Choosing the Right Remortgage

In simple terms remortgaging means replacing the existing mortgage deal with a new one. Remortgaging offers an excellent way to dodge high variable or fixed interest rates which were agreed upon some time ago. Your current mortgage deal might have been an excellent one at the time but with economic conditions changing it might be worthwhile to look at deals offered today. More and more homeowners in the UK are moving to remortgages as a way to save money. With interest rates being lower over the past several years existing borrowers are looking for ways to get a more desirable mortgage.

In their part lenders recently have made the process of remortgaging easy to accomplish and extreme competition between them means that borrowers now have access to even cheaper deals.
However choosing among hundreds of offers can be a daunting task so using the help of a mortgage specialist is advised.

Reducing the mortgage payments is perhaps the primary but no necessarily the only reason for remortgaging. If you have owned your home for while you may wish to free up some capital for home improvements, investing or vacations. Home improvements is probably the better financial reason for a remortgage because you borrow funds to increase the value of your property. If other financial outlays are necessary, such as a wedding, university education etc. remortgaging will help gain access to those funds at a much cheaper rate.

Before a decision to remortgage is made a review of the current mortgage should be done to determine its competitiveness against other mortgages being offered. Consider the penalties of cancelling the current mortgage and whether the savings will outweigh the costs of the switch. The costs will include the penalty if any assessed by the current lender, as well as legal and administrative costs. Some lenders trying to get you to switch will cover those fees and therefore the cost of prepayment will only need to be considered. Also, the size of the loan will also affect the decision to remortgage. Typically, for loans less than £25,000 the savings are just not large enough to outweigh the costs. For larger loans the savings are huge, though. Even if you shave off just 1% of your rate on £100,000 it will result in £80 savings a month. Obviously, remortgaging should only be done when it results in significant savings over a long term.

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Make A Good First Impression: Landscape Your Driveway

Is your driveway landscaped? It should be.

This includes the driveway itself, as well as the design elements on both sides. All sorts of materials from softscape options to hardscape are available to make your driveway attractive.

Make A Good Entrance

As the entrance to your home, the driveway should not be neglected. It can either be a scar on the other landscaping around the home or it can add depth to the entire look of your home. You don’t need to spend a lot of money on it either. You can be creative and choose attractive features, and have a very low cost landscape that is welcoming.

Make sure that you take everything into account before choosing your elements. For example, if you are looking for minimal work, do not plant a flower bush at the end of your driveway where the plants can be ruined by those in your neighborhood. Instead, use an attractive fence or a rock garden.

Another important aspect is the footpath to the home. Do not use any design elements that will be in the way of the normal foot traffic. You don’t want to visitors going out of their way, or worse, trampling your plants to reach your door.

Hardscape Choice

You have many options -- common ones include walls and fences, which can add distinction and accent your driveway. A small fence can add character and color to the landscape. Use hanging baskets or lanterns on the fence for more charm.

A large rock can be especially interesting, particularly when it has multiple colors. You can plant grasses and small flowers in the cracks of stones to create even more decorative looks.

Softscape Choices

On a limited budget, just landscaping along the sides of the driveway is an excellent option. It will cost little, yet add lots of beauty to your landscape design.

As for softscape options appropriate to driveway areas, many things will work, such as a flower bed or groundcover along the driveway. This will create a border that is interesting and separates the lawn from the actual driveway.

Ornamental trees and shrubs can do the same thing along the edge of the driveway. Shrubs can be cut to become topiary, which will add even more design elements to the look of the driveway landscape.

Another thing to consider is the curved driveway. If your driveway has a curve in it, a great idea is to add a focal point -- something to make a statement. For example, you can have a beautiful tree, a flower bed, or a rock garden there. Whatever it is it should be beautiful because the curve will focus attention at that point of your driveway. You can use water gardens, a wishing well, as well as many other types of elements to enhance this area and have it look amazing.

Doing these landscaping operations can completely transform the entrance to your home. In a simple, affordable way, you can add character and depth to your landscape design around your driveway.

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By: Ron King

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House Signs And Their Importance to House Sellers

As a maker of house signs it never ceases to amaze me at how few house sellers consider the importance of having a decent house sign on the properties they are selling.

We are told that the first impressions are so important to prospective buyers that the decision whether to buy or not, can be made if the first minutes of a viewing. If that is true, hanging a decent quality house sign on your home must be considered as a small but important part of your selling strategy.

Consider if you will the buyers viewpoint, they have an address and they are trolling down the road looking for the house of their dreams, the very first thing they see will be the house sign.

You have probably spent vast amounts of time and effort re-building, decorating and cleaning. You may have fitted new carpets and curtains to impress the buyers, you almost certainly repaired that leaking gutter and re-painted the soffits and exterior paintwork.

Now have a look at the house sign.

Is the house sign or house number on your property a testament to all your hard work, or does it say, there were things you couldn’t be bothered to do.

