On behalf of Kevin, Patty and all of us here at SMP, we’re so happy to have had so many participants joining us today to make this event a success! After an overwhelming response, two sold out sessions (August 4th still upcoming so email rsvp@suttonmember.com to get on the waitlist and we’ll try to slot you in!) and even requests for a recap of today’s webinar – we will be scheduling an encore event for Webinar 1 – Lead Generation and also Webinar 3 – Corporate Affiliations will be posted on our events calendar soon.
Totally awesome webinar, well done Kevin! Just what I needed right now. Trying hard to jump start my business, you’ve given me some great ideas[...]
Thanks again, P
Check out our special events schedule for REALTORS® and keep an eye out for the upcoming sessions, you’ll need to register quick while spaces are still available!
Come join us in this Meetup as we look at the highs and lows of being a landlord. This evening will be a great chance to share experiences and stories. We will go through what things you should watch out for when dealing with tenanted properties!
RSVP on Meetup.com or Facebook – in order to be eligible for the prize draws at the end of the evening!
Through our discussion on the highs and lows of being a landlord we will learn: should you charge the maximum rent, how to screen tenants properly, when not to use a property manager, is the Residential Tenancy Office friend or foe, why can it take up to 6 months to remove a tenant that doesn’t pay rent, and much more.
Back by popular demand! Our special guest speaker this week will be:
Vic Jang
Real Estate Broker, Project Marketing
Vic Jang will be on hand to share his experience in real estate letting us know the common trouble spots when dealing with tenanted properties. Vic has been in the real estate business for 25 years, is a Partner at Sutton Group – West Coast Realty and Managing Partner at Focus Marketing Systems. We will benefit from his insight accumulated starting from his first project, completed in 1986, to the present day.
Some of Vic’s notable projects include:
Residences at Richmond Inn, the first high rise tower in Richmond forefront of the area transformation in 1994.
Savoy, again one of the first high rise towers in Downtown Yaletown, and
Worked with London Drugs to transform the West Broadway & Arbutus previous ICBC site to a mixed use residential / commercial community incorporating a London Drugs and IGA. The concept was designed with groceries and amenities on site promoting a no-commute neighborhood years ahead of the green lifestyle movement.
Today we’re going to be talking about “How can I figure out if I qualify for a mortgage?” Part II. Today’s focus is more on pre-qualification and pre-approvals and I just wanted to let you know that there’s a lot of lingo and no standard definition for each of these things, so a pre-approval from a bank may mean something different than a pre-qualification or a pre-approval from me. So I’ll let you know what the actual aspects within a pre-approval are or a pre-qualification that you should look for in order to determine if what you have in your hands is actually sufficient for your needs.
1. Pre-qualification:
If you watched or read our last blog you know we’re looking for things like your income, your debts, and your credit history. We take all that information to form a picture of how much money you will be able to borrow and what interest rate you can get, and also the amortization period your payments will be structured within.
So to determine if you have a full pre-approval or pre-qualification done you will be able to get a piece of paper that says something like, based on all the information you actually qualify for a mortgage x amount. There is no range and there are no conditions, either you qualify for x amount or you don’t and maybe you’ll be provided with some suggestions for how you can become qualified for the amount you’re looking for.
2. Rate Hold:
A lot of you out there may have rate holds, but a lot of you may not because you might be thinking if interest rates go up a little bit you’ll get a rate hold then, but you won’t really bother to do it now.
There’s two things you’re risking without a rate hold. Number one is if interest rates are higher you pay more in your mortgage, but number two, I find a little more important, is that if interest rates are higher you actually qualify for a smaller mortgage amount. So think about this, if you’ve been out shopping and finding a house and you finally find your dream home and you go to finalize your mortgage, but interest rates are a little bit higher and you come up $10,000 short what are you really going to do at that time? You can’t get as much mortgage as you originally thought you could
3. Documentations:
You’ve provided all this information about your income, your debts, and your downpayment you do need to provide documentation in order to confirm these facts and if you wait until the very end, like a lot of people, to provide these documents and we find any surprises like if the numbers weren’t coming up the way we thought they were in our application and your employment status is a little bit different than you thought it was then at that point it’s too late you’ve already jeopardized your entire mortgage application if we cannot confirm these documents the way we think they should be written.
So if that’s confusing to you or you have additional questions give us a call and we’ll let you know if what you have in your hands is sufficient, or if it’s a pre-approval or pre-qualification or if you really need a second opinion.
Today we’re going to get a quick overview into “How can I figure out if I qualify for a mortgage?” A lot of you out there might not be sure what it is that we, mortgage coordinators, are looking for when we ask all these questions on your mortgage application; how much money you make, all of your past credit, credit cards, and all that stuff. These questions seem very invasive, but I’ll let you know what it is that lenders and banks are looking for when they’re asking you all these questions.
The three parts of qualifying for a mortgage are:
1. Your income:
Obviously you’re arranging a mortgage and you’re promising to repay a bank or lender, for example, the next five years. We want to look at not only how much money you make, but also your employment history, employment stability, and status. We want to know how reasonable it is to assume you will be able to make this amount of money for the next five years to pay off your mortgage.
2. Debts:
So obviously as money comes in, money goes out and at this point in your life you may have incurred some debts, like student loans, credit card debts, and even car loans and all the money that’s coming in is just going right back out to pay for those previous debts. This would indicate you don’t have much left over in order to arrange a mortgage and pay that as well.
