Philadelphia Nesties
letranger
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Any mortgage brokers/ re agents. Quick questions.
We'd like to refiance and possibly see about going from a FHA to a conventional mortgage. We have done a ton of work on our house and will be doing a bit more upgrading before we hit one year next month. Biggest project left laying carpet on the third floor and finishing replacing all light fixtures.
We want to get rid of our PMI mostly and like to drop our % by .25-.50 it looks like.
How accurate are sites like zillow and eappraisal? One values our home at 288,000 while the other at 230,000. Neither knows the work we put into the house clearly. We still owe like 205k on the house and looking to hit the 80/20
Re: Any mortgage brokers/ re agents. Quick questions.
The 230 feels low with the work we have done but 280 seemed a bit high but we have a huge 5 bedroom home a local home we toured when buying just sold at 160 per sw foot, which seems insane our house is way nicer now. We need 249/250 to be at 80/20 and drop the stupid 200 a month pmi that's all I really want but to refi down % would Be icing.
Did you pay for an appraisal first?
Both of you being local makes me think we might be where we need to be.
They also compare your house with those around you. Unfortunately in our case, a house just sold for way under market value when we re-financed. It was an elderly person who was going into a nursing home, so the family didn't care what they received. In your case, it sounds like you will benefit from the house that sold near you. Also, all of your upgrades will help too. Good luck! It was a total PIA, but totally worth it in the end.
It can be anywhere from $300 - $350, depending upon the bank/mortgage co. In the case of a refi/purchase, you don't pick the appraiser, the bank does. However, a homeowner can pay to have their house appraised by an independent appraiser at any time. Not sure if the price would differ.
When we went thru the selling/buying process this January-March, our RE agent explained to us that the Zillow and Trulia numbers are driving buyers' offers. It's not necessarily the legitimate appraised value, but buyers go to these sites and use them as leverage.
Also, if there have been a number of condos that have gone to settlement or have reduced in price in your area, they can over-inflate and/or unnecessarily bring down the zillow and trulia values, since they just look at housing stock as a whole, not real comps (like an actual appraiser would do).
We have done both the re-fi process in our old house (2010) and then bought and sold this year (March), so I'm still pretty familiar with the hoops we had to jump through. Let me know if I can be a resource.
So I want to refi I call up some companies/credit unions will they intially run comps to see what our home is worth? I want the best rate but don't want to pay a bunch of appraisal fees.
We just re-financed our FHA loan for the house we bought Fall 2009. Since we changed the terms from 30 years to 15 years, we had to get our house re-appraised.
Zillow had our house estimated at $10k more than what the appraisal came in at. We ended up having to put up cash for the difference. Very depressing to learn your house is worth $25k less than what we originally purchased it for.
Omg, if zillow was accurate for our house I would crawl into a hole and die and never come out. Our house is listed at $110K LESS than what we paid for it. I know that foreclosures in our neighborhood are making it tank. I know for a fact it wouldn't appraise for that, zillow even has it listed as a 1 bath and it's 2 and we have a larger sq. footage than listed.
We have a conventional 30 yr mortgage and we've been told we don't have enough equity in the house for a refi, especially now that the value of it most likely has gone down. We refi'd once and paid a bunch of points and now we're just so fed up that we don't know what to do.
If we want to try to refi again, does anyone have any suggestions on who we should talk to again? I'm so sick of 5.5% interest which was ON IMPECCABLE credit. We got screwed because we bought before the housing market crashed.
Sorry to hijack your post, lachute!!
If your zillow info is wrong you can claim your house and fix it. I think ours said we had like 800 square feet instead of 1400 something. Our zillow still sucks because of foreclosures, but at least the house info is accurate which helps the estimate.
We are finishing up a refinance of our FHA loan. We are sticking with a FHA so it's so much easier because no appraisal. We don't have enough equity to switch out anyway. I think we are technically underwater on our mortgage since we bought in 2007. We will still have pmi but it's only 90 a month. We will be going from 6.25 (which was great with our impeccable credit in 2007) to 3.5 unless rates change in the next couple days with 3000 towards closing. I can't wait. We will have more money to pay down our other debt now.
Zillow sucks.
The rent 'zesstimate' on the Philly house is about half what we actually get. The sale zesstimate is likewise off by at least a couple of hundred thousand.
On our new place it over estimates the value by about $100,000.
It's worthless IMHO and if a renter/ buyer tried to use it as leverage I would laugh and tell them that if they could find a place like it for that price to let me know so we could buy another one as an investment!
I would disregard completely what Zillow says - it's just not accurate enough to be useful.
Thats awesome lando! I may have some questions for you. We had 6.5% in 2007 too...I think we refi in 2009? I forget
We were in a similar boat! Bought in 2006 with amazeballs credit and even after paying for points (1/2 point maybe?) we still were at 6.5%. We haven't had PMI, thankfully for 5 years now. Burning the house down and rebuilding took care of the PMI, haha. We were getting a$$ raped with the 6.5%, though. Hard.
When the appraiser came out, we gave him a detailed list of the improvements we made and how much we spent on them. Not sure if that mattered a whole lot (b/c a lot of factors go into the appraisal), but the house did appraise slightly above what we paid.
Could you email your broker? Ours was a friend who kind of *** the bed on us so we'd like to look else where.
Did you pay closing costs. We are getting mixed results on closing like some friends say they didn't others did.
Not accurate at all.
If you want to email me I can run comps for your home and let you know what I come up with. kimberly.rock at comcast.net
Also regarding closing costs - a lot of times you can roll them into the loan and just take out a higher balance amount if you are allowed to, or you can take a slightly higher interest rate and get a bank credit (which allows them to offset the closing costs). I just refi'd two of my properties doing the lender credit, I took 1/4% higher interest rate and they paid the closing costs without increasing the loan amount.
oodsie awesome! i am going to email you.