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15 Oct Ep. 2: Contract Riders, Flood Insurance, & MLS Foreclosures
In this episode, Adam talks about The Council of Independent Real Estate Brokers (CIREB), contract riders that can save buyers & sellers a lot of money, and why city folk may need flood insurance. John Charlton of Midwest Mortgage Capital returns to talk about finding foreclosures by using the Multiple Listing Service website instead of paying for a list and also how renters can transition to buying houses for only $1,000 down with the aid of down payment assistance. Adam also takes a minute to rant about Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) Loans. Today’s deal of the week is for a home in the Princeton Heights neighborhood on Delor Street.
Email Questions To: PODCAST@HERMANNLONDON.COM
Host – Adam Kruse https://hermannlondon.com/realtor/adam-kruse/
Guest – John Charlton
ITUNES-http://goo.gl/rs1q9X
Blog-https://hermannlondon.com/podcasts/
Website http://hermannlondon.com/
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Address – 7350 Manchester Rd, St. Louis, MO 63143
Phone Number – 314-802-0797
Search For Homes on http://www.wizah.com/
Producer – Joey Vosevich
Theme Song by Trastornobeats
TRANSCRIPTION
Segment 1-CIREB, a deal of the week in Princeton Heights, contract riders, and why city folk may need flood insurance Live from the rooftop of the Hermann London Real Estate Group in beautiful downtown Maplewood, it’s the St. Louis Realtor Podcast, with your host, Adam Kruse! Welcome to this week’s podcast. This is the Hermann London Real Estate Group Podcast live from beautiful downtown Maplewood, Missouri, and this is our second one. I’m sitting here with producer, Joey Vosevich, and our guest, John Charlton from Midwest Mortgage Capital. So going through today’s agenda, we’re going to go over a couple things. It’s going to be really interesting, I’m sure. A couple updates; we have our Hermann London Real Estate Group company retreat coming up. Our retreat is put on this year by our life-altering amazing coach, accountability partner, sales dream team–whatever you want to call him–Trey Malicoat, and it is going to be on November 21st, so if you are a realtor considering joining The Hermann London Real Estate Group, I highly suggest you join us by then. It is going to be an all day retreat, and if you want to participate, you’ve got to be part of our team, of course. Update to the billiards tournament; we’ve had a few sign-ups, but it’s not too late. You can still email Tom@HermannLondon.com. A little update; we are going to be giving away a Bud Light smoker to the winner of the billiards tournament, and that is in honor of Tom, who is a real meat-loving guy. A couple other things we’re going to talk about today is the importance of riders on your sales contract. We’re going to talk about a few of the different riders like the appraisal rider, the home sale contingency rider, the subdivision rider, the condo rider, et cetera. I’m just going to go over those riders and just a little bit of interesting stories to how they can help you. I’m going to give an update on this CIREB group that I’ve been going to their meetings for a little bit. Of course we’re going to have the deal of the week. I’ve got a rant of the week this week that’s going to lead into our guest, John Charlton. We’re going to go through a couple questions that people have sent in and sent in through our Facebook. If you do have questions, please please, send me a message, send them to Facebook, email PODCAST@HermannLondon.com– whatever you need to do to get your questions in so we can go over them on the air. In the upcoming weeks we’re going to talk about staging and how important it is.] All right, again, the producer is always looking at me like, “Keep it going. Keep it going”. Basically I’m going to jump right in to talking about this CIREB. I went to this meeting today. It’s the Council of Independent Real Estate Brokers. We met at Bartolino’s there off Hampton and 44, which is actually a great space. I think we will consider that for having future company events there. The Council of Independent Real Estate Brokers is a group of real estate brokers her in St. Louis who are all members of the St. Louis Association of Realtors, but they are feeling like they want more support because most of them are small real estate companies–small shops that have 25 or less agents, some of them being just their own company, maybe just them working as their own broker, or an agent or two on their team. They like to have the support, which is great because I feel like I have a lot of support from agents here at our company and we have enough resources to have office managers and great people like Trey on our team and have our own podcast and everything like that. I’m also involved in the St. Louis Association of Realtors. I just got added to the board of directors for this upcoming year, but it is nice to go to other broker events and talk with smaller local brokers about issues that are facing them. You know, the Zillow buying Trulia, how it’s going to affect them, and different ways that they get leads. Hopefully in the future we will talk about how we can save money on things like E&O insurance and that kind of stuff going forward. If you are looking for a group of brokers to join that’s a great group to join. I always encourage our realtors, my friends, and everyone to go out there. Go to MeetUp.com, find a group, find people that you want to talk to. If you’re interested in something, there is a group out there for you that’s probably meeting somewhere and talking about it and you can meet some friends. If you’re a realtor you can pick up some new clients, etc. doing this kind of stuff. I’m going to jump into our deal of the week. This