Sterling Residential®, Realtors® offers its in-depth research on popular Northeast Houston neighborhoods. Don’t see your neighborhood listed? Contact us using our convenient request form and we’ll deliver your personal Neighborhood Spotlight by email — our free reports are available for the greater Houston including areas like Humble, Atascocita, Kingwood and Spring, Texas.

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Mortgage lenders are offering more products than ever, and sorting through all the available information can be confusing. Educating yourself with the mortgage financing basics is a smart way to start. To get the best deal, and keep dollars in your pocket, you should read, ask questions, and shop around.
Get tips & checklists for Home Buyers including resources on agency, credit, financing, inspections, insurance, and homeownership. View PDF files and download information useful to Texas real estate consumers. Adobe Acrobat Reader required.
Your credit is an essential component of the home buying process, and having good credit lowers the cost of financing your new home. Your credit history (willingness to pay), coupled with your credit score (ability to pay), are two major factors used by lenders in deciding whether to lend you money, and under what terms, rates, and fees.
Buyer “Due Diligence” is a technical way of saying, “Ask all the questions needed, to have the information you want, to make an informed decision about a potential home purchase.” Due diligence is preventative maintenance —- illuminating potential threats to a satisfactory home-buying experience.
Try our financial mortgage calculators with interactive calculations, dynamic graphs and detailed printable reports.
Sterling Residential®, Realtors® offers its in-depth research on popular Northeast Houston neighborhoods. Don’t see your neighborhood listed? Contact us using our convenient request form and we’ll deliver your personal Neighborhood Spotlight by email — our free reports are available for the greater Houston including areas like Humble, Atascocita, Kingwood and Spring, Texas.
Here’s a nuts and bolts tour of the homebuying process. Start with the home buying basics including understanding credit, financing your purchase, working with Realtors®, negotiating and closing the transaction.
Why use an exclusive buyer broker? If you’re not working with an exclusive broker at this point, it’s important to consider doing so early in the process. Buying your home is one of the most important purchases you will ever make, and having a knowledgeable professional on your side makes good economic sense.
Today’s Houston real estate asking prices are derived from local market conditions based on comparable sales prices paid by home buyers in a particular neighborhood. Despite recent sales volume declines, prices are holding steady across Houston. While that may not be true for all Houston area neighborhoods, there hasn’t been an overall 15% drop in Houston home values. The housing supply is growing — tending to favor home buyers — but it hasn’t increased enough to force home sellers into large double-digit price reductions.
A Houston Chronicle Real Estate discussion posted a few weeks ago asked if Realtors share blame for the mortgage crisis unwinding across the country. Citing dual-licensed Realtors (those holding real estate and mortgage brokers licenses) as part of the problem, some forum participants pointed to the potential conflict of interest between real estate and mortgage brokerage as a reason for the mortgage crisis, while others stated that dual-licensed Realtors couldn’t adequately perform both jobs as agent and mortgage broker. Both could be valid points — yet, the number of Realtors holding a both a real estate and mortgage license isn’t large enough to have contributed to the mortgage crisis in a significant way.
Hurricane Ike’s impact on local housing sales was dramatic — power outages and property damages forced the postponement of real estate closings across the area. Houston’s residential real estate housing market sales were down significantly in September 2008 with a year-to-year sales decline of 29.5% — the lowest September sales volume in years. Nationally, sales for existing homes were up 5.57% in September.
Markets across the US experienced home price declines of up to 20% or more, while Houston’s median home price for existing single-family housing made modest gains throughout the current year. In September, the median price increased again — jumping 5% in year-to-year comparisons from $150,000 to $157,500. For the US market, the median home price declined 9.0% from $210,500 to $191,600 in year-to-year comparisons.