On July 1, 1973 the Current Use Law became effective in New Hampshire. The Current Use law was designed to keep New Hampshire’s rural character in tact while allowing owner’s to use the land quoting from the preamble to the law itself: “It is hereby declared to be in the public interest to encourage preservation of open space, thus providing a healthful and attractive outdoor environment for work and recreation of the state’s citizen’s, maintaining the character of the state’s landscape, and conserving the land, water, forest, agricultural and wildlife resources.”
The effect of the Current Use law has been to provide a lower tax rate on larger tracts of land so that property owners would not be forced to subdivide and sell off their property in order to cope with large property tax bills. By keeping land in an undeveloped condition family farms have been preserved as well as woodlands, wet lands and other tracts that might well have been lost over the last thirty-nine years.
Over half on the land in New Hampshireis enrolled in the Current Use program and it has been the foundation of the State of New Hampshireprivate property based land conservation program.
The following are characteristics of the State of New Hampshire’s Current Use Program:
Generally speaking a parcel must be of at least ten acres, exceptions to this are wetlands of any size, tree farms of any size and parcels of less than ten acres that produce more than $2,500 in agricultural products. Open undeveloped land that is less than ten acres as well as any area covered by buildings does not qualify for Current Use.
If an owner acquires abutting parcels of less than ten acres the additional parcels can be added and would qualify for Current Use or if an owner has a number of abutting parcels of less than ten acres each but the entire contiguous amount owned is ten or more acres then the property is eligible for Current Use.
What is a contiguous parcel? Contiguous parcels under the Current Use Law are defined by the NHSPACE.org website as “more than one parcel of land, which is connected, even if a highway, rail bed, river or water body divides it. This means land that touches any of your property boundaries, or is across the road or on the other side of a pond, stream or river, on both sides of railroad tracks, or across a political boundary.”
If a property owner enrolls his property in Current Use it does not mean his land is now “Open to the Public”. When a property owner enrolls his property in Current Use it is still private property – remember the focus of this law has been keeping New Hampshirelarge undeveloped tracts in private hands – the property owner still has the right to determine how his property will be used just as he would if it were not in Current Use.
For more details on New Hampshire’s Current Use Law visit NHSPACE.org
By Dick Thackston CRB, ABR, ABRM
Broker NH, MA & VT
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Keene - R.H. Thackston & Company REALTORS with offices in Keene, Bellows Falls and Winchester announced the following personnel updates.
Dick Thackston, the company’s principal broker, received special recognition from the New Hampshire Association of REALTORS Honor Society. Earlier this year Thackston was made a lifetime member of the New Hampshire Association of REALTORS Honor Society. Every year the New Hampshire Association of REALTORS Honor Society recognizes the REALTORS within individual local REALTOR Boards for their outstanding participation in both civic and REALTOR affairs by using a points system for the various activities that individual members participates in over the course of a year. Thackston was recognized by the Honor Society as the highest number of points earned for any member of the New Hampshire Commercial Investment Board of REALTORS, (NHCIBOR) were he is a primary member. Thackston has been a member of NHCIBOR for several years; this is his first year as NHCIBOR’s high point winner for the Honor Society. Thackston is also a member of the Monadnock Region Board of REALTORS were he has also been recognized for earning the highest points in the past. Thackston will be serving as Treasurer of the Monadnock Board of REALTORS in 2012 and is a member of the New Hampshire Association of Realtors, the National Association of REALTORS, National Council of Residential Brokers and Real Estate Buyer’s Agents Council. Thackston is an accredited real estate instructor by the New Hampshire Real Estate Commission and a licensed real estate broker in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont.
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By Dick Thackston CRB, ABRM, ABR
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has begun sending out letters to borrowers who have faced foreclosure since 2009. It is estimated that approximately four million borrowers foreclosures may have been mishandled between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2010. Federal regulators and most of the nation’s largest home mortgage servicers announced earlier this week.
