Mortgage rates returned to their all time low of 4.78% last week. Mortgage rates were at 5.79% a year ago, but this week they returned to their all time low. A person taking a mortgage out today will save $100 off of a $200,000 mortgage compared to the high rate we hit back in mid-June.

Fifteen-year fixed rate mortgages topped out at 4.29% for the week.

Unfortunately, new mortgage applications are down 4.5% over the last week.

With mortgages this low, why aren’t we seeing increases in mortgage applications? You would think this kind of Mortgage marketplace would be increasing the market for Homes for Sale.

What we really need today, is job creation. We need to quit focusing on stimulating the housing market or individual sectors like auto manufacturing, Banking or Insurance. We need to find ways to create new jobs and stimulate the entire economy. Only then will buyers return to the housing market in force and make it so that the real estate market will begin to truly find its footing.

Thanksgiving. A day for reflection, thought and family. You may have flown on the “busiest travel day” of the year (according to the reports I saw, the day before Thanksgiving is the 221st busiest day for airports), or you may have driven hundreds or thousands of miles to be with your family. Perhaps you drove across town. Regardless of how you got there, I hope you are able to be with your family today. I hope they all share with you how thankful they are to have you in their lives and that you are able to share with them how thankful you are for them.

Enjoy the day and enjoy your family.

Reports today indicate that almost 25% of mortgages are under water. What does that mean? It means that if you wanted to sell your house today, you would have to write a check at the closing table.

What does it really mean to you? Well, that depends on you. Have you owned your home for a while? Are you weathering the recession? Do you have a driving need to move?

If you have owned your home for a while and have not refinance, there is a good chance you are not “under water”. While your home may have lost value, perhaps a significant amount, but that doesn’t necessarily spell disaster. The housing market went through this back in the early 80′s. Then, things turned around and soon homes were valued higher than ever. And, in the 80′s, mortgage rates were at all time highs. Nothing like the lows we have seen for the last decade.

If you are weathering the recession, and are still able to make your payments, it probably means even less to you. Unless the housing market takes another significant downward turn, you can probably continue to hold onto your home and soon “Under Water” will only refer to your fish tank. All of the signs today are that history is repeating itself and that you will once again be in control of your own destiny and your most significant investment, your home, will continue to be there for you and the future of your family.

It is only if you have a driving need to move that you have to worry. If you are under water and need to move, you have a more difficult path in front of you. We would recommend several things for you to think about. Nobody wants to consider giving up their home. However, if you must, is there a way to do it gracefully?

Can you rent your home? While it is not necessarily the ideal solution for you personally, it may be the right solution for you financially. Houses for Rent are still sought after by the general public. Perhaps you can rent yours for a year, or two, while you resolve the issues that are causing you the stress bringing you to this point. It could be a great way to relieve yourself of your current burdens and to allow yourself some breathing room.

Perhaps you are in a situation where you know you must give up your home permanently. If so, maybe making your home available as a Rent to Own Home is a better solution for you. You can make your mortgage payment until your prospective buyer is ready to finance the home themselves. Rent to Own buyers will take very good care of a home that they intend to buy. If for some reason, a couple of years down the road they cannot but, maybe things will have changed for you.

What ever you do. Take a look at your options. Try multiple solutions before you just walk away from your home. It really is still the great investment it was when you bought it.

According to the Realty Times http://bit.ly/5wskTM, home prices for existing single family homes across the nation are down to a median of $177K. That’s over 11% lower than the same quarter last year. At the same time sales are up in the latest quarter. They say it is due to the tax stimulus. But, is it really? Is that, maybe, a false impression?

The report goes on to say that 30% of the sales in the last quarter were distressed homes. If prices for houses for sale are down by over 11% and 30% of the current sales are distressed properties, how can we all go on blithely attributing an increase in sales to a tax benefit. Do people really need the added incentive to go out and buy?

In any Marketing endeavor (for the purposes of this blog, I’m calling the Tax credit a Marketing endeavor), you test your marketing tools. Why didn’t we just let the incentive lapse and wait to see if it really was what was driving the Housing Market. If we had given it a one quarter rest, we could have compared the two quarters to see if the Tax credit is part of what is driving the current Market or not. We have enough problems with the money our Government is spending, and that we are talking about spending, without reducing our tax base any further than we have an absolute need to.

I hope we take a little time before we extend this credit again. If we take a breath and the Real Estate Market slows again, then by all means, stimulate. But, if we let it lapse for a while and the Market begins to walk on its own two feet…

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Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal ran an article http://bit.ly/4spaCH about the apartment rental rates in the nation reaching the lowest in 23 years. They talked about it reaching 7.8% and how it was putting pressure on the single family rental market. Apartment complexes are offering tenants big screen TV’s, reduced rent and many other benefits if they will just renew their leases. This is putting an incredible pressure on the single family rental market. It continues to be harder for landlords of houses for rent to keep their properties filled.

The thing that continues to amaze us is the continuing building of apartment complexes that we see. No matter where we go around the country, we see apartment complexes going up as if there is no glut of apartment rentals around the country. Do these property developers think that things will just correct on their own. Do they believe that people will stop moving home to live with family just because they are building? Or, do they have such deep pockets that they can handle the losses without fear? What happens if the continued building just creates a greater and greater pressure on the rental rates around the country until these developers go belly up and their developments sit empty too?

MSNBC ran an article on Friday about replacing your Realtor with a website http://bit.ly/5kwC8v. They extol the virtue of saving thousands of dollars selling your home yourself. HouseHitz.com certainly will agree that using websites to help sell your home is necessary in today’s electronic world. But, replace your Realtor?

