Feuruary 2014 - Vol. 8 Issue 2
Rental Housing Journal Valley 2. Social Media and Marketing
6. Focus on the Prospective Resident
3. Getting the Lead Out: Local Efforts
7. Moisture and that horrible word
to Reduce Child Lead Poisoning
“MOLD”
5.A Message from Your President
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Property Ownership and Property Love this Management Outlook 2014 Job By Marc Courtenay The year 2013 will go down in the record books as a good year for both owners and managers of residential income properties. As I wrote recently in an article titled, It’s Tough to Afford to be a Renter These Days, “Housing affordability doesn’t look too promising as 2014 begins. If you listen to the National Association of Realtors the opportunity to be a homeowner hasn’t been this affordable in a long time.” If you’re looking to sell a home, 2014 may be a good year though probably not as good as 2013. But if you’re looking to buy, 2014 will likely be a better year than 2013. These are just some of the expectations that Jonathan Miller president and CEO of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraisal and consulting firm, shared with The Daily Ticker at Yahoo.com. “Take home prices, which have been rising at a rate of 10%-12% — depending on which data you use, for example.” Miller says home prices will rise half as much in 2014 because more supply will come on to the market. “Inventory is now below the usual six-month average, credit remains tight and unemployment and underemployment will remain high even if they’ve declined over the past year. “How can we have price growth that we didn’t see in decades? It doesn’t make any sense,” Miller
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explains in the video above. About 40% of Americans have low or negative equity in their homes, says Miller. “They can’t trade up, make a lateral move [or} downsize, so they sit.” And those who have the resources and good credit to buy will find that mortgage rates are higher. This is mostly due to the Fed’s recent decision to reduce its purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backedsecurities (MBS). As I’ve stated many time before, qualifying for a new loan is and will continue be harder than in recent years. “Under the Dodd-Frank financial
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reform law, lenders are required to meet new underwriting standards for “qualified mortgages” (QM) if they want greater protection from lawsuits. A QM loan must have a regular schedule for payment of principal and interest and fees paid by the borrower can’t exceed 3% of the loan amount and monthly payments can’t exceed 43% of the borrower’s gross income” Miller explained. The new rules “will continue to slow the momentum of improvement” in the housing market, says Miller. They will “bog things down for the first half of the year...an Continued on page 4
’m going to bet that you probably haven’t heard many people say that they love being a landlord. If anything, you’ve heard the cons, hatred, and horrific stories of doing such. But, in a world where there is so much emphasis on negativity, I’d like to bring our attention for a second to some of the positives of the property management industry. So, whether you’ve chosen to be a landlord as a career, or have been lucky enough to have inherited the job of managing rentals, there are many benefits that go along with being in this business. First, and probably most obvious, being a property manager creates wealth. There is no denying that owning and managing property over the long term is a great money earner. There will always be a demand for housing. However, the earning potential will fluctuate with the state of the economy and various conditions within th4 housing market. In good credit conditions, there will be a higher rate of owner occupation and increasing capital values. In more constrained times, there will be more renters with higher rents. Real estate investments are arguably the most stable and secure types of investments you can make. As property owners, you are able to use tenants’ money to pay your mortgage Continued on page 4
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