Cases will be reviewed by Federal Regulators as a result of an agreement established in April of this year in which the nation’s fourteen top mortgage servicers agreed with regulators to hire independent consultants to evaluate foreclosure processes and determine if borrowers had experienced financial injury as a result of errors or abuses by servicers. It will be up to the independent consultants to evaluate cases and determine compensation if any due to borrowers.
The Comptroller of the Currency as well as the Federal Reserve will be sending mails between now and the end of the year to notify potential victims of their rights. A mass media campaign is planned as well to direct borrowers to the website www.IndependentForeclosureReview.com or the toll free number 888.952.9105. All requests for review must be submitted by April 30, 2012.
The mortgage servicers and the government agreed that the servicers would pay all the expenses associated of setting up the program. Under government supervision they have hired eight independent consultants that have designed the program to be at no cost to the borrowers. The consultants have set up the website and call center noted above. The program is designed to encourage borrowers from all lenders to use one portal and there is uniform branding and product design to be clearer in the public mind than a number of different sites would be to the public.
There are several basic patterns that the consultants will be looking at to determine wrongdoing and these include miscalculation of fees, a foreclosure that happened while a borrower was under bankruptcy court protection and the most common one in my experience a foreclosure that was done while a borrower was waiting for a response on a loan modification.
This program is a direct result of last year’s robo signing scandal and the investigations that followed. About a year ago it came to public light that many mortgage servicers were cutting corners on due process when foreclosing on properties and either not properly executing documents or simply faking documents to expedite the large number of foreclosures they had on their hands.
This program is a good solution to an unfortunate situation. Objectively, most of these borrowers were in fact behind and many if not most were ready and willingly left their properties to begin over, however that does justify short cutting the legal protection of property rights built into our system of property ownership over the last thousand years from Common Law to Current Law.
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By Dick Thackston CRB, ABRM, ABR
The actual answer to the question in our title is very little.
From the street level- were you and I both are as buyers, sellers and REALTORS – mostly what it tells us is it’s not our imagination the people who make up these statistics only give a portion of the story or leave large parts of the story out.
I have absolutely no doubt that Home Sales Dropped 3%! In fact I’m sure of it!
But here’s what I think happened. The majority of sales at this point are in fact bank owned properties and Short Sales. For the last several months a large percentage of REO’s have been tied up either with Title Problems and/or litigation. The stream of buyers in the market while not as large as it once was seems constant at this point. Since early this summer there has been a decline in available REO inventory for these two reasons. Value Conscious Home Buyers have been out looking but have not been able to find satisfactory properties or the properties they have found have been snarled up with Title Problems.
Why, you may ask, did these buyers just not buy regular retail properties on the market from non-REO sources? The simple answer is they are waiting. They are waiting for REO inventory to become available, they know it’s coming and they are VERY PRICE CONCIOUS. The majority of retail home sellers and their agents still have an unrealistic expectation about pricing and many have had their properties on and off the market at the same or very nearly the same price for several years. It’s just not going to happen. Home Buyers in this market have lots of information, most of it good, some of it bad, but it’s more information than any other group of Home Buyers has had in history before making a decision to purchase, and Home Buyers are not betting the market changes anytime soon.
The good news is that as the litigation and Title Problems now seem to be clearing more inventory is coming on the market and lenders have started to embrace the short sale process rather than fight it so Short Sales are becoming more far more viable then they were even a year or so ago. To be sure lenders are not going to leave money on the table or sell for less than current fair market value but the approach they are taking now seems like a good thing for everybody and that doesn’t get picked up in the statistics.
Bottom line is the viability of the inventory is improving and buyers are responding even though we are likely years out from an actual fix in the housing market.
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By Dick Thackston CRB, ABRM, ABR
Since the down turn started in the third quarter of 2005, (yes that’s right it’s actually been over six years if your benchmark is real estate brokerage), and the economic seizures started happening almost daily after November 2008, I’ve actually had some excellent experiences helping sellers and lenders work out a short sale.
