Words from a basketball coach- “Shooting means every time you catch the ball, your eyes go to the rim. By looking at the rim from any position, allows you to see everything that happens on the floor.”
When you are positioning yourself to score on your real estate or mortgage deal, you need to have your eyes on what you want to accomplish. It might be buying a home in a particular neighborhood. You may want to reduce your overall monthly debt by refinancing a mortgage. Knowing your comfort level on move-in costs and monthly payments helps you keep your view of the playing field in perspective.
We have experienced the lowest rates we have ever seen several weeks ago. February 2021 saw the price on rates start an upward climb due to the fear of inflation, actions, and comments by the Federal Reserve. Even though mortgage rates are not tied to the Fed Rate, the Federal Reserve somewhat controls the price you pay for your mortgage rate by the amount of mortgage-backed securities they buy.
We are seeing the highest values on homes. Corelogic Equity reported fourth-quarter 2020 showed that homeowners with mortgages saw their equity increase by over 16% year over year. The increased equity build-up helps home sellers position themselves well for more net profit selling their homes.
The week of March 8th, 2021, was kinder to rates, inching down slightly. What does the playing field look like to you with your plans to buy a home or refinance the one you have? Are you going to make your play and take your shot to score? Some people say you miss every shot you don’t take.
Renters want a piece of the profit from real estate values. They are playing some smart strategies to buy a home. It’s competitive, but if you know what you want, you are prepared and play a good strategy, you can score on purchasing the home you want.
Bo Binkins felt cramped for space in the city apartment. He wanted fresh air and the wide-open space outside the city. With the help of a low-interest rate and low mortgage payment on the 100% USDA Rural Housing loan, he moved his family and his fishing gear to his new home on a country road closer to his favorite fishing spot. Bo can brag about his zero-down home purchase with his monthly payment much lower than the rent he was paying in town for a smaller space.
Karen had worked hard throughout her career. She had sacrificed to invest in her retirement funds and hoped to have her home paid off by the time she retired. Retirement loomed ahead, and she realized with a slight bit of panic that her income would decrease, but her bills would still be high.
Karen told me, “It suddenly hit me that I do NOT have to pay off the house. If I can refinance my mortgage back to a 30-year term on a rate this far below what I am currently paying for the 15-year loan, I can do more and live better with the extra freed up cash flow each month.”
Realtors and mortgage loan officers can see the real estate market from high up in the press box. What opportunities do you see for your homeowners, home buyers, and home sellers?
As a real estate professional, you are in the press box with a top-down view of the opportunities available to your clients. What winning strategies do you see right now?
Change can be difficult, but it can also be an opportunity. New changes to the loan application form and the challenges that go with it are an issue for a large number of reasons. While any change in the mortgage industry is an issue, most recently TRID, you can always find a path forward.
I follow a few loan originator forums and often contribute when I think I have something significant to offer. Today I just want to point out that the change is here and we all have to live with it until the next change comes along. Complaining about the changes will not resolve the issue. Complaining on how much harder it is to do your job with the new application will fall like a brick. Whining about how it is harder to use your LOS and some of the supporting loan software you may have is a complete waste of your time! The form is here for now so get over it!
Take control of what you can control! The new form requires more specific information and there is no getting around the fact that you will have to work a little bit harder on the front of your loans (pre-approvals) to get what you need for a smooth transition from pre-approved to being in contract to buy. It may cause some borrowers to ask why you need all of this information? The answer is simple, without the information you can’t complete the pre-approval process, which is needed so we can close your application quickly once you are under contract!
Everyone is facing challenges. Your job is to make sure you can guide your clients and referral partners down a path that provides for the best possible outcome in the shortest period of time! Dealing with the new loan application is just one piece of the puzzle. Rising rates, COVID-19, spring buying season, huge numbers of buyers, potential delays in IRS activities, software interfaces, and all kinds of other issues will get resolved either by taking control of the things you can, and accepting the things you can’t. Anything else is counterproductive!
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Jennifer is Assessments 24x7’s VP of Certification, Coach/Mentor, professional Values Analyst, and instructional designer for client customization and resource development. She specializes in helping clients, coaches and facilitators understand unique assessment results, and assists individuals and groups in personal and professional development.
Through educating others in improving communication, understanding critical thinking, embracing learning styles, evaluating emotional intelligence, and aligning behavior and values, Jennifer seeks to infuse others with a passion for learning and growing, encourage self-awareness, and impart simple, practical and applicable knowledge to help grow relationships and increase personal and professional effectiveness. Her career path has included individual and organizational development, secondary and adult education, customer service, corporate finance, and investor relations.
She holds a Washington State Secondary Education Teaching Certificate, a Bachelor of Arts in English with an emphasis in Composition & Rhetoric, a Master of Arts in Adult Education and Training, a Master of Science in Psychology, and a Master of Business Administration with an emphasis in Human Resource Management. She is also certified in a variety of training courses and development workshops with many well-known vendors.
She’s traveled all over the world sharing her passion and expertise, and training and certifying others to make a difference. Jennifer has delivered intimate and large-scale, public and private presentations since 2001 to corporate, educational, and professional development audiences on topics such as leadership development, self-awareness and personal growth, relationships between men and women, building effective communication, and quality training programs. Jen is also an avid painter, a professional singer, and a very busy wife and mom to a teenage hockey player.
