Role Description:

Do You Have Strong Administrative Skills and a Desire to Work 20-40 hours per/week?

Are you ethical, organized, excel at follow up, love to talk to people, A very efficient admin? If so, you’re sought by our fast-growing real estate office!

Starting at $10/hr plus performance bonuses.

Unlimited growth opportunities available.  We’re only interested in people that are self starters (no hand holding) and have a “Whatever It Takes” attitude.  Training will be provided but you need to be organized!

MUST HAVE REAL ESTATE EXPERIENCE!!!

Real estate office needs a Lead Feeder (Someone who answers the phone from our Buyer Leads and distributes them to loan officers for approval)

Excellent customer service skills and a positive attitude are a must!!

Excellent office skills including… – Customer service & follow up – Great Telephone skills – Typing & data entry – Microsoft Excel, Word – Extremely organized – Editing … are necessary. References required. Compensation: $10/hr + performance bonuses.

Please your resume or fax it to 704-200-2805.  This role has the potential to be home based depending on each individual candidate.

Thank you,

Mike

I spend a lot of time with my staff working to implement repeatable and reproducible processes so that we can “set it and forget it” so-to-speak and move on to more value added activities. Wouldn’t it be ideal to have your business completely automated and only have to check-in on it daily or weekly? Well, this is not an easy task to accomplish but definitely one worth pursuing. 

Below are the 7 key steps that you should take to move towards a repeatable operation:

1. Create a manual process that works. Make sure that you can walk before you run.

2. Optimize each process then document. I find that creating process maps is a great way to visually understand what it going on. You can use tools like Visio or Powerpoint to accomplish this.

3. Group the processes by either business function or job role. Ex.) All processes to do with selling a house should be in the Sales function or the Sales Manager role in my business.

4. Schedule “Process Optimization and Automation” meetings with each of the key stakeholders on your team which utilize and own each process. The goal of these meetings is to assess where the possible automation opportunities lie. Make sure that you identify what the role of each automation point is first (business requirement) before you identify solutions. It is much easier to adapt solutions for automation later once you understand what the purpose is.

5. Implement new technologies to automate each process point. Look to group where possible.

6. The last step is to create a control plan for the overall process. This ensures that the new solution does not operate out of the acceptable result in the future. A great example of this would be to setup an email alert to be sent to the Sales Manager when a property is on the market 60 days or greater.

7. As part of the control plan, always setup a regular review process with the key stakeholders so that the process and your business can benefit from continuous improvement actions.

Practice these simple techniques on a regular basis and you will find that your business will not only grow, but your staff will be happier because they will be making a change as they grow in their roles.

Take care and good luck,
Mike

If you are relocating to Charlotte or within the greater Charlotte, NC area and need assistance, please call 704-885-0488 or submit an online request.

Be sure to checkout last week’s video quick tip on Charlotte NC Inventory Real Estate On Sale Now if you missed it.

Take care and thanks for watching!

Mike Moulton

A lot of the First Time Home Buyers have been seeking local or government down payment assistance and/or applying for FHA loans.  We’ve noticed that these agencies are experiencing delays in processing the down payment assistance money.  In the short sale market, lenders are both overwhelmed with case loads and they are redistributing resources on loan modification programs which is delaying processing of the short sales.

Drilling down a bit, in Mecklenburg County the north part of the county had the most sales in August with 174 units sold with an average sales price of $183,727.  The Uptown Charlotte market has declined in sales tremendously only producing 12 sales in August with an average sales price of $347,391.  The following are the sales numbers for August 2009 for some of the surrounding counties:

Union County =       208 sales (avg. sales price of $267,172)
Cabarrus County = 153 sales (avg. sales price of $196,313)
Gaston County =      144 sales (avg. sales price of $127,517)
Iredell County =      107 sales (avg. sales price of $144,289)

The Lake Norman area had 91 sales (avg. sales price of $413,056)

Hopefully you found this useful.  As always, feel free to give us a call at 704-885-0488 if we can help you with your real estate needs or click here. Take care,

Mike Moulton

Bee Home Solutions, Inc.

Some recent areas that Mike visited were homes in Marvin, Reflection Pointe, Providence Downs South, Denver NC, and Mooresville NC.

If you missed last weeks video on the $8000 First Time Homebuyer Credit Demystified then click the highlighted text to view it.

Looking for a great deal on a home in the greater Charlotte NC area? Give us a call at 704-885-0488 and ask for Mike.

