New Careers Site is Launched

The new Illinois real estate career web site is now up and running. There you will be able to find information on a career with Prudential Starck Realtors®, links and information about our partner real estate school, Your House Academy, web links to sites we've discovered, material on prelicense course work, the State of Illinois exam, the new format for the Illinois broker exam, some general information about working in real estate, and we'll be adding content frequently. You'll find the site under the old URL of prudentcareers.com. Let us know what you think.

Lenders Are Terrible Sellers

It's been said time and again ... As soon as we get rid of this inventory of foreclosed and short sale properties, the market will be back on track. Well, anyone who's been actively involved in the residential sales market lately can easily see where the real problem comes from ... it's the fact that BANKS JUST DON'T KNOW HOW TO BE SELLERS ... They're just awful!

An agent in my office put it this way ... "It's like the Wild West. There are no rules, no common courtesies and nobody cares who gets hurt!"

The lenders are taking weeks and often months to respond to an offer to purchase a foreclosure property ... and much longer if it's a short sale.

The banks are "stacking" offers and seem to be waiting for a better one even though there are good and honest contacts that have already been presented. They just don't seem to be in any hurry ... and why should they be? They got billions of dollars in government bail out money and they really don't care how long this mess hangs around. They don't care about the property and they don't take care of the property ... driving the values ever lower because of their neglect.

As a result of all the nonsense, we even have middle men who, for a fee, will expedite the transaction. Expedite the transaction!? I thought that's what agents and brokers are supposed to be doing.

There's been lots of blame thrown around since this whole mess began ... greedy lenders, dumb buyers, poor economy, and on and on. But right now, the blame is squarely on the lenders. Someone should give them all a good lesson on how to simply be a good seller.

New Careers Web Site

Prudential Starck Realtors® will soon have a new site dedicated to providing information to both new and experienced agents. Obviously, the focus will be on attracting agents to our company, but we sincerely hope the information will prove valuable to all. The site will gather information from various news sources, Realtor® groups, our partner real estate school (Your House Academy), and articles by licensed instructors. It is right now a work in progress, stay tuned.

Simple Math?

A math type question often seen on school finals as well as the State exam, involves calculating a purchase price given a loan amount and down payment percentage. The question may be slightly compounded by stating that the purchaser paid points amounting to some amount without giving the loan figure. Take a question like, "The buyer paid two points totalling $1,400 and had an 80% loan to value ratio. What was the purchase price?" Well, since we know that one point is 1% of the loan amount, we can calculate that the loan was equal to $70,000. Now since the buyer put down 20%, we would want to add that amount to the $70,000. This is done by dividing the loan amount by .80. In other words, if you want to add a percentage to something, divide by the residual. Another typical example is, "A seller tells an agent he wants to gross $100,000 after the brokerage fee. What selling price would be needed?" If the brokerage fee was 6%, you would need to divide $100,000 by .94 to add the .06 to it.

How to Calculate Property Size from Legal - The Easy Way

Suppose you have a legal description reading something like "...the S 1/2 of the NW 1/4 of the S 1/2 of the NE 1/2 ....of Section 17, T12N, R3E..." and the State exam asks you to calculate the size of that piece of property. Well, you DO know that a section has 640 acres, right? So, instead of drawing out the problem just divide backwards, in other words, 640 divided by 2, divided by 2, divided by 4, divided by 2, and you'll have the answer: 20 acres. The only catch is that if the description you get has an "and" in it, you need to calculate two amounts and add them. So, S 1/2 of the NW 1/4 and the S 1/2 of the NE 1/2 would be much larger and amount to 240 acres (640 divided by 2, divided by 2 plus 640 divided by 2 divided by 4).