miOaklandCounty.com

Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone here in Metro Detroit. Unlike many of my neighbors, I don’t really know too much about cars. Last year when I hosted the Carnival of Real Estate #35, I used the Motown theme, so this year I am pretty much obliged to attempt to do something somewhat creative [...]

When the Feds dropped the prime a couple of months ago, my husband and I decided to refinance our home in Rochester Hills. Our 5-year ARM was maturing in September.
We never planned to refinance this home. In fact, I believe the phrase “if we’re still living here in 5 years, I’m going to shoot myself” [...]

For the last 18 months, maybe longer, a significant part of my job has been to disappoint people. I get to deliver messages that nobody wants to hear:

“Your home is not worth what you paid for it.”
“You owe the bank more than your house is worth.”
“Your neighbors got more last year than you will [...]

Right out of college I worked as a commercial loan officer for First of America Bank in Kalamazoo. Every loan decision in every area of the bank was made manually, by a human being or a committee of human beings if it were large.
One spring, the residential mortgage department was buried in applications [...]

Consumers might not notice this readily, but a different kind of correction is taking place in the Southeast Michigan real estate market: agents are quitting the business.
The exodus in the mortgage industry began some time ago, maybe more than a year. With refi business falling off and purchases at a lower rate, mortgage [...]

It’s not often that I comment on anything being done in Washington on this blog. I am not apolitical, but I keep this place as local as I can, and usually Washington isn’t doing too much that I want to talk about. Take that comment as you like.
When the news popped up in my [...]

“Every morning, I wake up unemployed. I have to figure out where my next paycheck is coming from.”
Read on for a great piece from a new blog.  Jay found it first.
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Written by Maureen FrancisSKBK Sotheby’s International Realty, 248.430.4450
Visit WebsiteSearch for homes in Oakland County_____________________________________________________________

Our daughter, Katya, was born into a family where both of her parents work together as Realtors. As such, she has no idea what it is like to have parents with “normal jobs”, where they stop working when they get home for the day, don’t answer business calls after 6, have weekends that consist [...]

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit this morning reading a juicy blog about Kate in LA and her search for a home. From what I gather, Kate is a lawyer, and she and her boyfriend, whose identity she protects by calling him “E” so that he does not become an instant [...]

I’m not the only agent who has observed that there are fewer and fewer agents visiting homes during our weekly board of Realtors tours. These tours, typically on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Oakland County, are designed to invite Realtors to come through the new listings. There could be lots of reasons that attendance [...]

Yesterday Dmitry was having a conversation with an unrepresented seller, lets call him Simon, who told Dmitry, “I would never use ‘PruCenturyMax Brokers’ [name changed to protect the guilty] to sell my home. When we bought this home they helped us and they gave us terrible advice. They recommended that we pay top [...]

Last night I was watching the Birmingham City Commission meeting on Comcast and one of the commissioners (it might even have been the mayor) misquoted a statistic that was wrong in the first place. He stated that “10% of Birmingham homes are in forclosure.” He was quickly corrected, or quickly corrected himself, and [...]