3. Your credit:
This is sort of related to your debt, but not really. Credit is a history of your previous debts recorded in one easy to read place, now they look at how well you have been paying your previous debts, things like student loans, credit card, car loans, if you’ve ever missed any payments, if you’ve ever filed any bankruptcy or collections. What they do is they calculate all of those and assign a number, which ends up being your credit score. The higher the number the better, which essentially means when our banks and lenders look at your application, if it’s a nice high number, they are quite willing to lend you money because based on your past history, it is quite likely you will be able to repay this mortgage in the future.
Now obviously there’s some other issues like your downpayment, you do have to satisfy some downpayment requirements and once you are pre-qualified and you find yourself a property the property itself will also need to be looked at. The lender won’t lend you money if the house is going to fall over and be worth nothing in the next few years. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us and stay tuned for Part II of this topic coming soon!
Today I’m here to invite you to our next meetup! We will be discussing presale developments in particular why not buy a presale development and also when you should buy a presale development.
We’ll be meeting up on Wednesday, not Thursday this time, June 22nd at 6:30 PM. The reason for the change is we were lucky enough to invite Vic Jang, our special guest, who will not be available on Thursday. He will be talking to us about presale developments because he’s been involved in quite a few of them over the last 20-30 years.
For myself I’ve always thought that presale developments are a great option, but in the past meetups we’ve been talking about leaky condos, foreclosures, estate sales and everything that might have a problem with it, but might get you a great deal. On the flip side I always thought that presales developments were great option because you get a brand new place nobody’s lived in it and it’ll be hassle free, worry free and you’ll pay today’s price for something two year’s later, and the price is sure to increased. Sounds like a great situation, but there are actually a lot of things you might need to look out for. If you are think about it you’re paying a deposit today, but there’s nothing there yet, no tangible apartment building for you to look at yet and you won’t know how well built the place will be or how reputable the developer is. We’re going to be sharing a lot of that information with you and after the meetup if you decide that you want to buy a presale development because you’re armed with more knowledge and you’re more comfortable with your decision you’ll know what to look out for, what questions to ask.
Make sure you remember to RSVP on our page because there will be a prize draw at the end of the night for those who have RSVP’ed online (the draw excluded people who are just drop-ins).
Today I’m here to talk about interest rates and what makes them move up or down. So you might have noticed that the fixed mortgage rates recently have been going up and down like crazy while the variable rates have just stayed the same, no big change since the beginning of the year. Many of you might be thinking what’s the difference? Aren’t all interest rates at an all-time low, so they should all be heading upwards? On the other hand why aren’t the fixed and variable rates going up and down at the same time? Why is one so volatile and the other reasonably steady?
So we’ll discuss the difference between the two and where to find information regarding this. Fixed mortgage rates are actually based on what the bond market does. So if you think about a 5 year bond, if you invest in that, whatever that rate does, whether it goes up or down the 5 year fixed mortgage rate will follow. This also contributes to the volatility of the rate, since bond rates can change ever single day depending on what people want to invest in. For example if people feel like investing in anything else is insecure they’ll invest in bonds, therefore driving up bond rates and your 5 year mortgage rates will follow. This is applicable for all the varieties of bonds and corresponding mortgage rates on the market and all the individual changes will influence the 1-5 year mortgage rates.
Now the variable rate on the other hand is not based on the bonds at all, it’s actually based on the “Prime Lending Rate”. Each individual bank and lender will set their Prime Lending Rate (Basic Rate), they don’t just pick this number out of a hat, and they are actually based on what the Bank of Canada sets as their Prime Lending Rate. Now this means that the Bank of Canada is free to change this rate up and down, however they have the entire economy to think of, so they have goals of improving the economy and in addition any changes they make may impact the economy negatively, so they have to be very conscious of any changes that they make. Therefore the Prime Lending Rate is consistent and they’re thought out before anything happens. Usually there are a lot of indicators of when it will or will not change months before it does happen.
So if that’s of interest to you or if you want to know where to see the graphs and charts for each of these please feel free to contact us and we’ll be more than happy to help you out!
Today I’m going to talk a little bit about mortgage planning. In particular how identifying your long and short term goals can save you money on your mortgage in the long run.
What brought this up was that there were a bunch of articles lately about some unfortunate people that had been hit with really hefty mortgage penalties, in some cases $20,000-$30,000. Now I’m not saying this will happen to you, however I want to bring to everyone’s attention sort of what I think went wrong in these cases; where people should have looked to avoid the situation in the first place, and also what they should have done later on to lower their penalties (mitigate the amount of money they had to pay out).
The main thing that I like to do with my clients is I like to pry into their financial plans and personal lives a little bit and find out what are their goals, what are their short term plans, what are their long term plans, are they expecting any children in the future, do they have any kids that are going off to school that they need to pay for, would they be retiring, are they upsizing or downsizing their property. All these things actually change your mortgage financing and if you’re caught unaware for example if you’ve taken a long 5 year mortgage and you need to change something after 2 years you might be susceptible to a large penalty because you were not prepared for it. It is always good to identify what is going to change in your life and plan your mortgage term around that. There’s always a good reason to take a 1 year mortgage, 2 year mortgage and so on. One of those reasons will be to fit your scenario perfectly.
If you are caught in a situation where you didn’t plan or you do have some unexpected expenses come up and for some reason you need to sell your property, talk with your mortgage broker and your mortgage planner before you rush out and do anything because there are things that we (they) can do, or advise they can give to mitigate your risk, and get your penalties under control. If that’s the situation you are in or you’re just curious or starting to look for your first home and you want to make sure you get the right mortgage for you then give us a call and we’ll be happy to work through it with you.
Totally awesome webinar, well done Kevin! Just what I needed right now. Trying hard to jump start my business, you’ve given me some great ideas[...]