week it is another property I have listed for sale. Last week we went over Whispering Windsong which is a home in St. Charles in O’Fallon that we just lowered the price on actually. This week we’re going to talk about a home that is for sale in south St. Louis off Delor Street. It’s 5310 Delor Street. The reason I consider this home to be the deal of the week is because it has really really good bones and it has got a lot of space. The home, to me sort of from the street, is a little unassuming. You wouldn’t think it would this big but it has a really large upstairs with two bedrooms. The kind of hidden gem about this home is that if you take up the carpets it is all beautiful hardwood floors throughout the house. I say beautiful, I don’t know exactly what’s under the carpet, but from the corners we have pealed up, the hardwood floors look like they are in great condition. We are asking $139,900 right now for the home, which is a pretty good deal actually for a home in this area just in general. I feel like if you remove the carpets, do some painting, do some clean up, the home will have a lot more value. It is a 4-bedroom home with 1 bathroom and it is in a desirable south St. Louis neighborhood. If you are interested in that home or any other deals or homes for yourself or investments, give us a call here at Hermann London at 314-802-0797 and we’d love to work with you. If you have a home to sell, of course give us a call for that too and we can feature it on our podcast or we can get it sold. We’ve been selling a lot or properties lately. When you look at our inventory for our company our inventory is down and that makes me a little sad, but then I look at the fact that so many of our properties are under contract and pending, and that makes more sense about why our inventory is down because most of the homes that we list go under contract really quick. It is hard to keep inventory when everything is selling. I’m going to talk a little about these riders. I want to talk about the riders that we as realtors can add to our sales contracts. I always have to remind everyone that I am not an attorney. These documents do have legal consequences. If you don’t understand then please consult your attorney, of course. I mentioned that there are a few different riders that we typically add to the contract. For example, if you are getting a conventional loan, we will usually add the appraisal rider. The appraisal rider basically protects the buyer to make sure that the home will apprise for at least what the buyer is paying for it, and it doesn’t, they can lower the price, they can walk away, they can come up with the difference, or the deal can just die. We had two listings in the last two weeks that we listed, we got contracts on them from buyers from realtors from other companies, and once the property appraises, they appraise the property for less than what the agreed upon sales price was. You can say a lot of things; is that good for us? Is that bad for us? I think it is nice that our marketing did a great job and we were able to bring a buyer that was willing to pay top dollar for the property. Ultimately it is going to end up being bad for the seller because most likely they are going to end up lowering the sales price for the home, or they can consider trying trying to put the home back on the market and hope a different appraiser gives it a different value, but chances are that the property is going to appraise for about the same price. There is an art to appraisals, not a science, so you never know exactly what it is going to come up to. This appraisal rider form that this particular realtor used on the sales contract did protect their buyer. The seller, our client, did have to end up lowering the price by about $5,000 to be able to sell their home. Unfortunately that’s what they had to do, but in theory they should have never got a contract for the price that they did because the buyer was trying to pay more than what the market value of the home was. The next rider I want to talk about is not the appraisal rider, it is the contingency for sale and closing of buyers property. This is an interesting form because a lot people have a home that they want to sell because they need to buy a new home. I’ve got clients right now that are looking to buy a new home. They want to upgrade. They want to get a bigger home for their family that is growing and of course they have a home that they want to sell first so they don’t get stuck with two mortgage payments. We quickly found a home for them to buy and on our offer we added the contingency for sale and closing of buyer’s property. This form has few interesting nuances to it, even in its title of contingency for sale and closing of buyer’s property. In this case we have their home listed but we do not have it under contract yet, so our contingency is truly for sale, meaning, getting it under contract, and closing, meaning, getting the deal to close of their property. If they would have had it under contract already our offers probably would have been considered stronger because the seller doesn’t have to wonder how long it is going to take for these buyers/sellers to get their home under contract and ultimately sold. Additionally I just wanted to mention one thing about this rider form; it is interesting that it has the same sort of wording that we see in some of our other riders related to short sales, which is that the time frames provided in paragraphs 8, 10, 10a, and 11 of the sales contract, which are things like how long do we have to do our inspection, how long until the municipal inspections start, that type of thing, shall begin when buyer contracts to sell his property referenced in paragraph 1 above or when buyer waives contingency, whichever occurs first. Meaning, when my buyers