Take care,
MIke

Checkout the video below:

If you missed last weeks video, then click this text: You Need To Sell Your House Quickly But Don’t Have Time To Put It On The Market

Be sure to stay tuned for next weeks’ video.  If you are in the market for a home in the greater charlotte, NC area and need some assistance, call our office at 704-885-0488.

Take care,

Mike

When To Sell and How

I speak with a number of investors and homeowners on a monthly basis. Recently, I have had a number of similar questions all pertaining around how to maximize return on their own homes or on investment properties (or both). My first question is always, “What is your ideal situation for your level of involvement through investing in real estate?” Do you want to hold for long term wealth? Do you want to buy it and quick turn it (a.k.a. flipping)? Do you want to buy it, redevelop the property, and resell it on the retail market? Would you like to be a private lender and provide capital at a fixed rate of return for projects that my company is doing? Answers to these questions are paramount to any one persons’ overall investment strategy. I believe that in the end a mixed strategy is the best approach. You can create your own mutual fund in real estate by implementing many of these strategies with the proper training and education/guidance. For most of my clients, I advise them to create some focus initially and choose one investment strategy to master (make it their commoditized product) then test other strategies to add into their portfolio as time goes on then grow from there.

The majority of the responses that I receive revolve around “flipping” a house through redeveloping it. When I use the term “redevelopment,” I’m simply stating a run down property is bought and restored back to its original condition (or updated) or better. The media has created numerous shows on television that create this perfect (or not-so-perfect) euphoria around “flipping” houses. It seems that the general public is enormously entertained by others faults, errors, or mistakes on these television programs. Or, they are amazed at how “easy” it is to buy a home, redevelop it, and resell it on the secondary market. My colleagues and I are always amazed at how poorly these shows perceive the actual costs involved in a house redevelopment project. They portray the costs involved are “acquisition price minus repairs = profit.” What we’ve always wondered is who is paying the holding costs (mortgage, insurance, utilities, etc.), sales agent fees (they all have open houses when they sell hosted by an agent), etc. to get this great profit? Quick turning real estate is a great platform for what I like to call “keeping the lights on” every month. It is cash now strategy that helps with daily operating costs. However, the downside is that you forgo the benefits of owning real estate over a longer period of time. Whether you take title to it, improve the property, or not, you also are subject to higher taxes on your profits because you have held the property for a short period or assigned the contract for a fee and you take the proceeds as income. Of course there are other advanced strategies around buying and selling properties short-term tax deferred in your self-directed IRA in real estate or through a 1031 tax exchange, but that is too large of a discussion for this article.

One of the time tested exit strategies in real estate is the buy and hold strategy. This is a very simple strategy in concept that also has its challenges along the way as well. Through utilizing this strategy, you simply buy properties that are in areas that can maintain a decent monthly rent and then manage (or pay to manage) them well over the period of ownership. The goal with this strategy is to minimize property vacancies and repairs and keep them occupied and the monthly rents coming in on-time. You can further optimize this strategy through buying the properties at discounts and/or in areas targeted for longer term redevelopment which can equal large appreciation over time. If you don’t require “cash now” so-to-speak, then what an opportunity over a period of 5, 10, 15, or 30 years to take advantage of property appreciation, depreciation, tax write-off’s, etc. all while someone else pays your mortgage off for you. Although the buy and hold strategy can be frustrating at times, if you hold for long periods of time you can ride the market and make out very well for yourself in the future. How can you relate this to your lifestyle? What if you bought a rental house every time that you had a child? What a great way to plan for college by assigning a profit and loss center to each of your children? This is truly a scaleable strategy. Imagine buying 5-10 properties this year and renting them for the next 20? How would your net worth and wealth reflect these actions?…Very well! My final thought on this strategy is to keep reminding yourself to treat this as a business and leave the emotions behind. Evictions, property damage, late payments, etc. are all aspects of the buy and hold rental strategy but business is business and just create a process to deal with each situation and work through them one by one and you will enjoy the benefits of long term property ownership.

When all is said and done you need to figure out what your personal financial goals are and what percentage of those goals will utilize real estate to achieve them. Do you want to own property or do you want to passively invest in real estate through companies like Bee Home Solutions, Inc. to earn a great, secured return? Do you want to rejuvenate properties and resell them on the retail market, or via lease options, or rejuvenate and hold them to rent in your portfolio? Of course there are limitless amounts of creative real estate investing and selling strategies that continue to expand off the basic ones that have been discussed in this article. I suggest that you start with the basics and build from there. The basic rule of thumb is to always know upfront what your exit strategy is before you invest in any property. Ready, Set….GO!

– Michael Moulton, Broker-in-Charge/Investor of Bee Home Solutions, Inc.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed above are those of Michael Moulton and are not to be perceived as legal or accounting advice.

