Fremont Real Estate and Beyond

As a Christmas/Hanukkah gift to sellers who went through a short sale or pay mortgage insurance premiums, the President will be signing a the Tax Increase Prevention Act.  There were 55 provisions, among them was a 1 year retroactive extension of the mortgage tax forgiveness act, which covers short sale deals performed in 2014.  The other was permitting a deduction of mortgage insurance premiums. Details are here-- http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d113:HR05771:@@@L&summ2=m&

Interesting numbers coming from FirstTuesday on first time home buyers, GenY, and retirees. 

In the past, the minimum down payment you could make was 3.5%, now Fannie/Freddie Mac are accepting loans with as low down payment as 3% to those who qualify.

Summary of what's happening in the East Bay.

November statistics for the East Bay courtesy of BayEast MLS

Many people don't really think about solar panels when they buy a home.  Homeowners who like the idea but can't afford to pay upfront the installation costs choose to lease them over a period of time.  Sometimes during this period of time, the homeowner puts their home up for sale and that can open a can of worms. Why am I bringing this up? A) In Southern California it's really popular and it's slowly creeping up here to Northern California.  and B) The new residential purchase agreement (RPA) just added new verbiage to address this issue.  It gives the seller 7 days to make the disclosure and provide any paperwork necessary to assume/cancel the lease to the buyer.  What are the issues? One of them is that the seller needs to transfer the lease to the buyer upon sale of the home or cancel it.  If the buyer doesn't qualify for the lease or doesn't agree to the terms, trouble starts.  I've heard a seller pay $50k+ in cancellation fees because they didn'