get their new home under contract they don’t have to actually spend their money on their inspections until they know that they are going to sell their house or at least until they have their home under contract. They can avoid wasting their money if the timing ends up not working out and the seller wants to cancel the contract or kick them out because of this contingency. There is a lot of nuances to all these different forms that we use so it’s always good to always work with a realtor. As far as I know these forms are only available to realtors anyway, and also, typically working with a buyer’s agent doesn’t cost the buyer anything, so they might as well use a realtor. We have access to all these forms so let’s use them. Another rider that is probably under used is called the review of the indentures and restricted covenance rider. Here’s an example of what this rider says: once you have an accepted contract we need to be able to take a look at the home owner’s association documents. If we see any problems in there or if we have any concerns about it then we can terminate the contract and get our earnest money back. This happened in a recent deal. I got a call from one of our agents today actually, and her client was looking to purchase the home, he was going to live in the home for one year, and when that year was up he intending to rent the property out and have it become an investment property for now and forever. When he received the home owner’s association documents he found out that this particular subdivision has a rule that you can’t have any rental properties. Now he knows that he can actually back out of the sales contract if he wants to or he might end up buying the property and living there for a year or however long he wants to and then selling the property because he is actually getting it for a great deal, but because he found that they property would not be able to be rented, just because of the home owner’s association rules, he does have the right to back out of the property because we are withing our timelines. Again, this is the type of thing you want to work with your realtor directly on. The last rider I want to mention is kind of similar to that one. It is a condo rider and basically it states that you need to be able to see the condo association documents and rules before you are firm into your contract because you may found out that it can’t become a rental or you can’t have too many people living in the condo or that you can’t have a barbecue grill on your deck and that is something really important to you. There is a lot of little details that go into writing a contract to protect your clients in the best way and those are just a few examples of some forms that we use to make sure that our client’s best interests are protected. While we are waiting on John, if this is okay with Joey for this production right here, I’m just going to answer the two questions that we got for the week. One of the questions was: Can you do an MHDC deal on a 203k loan? The short answer is no. You may be wondering what is an MHDC deal, but don’t worry, we are going to talk about that in just a second. The second question that we got is relating to an investor that wants to buy a property in University City, and they found out that the property is in the 100 year flood zone, and they are wondering what that means. Also they were concerned about what that is going to do their insurance. Apparantly back in 2008 in University City there was heavy rain and it cause a flood and Missouri Sewer District, or MSD, installed a device in the sewer that is supposed to prevent this from happening. What is this device? This is kind of the question that we got. We actually tapped into one of our agents, Matt Simon, who lives in University City and is familiar with this situation because he has had the problem. I just went over to his house the other day and he told me that his house was flooded so I knew he would be a great person to be able to answer this question, and here is his answer. There are various flood plains throughout St. Louis. They are named for the amount of time they think will pass before the next flood, hence the 100 year flood plain would be a place where a flood could happen once every 100 years. The 100 year flood plain actually does cross through a section of University City, which was surprising to me, and that will require the owner to acquire flood insurance. The price of flood insurance and the process of getting the insurance can be a hassle through the government organization, FEMA, and I believe FEMA might be the only one that actually offers the insurance. Maybe we will have to have an insurance guy on in the future to answer that question for us. As for the sewer, MSD has had several issues with University City, and as the question-asker mentioned, in 2008 there was 4.5 inches of rain within 3 hours and the sewers backed up into people’s basements, so MSD developed a program called SSP, the sewer separation program, for eligible neighborhoods that have been affected by the backups. He happens to live in one of those neighborhoods, University City as I mentioned, and he is having one of these SSP devices put in his yard right now. The way it was explained to him is that it will prevent the main sewer line from backing up into his house by creating a disconnect in the instance that the sewers back up. All of his neighbors had them installed after 2008 and they haven’t had any problems since. I hope that was a helpful answer to the question. We love getting questions so please please send in your questions. Again, Facebook, or call us, or send an email to PODCAST@HermannLondon.com. Next we’re going to call in John Charlton to listen to my rant of the week which is then going to lead into our topic, so here he comes.