Initially mortgage lenders were less likely to work out a short sale for a number of reasons: they didn’t believe the property was upside down, mortgage insurance would cover their losses if it went to foreclosure and/or they were simply too overwhelmed with the volume of business collapse that they couldn’t function efficiently and make decisions.
In 2007 I began the process of helping people work out a Short Sales on their homes if they were over mortgaged. One of the most successful short sales I’ve done was a house inKeene,New Hampshire. The owner had purchased the home about twenty years before he called me. He had tried selling the home himself and tried a Virtual Real Estate brokerage from outside the area with no local support. All the time he tried this, his home was sinking in value.
Why, one might wonder, if he had owned this home for over twenty years would he owe more than he paid? Well, actually what he had done was borrow money incrementally over the years to put his children through collage and purchase each of them cars when they graduated. He literally used his home as a savings account.
The biggest hurdle in the transaction was the owner, he just couldn’t believe that his home would be worth the loan balances plus and additional ten thousand dollars so that he could start his life over again someplace else. Once I was able to get him to understand that the value just wasn’t there, and he agreed to price the house to the market comparable prices in his neighborhood at the time, we got some OK sales traffic and ultimately an offer. I presented the offer to both the owner and his lender. I obtained the owners detailed financial information and the bank agreed to accept the short sale. Little or no emotion, very rational, and very efficient successful transaction.
The entire transaction from day of listing to day of closing the short sale, including negotiating with lender, was about five months or one hundred fifty days to closing.
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By Dick Thackston CRB, ABRM, ABR
Short Sale Success Story:
Short sales have become a major part of my companys business.
In 2007 I realized that more and more of the owners I interviewed during listing appointments were helplessly under water on the loan on their home.
During the Savings & Loan crisis of the late 80s and early 90s I first experienced short sales. Back then, it was mostly small business owners who had second business loans against their home and as the economy slowed, their businesses slowed or failed, and the bank came after their houses. This is where I learned to do short sales. Up until then, personally, I had never even imagined not being able to sell a house and not clear the loan balances and I had been in the business over ten years at that point.
So I learned to negotiate with lenders to help them understand Fair Market Value and accept the reality of the situation – not the ideal for anyone, but half a loaf is better than none.
So when I started to see homeowners under water again four years ago I felt it would be important to start trying to negotiate short sales – again. Unfortunately both home owners and lenders were still stubbornly unrealistic about the situation at that time. Many of the homeowners I initially advised to consider a short sale ultimately lost the property singing the “I need, I own, I won’t” chorus regardless of market realities, or they spent valuable months and years following the market down. Needlessly doing needless damage to their credit by loosing their home to foreclosure, most had they followed my initial advice would have in fact walked away from a sales with some money, less than they had expected but some money – far better than a short sale or total loss through foreclosure.
Some of the short sales I initially proposed to banks wound up going to foreclosure as well. Costing the lender $50,000 to $100,000 in equity that could have preserved for their company, however banks had a problem too because many had just done refinances or made new loans they would say something like “we have an appraisal that is only six months old” not recognizing how quickly the market was changing in those days. What a tragedy! What a tragedy for all parties!
So now Short Sales are commonly accepted as better than foreclosure and few, if any, lenders are waiting for the market to recover. The biggest issue with Short Sales remains sellers that are too slow to take action. I got a call today from a seller that is schedule for foreclosure sale in ten days. He turned down a short sale about a year and a half ago and now he wants to try and find a buyer and complete a short sale negotiation in ten days? Not going to happen. I suggested that he simply needs to plan on the foreclosure and arrange to move out of the house. Banks at this point are far more realistic than sellers and far more prone to look realistically upon a short sale and work on it realistically. Bank of America and Citibank have made tremendous improvements in their systems for handling short sales. In both cases they have gotten to be the best in the business to deal with, when a few years ago I really don’t think they allocated any serious resources to the Short Sale process.
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The Great Recession that has shaken the American Economy and Housing Market over the last five years has taken many would be home buyers out of the market and loaded the Home Buyer psyche with skepticism however it has not generated an increase in the demand for buyer brokers. In fact if anything the willingness of buyers to contract with Buyer Brokers appears to be in decline and the willingness of agents and agencies to provide buyer brokerage services appears to have declined.