Mike getting ready to kick some butt!

This past weekend a group of us ran in the 3rd Annual Marine Mud Corps Run at Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, NC.  It was a great time and its always good to help a charity.  My friends and I had brought 2 teams of 4 people each to endure the 5-5.5 mile course.  The course was filled with all sorts of different challenges including a number of calistenic stations, climbing over walls, crawling under tarps, running through a single track course through pricker and poison ivy filled woods, and my personal favorite which was crawling through 2-3 feet of a 150-200 ft mud pit.  Did I say crawling?  This also included push ups, running, and getting yelled at by a number of Marines as we did this.  Not only were we yelled at in the mud pits, but also throughout the entire course.  Let’s just call it “verbal encouragement”.

All in all it was a great morning last saturday.  My team (“The Swamp Donkeys”) pulled it together and we crossed the finish line together.  Note: If we didn’t finish together we probably would’ve been beaten to shreds on the spot.  Remember, the Marines “Never leave a man behind” and nor did we.  Checkout the pic below.  I was picking tiny grits of gravel out of my contact lenses the entire rest of that day!

Mike's Team Approaching The Finish Line

I urge you to google a marine corp mud run in your local area or join one of the few offered in the greater Charlotte, NC area. Here is the website of the event that we just did – Marine Corp Mud Run . To view more pictures of the event click here.

Take care, to your health.

Mike

While the thought of paying a mortgage is more enticing than paying rent, it’s important to understand all the costs involved in buying and owning a home as you determine whether you can afford to join the ranks of homeowners.

Potential buyers sometimes forget to factor in the down payment, homeowners insurance and the possibility of depreciation, as well as the costs associated with closing the transaction, moving, purchasing major appliances, and home, landscape and pool maintenance, not to mention furnishings and design accessories once you move in.

The days of calling up the landlord to fix your problems come to an abrupt halt when you’re a homeowner. You’ll be responsible for everything from malfunctioning appliances to leaky faucets to broken heating and air conditioning units and everything in between. And if you buy an older home, you’ll probably eventually encounter costly repairs, such as replacing the roof or windows.

To determine whether you can afford to buy a home, you should do the following:

1. Determine the property value of homes that interest you. The property value (what the home is worth) is determined by comparing the prices of homes recently sold of similar size in the same neighborhood. Your real estate agent will be able to provide this information to you.

2. Review different mortgage loan types and compare their required down payment amounts to the money you have available. Down payments, based on a percentage of the value of the property and determined by the type of mortgage you select, typically range from three to 20 percent of the property value. Don’t forget to factor in private mortgage insurance, a policy that allows mortgage lenders to recover part of their financial losses if a borrower fails to full re-pay a loan. Mortgage insurance makes it possible to buy a home with as little as 3 percent down. Usually, the lower the down payment, the higher the PMI, which typically will cost somewhere between $40 and $125 a month.

3. Get an estimate of your closing costs, including points (the dollar amount paid to a lender for obtaining a lower interest rate on a loan – one point is one percent of the loan amount), taxes, recording, inspections, prepaid loan interest, title insurance (a policy that insures a home buyer against errors in the title search; cost of the policy is usually a function of the value of the property, and is often borne by the purchaser and/or seller) and financing costs from your mortgage lender or a real estate professional. These will generally add up to between 2 and 7 percent of the property value. You’ll receive an estimate of these costs from your lender after you apply for a mortgage.

4. Add the down payment requirements and the closing costs together to determine the amount of money you’ll need right off the bat. But you’re not done yet.

5. Think about the actual move. Will you hire a moving company or rent a truck? Either way will cost you. The more stuff you have, the more it will cost.

6. Property taxes. Many lenders will require an impound account in which monthly payments for property tax (and often insurance) are paid together with the monthly mortgage payment. You can figure your average annual tax rate will be about 1.5 percent of the purchase price of your home.

7. Next, budget for maintenance and repairs. HouseMaster, a home inspection company with 300 franchises nationwide, said that based on a study that evaluated 2,000 inspection reports, the typical costs of major repairs are:

• Roofing: $1,500 to $5,000
• Electrical systems: $20 to $1,500
• Plumbing systems: $300 to $5,000
• Central cooling: $800 to $2,500
• Central heating: $1,500 to $3,000
• Insulation: $800 to $1,500
• Structural systems: $3,000 to $1,500
• Water seepage: $600 to $5,000

Once you crunch the numbers and find you come up a bit short, investigate ways to reduce or creatively fund your down payment – it can come from a variety of sources. Check with your realtor or lender to find out what’s available.

