George's Blog

The three things that have the biggest impact on your credit are Credit History, Available Credit, and Years of Credit.

1)   Credit History:  Represents 35% of your Credit Score, and it is the history of how well you have paid your bills during the time you have had credit.  However, late payments, charge offs, or collections that are over two years have very little impact on your current credit score.  In fact it is better to not pay off a collection that is over two years old, because if you do you will bring the last reporting date current again which will be a recent late payment.

2)    Available Credit:  Represents 30% of your Credit Score.  Available Credit is just what it says, it is the amount of credit that you have available to you.  For example the number of credit cards you have, and how  much of the credit limit on the cards are still available to you.  If you are over 30% of the available credit on a credit card it  has a negative impact on your credit.  So a quick way to improve your credit is pay down your credit cards to less that  30%.  This has a huge quick improvement on your scores.

3)   Years of Credit:  Other wise know as length of credit, and it represents 12% of your Credit Score.  This simply is the number of years that you have had credit, the long the number of years with good credit the higher the score.

Also one other point closing out unused credit cards does not help your credit.  You are better off keeping them open, because it adds to your available credit.

I hope this helps.

Even though FHA made major change to their appraisal requirements, some Realtors are still concerned about Loans that require an FHA Appraisal.  Most of these Realtors still have concerns because they are not aware of the changes that occurred in January of this year, or they have not seen these change first hand yet.

I have done several CHFA, and FHA Loans since these change and I can truly say that there is very little difference between an FHA Appraisal and a Conventional Appraisal today.  Since Januare I have only had one CHFA Loan that need repairs, and they wer minor.  Here are some of the major changes that occurred in January:

Examples of MINOR property conditions that no longer require AUTOMATIC repair for existing properties are:

• Examples of Missing handrails;

• Cracked or damaged exit doors;

• Cracked window glass;

• Minor plumbing leaks (such as leaky faucets);

• Defective floor finish or covering (badly soiled carpeting);

• Rotten or worn out counter tops;

• Crawl Space with debris or trash;

• Defective paint surfaces in homes constructed Post 1978

Examples of tests that may no longer be REQUIRED:

• Wood Destroying Infestation Report-required if there is evidence of READILY OBSERVABLE ACTIVE infestation;

• Well (Individual Water Test)-Required if there is knowledge that well water may be near sources of contamination;

• Septic Test-required if evidence of system failure.

 
As you can see these were major changes!!

This Fall is a great time for First Time Home Buyers to purchase their first home.  Rates on conventional programs continue to drop, and CHFA is at 5.5% for the third straight week. With these low rates buyers can afford to by bigger more expensive houses than they could have this summer.  With sellers motivated to negotiate on the price of their house, this is not the time to buy instead of waiting for spring.  By spring rates maybe on their way back up again, and more buyers in the market,  making sellers less willing to accept offer that they will probably accept today. Those of us in the Real Estate and Mortgage Business should be sharing this positive news with our customers, instead of just letting them hear the negative news the News Media is putting out.

One more person that I invited to join the website joined today.  Lisa Bookman has recently joined McCue Mortgage and is already proving to be an assit for McCue Mortgage in Western Connecticut.  

Recently the News Media has been reporting that Home Sales have dropped from last year, and that housing prices are going down.  Personally my activity in Pre-Approving Buyers is the highest it has been over the last 12 months, and also the number of loans that I am doing.  Also if housing prices are going down, it is only because Sellers were listing their home at prices way above what they should have been, and now they are listing them at modest increases from the last house that sold in their neighborhood.  The house they are selling is still selling for more than the last house sold in the neighborhood, but at a reasonable increase.  So if Home Sales are slowing down, you could not tell it by my activity!!!

Today three of the people I invited to join this website accepted the invitation, Sharon Smith, Matt Mauro, and Wendy Cambell.  I hope that this site proves to be a good resource for them.