6 Effective Mortgage Tips For Luxury Home Buyers

6 Effective Mortgage Tips For Luxury Home Buyers

The market for an ultra high-end real estate is booming, whereas the market for general homes is plummeting. We know this as we have kept a close eye on various properties especially luxury condos for sale in Madison WI.  Therefore, the luxury home buyers are required to be cautious while investing a fortune in a mansion. You need to be patient as it can be trickier to possess these amazing properties than investing in low budget homes. So, a first time home buyer is required to keep the following points in mind and ask mortgage questions if he/she has any doubt before investing.

You need to prepare yourself mentally as well as financially when you’re planning to buy a luxury home.

Here are a 6 effective mortgage tips for the first time luxury home buyers:

1. Avoid mortgage brokers

When you’re planning to invest a fortune to buy a mansion, make sure you avoid working with a mortgage broker. These shrewd brokers can only work to safeguard their interest. When you’re planning to apply for a mortgage try to get a copy of a good faith estimate to ensure you are getting the loan at a favorable rate.

2. Avoid large down payment:

Most of the luxury home buyers are expected to make a large amount of down payment. If you’re buying a second home, then you’re required to make 30-50% down payment. The financial experts opine that the home buyers should avoid spending all of their cash reserves. Therefore, do not lock all your cash in your luxury home.

3. Shop around

Make sure you do not buy the first home you see, you’re required to be sincere and shop around in order to get the best deal. If you’re patient, then you can get your dream mansion on a favorable offer. You can approach a Certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist (CLHMS); the certified expert can guide you while buying a luxury home.

4. Calculate your mortgage payment

Before buying a luxurious mansion, make sure you calculate your mortgage payment in accordance with your budget plan. You’re required to consider additional expenses like insurance, landscape maintenance, utilities, housekeeping and so on.

5. Review your credit score

The mortgage lender may check your credit score; therefore you need to have a good credit report. If you have a good mortgage score, then you can get an affordable mortgage quote.

6. Take attorney and tax consultant advice

Make sure you have proper tax and financial planning in order to avoid problems related to real estate while buying a luxury home. Therefore, if you’re investing in a luxury home for the first time, then hire an estate attorney and tax expert for a better financial planning.

Therefore, you can own your dream home without any complications if you keep the above-mentioned points.

by Maria Antoinette a professional Madison Realtor

Luxury Home Purchase Guide For The Affluent

According to the report published by the National Association of Realtors and Professional Madison Realtor, titled Existing Home Sales Report, it has been found that the housing market is in a recovery mode.

One of the most outstanding data provided in the report says that since July 2018, properties worth over $500,000 comprised about 11% of all the confirmed sales and properties worth below $100,000 comprised about 20% of the aggregate sales.

Moreover, the NAR’s report also revealed that there was a 19% jump in sales of properties worth upwards of $1 million during the month of July 2018. We saw this in our Condos for sale in Madison WI. This increment in sales of luxury properties has been attributed to the slumped jumbo mortgage rates that are fueling the demand for more such properties.

Current jumbo mortgage rates

High net-worth individuals can have a look at the current jumbo mortgage rates which have been given below to serve as a reference while shopping for a luxury property:

  • 30-year fixed rate jumbo mortgage loans are available at 4.250%.
  • 15-year fixed rate jumbo mortgage loans now cost 3.125%.
  • 5/1 adjustable mortgage loans are being given at a rate of 2.250%.

The jumbo mortgages listed above have an origination cost of about 0.7-1% charged on them. However, only homebuyers with a steady source of income along with an impressive credit rating are eligible to take advantage of these rates.

Jumbo mortgages – How to get them

The real estate market is positive for buying luxury properties. It forecasts the return of the private mortgage lenders who gave around $38 billion as jumbo mortgages to buyers during the past 2 quarters of 2018. Therefore, people who want to buy high-end properties should follow the below mentioned steps in order to get a jumbo mortgage loan to finance their luxurious purchase:

  1.  Mortgage brokers – These real estate professionals make getting the loan processed a cakewalk for the homebuyers. They widen the scope and reach for jumbo loans because of their influential industry contacts.
  2.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – Jumbo mortgages are not bought by the government-approved mortgage organizations like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. As a result, they are comparatively costlier than normal mortgage loans. So, homebuyers can approach a mortgage lender and get as many affordable loans as possible. In order to achieve this objective, homebuyers have to devote their time and energy towards local market survey and obtain multiple mortgage quotes.
  3.  Down payment – The more homebuyers pay as a down payment, the better. This is because even now there are some risk left in the jumbo mortgage market which is compelling the lenders to ask for a minimum of 20% as down payment and if the situation permits they may charge higher. Through this amount, lenders try to minimize the risks directly related to their investments. Therefore, homebuyers should calculate their mortgage affordability by analyzing their financial health through a jumbo mortgage calculator and make down payments accordingly.
  4.  Mortgage application – Homebuyers should check their mortgage application several times before officially submitting them for the lender’s approval. Jumbo mortgage revolves around a highly competitive loan market, so applicants must ensure that they have given all the appropriate information in a proper format, as asked by the lenders. Any errors on the loan application will be revealed by the database applications used by mortgage lenders that will get the application rejected.