You’ll also need to factor in the cost of homeowners insurance. In addition to the type of construction, age of the home, your credit history and past insurance history, new issues like litigating costly toxic mold cases are raising homeowners insurance rates.

In your final analysis of whether you can afford to buy a home, you’ll want to weigh the costs with the financial benefits – a consistent mortgage payment (unlike rent, which can increase), the tax benefits (you can deduct, in most cases, mortgage interest, closing costs, and property taxes), and the all-important appreciation factor — the rate of increase in a home’s value.

And of course, you’ll want to weigh perhaps the biggest benefit of all – having a place to call your own.

by Michele Dawson
RealtyTimes

About to make a down payment on a home? Here’s how to avoid the six most common down payment errors. Deciding how much of a down payment to make on a home is one of the most crucial steps in the mortgage process. The amount you pay up-front is a major factor in determining how much your monthly payments will be, which makes it a decision that could affect you for years to come. Here are six of the most common down payment mistakes home buyers make and advice on how to avoid making them yourself.

Mistake #1: Making too small a down payment
While lenders do offer mortgages with down payments of less than 20 percent of a home’s sale price, these loans require you to pay private mortgage insurance (PMI) — an additional fee tacked on to your monthly payment to help protect the lender in case you should default on your loan.

In addition, low- and no-down-payment loans frequently carry higher interest rates and so can end up costing you considerably more over the life of your loan. Conversely, a down payment greater than 20 percent may earn you a more favorable interest rate if you have a less-than-stellar credit rating.

Mistake #2: Making too large a down payment
While common sense dictates that the more you pay up front, the better off you’ll be, that’s not always the case. One mistake first-time homebuyers sometimes make is using such a large portion of their savings for their down payment that they end up not having enough left over to cover closing costs and other expenditures for their new home.

Mistake #3: Not making a down payment at all
Some lenders offer mortgages that require no down payment but these loans can be risky. Paying no money down puts you in the position of having no equity in the home (i.e. you don’t own any part of it). Should the value of your home fall, there is the risk that you could end up owing more to the lender than your house is worth. This situation could also make it difficult to refinance your mortgage in the future.

A no-down-payment mortgage may be an effective strategy in certain situations. However, you need to be economically responsible and financially sound to be able to handle the inherent risks involved.

No-down-payment loans often come with a higher interest rate than loans with a conventional down payment. As a result, your monthly payments will be higher, leaving you with less money available for bills and emergencies.

Since you’ll be paying less than 20 percent of the home’s purchase price, you will also have to pay PMI or be required to take out a second loan (known as a “piggyback loan”). Each of these options increases the monthly cost of owning the home.

Mistake #4: Paying with unseasoned funds
In most cases, a down payment is a pretty substantial chunk of money, and not everyone has the ready cash to cover it. A gift from a friend or family member can help, but don’t think that just because you’ve come up with the full amount that you’re necessarily in the clear.

All funds — whether they’re gifts from relatives, loans against an investment portfolio or your own savings — that have been in your account for longer than two months are referred to as “seasoned,” meaning that they’re considered your money. If your bank statements indicate a large cash deposit that’s less than two months old, your lender will need to know where those funds came from and whether they’re gifts or loans. Gift-givers may be required to provide a letter to the lender indicating that they are in a financial position to offer the gift. Also, generally speaking, the larger your overall down payment amount, the less concerned the lender will be about where the money is coming from.

The lender wants assurances that the money you’re putting towards your down payment is actually “yours,” since it’s assumed that if you’re investing a significant portion of your own money into the down payment, you’re less likely to default on your loan.

Mistake #5: Neglecting to bring a cashier’s check to closing
Along with figuring out how much of a down payment you should make, you also need to ask your closing agent exactly how much you will be required to pay at closing. It’s not enough to simply bring your personal checkbook to closing. You will a cashier’s check to pay the amount of your down payment and your closing costs. Find out ahead of time exactly what the final total will be and obtain a cashier’s check for that amount.

Mistake #6: Incorrectly assessing your debt comfort level
No one knows better than you how much debt you can handle. Trust your instincts; if you’d rather pay as much as you can at the start and have the benefit of lower monthly payments, don’t let anyone dissuade you from that. The worst thing you can do is lock yourself into a mortgage that ends up costing you more per month than you can comfortably afford to spend.

Michael T. Moulton

Broker-In-Charge/Investor/Realtor

Bee Home Solutions, Inc.

The Creative Realty Firm.

Phone: 704-885-0488

Fax: 704-896-2802

Visit us on the web: www.BeeHomeSolutions.com