If you choose to undertake selling your home yourself, you will save thousands of dollars. Depending on the price of your home, you may save tens of thousands of dollars. However, if you choose to go down that road, be ready for a lot of work. The tools for Realtors in today’s internet world abound. But, you are going to have to search for them. The value a good Realtor brings to you is more than most people think. Beyond listing your home on the MLS, they should know all of the tools that are available to them. They should be enlisting the aid of sites like ours to spread advertisements of your home to multiple websites so that you get the best possible exposure for your home. They should be making sure that they get lots of pictures in the advertisements. The average person searching for homes to buy will quickly breeze past advertisements on sites like ours and those we feed our advertisements to if there are few or no pictures with the ads. They want to know if it will be worth their time to actually look at a home for sale. The way most people determine that is if there are pictures that attract them to what they see. They want to see more than just a nice price. In this case, a picture truly is worth a thousand words. If you chosse to go without a Realtor, you are going to need to be ready to figure all of these things out yourself. Find the sites that will help you get the word out about your home, prepare the advertisements with the pictures people want to see before they will even call and make sure you are spending your advertising dollars in the right places and in the right ways.

So, don’t let the thought of the thousands you will save be the only deciding factor for you. Make sure you are willing to do the work to learn the marketing techniques that Realtor has spent years learning and refining.

Whether you decide to tackle it on your own, or choose to take advantage of the knowledge your Realtor has spent years amassing, here is a tool that might be helpful:

An innovative approach that can give you a marketing strategy you and/or your Realtor could use to sell your house in as little as 21 days, even in the hardest of markets. Sell your home in 21 days

An insurgence of foreign real estate investors is being seen around the country, as reported by Yahoo News http://bit.ly/6pYjP6. The question in my mind is, what will it do to the rental home market. Will it continue to push rent rates down as the supply of houses for rent goes up?

With the increase in foreclosures around the country, the number of houses for rent is on the rise. Investors are snapping up properties as the banks throw in the towel and take their losses. Home prices have dropped lower over the last couple of years but, buyers are still wary of the market and are not jumping into buying for fear of continued downward trending. This is causing more and more houses for rent to be available as investors continue to see the opportunity as outweighing the risk. But, is it helping or hurting the rental market? In any free market, if supply begins to exceed demand, then pricing will have to come down. The increase in foreclosures becoming rental properties is starting to cause a glut in rental house availability. The other factor affecting this is the continued building. We see apartment complexes continuing to be built. Not sure if the developers are hoping the people going into foreclosure will just decide to take the less expensive apartment, or if they just already had the projects on the table and felt it was a worse alternative to just scrap the projects.

Today, searching for rental houses in the United States is made convenient by the a number of websites like HousHitz.com. Logging into websites like ours and saving a search that will let you know when properties come available is a great way to begin your search. The prices for different houses for rent vary with the location, number of bedrooms and additional facilities provided. You will find a wide variety of homes to choose from nationwide to meet your financial and comfort needs. Regardless of your needs, you can save the parameters of the housing you are looking for and as new homes are placed in our database, we will send you an email to let you know about the newly added home.

Real Estate Brokers – Learn where you can:

– Train your real estate agency staff so they can setup this whole system themselves so you can relax and watch the leads roll in.

– Position yourself as the expert in any real estate field or target market you choose, and I’m going to show you how to do it for free, and what’s even better than that, most of the time you will be paid to promote your business!

– Find the most profitable niche market for your business. Targeting the wrong market for your business is a mistake you do not want to make.

– Create mini sites that take just hours to create but suck in leads like the Bemuda Triangle, every day of the week, whether or not you are there sitting behind a desk, or out playing golf.

– Setup your own 24/7 sales machine. This “robot” costs less than $20 a month, but he/she will followup your leads for months until they take the required action, with no input from you. You just sit back and watch the leads get all the information they need on autopilot.

– Get all the traffic you could ever want to your website for FREE! If you are paying a fortune for quality traffic to your site, you are spending too much money. The best advertising on and off the Internet is free and I go into a lot of detail about this.

Click Here To learn how to create your own 24/7 Real Estate Lead Machine!

With increasing number of homes going into foreclosure, Rent To Own Homes have gained popularity as one of the most important services in the real estate market. In highly populated cities like New York, Washington and Los Angeles, the price of buying a home is very high. The demands for homes increase every year. The best option in many cases where someone has been foreclosed on and will be a while before their credit is back where they want it to be, is Rent To Own Homes. This allows the owner to lease his home to a tenant for rent with the expectation that the tenant will buy the home down the road. Rent To Own Homes, also called lease purchase homes allows the owner to make available a property while it provides the tenant with all benefits of owning the home. The tenant also has the option to buy the home after a certain period of time, generally a few years, at a previously fixed price.

Rent To Own Homes require tenants to pay monthly (timely) rents and undertake complete maintenance of the homes. It has many advantages for the buyer. You may go ahead and buy the home after a few years or may renew the lease for a longer time. Or you may terminate the contract at the end of the lease period if you plan to move out.

Websites pertaining to rent to own homes make the search easier and act as a connection between prospective buyers and sellers to find the best deals meeting their requirements. Demands for rent to own homes for commercial purposes are also on the rise in USA. Rent To Own Homes are the ideal options for people who want to live in a home but are unable to buy one right away. You can actually try out a home before you decide whether or not you want to buy it permanently.