bills. If your financial house is in order, banks will lend to you.