Finally, luxury homebuyers should understand the closing costs of jumbo mortgages. Many times, lenders dupe borrowers with the offer of a reduced interest rate but make up the deficiency by including additional costs like processing fees, origination charges, etc.

Guide to Writing Usable Web Content

In my wanderings through the web, for shopping, information or even when getting acquainted with a new client, I’m often amazed at how difficult those websites make my task of finding what I need.

What companies often do not realize when going online is that writing content for the web is different in many aspects than writing content for the off-line media.

The wrong way of writing content for the web is characterized by:

  1. Content rich articles, sometimes monstrosities with more than 1,000 words
  2. Content-rich paragraphs, having multiple sentences
  3. Overly creative headlines, sometimes trying to get clever with the readers

These companies are losing quite a bit of potential customers, hence revenue, by not realizing that writing for the web is a lot different than writing for the off-line media.

How much do users see on the web?

Dr. Jakob Nielsen shows a result of analyzing 45,000 pageviews containing between 30 and 1,250 words.

The following table shows the maximum percentage of text users could read during an average visit to pages with different word counts:

As you may notice the curve approaches 20% very rapidly as the word-count increases.

In a case of a very modest page, containing 250 words, the average user will read less than 40% of the content. This fact alone should raise a red flag for anyone planning to upload an existing magazine article to his website.

The best practice would be to have short and precise pieces of content, having 250-500 words. And, to concentrate your main ideas towards the top of the content.

But wait, it gets better…

What do users see on the web?

In a different study, Dr. Nielsen examines user behavior on a page since first arriving at a site.

After recording users’ eye movements with an infra-red camera, Dr. Nielsen discovered a common pattern in the page reading behavior:

  1. Users first read (scan) across the top two paragraphs of content
  2. Users proceed to quickly scan the first few words of the content

These two parts of the reading pattern create a resemblance to the letter F, which sometimes can be the letter E if the user scans the third paragraph as well, as demonstrated in the following image:

Before Writing Any Web Content

Keeping the above findings in mind, one should always think about the following guidelines when writing content for the web:

  1. Keeping the first part of content and precise, having 250-500 words
  2. Revealing the main idea at the beginning of the content, preferably in the first two paragraphs
  3. Informative, rather than creative, headlines
  4. Main keywords at the beginning of the headline
  5. Using bullets and numbered lists, that are easier to scan, instead of long multi-sentence paragraphs
  6. Keeping the content between 2500 and 4000 words

Research on how users read on the Web and how authors should write their Web pages.

  • A short summary of the original findings: How users read on the Web
  • How little do users read? — users spend 4.4 seconds for every extra 100 words on a page
  • An f-shaped pattern for reading web content, as seen in eye tracking studies
  • Eyetracking of people reading email marketing newsletters
  • Low-literacy users exhibit different behaviors
  • PR and press releases on corporate websites (103 design guidelines based on usability studies of how journalists visit company sites)
  • The writing style for print vs. Web
  • Blah-blah text: Keep, cut, or kill?
  • Email newsletters (165 design guidelines: scannability even more important than for websites)
  • Writing transactional email and confirmation messages
  • Teenagers on the Web: poor reading skills and low patience levels mean that text has to be ultra-concise for teens and that more information must be communicated in images
  • Tagline blues: what’s the site about?
  • Passive voice is redeemed for Web headings
  • World’s Best Headlines: BBC News
  • Use old keywords when writing to be found by search users
  • Show numbers as numerals when writing for online readers
  • Microcontent: writing headlines, page titles, and email subject lines
  • Nano content: the first two words of links and titles
  • Company name first in microcontent? Sometimes!
  • Long vs. short articles as content strategy
  • Kindle Content Design (writing for Amazon.com’s e-book reader)
  • iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds
  • Write inverted pyramids in cyberspace
  • Information pollution
  • American English vs. British English
  • Twitter Postings: Iterative Design
  • Distributing Content Through Social Networks and RSS (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and RSS)
  • Corporate Blogs: Front Page Structure
  • Intranet usability, including guidelines for intranet content, news on intranets, HR manuals, and how to present information about projects, teams, and individuals on intranets
  • A full paper documenting the original research from 1997 (long): Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web (unfortunately this paper was written for print and not online)
  • Case study: Applying Writing Guidelines to Web Pages improved usability by 159% when rewriting sample pages from a popular website
  • How to write “About Us” pages for a company’s or organization’s website

