Las Vegas Homes, Condos, Land and Commercial Real Estate Blog

The first issue is the problems that Las Vegas homes and condo buyers have in regard to financing their purchase and getting an offer accepted while competing with cash investors who give the bank cash offers with two weeks close.

I personally don’t blame banks to choose an investors cash offer over those who want to finance their deal. The bank knows that the deal is going to close and most of the times there will be no appraisal since the investor would not want to spend money on the appraisal since it is not required by a third party beneficiary, such as a lender. The bank will not do appraisal contingent repairs before closing a deal, etc. There is no downside to selling a property for cash as compared to financing. So those who want to finance their real estate deal are in a great disadvantage compared to cash buyers and lose many offers to cash investors.

Enter, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are run by the same government that some people are scared to death of letting get between the benevolent health insurance companies and the insured  who are screwed by them every day.

Anyways, Freddie Mac and Fannie have started to put the emphasis on owner occupied buyers and in some cases do not accept an investor offer for up to 15 days, just like HUD who has the same policy with HUD homes.

This brings up the problem of financing a condominium deal in Las Vegas. If a buyer needed FHA or VA loan, we would check FHA and VA approved condo list that is available online before we showed the condo. All was nice and easy until Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae changed their financing criteria and announced that they will not finance condominium communities that are more than 50% investor owned or more than 15% of units have been delinquent in paying HOA fees for 30 days, etc.

This rule excludes the vast majority of condo communities in Las Vegas and made our job next to impossible as we can’t check on the delinquent HOA fees every time we show a condo in Las Vegas. Keep in mind that the delinquencies for HOA fee is a fluid situation and can change month to month. Again, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are financing their own foreclosed condominiums and this the best way to buy a condo that needs to be financed.

Some may be wondering about why I have started to blog more frequently. Well I have not mentioned the fact that last time that Google updated their search engine rankings, I was expecting a big fall in the rankings due to lack of activity in blogging. Instead I saw a meteoric ascension in rankings to a point that www.lasvegas4us.com is in the top 3 real estate web-sites in Las Vegas if not the dominant one. Total domination is about 6 months away. To give a couple of examples if you search highly competitive key phrases like (Las Vegas commercial real estate), the first top three links are mine, and I am beating national web-sites like loopnet, costar and cityfeet.com. Or (Las Vegas real estate auction), again top three links are mine (top three links in Google is close to domination), I have about 50 pages of top 20 links in Google. The deal is if I don’t keep up blogging my stay at the top will be followed by a free fall and I have worked my heart out for the past few years to get to the top.