The government thinks that Americans are sorely lacking when it comes to key homebuying information. It’s hard to say whether that’s true of the Costa Mesa homebuying population—but Fannie Mae’s latest study explains some good reasons why it might be.
In Fannie’s recently issued publication, 3,600 respondents were ‘largely unsure’ or just plain wrong about current homebuying realities. This, despite the significance of homebuying as the most important purchase most people make. Homebuying is also such an infrequent transaction most people don’t focus on data when it’s available.
Another contributing factor is “a fundamental lack of financial literacy across the country.”
The majority of those quizzed hadn’t a clue about credit score
Long before well-prepared Costa Mesa homeowners arrive at the signing table, they will have been aware of the factors mortgage lenders pay attention to—foremost among which is their bill-paying history. For years, they will have avoided making late payments—or underpayments. They will have corrected erroneous negatives on their credit reports and straightened out any historical inaccuracies.
If they have read up on how home loans are originated, they will know that a second weighty factor is “amounts owed”—but that’s a term that can be easily misunderstood. It turns out to include more than the term implies.
You’d think that “amounts owed” would be a simple dollar amount. If John and Jenny Smith have credit card debt totaling $8,000 and a car
Last year, Costa Mesa readers started reading about real estate sales transacted in bitcoin. Since Costa Mesa real estate changes hands through transactions involving six- or seven-figure dollar amounts, the idea of actually completing sales in the mysterious new digital coinage was novel enough to get a lot of attention. “Will Bitcoin Revolutionize How Real Estate is Bought and Sold?” asked NAR.com this past February. The answer was maybe, but probably not in a meaningful way—at least not any time soon. So Costa Mesa homeowners needn’t feel that they are likely to be left out of some momentous advantage if they don’t constantly track bitcoin’s value gyrations. But there is a related phenomenon that could prove to be more of a Costa Mesa real estate
20501 Callieburn, Huntington Beach Sat & Sun 1-4 PM
3058 N Westhaven, Orange
Sun 1-4 PM
We are built on a philosophy of Heritage & Hustle L3 is a full service real estate agency with a regional office located in the heart of #CostaMesa, offering a wide-array of custom services to meet their clients’ needs with roots in the community since 1976. It’s L3 mission to provide trusted, convenient, responsive service to ensure clients enjoy their real estate experience. L3 was originally formed to offer personal, concierge-level service as an alternative to the large, nationally based real estate companies. From
As with any momentous decision, settling on when to sell your Costa Mesa house can take time—and even then, acting on the decision can be slowed by extraneous factors. Who doesn’t have local obligations to deal with and Costa Mesa friends and neighbors who’ll need to be reassured that your relationship isn’t going to be irredeemably severed? Acting on a decision to sell your Costa Mesa house can seem to be the real estate equivalent of moving an ocean liner with a single tugboat: very slow going. Even so, there are persuasive reasons why you might want to move the process along more quickly than momentum would dictate. Recently some of those reasons were laid out in Realtor, the official magazine of the National Association of REALTORS®. It’s
20501 Callieburn, Huntington Beach Fri 10:30AM -1 :30PM & Sat & Sun 1-4 PM
3058 N Westhaven, Orange Sat & Sun 1-4 PM
We are built on a philosophy of Heritage & Hustle L3 is a full service real estate agency with a regional office located in the heart of #CostaMesa, offering a wide-array of custom services to meet their clients’ needs with roots in the community since 1976. It’s L3 mission to provide trusted, convenient, responsive service to ensure clients enjoy their real estate experience. L3 was originally formed to offer personal, concierge-level service as an alternative to the large, nationally based
If you’ve been contemplating selling your Costa Mesa home, if you came across last week’s USA Today article that found “home sales are slowing,” it might make you think twice. You couldn’t be faulted for jumping to the conclusion that slowing national sales means tough sledding for selling Costa Mesa homes—but that takeaway is almost certainly wrong. The reasons are tied to the nature of the market—specifically, to this year’s Costa Mesa market. It is true that in some slow markets, sellers find themselves at a disadvantage. That’s the case when a sales slowdown is due to a national economic outlook that makes consumers nervous, or to financial turmoil like runaway inflation, or to other general conditions that drive down the number of eager
We are built on a philosophy of Heritage & Hustle L3 is a full service real estate agency with a regional office located in the heart of #CostaMesa, offering a wide-array of custom services to meet their clients’ needs with roots in the community since 1976. It’s L3 mission to provide trusted, convenient, responsive service to ensure clients enjoy their real estate experience. L3 was originally formed to offer personal, concierge-level service as an alternative to the large, nationally based real estate companies. From its small beginnings of only two employees, L3 has grown to a full staff of 20 serving over 300 clients a
It may sound paradoxical, but one proven way to sell your Costa Mesa home is to make it boring…or at least, a little bit more boring. The principle here stems from buyer psychology—specifically, the difference between a house that would make a great tourist attraction and one whose first impression is more apt to lead to a sale. At first blush, the flashy version might seem to be not only memorable, ¬¬¬but more valuable as well. But that’s not typically true. A potential buyer can remember your house in two different ways. One memory might be of striking red walls and purple tile that call to mind images from an architectural magazine. That sort of memory will be vivid, but it doesn’t necessarily help to sell your home. A different type of memory
We are built on a philosophy of Heritage & Hustle L3 is a full service real estate agency with a regional office located in the heart of #CostaMesa, offering a wide-array of custom services to meet their clients’ needs with roots in the community since 1976. It’s L3 mission to provide trusted, convenient, responsive service to ensure clients enjoy their real estate experience. L3 was originally formed to offer personal, concierge-level service as an alternative to the large, nationally based real estate companies. From its small