Buyer Brokerage, properly understood by the consumer and properly handled by the Buyer Broker is an excellent program and an excellent service for any home buyer in today’s market.
The top ten things when getting involved in Buyer Brokerage follow:
# 1. Find a Buyer Broker that you feel you can know like and trust. This person is going to need to have both your attention and confidence. Remember you’re not hiring them to be your best friend you’re hiring them to help you make solid business decisions.
# 2. Understand that you are HIRING the Buyer Broker which means you will be responsible for PAYING the Buyer Broker. Most agents will be happy to accept as compensation whatever fee is offered through their local MLS however sometimes listing brokers will not pay a fee or will not pay a reasonable fee and it will be your responsibility to handle this cost. Discuss this in detail when you hire the Buyer Broker.
#3. ONLY HIRE A BUYER BROKER WITH TRAINING IN BUYER BROKERAGE. Lots of agents and agencies will agree to be paid as a buyer broker but very few have actually training in Buyer Brokerage. The top level of training for a Buyer Broker is an Accredited Buyer Representative Manager a designation offered exclusively through the National Association of Realtors, Real Estate Buyer Agent Council.
#4. Have some idea of what you want and were you want to live. It’s the Buyer Broker’s job to help you figure out the best value for you but you need to understand your own needs and wants so the Buyer Broker can help you figure things out.
#5. Listen to the Buyer Broker. Most Buyer Brokers can send you to good service providers: Loan Officer’s, Title Companies, Home Inspectors etc and do so to help you get good service – no other reason, really.
#6. Find out if your chosen Buyer Broker requires a retainer and how that’s handled. Many Buyer Broker’s require a retainer when you contract for services. Most refund that after a successful closing, some do not establish how this item is handled when you sign your contract.
#7. Establish the level of service you expect and the level of service your Buyer Broker is ready willing and able to provide. Some buyer brokers will check zoning, building permits and title issues; some will not work with For Sale by Owner and non-MLS listings be clear about how these issues are handled.
#8. Establish an exit plan. Sometimes relationships just don’t work out or sometimes your situation will just change. Be clear at the beginning of your relationship with the Buyer Broker how things can be ended if you don’t feel the relationship is working out.
#9. Understand the agency laws in your state. Every state has different rules governing the actions and relationships of the real estate agents with the public – no two are exactly the same.
#10. Make sure you know who the boss is. When contracting any licensed professional for services make sure you know who they report to and who regulates Buyer Brokerage in your state. There is NO STATE where Buyer Brokerage is regulated by the REALTORS.
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By Dick Thackston
Whether the US Economy is entering or has entered a double dip is a hard call and seems less than clear to most of us. Remember as President Nixon famously said over forty years ago: “Unemployment’s a matter of perspective which mostly depends on whether you’re working or not.”
Happily, New Hampshire and Vermont are among the most economically successful states in the country at this time. New Hampshire gained approximately 12,000 jobs from the peak of unemployment and Vermont has gained 5,700 in the same time frame. To be sure both states still have a net loss since 2008 however both states show that they are making the long crawl back from the bottom. New Hampshire’s economy is outperforming the US economy overall by adding jobs faster which has lead to increasing income and spending and our lower unemployment and is likely to do so in the foreseeable future according to most Economists.
So where’s housing?
Why aren’t prices stable and buyer’s buying at such low interest rates?
House prices have fallen about 20% overall in New Hampshire: more in the poorer areas and on poor quality properties and less in the wealthier areas and better quality properties. The number of homes available for sale in New Hampshirehas ranged from twelve to sixteen months worth of inventory over the last three years and seems to remain in that range.
Why is that?
If homes are selling at some pace why can’t we get ahead and drive the amount of inventory down to a more manageable backlog and generate some appreciation and good news? There are several critical factors: consumer age, nature of inventory, consumer confidence and banking regulation.