The quality of the sign can either make a small but positive impression or it can put them on their guard. Has this house been cared for? Has the building work been carried out to a high standard, is this a quality home? The home owner or builder who has neglected the house sign may have neglected other things!

All or some of these things may be in some small way deduced from the quality and condition of the house sign.

If the property you are selling has been advertised as a quality development, does it really help your cause to have an old plywood sign nailed to the tree with the name written in felt tip pen, or the numbers of that ‘charming country cottage’ displayed with plastic numbers screwed to the gate? Don’t laugh I have seen this!

Having a poor house sign probably wont be a deal breaker of course, but if you are serious about selling your property it doesn’t pay to miss any trick.

This is not to say that you have to pay vast fortunes for a suitable house sign, the main things to consider are: does the design of the house sign suit the property. If the material the sign is made of compliments the building style, its a good first step.

Do not be tempted into the false economy of buying a sign that is too small for the house. That will look just mean. Nor in a style that is inappropriate. Smart homes should have smart signs. Cottages are best suited by rustic signs and if you have spent time and energy designing and decorating a contemporary home, then search out a contemporary house sign maker.

There are plenty of house sign web sites. Try to focus in on the style or material you would prefer for your house sign and then narrow the field by doing a focused search on a search engine.

Browsing these sites and taking the time to choose a house sign that will enhance the selling of your house will be time well spent.

About the Author:

By Steve Walker

Steve Walker has been a craftsman in stone and marble for 40 years. In his long career has practised as a stone mason, letter cutter, restoration carver, marble mason, and fireplace designer/manufacturer.
He now specialises in engraved stone, granite and slate house signs as:
www.stoneengravings.co.uk StoneEngravings, Engraved Natural Stone House Signs.

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Real Estate Investing’s Inner Game

THE INNER GAME OF COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

Every once in a while I get an internal reminder that I am a work in progress. In this instance it was not one of those “hit you over the head with an 8 pound sledge hammer” reminders that you get when you have been particularly blind to your own faults. It was more of a little “A Ha!” that had larger implications if uncorrected. And by being aware of this quiet reminder, I hope to avoid the previously referenced sledge hammer in the near future!

The subject of my internal wake up call was driving a beautiful new black Mercedes 550S Class sedan and was waiting to make a left hand turn across my lane. The driver was female, looked like she had just gotten back from the salon, and was politely waiting for me to pass. She did nothing wrong, sat there calmly waiting for me to drive by, with her flasher on. As I drove by I thought to myself something like: “Oh boy, there goes another rich twit in her paid for …”

Whammo.

The guardian of my mind popped into my head waving his mechanical arms like the Robot in an episode of that 1960’s television series “Lost in Space.”

“Warning!” “Warning!” “Danger, Craig Higdon!!!”

For those of you too young to know the reference, I’m sure that you can find an old episode somewhere on cable TV. You won’t have to wait too long before ol’ Mr. Robot shows up to give you a demonstration.

Anyway, do you realize what my “guardian” did for me? He trounced all over a “limiting belief” and gave me a chance to correct it.

Choosing Our Beliefs

For those of you not familiar with the term “limiting belief,” I first came across it while investigating Neurolinguistic Programming, or “NLP” some years back. NLP is a study of internal and external communication processes and its effect on human behavior.

One of the things that you learn in the course of studying NLP is that in large part our behavior is governed by our beliefs … and that our beliefs are what we make them! Think about that for a moment … we chose all of our beliefs! Everything that you believe about everything was a choice that you made. You will have to take my word for it for the moment because I could fill volumes on just this aspect of NLP.

Just for fun, you might want to examine a belief or two that you have. Start with something simple like: “I believe that peanut butter is good for me.” Now ask yourself a few questions:

When did I start to believe that? What evidence do I have that makes that true? What evidence do I have that makes that not true? What do I get out of believing that? What would happen if I did not believe that?

There are more questions to ask that would help you to change a belief, but hopefully in the course of asking yourself the questions above you came to the realization that you decided to adopt that belief at sometime in the past based upon some rules, some evidence, or an experience that you had. This has some interesting implications, doesn’t it?

And what does this have to do with commercial real estate investing, commercial loans, and construction projects? Quite a bit, actually.

One of the questions that I get frequently is: “How do I get started or go to the next level in commercial real estate?” The overly simple answer to that is: “Well, first you have to believe that you can!”

Limit Those Limiting Beliefs

Let me illustrate this. I have had people who owned multiple 1 to 4 unit properties, maybe 20 to 30 units in all, ask me how to buy their first apartment building or other piece of commercial real estate. When I get that question I have to chuckle … because they already have an apartment building! It is simply broken up into smaller chunks. Granted, the mechanics of multifamily real estate are slightly different than for multiunit residential, but in this case the questioner is already a commercial real estate or “income producing real estate” investor. He just hasn’t realized it.

He doesn’t “believe” that he’s is a commercial real estate investor and has thus artificially “limited” his options for investing. He does not yet “believe” that he can invest in other types of real estate.

