As promised, I have included some of the "Best Buys" for coastal San Clemente under the $600,000 mark. These homes are not only cute as a button, but close to great schools, shopping, parks and local beaches. With less homes entering the market place in South Orange County, these homes will not be on the market long. We have noticed a serious demand for homes in this price range.
Enjoy viewing:
Please click on the link(s) below to view property information.
Client Brief Report + Photos
| 30 yr fixed mtg | 5.29% |
| 15 yr fixed mtg | 4.72% |
| 30 yr fixed jumbo mtg | 6.21% |
| 5/1 ARM | 4.58% |
| 5/1 jumbo ARM | 4.98% |
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Use any metaphor you want: the ticking clock, sands running through the hourglass or pages falling away from the calendar. The fact is, time is running out to claim the $8,000 first-time homebuyers tax credit.
Passed earlier this year as part of the economic stimulus package, the credit is good for up to $8,000, or 10% of the purchase price, and applies to people who have not owned a home in the previous three years. (There are some income restrictions.) The best part: Unlike a similar program from 2008, the credit does not have to be repaid.
The bad part: It ends on Dec. 1.
Because it usually takes around 90 days to close on a house after a contract is signed, buyers have very little time left to act. As of Thurs., Aug. 27, there were only 96 days left before the credit ends.
"Buyers have to get a home under contract very, very soon," said Tom Kunz, CEO of Century 21. "They probably should get out looking."
What they will find may surprise them: Many of the prime properties have already been snapped up. Home sales have been on the upswing, and inventories are so depleted in hot markets that first-time buyers are struggling to find homes in their price range. (Check prices in your city.)
In Whittier, Calif., for example, there are few repossessed homes for sale. Those are easy to buy because there isn't a lot of red tape and the bank wants to get rid of them as quickly as possible. Instead, most of the properties are short sales, where the sellers have to convince their lender to let them sell the house for less than they owe.
"That's why there's such a sense of urgency now," said Irma Tapper, a Century 21 real estate agent in Whittier. "The banks have to approve short sales, and they're taking three to six months to do that."
That means a first timer putting a bid on a short-sale might not get an answer form the bank until well after the Dec. 1 deadline for the tax credit. So when an actual repossession listing hits the markets, it creates a feeding frenzy.
Chuck Whitehead, who runs the Coldwell Banker agency in Temecula, Calif., said one recent listing hit the market on a Friday and by Monday there were 57 bids.
The National Association of Realtors attributes much of this activity to the first-time buyer tax credit. It estimates that 1.8 million buyers will file for the credit, and 350,000 of them wouldn't have been able to buy without it.
"It makes a big difference because most of these clients are in a lower price range," said Michelle Edmunds, an agent with Coldwell Banker in Temecula, Calf., who has closed sales for six first-time buyers. "The houses they buy need work and normally they wouldn't want to move in because of the [less than perfect] conditions the homes are in."
That is true for Wesley Forsythe. This June, the 30-year-old computer consultant and his girlfriend bought a row house in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia. Since he paid just $80,000 for the three-bedroom, two-bath place, the credit acted like a 10% discount.
"It allowed us to expand our price range and plan additional renovations," he said. "My mortgage is several hundred dollars less than what my new rent would have been."
Forsythe applied for the credit immediately after closing, filing an amended 2008 tax return. The IRS cut him a check in less than seven weeks. He's spending it now on new hardwood floors, repainting most of the interior and renovating a bathroom. He's stretching the cash by doing much of the work himself.
| 30 yr fixed mtg | 5.29% |
| 15 yr fixed mtg | 4.72% |
| 30 yr fixed jumbo mtg | 6.21% |
| 5/1 ARM | 4.58% |
| 5/1 jumbo ARM | 4.98% |
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Homes continue to be more affordable than they have been in nearly two decades.
The typical American family, making the nation's median income of $64,000 a year, could afford to buy 72.3% of all homes sold in the United States during the second quarter, according a quarterly report from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500).
That's off just a tad from the record 72.5% reached during the first three months of 2009, but up substantially from the second quarter of 2008 when only 55% of homes sold were affordable.
"The increase in affordability -- along with the $8,000 federal tax credit for home buyers -- is stimulating demand, particularly among young, first-time buyers," said NAHB Chairman Joe Robson, a homebuilder from Tulsa, Okla., in a prepared statement.
The NAHB judges a home to be affordable if a family making the metro area's median income could devote no more than 28% of their take-home pay toward housing costs.
The vast improvement this year is due to plunging prices and rock-bottom interest rates. The average U.S. home price has dropped more than 32% from its peak, which was set during the summer of 2006, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price index. And, for most of the three months mortgage rates were historically low, under 5% for a 30-year fixed-rate loan.
The improved affordability comes, of course, at the expense of sellers. Real estate Web site Zillow reported that more than 30% of all homes sold during the three months ended June 30 went for less than what the sellers originally paid.
The longer they owned the home, the more likely they were to profit from the resale, but virtually anyone who bought within the past five years and sold during the quarter lost money on the deal, according to Stan Humphries, Zillow's vice president in charge of data and analytics.
The heartbreak among home sellers is compounded by the foreclosure problem. Many of the homes on the market got there because families lost their homes to foreclosure.
Part of the reason that home prices have become so reasonable is the volume of REOs -- real estate speak for homes repossessed by banks -- has spiked. There were more than 87,000 repossessions in July, about triple the number of July 2007.
Foreclosed homes are often listed and sold at steep discounts to produce quick sales, according to Brad Geisen, founder of Foreclosure.com, which markets such properties.
"The big banks are finally pricing their properties to what people will pay for them," he said. "Foreclosure inventory is now selling at about the same rate it's coming in."
The older, industrial Midwest cities generally offer the best bargains. Indianapolis has led the NAHB's Housing Opportunity Index for 16 straight quarters. Nearly 95% of all homes sold there were affordable to those earning the area's median income of $68,100.
Other leaders were the Youngstown, Ohio, metro area, Detroit, Dayton, Ohio, and Grand Rapids, Mich.
The least affordable large metro areas were New York, where only 21% of homes sold were affordable, Honolulu, San Francisco,Los Angeles and Santa Ana, Calif. 
