Alpharetta Real Estate Homes for Sale

I wanted to make a quick post regarding a subject near and dear to many of you, and one that has in the past, sent shivers down your spine. Yes, I am alluding to the infamous FHA loan. With the tightening credit market and many of the true 100% loans gone by the wayside, more and more borrowers are turning to the FHA loan as a way to get into their new home.

But don’t let these deals scare you!

• Most lenders have beefed up their FHA underwriting staff. We can close most FHA loans in 5-10 business days;
• Loan limits in the metro area are as high as $346K;
• The 3% down payment requirement still can come from a gift or a down payment assistance program for the 100% loans;
• Seller contributions on FHA can go as high as 6% of the sales price;
• The Monthly Mortgage insurance cost about 30% less than conventional loans;
• Rates are excellent with yesterday’s 30 year fixed around 5.75% for the 30 year.

 
FHA loans are great for first time home buyers.  We have at least 10 lenders who offer FHA loans.  If you have ANY questions regarding FHA procedures or policies, please drop me an email.  With the market bottoming out, don’t let financing be a problem in achieving your home ownership goals.

Ted Fithian, Home Town Mortgage  

I was online last night looking at various home search websites, comparing and contrasting and trying to determine what works best.  I stumbled upon the Real Estate Book and while it is not that different than any other online home search engine it has some nice features. 

You can search for foreclosures (there is an integration with RealtyTrac) and you can search for "new listings," although it doesn’t tell you how new. What would you like in a search engine that you haven’t been able to find to date?

I’m not exactly sure where The Real Estate Book is getting its listing data.  However, it provides a database of over over 400,000 homes for sale in the US, which is an over kill for me but I guess if you want to price things around the country it could be useful. It is showing 654 listings for Alpharetta homes for sale.

I picked a larger city for my area, Atlanta homes for sale, and it allowed me to check other nearby towns by hovering my mouse over the city tags. For example there are 356 homes for sale in Roswell.  However, it didn’t allow me to select cities like Johns Creek or Milton from the list.  I know these cities are new, but I think what we have is a generic solution built for Anywhere, USA and it fails to understand the local housing landscape and political boundaries.  Guess you have to rely on me for that ;-> and perhaps a more local solution.

Unbelievably, there seem to be lots of people who are not using the Internet as the Free Real Estate Book magazine still has a distribution of over 8.5 million copies. This is the same Real Estate Book that all the agents in my office used to advertise in religiously but which I haven’t heard a whisper of in a loooooooong time.  It looks like they are switching their strategy to online.  Duh.

Please let me know which are your favorite online home search engines.  I’m always looking for ways to improve the way people can search for homes and my own website search engine.  Remember, one of my latest projects is  working with the guys at softrealty.com on their new search engine.  It is still in beta but has a lot of promise.

Let me know what you’d like to be able to do, but have a hard time doing currently when searching for a home online.  What would be your killer application?

I’ve received a lot of questions and interest in these pictures that I innocently posted months ago, so I thought that I’d repost them this time using Next Generation Gallery and Piclens so that you can view them more easily.  If you don’t have piclens, GET IT!

[piclens-lite-link]

[gallery=8]

Stone and Brick elevations on homes are increasingly popular in Alpharetta and the surrounding areas. While I like a lot of the stone and brick combinations, I also think that it is the cedar timbers that make the whole thing come together. 

Of corse, it is also possible to make some terrible mistakes when combining brick with stone…it can be like wearing stripes and plaids together, and it is not like you can just change the paint color if you don’t like the look.  I should start taking pictures of the bad combinations, too!  Ah, another project…

I took these pictures at The River Club, which is technically not in Alpharetta, but just over the Chattahoochee River in Gwinnett County.  None the less, they are representative of this style of home being built today in Atlanta and the northern suburbs.

PS:  These houses are all a million dollar and up.  However, you can find brick and stone homes for a lot less if you like the style but don’t like the price ;->  Just call me and I can tell you where to look depending on your price preference.

This is a gallery of pictures I recently took of a million-dollar home in The Shoals at Arbor Creek, Cherokee County, GA.

This home was custom-built by Chatham, is on over an acre and features many upgrades.

I wanted to show you these pictures, not only to interest you in the home, which is for sale, by the way, but not on the "open market," but also to give you the experience of viewing the pictures with piclens.

If you don’t already have it, get the piclens viewer from www.piclens.com; that way you’ll get the full experience of viewing these photos on a 3D "wall of photos."  Then make sure to click on the View Awesome 3D Slideshow link below the pictures below.  [Note:  If you don’t get the piclens viewer, you can still view the photos, you just won’t get the full effect.]

I believe that piclens is the future of viewing photos on the web and how every home should be displayed and marketed.  Let me know your thoughts about it by leaving a comment:  Were you able to get it to work?  Was it easier and better than traditional methods.

[gallery=1]

[piclens-lite-link]

PS:  I want to give a tip of the hat to Shack Dougall for writing the piclens plus plug-in for WordPress and for helping modify it to perform for my purposes.  I couldn’t give you this functionality without Shack’s help.  Thanks, Shack.

With so much doom and gloom in the real estate market, I thought that I’d share some market news that I got from none other source than my barber.  Hey, barbers know what is going on around town.

Bowen Family Homes has sold 12 new homes in their Stonehaven subdivision in South Forsyth in the last two weeks.

The neighborhood will ultimately have about 500 homes in the $200’s and has a 10-acre recreation area.  There are currently about 300 homes built.

I suspect that a lot of these buyers are first time buyers taking advantage of low interest rates and not having to sell a home before they buy. 

Just wanted to let you know that it is not all doom and gloom in the Alpharetta (and Cumming) real estate market.

Now, if you need the best haircut in Alpharetta, go to Gino and Jacksons at Hwy 9 and Windward Parkway next to La Parrilla.