So let me get back to my story and my little mental guardian. I passed the nice lady in the Mercedes, saw her make her turn in the rearview mirror, and we both went our merry ways. As I drove away, I changed my thoughts about her to: “She has done well and I wish her to continue to do well.”

Because I have had a little training in NLP I was able to catch myself looping into an old belief about wealth and wealthy people and make the “change” at the time in my thinking. The experience did serve to remind me that I need to be vigilant in my “belief monitoring” and that I might want to make a personal inventory of my beliefs concerning wealth in the near future.

And if you don’t think that you have some buried beliefs about wealth and being wealthy that are working against you in your real estate investments, my friend, you are simply kidding yourself. They are all there in the daily newspapers, T.V. shows, magazines, etc. You probably can’t go 10 minutes without hearing or seeing something “bad” about making money or being “rich.” Have you ever heard the phrase “filthy rich?” Uh huh. And I’ll bet that you know a bunch of others, too.

So you need to place a guardian in your mind to sift out those limiting beliefs. This will help you with any self-sabotage you may have encountered in your life. It is not easy without the right tricks, but it is very rewarding. So as you develop your commercial real estate investment techniques, remember to focus on your inner game to manifest your outer goals.

Note: NLP is slowly being supplanted by a more powerful “technology” called Hemispherical Integration. You can find out more about it at the web site NLPLA.com.

By Craig Higdon

About the Author:

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR E-ZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete statement with it: ‘“The Investment Property Insider” is published by Craig S. Higdon, a veteran commercial mortgage broker. He publishes the weekly e-zine and blog, www.InvestmentPropertyInsider.com, for commercial real estate investors, developers, and industry professionals. Visit the blog and get this free report: “The 7 Biggest Loan Mistakes Real Estate Investors Make and How to avoid them.”’

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Commercial Real Estate Credit

CREDIT AND ITS IMPACT ON INVESTMENT LOANS

The status of your credit plays a major role in helping you to obtain commercial real estate financing. It helps to determine how much financing for which you will qualify and what kind of an interest rate you will get on the loan. Unfortunately, most people do not pay attention to or monitor their credit files on a regular basis. If you are going to invest in real estate, this is an absolute “must.”

What is good credit?

Good credit for a commercial real estate investor usually means about twelve to fifteen “trade lines” of seasoned credit in a credit report, with several real estate loans either showing as active or having been paid off successfully. For example, car loans, current mortgages, and charge cards which are at least two years old and show no late payments. Again, for real estate investors, successful maintenance of real estate loans is a “must.”

Now granted, not everyone is perfect (in fact, very few are!) and we all have our ups and downs, so don’t be worried if you have a few 30-day late payments or some old collection accounts on your credit report. Today, credit reporting systems use a complex method of evaluating credit patterns which is distilled into and issued as a “credit score.” The higher the number, the less risk there is that a borrower is likely to “default” on a loan.

While this process, called “credit scoring,” is in full use for residential loans, the commercial lenders are only now starting to adopt it. There is a trend to use them by certain non-bank lenders for loans less than $2,000,000 or so.

Most underwriters (the people who would approve your loan) and underwriting systems that review your track record are looking for trends. In other words, they’re looking for a history or recent pattern of good or bad credit. Isolated incidents should not affect your ability to get a loan.

How Can You Repair Your Credit?

In most cases, a simple letter or phone call to the credit card company or business that originally gave you the “credit” can put you on the right track to having that “scar” removed from your report. It may not even be necessary though, based upon your recent credit patterns!
Sometimes they’ll require you to pay-off the balance of your debt or send in a letter explaining why you were late with your payment. Don’t pay any creditor off without talking to a qualified professional financial advisor or mortgage consultant first!

However, if you have a history of recent late payments, you’re probably going to have to let time take its course (although there might be trick or two here you can use).

There are a million scenarios I could review, but I think it’s important you walk-away with two key thoughts from this: 1) Your credit can make or break your ability to acquire a loan; and 2) you must know what is on your credit report, your credit score, and begin to examine and, if necessary, repair any credit problems immediately.

What Role Does Your Investment History Play?
Your investment property loan history or “track record” will play an important role in whether or not a lender will want to finance your next property. Investment properties, and their respective loans, are often looked upon as a higher credit risk than if you were buying your own home. So, if you have a proven track record of successfully selling or managing investment properties loans, with no late payments, then you are more likely to get your loan approved.

The bottom line is that “credit” or, more accurately, “credit history” is a major determinant in your ability to finance commercial real estate. Pay close attention to this area of your finances if you intend to be an active investor and manage your credit as you would one of your properties: Actively.

By Craig Higdon

About the Author:

“The Investment Property Insider” is published by Craig S. Higdon, a veteran commercial mortgage broker. He publishes the weekly e-zine and blog, www.InvestmentPropertyInsider.com, for commercial real estate investors, developers, and industry professionals. Visit the blog and get this free report: “The 7 Biggest Loan Mistakes Real Estate Investors Make And How To Avoid Them.”

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