Segment 2-Foreclosures, MHDC loans, and transitioning from renting to owning a $200,000 home for $1,000 out of pocket Adam-We just got another question sent into us from Pete Deprado on Facebook and it looks like Pete is looking into buying a foreclosure home and he said he’d be interested in a segment on some of the issues associated with buying a bank-owned home. We’ve got John Charlton sitting in here with us. Our friendly local banker, mortgage broker, loan officer–what do you call yourself, John? John-Senior mortgage banker. Adam-Senior mortgage banker. Okay. Do you want to talk about any of the issues associated with buying a bank owned home? John-Sure. We can talk about it. Do you have any specific questions? Adam-We could talk about it all day couldn’t we? John-We could. Adam-I think some of the issues that I’ve run across with my clients trying to buy a bank owned home is when the home is not in livable condition. You don’t want to give someone a loan on a home if there is no working bathroom or working kitchen. Is that right? John-Yeah, that can be a big problem depending on the type of loan program they are wanting to do because if the property is not livable then almost certainly an FHA loan isn’t going to be something that can be done unless it’s a 203k or something like that. Adam-Oh, so they can get a conventional loan even if there is no working kitchen or bathroom. John- They can…the guidelines on that are going to kind of specific to the investor. Normally you are going to see more of a down payment requirement. They are going to want to know that the buyer has sufficient reserves to do the work or they are doing a home path renovation loan or something of that sort where the actual financing for the renovation is part of the loan. Adam-Just to be clear, it is not because the property is a foreclosure and it doesn’t have a working bathroom that we have a problem. From my perspective the problem is if my client is buying a home from someone privately owned who doesn’t have a working bathroom and we discover this, most likely we can say, “Hey seller! We can’t get a loan unless you fix the bathroom.” John-Exactly. Adam-…and the seller says, “Golly. I guess I’ll have to fix that bathroom.” But in the case of a foreclosure we say, “Hey, bank! Go ahead and fix that bathroom!” and they say, “No. I’m not gonna.” John-And in fact you see this in the listing of a foreclosure as an as-is property, meaning just that, they’re not going to do any work to it. It does depend somewhat what the issue on the property might be. It might be something that hopefully might be seen during an inspection process to there would be contingencies already set up before you get an appraisal done and the appraisor says, “Hey. This is going to have to be appraised subject to a certain amount of work being done.” Adam-Okay. Another thing, we are just sort of talking in general, Pete. We could actually talk about foreclosures, buying foreclosures–I could talk about that all day. We could have a podcast just about that probably. John-Yeah. Adam-You know, talking about what is a short sale, what’s a foreclosure, what’s an REO, how do you buy a property on the the courthouse steps, that kind of thing. One of the things I would like you to know is that most foreclosures are actually considered REO. It is a balance sheet’s term. REO–real estate owned. Most of those are listed by realtors and they are on the websites like realtor.com, HermannLondon.com, and other real estate websites, so if you see someone offering a free foreclosure list, that is really just a marketing gimmick that they are going to pull up from their normal MLS search and give you a list of foreclosures from that. John-…and charge you for it whereas a realtor could just get you that list of… Adam-They might charge you for that. I’ve seen realtors say, “Call me for your free foreclosure list.”, or whatever, and that’s fine. They are just trying to get people that are interested in foreclosures to call them, but essentially my point is that foreclosures are listed on the MLS just like short sales are, just like regular homes are. We can now search, and this happened probably a year or two ago, but we can now search the MLS, realtors can, specifically for foreclosures, or technically, or bank-owned properties. Which is nice. John-Yeah. Adam-If you go to our website and you are searching for properties, you are going to see foreclosures on there too. You can guess it is a foreclosure if you see terms like as-is, corporate owned, or seller to do no repairs. Often times those are foreclosures. Not always but often times those are foreclosures. John-Right. A lot of times we might not see it is missing a bathroom but we might see that there are smaller issues with the property that an appraiser can or cannot notate in an appraisal if it is a small item. For instance, I have a contract going right now and there is a hole in the ceiling. It is not from a water mark or anything but for some reason this property has a random hole in the ceiling. The appraiser called and said he didn’t think it was going to affect the price on the property or the ability to sell the property so it was omitted from the appraisal report. Adam-That’s good. The other question that people ask me a lot about foreclosures is, “Aren’t they a pain? Isn’t that going to cause trouble? Isn’t that going to be a lot of red tape?” Not necessarily really. A foreclosure has already gone through most of the red tape. The bank is agreeing to sell it at this price and if we write an offer it will probably close in a reasonable amount of time. It is the short sale that is going to be a pain. Will you get it in one month? Probably not. Will you get it in two years? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. It is the short sale that can cause more red tape and be a pain. It is still potentially a great deal. We do short sales all the time but there is a big difference between short sales and foreclosures. Foreclosures are not necessarily a pain to buy, especially if it is in decent condition, and a lot of them are. John-Yeah, and I think surplus has something to do with that. I think banks have gotten good at processing foreclosures and have gotten contacts as far as getting those properties listed quicker. There is not as many problematic…there are a ton of properties and the banks don’t have time to deal with all of them now in the market compared to 3 or 4 years ago. Adam-They’ve gotten good at doing their work up front; doing the property preservation, meaning cleaning the property out, getting it boarded up, getting it winterized, getting the water turned off, all that type of thing too. You should see less damage happening to the property from the process of it sitting there for maybe up to a year while the bank figures out what they are going to do with it while it sits on their balance sheet. You’ve heard horror stories about people who have gotten foreclosed on putting concrete down the toilet or that kind of stuff. I guess that could happen. Maybe it could happen. If you’re buying a house on the courthouse steps with no opportunity to inspect it, that might be more of a concern, but we don’t typically deal with people buying homes on the courthouse steps. Typically we deal with people that are buying through our normal process and we will get the opportunity to inspect it. A good inspector is going to find most of those things. We often suggest that they get a lateral line inspection where they stick a camera down the plumbing line and they will find out if there is concrete in there or not. Some people do damage the home. Honestly, most of the people kind of damage more while they are living there. We some fairly nasty homes. Just because you got a foreclosure doesn’t mean that you have a nasty home necessarily. They are in all different conditions. John-Yeah, and on the buying side I would tell you that it is no different than any other purchase. Banks look at collateral to make sure it is good so that they are making a good decision to give you a loan on it. That’s true of any purchase whether it is a foreclosure or any type of purchase. Adam-Thank you for the question, Pete. Now we are going to move on to my rant of the week. I’m not typically the type of person that rants, especially in public like this, but I’m doing a deal right now where I am representing the seller and the buyer is getting their down payment using a program called NACA. Basically it is not very good to work with them. They are taking forever. They are stalling our deal. We don’t have any information. What is going on? Why is this taking two and half weeks extra past the closing date? What are all these rules that you guys have? Who are all these different people involved in the deal? It has not been fun. NACA is bad but down payment assistance programs are not necessarily bad, right, John? John-No. Not necessarily. Grant programs can be difficult to work with if that’s what you are talking about with NACA. There’s a difference between down payment assistance and a grant. Somebody that is looking for a grant has to qualify based on all sorts of criteria. There are down payment assistance loans that have very simple criteria though. That is what our banks tends to focus on. For instance MHDC, which is an acronym which stands for Missouri Housing Development Commission, is basically a down payment assistance loan for a first time home buyer in the state of Missouri. It gives you 3% towards a down payment and it is a forgivable lean for 5 years. It is pretty straight forward. We do a ton of them and they are easy to work with. That is the main thing. Adam-We’ve done a few of these MHDC deals together and they have been pretty easy to work with. Maybe they are not any better than NACA, I don’t know, but the communication is definitely better. John-Yeah. You know what you have pretty fast. That is an important thing because often times circumstances change with loan programs all the time. MHDC has pretty much had the same criteria for the past five years and they