All about Flagships and Using Hubpages for Web Marketing

Flagships and Using Hubpages

by Milwaukee SEO

There aren’t many places on the web today, where you can place your highly valued, original content and wait for the traffic to come. Most of these content sharing sites are spammy and don’t contain any non-commercial content. Since I’m an SMO freak and really obsessed with finding new ways to promote our content via various web 2.0 and social media channels when I ran into the flagships idea I couldn’t avoid trying it.

What is Hubpages.com and what is a Flagship?

Hubpages defines itself as an online content publishing eco-system. The “hubbers” (Hubpages users) use this platform to create “hubs” (their own unique pages), in which they upload content. This is a useful and friendly platform to share the world with your knowledge and expertise. Flagships are actually the top-quality-hubs, which follow a long list of requirements and demands. The main idea of the flagships concept is to create unique and valuable content database. Furthermore, flagship hubs are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly, and when built properly, can gain very good rankings, as well as revenue (Hubpages offers incentive based on revenue share with the writers).

How can you leverage Hubpages for Web Marketing purposes?

Hubpages is a great online platform that enables you to create content pages containing videos, images, links, RSS feeds, related tags lists and more. The main advantage of this platform, which is more significant in flagships, is that an excellent and popular content can be promoted independently on search engines, thanks to the friendliness of this platform to search engines.

Suppose you’re a nutrition expert, and you write this great article about the importance of eating in various colors. Creating a flagship in this theme is much better than any article syndication act or even a blog posting. After submitting the nutrition flagship, the Hubpages staff will review your flagship content, and once accepted, they will actively promote the page and you may do the same.

So basically, your high valued content does the work for you! You can reach the top of the search results pages very quickly (suppose they aren’t that competitive) and your target audience will stumble upon your flagship. Since this types of pages are very informative and professional, they have a high tendency to convert later on.

In order to create a flagship, you have to register to the flagships program, choose a unique subject from the subjects’ pool and sign the flagships contract. You can view some finished flagship examples here.

Some Flagships Tips

1 – Write creatively, use unique images, videos and news updates.
Don’t spam or use the flagship as a link farm (in this case, you will also be banned by the flagships program).
2 – Link to other unique and interesting sources that have a real added value to your readers. If your flagship will be a real information source for a high-searched term, you can make great profits.
3 – Let’s not forget the SMO and the full circle SEO strategy! Always create social media links to your new flagship – Facebook it, twitter it and so on… If it’s a niche flagship, don’t hesitate to create links in niche blogs, forums and more. Just be creative about it. Another important thing is that every link to your flagship increases the chance to earn more money.

To conclude, hubpages.com is above all a content sharing platform, which can be used as a web marketing tool, especially when using the flagships with unique and high-quality content. Don’t forget to follow Hubpages requirement and you’ll probably get great results. Of course, there are many other similar content platforms that you can use (such as Scribd.com, Squidoo.com etc) but I’ll write about them specifically next time.

Final Verdict,

The problem with Hubpages is that they have recently become very hostile to their platform being used by any marketers of any products. About one month ago, complaints about whoever is auditing Hubpages websites began streaming in. In my own dealing with Hubpages, I have found their service to be offensive and a waste of time.

For example, I’m an author of a book, seems straightforward enough to offer valuable content to people and if they like what I have to say, they can buy my book. Harassment from Hubpages began on day one. First, they shut down my Hubpage because it was too “promotional”. After I dropped all reference to my book and just gave links to my book selling on Amazon.com with keyword tags, they refused to publish the page because the hyperlinks like “internet marketing” were attempting to drive people away from Hubpages to my book on Amazon… Well yeah! Gee, I’m guilty of that one. The final straw was when they would still would not publish my Hubpage because, now get this, I used a quote in my Hubpage. Here’s the funny thing, it was MY quote!

I think Hubpages is involved in their own affiliate marketing and products and if you try and publish a hub that is in competition to their own in-house work, then they basically nit pick you to death until you give up on publishing your Hubpage.

Time is your most valuable asset for time is the stuff life is made of. Life is too precious to be wasting time arguing with the screener at Hubpages. Several years ago, Hubpages was good. Today it is terrible in my opinion. I’ll never go back to Hubpages and I can’t recommend their service to anyone else. Squidoo is much more marketer friendly and I have not had a single problem getting any of my lenses published.