All Forum Posts by: Jason Ligon

How many houses have you looked at with your realtor? Have you actually looked at this particular house or just online? The more houses you look at in your target areas the more you get to know the market and what will sell for what price which well help you determine the price you are willing to pay for the property. It's hard for us to suggest a specific price without really knowing that market and the property details. If you are strictly buying this as an investment property then I personally would try to get it as cheaply as possible because your money with investment properties is made at purchase time NOT RESELL. Lots of forums and sites will tell you that the lowest offer HUD will accept on one of their houses is between 85-89% of the listing price. Some automatic computer calculation. Once an offer or more meets the computer generated limit then it goes to the Asset Manager to review the bids that meet the criteria. Then they accept the highest NET offer to HUD. Remember to subtract the seller paid closing costs and buyer agent commission from your offer to get the NET offer to HUD. They only care about what they will NET which makes sense. If you are not under any time constraints to invest and you don't think this property is a good enough deal at listing to 89% of listing then you could wait for HUD to lower the price or just look for other deals in the area.

That's great news Mark! I had a strong feeling in my gut that I was right. But he's the Pro that's been in the game for many years, so I was second guessing myself. There's no guarantee that our bid would even be accepted but I would hate to not even try due to some flub like this. Hopefully it's just a mix up on his part and not intentional. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I get the feeling sometimes that when we find deals as good as this one, that our realtors (we've gone through a couple) try to steer us clear of them. Maybe because they want to jump on the deal or recommend it to a friend. These 3-4 months have been very frustrating but very informative and exciting. I've managed to educate myself on a lot of topics.

Are all bids treated equally within the first 10 days? I think I read somewhere that bids submitted within the first 5 days were opened simultaneously. Then daily after that. But i think it's the first 10 days simultaneously then daily after that.

My wife and I have been looking at houses for about 3-4 months now. This will be our first house and we've been approved for an FHA 203(b) loan. It's been a rollercoaster process for us. We've found 2 houses we liked that eventually didn't work out for various reasons. We've just got back from looking at a HUD house tonight that we love. It rained really hard yesterday and today and we noticed that the basement has a leak on one side of the house. Everything else with the house is great minus some spotty carpet and garage door panel needing repair. Our realtor told us that we would need to go with a conventional loan if we wanted to bid on this house because of the leak in the basement. He said it wouldn't pass inspection with FHA loan. My question is this.... the house is already listed on the hudhomestore. The website says that an apprasial was completed Sept 25th of this year. The house is listed as insurable w/ repair escrow (IE). The property condition summary lists the following garage door needs replacing ($1000) + repair plumbing (water line leaks) ($1000). So that's only $2000 that could be rolled into our 203(b) loan. The question is why would our realtor tells us that it wouldn't pass FHA inspection if it's already been inspected and those were the only two things on the report. Does FHA inspect it more than once. I think they will come out and look at the 2 repairs (garage and plumbing) that would need to be fixed within 90 days of closing. Tonight is the 5th day of bid submissions which I think would give us the best opportunity of getting the house if we were to put in a bid tonight (right?). Is our realtor right or does he have it wrong?

Thank you for your reply. I appreciate the information. I wanted to do the FHA 203K but we just missed the credit mark. Yeah I know that's pretty horrible but it is what it is. So we are just doing the regular FHA loan. I don't know how we are going to finance the home repairs if we end up finding a house that needs some repairs. I guess I will just end up working a couple part time jobs and saving money until I can afford to do a rehab project and just do one little rehab project at a time.

Hello all,

This is my first post on the forum. My wife and I hope to be purchasing our first home within the next few months. We found a mortgage broker and he has come back to us with 3 different FHA loan options. The first option is for lets say $100K at %5.858 APR the second option is for $75K at %6.142 APR and the third option is for $50K at %6.458. I find it puzzling that the APR increases as the amount we would borrow decreases. Is that normal? Is that just the lender trying to make as much money as they can regardless of the loan amount? I would think that because we would be borrowing less, it would be less risk to the bank and we would get the same or lower rate as the highest loan amount of %5.858. Why is the percentage going up as the loan amount goes down? We would ideally like to get as nice a house for as cheap as possible. This almost discourages that idea.