are pretty easy to work with. Adam-Okay. One more time. What is MHDC? John-Missouri Housing Development Commission is what it stands for but basically when I say an MHDC loan I’m talking about a down payment assistance loan; an FHA loan… Adam-So I’m still getting my down payment through you, John. MHDC is going to cover my down payment. Do I get my loan from somewhere else? John-No. The loan is still through our company. That MHDC loan is a 5 year forgivable loan that you get from the Missouri Housing Development Comission. Adam-So I’m going to end up with two loans? John-You are going to end up with two loans but the loan to the MHDC, you are not going to make a payment on. It is going to sit in second position as a lean for five years and then it is going to be forgiven in its entirety. Adam-Do I have to live in the home for five years? John-You have to own the home for five years and that is a key distinction because a lot of times people will think, well, we gotta live here for five years. Am I really wanting to live in the same house for five years? That is a long commitment. No. But you do need to own it. Adam-So I could turn it into a rental? John-You could turn it into a rental. The purchase of your next home might be somewhat impacted by having, number one, a whole loan with another house if you’re not renting it already, but yes, you could turn it into a rental property if you decided you needed to move or something like that and you decided to rent for a while you could keep that house. Rent it. It wouldn’t be a problem. Adam-Does MHDC only work if I am getting an FHA loan for 96.5%? John-They actually have programs for VA, for conventional loans, there is a whole gamut of products that they do. We primarily only use it for down payment assistance for a first time home buyer because that is really their strongest program; best interest program that they have. Adam-If I’m a buyer and I call you do I have to have never bought a home before? John-The definition of a new home owner for MHDC is 5 years without being on the title of a property. Adam-Let’s just say I’ve never owned a home before. John-Yeah. You are perfect. Adam-I call you up and say, “Hey, John. I want to buy a house. I’m working with the Hermann London Group as my realtor. I want to buy a house.”, and you are possibly going to say to me, “Great. You have to bring no money to the table.”? John-No. Your minimum skin in the game, so to speak, is a half of a percentage. The normal down payment for an FHA loan is 3.5%. An MHDC loan is a 3% loan so your borrower in that sense would still need a half of a percent down. Adam-So if I am buying a $200,000 house I need to bring $1,000 to the table? John-That is roughly what your minimum contribution to the closing would be. I say minimum because contractually, as a realtor you know this, you can get concessions from the seller. Say they give you 3% concessions to cover your closing costs, then theoretically that borrower buying a $200,000 home could get in for $1,000. Adam-Okay. So even if they are going to pay my 3% closing costs, what is my $1,000 go to then? John-That’s part of your down payment. Adam-Oh, it will go towards my down payment. Okay. John-And the other 3% of the total 3.5% down payment would come from MHDC. They would actually supply that money for you. Adam-If I’m buying a $200,000 home and I really only want to take $1,000 out of my pocket I can have the sellers pay for my closing costs which can include my pre-paids? John-Uh-huh. Adam-My inspections? John-Yeah. Everything. I always explain MHDC to your person who is renting by saying it is the easiest transition from a renter to a buyer that you could have because, if you think about what that down payment signifies to a person, it is pretty much the equivalent to paying rent for a month, and that is usually what we find is that people that are renting for $1,000 a month are probably looking at a $200,000 property. What would normally be your rent payment is now a down payment on a house. You are not going to have a payment for a month and a half or so on the new house. It is a good way for somebody to transition from renting to owning. Adam-And that applies to us because we have working a lot with our renters and people that call in on our rental properties to get them qualified. John-And it applies to anybody you talk to who says, “I want to buy in a year and a half.” Well, why in a year and a half? A lot of times the reason, if you ask somebody that, well they want to save up for a down payment. Okay. What if there is a program where you could buy a house now, get a great interest rate, because the rates on these loans are fantastic, and you don’t have to spend a year and a half trying to put together 5% or 10% for a down payment, which in a year and a half, maybe that house is costing 5% or 10% more. Who knows? Adam-As a side note, what do you say to my aunt Maerze who thinks anyone who doesn’t put down 20% is a sinner–a bad person? John-Rather laugh with the sinner than cry with the saints? I