Convenient to Spring Hill, USA, and West Mobile. Low maintenance yard.

Within walking distance of USA Mitchell Center and Stanky Field.

Amenities Include:

• 1,731 SqFt of Living Area
• 3 Bedrooms
• 2 Full Bathrooms
• Double Garage
• Laundry Room
• Two Full Bathrooms
• Formal & Kitchen Area Dining Rooms
• Large Living Room With Recessed Lighting
• Crown Moulding
• 9′ Ceilings
• Double Vanity
• Garden Tub
• Separate Shower
• Tray Ceiling In Master Bedroom
• Ceramic Tile In Bathrooms, Kitchen, & Utility Room
• Roomy Walk-In Closet In Master Bedroom
• Ceiling Fans

Click here to view pictures of this property.

For more information, contact Jason Stewart at Keller Williams Realty - (251) 366-6428

Search for homes in Mobile and Baldwin Counties at HousingHangout.com.

Jackson Heights - 2007 Sales Data

Find out with our new Amortization Calculator…

If you happen to find yourself in this situation, take a moment to consider the value of liquidity before investing everything into a new home.

It’s hard to know know when the need for cash will arise. The need could be anything: plastic surgery, a masters degree, starting a new business, everyday expenses after a lay-off, or an experimental treatment not covered by your health insurance. Who knows what the future holds?

One way of turning your home’s equity back into cash is putting the home up for sale. Aside from the obvious inconveniences of sale preparations, repairs, moving, and finding another place to live—there are also numerous expenses incurred when selling a home (i.e. closing fees, moving costs, rental storage, etc.).

Another popular way to turn equity into cash is the ubiquitous home equity line of credit that banks so eagerly push. A home equity loan is a variable-rate loan secured by the equity you have accumulated in your home. The primary advantage of a home equity loan is convenience: it saves you the time and trouble of selling your home to turn equity into cash. However, this convenience is not free—you will pay monthly interest at a relatively high, variable rate to borrow what is essentially your own money!

To avoid these stressful and costly scenarios, do not put your last dime into a down-payment. Try to keep enough cash in savings—or other liquid assets—to maintain your home and service its mortgage for six months to a year.

20% is the magic number for down-payments. At 20% down, buyers avoid PMI costs (Private Mortgage Insurance) which can add hundreds to the monthly payment. Paying more than 20% will reduce the monthly payment, but larger down-payments yield diminishing monthly savings beyond 20%. So, if you can afford to put more than 20% down, don’t. Put only 20% down to avoid the PMI cost. Put the rest of the cash in safe, liquid, interest-bearing investments that will keep up with inflation.

By preserving your cash with fixed-rate financing, and keeping some of that cash in more liquid investments that will help you keep up with inflation—like CDs, savings accounts, money market accounts, bonds, stocks, REITs, ETFs, and mutual funds—you can still buy a fine home while avoiding the expense and inconvenience of selling or re-financing your home when you need cash.

This information can be readily obtained from title companies or directly through tax records (sometimes the local revenue commission will even provide a web interface for searching local property tax records).

If you ever encounter this situation, keep an open mind and extend the benefit of the doubt. In many cases, individuals trying to sell property without ownership simply misunderstand their rights to the property.

Choice examples:

• Tenants without an understanding of the law
• Handymen working for a cut of the sale proceeds
• Estate heirs trying to sell before probate has officially transferred title
• Life Estate holders who cannot deed fee simple ownership to the buyer

So, regardless of whether you are a buyer or an agent, trust but verify before negotiating the purchase and sale of real property.

Pen-and-paper served me well for my first few transactionsuntilI ran across a particular customer who was just too impatient to wait five minutes for an estimate of her closing costs and monthly payments. So as much as I dreaded the prospect of lugging a laptop all over creation, that moment I knew it was time to go electronic!

So, I went back to those spreadsheets the other agents gave me. As expected, they didn’t quite jibe with the HUDs from prior transactions… time to bring them up-to-date!

To get the spreadsheets where they could correctly figure closing costs, taxes, homeowner’s insurance, principal and interest, PMI, MIP, and total monthly payments, I had to review my closed files to get a good ball-park average of what vendors and title companies were charging—also had to get per-municipality millages to correctly figure property taxes. Finally, a spreadsheet accurate enough to use in practice!

After using it a while, I got to thinking: “Wouldn’t it be cool if this could be done over the internet without any special software (Excel) where everyone could use it?”, so I put my old computer skills to work to craft a more accurate mortgage calculator for Mobile and Baldwin Counties.