Since the year 2000 the populations of New HampshireandVermonthave seen their highest growth rate in the categories ages 55-64 and 65+. This seems to be driven by two major dynamics. The low rate of economic growth means younger families are not as attracted to the region as they might be to other more dynamic regions and the tax climate is very favorable to wealthier households that tend to be older. Older consumers tend to not spend as much in general and tend to not be as mobile in housing. They tend to stay put reducing the velocity of sales in the region.
The inventory of available homes in our region tends to be of poor quality over all – to be sure there are many fine homes in excellent condition available – which generate little or no interest in housing consumers of any demographic. During the housing bubble these homes sold at unreasonable high prices because they might be the only property available to many consumers most of whom might have been better off without the property. Many of these properties have no future and this is the range where we see sales in the region in the < $50,000 range. The prices often reflect lot cost minus the price of removing existing structures. Even at that low price level there is very limited demand and these properties are likely to remain a glut on the market statistically for years not months.
Consumer confidence remains weak. If economic uncertainty is to remain the ruling dynamic for the foreseeable future is it any wonder that household savings is likely to continue increase dynamically? Is it any wonder that large corporations are mimicking households as a rule and holding on to large amounts of cash at a time when lending is not guaranteed to be available to even the most qualified of borrowers?
Banks have positive economic incentives to hold up foreclosures and release them onto the market slowly. The longer banks hold delinquent properties off the market the longer they can put off recognizing losses so they look better to both regulators and investors but more significantly they aren’t forced to compete with themselves and there is an increasing trend among lenders to work out short sales with their delinquent accounts. Most industry analysts in the mortgage banking industry expect a surge in short sales in the next twelve to eighteen months. Shortsales reduce lender losses by so estimates as much as $50,000 per property and is far better from a public relations point of view with the consumer that has is over mortgaged.
So what’s the best plan for the average consumer at this time? For seller’s it’s simple: be realistic about your price; if you’re over mortgaged select a REALTOR with success handling short sales and begin working with your lender early in the process. This is likely to allow you to obtain the best terms from both your lender and the home buying public. For buyer’s it’s more complicated: understand what you really want and can afford; get pre-approved by a lender early in the process – bank owned properties and shortsales won’t normally consider any offer from a buyer that can’t produce a pre-approval from a lender with a contract; and most importantly understand that the really inexpensive properties are mostly trash and will not be financeable – there are no free lunches in housing!
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By Dick Thackston
Distressed properties are the biggest part of the real estate business today. Of the distressed properties that are on the market and selling now the majority are not bank owned REO properties rather the majority of distressed properties on the market and selling today are “Short Sales”. Short sales are properties where the home owner owes more than the current market value of the home and is attempting to sell the property and have the bank write down the loan balance on the home.
Generally, Short Sales properties are in better condition and are still financeable with normal condition than properties that have gone to foreclosure because the home owner still lives in the home and maintains it as their own. These seller’s generally are looking to maintain their credit and are just people caught in the trap created by a declining real estate market over the last five years and have to move on for one reason or another.
National data services show that 12% of all homes that closed nationwide in the second quarter of 2011 were short sales; that’s up from 10% from 10% for the same period in 2010! Effectively a 20% increase.
The reason for the increase appear to be multifold: it appears that more home owners have come to accept that their home will not increase in value without improvements in the property or the economy that are outside their ability or control and their reason’s for needing to move generally revolve around job and/or family changes as well as just a plan old need to move on.
Another major factor in this phenomenon has been banks & lenders that hold mortgages. Banks & lenders have come around 180 degrees from where they were five years ago. Five years ago very few banks & lenders would even consider a short sale, they like most home owners expected prices to maintain or recoup in a few months, but today they have come to realize increasingly that it is in their best interest to work with troubled home owners to resolve mortgages where the homeowner is upside down on the loan. To be sure this has resulted from pressure from the government in Washington as much as from market forces but overall it is good news and likely to pave the way to a more stable and prosperous housing market in the future but getting the dead weight of over mortgaged homes through the system. As an example Bank of America has announced that it expects to complete around 100,000 short sales in 2011!