These days, data has become more valuable in our economy than oil. There have been many discussions about the individual value of your personal data, how to protect it and even who owns it. But what about your intellectual property as an entrepreneur or business leader within an organization? How do you protect something digital?
Time and again throughout American history, ideas have been stolen or “borrowed,” whether it be the historic squabble between Apple founder Steve Jobs and Microsoft founder Bill Gates and if Gates stole the idea of the Graphical User Interface from Jobs, or the more recent founding of social media giant Facebook where a savvy coder named Mark Zuckerberg “borrowed” the idea of Facebook from two brothers trying to get his help on a contract-to-hire basis for their similar idea.
As the rate of technological innovation increases exponentially, an increasing number of entrepreneurs are developing innovative processes, services and products. When you create and drive growth on a global basis, it’s imperative that you capture and protect your intellectual property.
So why do so many entrepreneurs fail to adequately protect their intellectual property? The answer is that intellectual property is considered to be intangible whereas a product or service we provide is something tangible. We forget to protect the intangible because we are so busy producing the tangible—the products or services we provide.
This categorization is grossly incorrect in the digital era we find ourselves in today. Intellectual property as an entrepreneur or business leader is just as tangible as creating wearable technology. For example, the software and idea behind a FitBit is the only reason someone purchases a FitBit to begin with. It’s not just a bracelet!
Every tangible product came from an idea. Intellectual property can make your organization money, and today, integration between the digital and the physical has made the ordinarily intangible tangible.
Protecting intellectual property goes far beyond products and services, and too often I see organizations ignoring the need to protect other types of intellectual property that will cause long-term detriment to their organization.
This is because the process of legal protection is often lengthy and arduous, deterring smaller organizations from considering the immediacy of protecting intellectual property, assuming they will do it later on as they grow.
I teach many entrepreneurs and business leaders alike how to implement my Anticipatory Leader System, which trains an individual to identify both Hard Trends (or future certainties that will happen) and Soft Trends (or future maybes that are open to influence) in order to see digital disruption heading their way and find a way to leverage said disruption to their advantage.
As we become more digital as a society, the Hard Trend that comes in tow is that cybercrime will go up as well and likely get more complex. Organizations that continue to put protecting once-intangible intellectual property on the back-burner can and will likely experience some type of digital theft of groundbreaking ideas that give their company the competitive advantage in their industry.
The good news is that identifying that aforementioned Hard Trend allows us to pre-solve the issue of cybercrime before it happens. Likewise, technology’s exponential growth is simplifying certain legal processes in protecting intellectual property.
For example, Blockchain technology, which is what cryptocurrency is built on, is a digital decentralized ledger that has the capabilities of facilitating legal contracts, such as patenting or trademarking. Even better, the security and encryption involved in contracts executed on the Blockchain make it nearly unhackable—something never before seen in digital data. This makes protecting our intellectual property tremendously easy and secure.
There are several different types of intellectual property that need protecting and a multitude of ways to do so, depending on its nature. Here are three specific ways this can be done:
1. Trade Secrets Are Your Competitive Advantages
Knowledge-based competitive advantages like trade secrets are best protected by documents such as confidentiality agreements and employee contracts. The food industry and specific recipes would be covered under a trade secret.
2. Patents Protect Your Concepts and Functions
If the advantage of your product is its function, the best way to protect it is with a patent or design registration. Patents can protect concepts that, because they include software and business plans, are paramount today. The distilling process for a beverage could also be covered by a patent.
3. Trademarks Allow You to Own Your Brand
If the look of the product is your advantage, you should get a design registration that protects shapes and patterns. Brands include words, shapes, sounds, logos and company colors, and these can be protected with a trademark.
My Anticipatory Leader System allows you the ability to create game-changing disruptions and revolutionary products and services; however, it can also help in protecting those items when they are in the inception stage.
Learn to stay ahead of cybercrime and intellectual property theft by anticipating what technological advancements will disrupt your industry and how to pre-solve issues of cybercrime before they occur.
By paying attention to the Hard Trends both inside and outside of your industry and using the tenets found in my New York Times bestseller “The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change Into Opportunity and Advantage,” you can create and protect the game-changing innovations that will be in high demand in the future.
The fall in bond prices and the rise in rates continue. Awareness of things we control and those we don’t are now significant. Seeing the opportunity of the situation is critical!
We don’t control rates, but do control the process we provide and the value that process brings to those we serve! NOBODY in this market has the best price; that left a few weeks ago, now all we have is our commitment to our process and the benefits our process provides!
In a rising rate environment, the ability to be correct, quick, and close in 30 days or less is the VALUE, because the cost of money rises over TIME
Your fully documented pre-approval and the ability for your buyers to present an offer that will close in 30 days or less can now be worth more than a higher offer to a seller facing the cost of higher rates due to a longer loan lock or delay in their next purchase!
A listing agent and a seller can see the benefits of speed and time, manifest in a lower cost to finance their next home. The velocity of money is real; the cost of delay can be felt for decades!
Make it known why your process makes it possible to lock in a lower rate, close in fewer days, and allow for everyone involved benefiting because of your PROCESS!
Talk to your buyers, their agent, the listing agent, and even the seller. Have a video that details your process that you can share with everyone that talks about PROCESS over PRICE! Now more than ever because the best price is GONE for now but the need to buy continues!
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