Here it is: http://www.housinghangout.com/mortgage/

Just a few of the things it calculates:

• Closing Costs
• PMI Estimate(if necessary)
• Homeowner’s Insurance Estimate
• Actual Taxes (based on selected municipality)
• Actual Principal and Interest (P&I)
• FHA and VA fees (if applicable)
• Total Monthly Payment

The biggest problem with using these e-mail services can be summed up in a phrase: lock-in.

Internet service providers give us MANY different ways to import our old e-mail into their e-mail systems, but I have yet to find a single one who bothers to provide even a single way for us to export our e-mail archive in their system into another e-mail system!

For example: If you switch from AOL to BellSouth, I can guarantee that AOL’s support representative will certainly not entertain forwarding your AOL e-mail to a BellSouth account. Same thing applies if you’re moving from any internet service provider to any other internet service provider.

Brokerage provided e-mail accounts are just as bad. See what happens when you ask your Prudential broker if he’d be willing to forward your old Prudential mail to your new RE/MAX e-mail address. I think his answer will involve something freezing over…

Another issue is privacy. Google’s highly regarded G-Mail system reserves the right to statistically analyze the content of your incoming and outgoing e-mail and use that information to improve the targeting of their internet-wide advertising colossus.

Two steps to avoid having your e-mail address held hostage:

1. Reserve a domain name. ($8 to $12 a year)
2. Buy POP3 or IMAP e-mail service for your domain name from a hosting company. ($20 - $100 a year)

It’s not free, but domain name ownership is an extremely affordable way to have equity in our own e-mail address, and spares us the greater expense of having our on-line identities held hostage by sub-par internet service providers, unsatisfactory franchises, snooping corporations, and the like.

In certain parts of the country, these lawn irrigation systems may come in handy, but that is certainly not the case in the Southeast—especially in the Mobile Bay area. We are the second rainiest area in the contiguous United States after Seattle, Washington!

Under normal weather conditions here, daily irrigation will drown your yard and leech nutrients from the soil—eventually killing the lawn.

So, if you’re moving to South Alabama, leave the watering up to mother nature, and only turn the sprinklers on during a drought.

Generally, people perceive the country to be simpler, idyllic, and peaceful, but personal experience does not agree with the public perception.

Things to look out for in the country:

• Rural residents usually keep many pets—especially dogs! Some are friendly puppies, others are bloodthirsty hounds. Rule #1 when you encounter the latter: show no fear and maintain eye contact. Stare them down! Running is pointless. Dogs run faster. If you can’t stare it down, mace or pepper spray could come in handy…
• Squatters. Vacant country homes with no immediate neighbors have a tendency to attract hobos and the like. Just like the dogs, some are harmless, others… not so much.  Don’t just breeze in they way you would with a suburban home. Lord only knows who’s around the corner.  Again, mace or pepper spray may come in handy…
• Ornery neighbors. People who live close together in rural areas tend to watch out for each other. This is a good thing for the residents, but not such a good thing for an unknown real estate agent fumbling around another person’s home. If you see a neighbor out in his yard, announce your intentions and give him a card. Not only is this a good way to create business, it may also save you from being held at gun point while trying to explain why you were snooping around Mrs. Johnson’s house.
• Gnats. Many rural areas do not use sprayer trucks for municipal pest control. Blood-sucking insects are common. Give yourself a good spraying of pest repellent before heading out.

If you have additional tips for showing rural property, please post them in the comments section. If it’s a good one, I’ll incorporate it into the original post (giving due credit of course).

During the consultation process, pricing will be a major topic of discussion.

If Agent A suggests an asking price of X, and Agent B suggests a list price tens of thousands higher, ask each agent to go over his research before making a snap decision to list with Agent B, for he could be engaging in a practice we refer to as “buying the listing”.

Buying the listing is the disreputable practice of enticing a potential client with an asking price that has no chance of being met by a qualified buyer in order to secure the listing.

You may ask:

Since real estate agents aren’t paid unless the home sells, why pursue a listing at a price that will not sell?

The answer is simple: free advertising. The yard sign—especially in high traffic areas and highly desirable neighborhoods—is incredible free advertising for an agent. Also, most buyers and sellers find their agent in the process of looking for a home—that is, they seek homes (LISTINGS!), not agents. Having an over-priced home in REALTOR.COM is excellent advertising for the listing agent, but it will not get the home a full-price offer.

So, before blindly listing with the agent who promises the most money for the home, ask each agent to explain how he arrived at the suggested asking price, and make sure that the comparables used to price your home are actually comparable.