The key to a successful short sale experience is consistently an agent who has the background and experience to complete a short sale it is not an easy process even now. It generates many times the paperwork and problems of any other sale. The team at R.H. Thackston & Company has been completing short sales since the Savings & Loan crisis of the early 1990’s and has the experience and knowledge to serve you in managing a distressed property sale. Since the beginning of 2011 we have completed on average 3.5 distressed property sales every month.
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By Dick Thackston
Its a buyer’s market – true – but what does that mean to you if you’re a home buyer? Are you looking to get “a great deal” and tell all your friends that you bought a house from a bank for $20,000 or are you looking to buy a home that you can live in and build equity and “have a life” over a reasonable period of time? Do you have the temperament of or for being an investor or do you not have the willingness or ability to take risks and experience losses? These are all REALLY, Really important questions you need to be able to answer if you thinking you want to play in this market.
First let’s consider what’s a good deal. Certainly you can buy a house for under $50,000. Many properties are being sold for small fractions of what they last sold for or were mortgaged for at the top of the market. DO NOT BE CONFUSED ABOUT WHAT THIS MEANS! These homes are in poor condition; most were not really qualified for the mortgages they had based upon condition but one of the characteristics of the B & C lending market of a few years ago was that they did not require homes to be up to speed. The loans were made on the hope that the borrowers would fix them up or that the housing market would inflate further or more likely both.
To buy these homes now for the most part you need lots of cash: cash to buy them and cash to renovate them. You also need to know that you may be years from getting your cash back. Normally lenders will require that your ownership and repairs be “seasoned” for at least a year before they will allow a new loan. Also, you will need to know that just because you want to make certain repairs that will “make it yours” it does not mean that you will be adding significant or any value in today’s real estate market. Roof’s, septic systems, electrical work, plumbing are all things that are expected by most home buyers to be in fair or better condition when purchasing home so you don’t get extra credit for those.
What if you miscalculate on your repairs? You eat the loss. That’s why these are called investor specials you and can win or loose. I work with several teams of investors who take on these projects. They are well capitalized and they have a plan for doing the work, they have studied each property sixteen ways from Sunday and if doesn’t look like it will work exactly as they have calculated they don’t do the deal. If your plan is to buy and work on it, will you really be prepared to live in a construction site for the next three to five years? The work always takes more time and money than the average buyer expects – even in normal times – and these are not normal times – and what typically happens is that people get bored or overwhelmed and the sell at or slightly above their costs and move on because home prices have inflated. There is no expectation that home prices will be inflating anytime soon. Most experts plan on housing to stay about where it is right now for at least another three or four years. It may get worse first.
Buying the house you want may prove to be a paradox. The value of well maintained homes has not declined as much as the averages would lead you to believe. Why, you may ask, is this? Simple if people who bought their homes in the last ten years, for all the right reasons, still have their jobs, still like their neighbors aren’t dead or getting a divorce why would they sell in this market? They don’t. Remember that in our area,Central New England, unemployment is some of the lowest in the entire country – generally under 5%.
When you hear about the million houses projected to be going to foreclosure over the next year that sounds like a big number, but remember that home sales in this country have regularly topped 5 million in the last generation, so while the number of foreclosures is huge relative to all the homes that exist in this country that are privately owned, it’s a relatively small number. The truth here is that as a country we never expected to have any significant number of homes go to foreclosure.
What does that mean for you as a home buyer in this market? It means that if you want a home now you can get a good value but you need to know who you are how, much you want to spend, and how long you want to stay in a home before you think you might need to or want to sell. Prudence is certainly important and the most important aspects of buying a home in today’s world are that you plan on using it as a house not a piggy bank and know that it’s a place to live for three or more years, maybe the rest of your life, maybe a decade, maybe till the kids are out of school. You won’t make $10,000 trouble free dollars by painting the bedrooms neutral colors and selling the house in a year.
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