The Ruhl Blog

5/1 ARM Offers Best of Price and Stability

With rising interest rates, this is a great time to take a fresh look at adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) for your purchase and refinance. These are not the exotic ARMs involved in the subprime meltdown – they are traditional, 5/1 ARMs with unbelievable rates that are in the threes today! That’s more than a point lower than 30-year fixed rates....

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Foreclosures Decreasing: Exploring the Short Sale Option

RealtyTrac released its U. S. Foreclosure Market Report for November 2010, which shows foreclosure filings were reported on 262,339 U. S. properties in November, a 21 percent decrease from the previous month and a 14 percent decrease from November 2009. One in every 492 U. S. housing units received a foreclosure filing during the month. Both...

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Millennium Did Not Crash the Housing Market, What a Great Decade!

With all the teeth-gnashing over the real estate bubble, the bust and the mortgage mess, you can be forgiven for failing to notice this little tidbit: Housing had a superb decade. In fact, the value of a square foot of housing in the U.S. is up 58% from its January 2000 level, according to data from New York housing analytics firm Radar Logic...

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Myths: The Earth Is Flat and Newspapers Sell Houses

It is amazing how masses of people can believe something that is absolutely untrue. I mean, at one time the vast majority of people believed the world to be flat. Today, we want to debunk another commonly held belief - that newspapers sell houses. Somehow this notion gained believability even though the facts consistently prove it NOT...

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Real Estate a Great Investment in Our Region

Home prices continue to be stable in our markets in eastern Iowa, while the rest of the nation experiences declines. Nationally home prices have fallen 8.36% in the last five years, but all of our markets’ prices are up: 9.25% in Dubuque; 7.22% in the Quad Cities; 5.68% in Cedar Rapids; and 5.43% in Iowa City. According to the Federal Housing...

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