don’t know. Adam-There is two schools of thought; aunt Maerze’s school of thought and my school of thought. What else do I have to do to qualify? Do I have to have a certain amount of money or not a certain amount of money? What are the rules there? John-There are restrictions. The first and most important restriction I would say is they have targeted and non-targeted areas. The majority of the areas you are going to be looking at are non-targeted because it is very specific. New development neighborhoods are targeted by MHDC in growing population centers. That is not going to be a whole lot of places. You can go to their website to find out where they are targeting but if it is a non-targeted property then your max is $265,158 for a single family. Adam-Slow down. Slow down. What?–Oh. Two hundred and sixty five thousand and one hundred and fifty eight dollars. John-That is going to be your maximum loan amount… Adam-Purchase price…in certain areas. John-Uh huh, and it is loan amount not purchase price, but then the same thing with duplexes. It is up at kind of a higher price point. $339,455 is going to be the maximum loan amount for a duplex. Income restrictions also apply. You can do an MHDC loan without the down payment assistance if you make more than $300,000 a year but if you are a single person, your maximum income to get the down payment assistance is going to be $67,000 roughly. If you are a family of three it is going to be $77,000 annual income in order to qualify for the down payment assistance. Adam-I have two questions for you. What do you mean I can do the MHDC loan without the down payment assistance? What is the point of an MHDC if I’m not getting down payment money? John-In some cases MHDC interest rates are better than market interest rates. That was initially the intent of the commission. Why it was created was to give people lower interest options, however the market right now is so low that there are not always the lowest interest loans that you can get. Adam-The lowest interest loan for the full loan? John-Correct. You know, in years past, when interest rates were up in the 6% and 7% range, MHDC loans might have been at 5.5%. That is a fantastic deal and maybe we will be in that environment again. Right now the interest rates are so low with everybody that they often times might be a little higher, might be a little lower depending on the scenario. Adam-I guess I should mention this. Right before we started recording this podcast you said, “Hold on a second. MHDC just changed all the rules so let me look up what the exact ones are right now.” If someone is interested in doing this should they assume what you said is still current? Still correct? John-They should give me a call. These programs do change because the government is trying to fit the pool of people looking to do loans and to buy homes. They do adjust everything at least quarterly. One of the other nice things about MHDC loans is that their interest rates don’t change very often. For instance, depending on the market, sometimes a conventional loan can run, this last year, anywhere from 4% to 5%. Well, MHDC loans all year long have been at 4.25% and they haven’t changed, so they are not going to fluxuate with the market as much. Adam-Okay. Tell me your phone number. John-My direct line is 314-744-7851. Adam-Do you have to give me any other little stuff like I hear in radio commercials? John-…and my NMLS number is 188910. Adam-Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming. I’m just going to make two quick announcements and that will be the end of our show. I see Joey here telling me to wrap it up. Two quick announcements. We are adding a feature to our website. I’ve never seen this on any other website before. When you go to our website and you search for properties, and you are on the property detail page of a home that you are looking at, on the right you are going to see a button that says either make an offer or bid now or something like that. We are literally going to make is so you can make an offer on a home from the website. You don’t have to talk to me at all. We are still tweaking it. We are still testing it so if you are interested in that please go check it out. Click the buttons. See what happens. Give us your feedback. We want to be innovative here and that is one of the things that we are trying to do. And the last announcement is that we are going to have some great guests in the upcoming weeks. I’m going to have a real estate investor on the show. I want to have a stager on the show. I want to have this guy from the Nevada Holding Corporation on the show to talk about why you should open your companies based out of Nevada instead of based out of Missouri. We are going to have some great topics. Please please please submit your questions to our website, to our email, to our Facebook, to our whatever, and don’t forget about the billiards tournament. Come on and get that Bud Light smoker. Thanks once more to our producer, Joey Vosevich, and have a great week. Take care.