Svetlana Stolyarova: 877-770-5551

I love Greater Cleveland and I am happy to greet everyone who is moving to our great communities. It’s always confusing to pick up the right one even when you live in the vicinity and can drive around before making the final decision. It’s much harder when you are too far away from the place where you suppose to move to.

Isn’t it great that we have so many on-line open sources of all kinds of information about the neighborhoods? I think that the one offered by Local-n-Global Realty is real helpful. Please check out this new great tool - I am sure you will be pleased by convenience and accessibility of valuable information provided via our Community Reports.
Please feel free to contact our Local-n-Global Real Estate experts by phone 216-548-4663 or via e-mail: Realty@Local-n-Global.com.

We love our communities!

You can find great local Mayfield Heights, Ohio real estate information on Localism.com Svetlana Stolyarova,Local-n-Global Realty, Broker is a proud member of the ActiveRain Real Estate Network, a free online community to help real estate professionals grow their business.

Despite all the troubles of today’s critical market, people still get married, families grow, kids go to college, people get new jobs. All these changes usually mean sale or purchase of a house. New sellers-to-be look around the neighborhoods and see the scary signs of buyer’s market: large inventory of homes for sale, lower prices, tons of “short sales” and many new, but not good  ”neighbors” - banks and “asset management” companies who can not take care of their assets but can and do drop the prices ruthlessly competing with respectable, diligent private sellers.

We in Local-n-Global Realty compiled the special report “Seller’s Guide to Buyer’s Market” which we offer to your attention.

Read this doc on Scribd: Seller’s Guide to Buyer’s market

Please call us 877-770-5551 with any questions regarding Greater Cleveland Real Estate. If you need to sell your house, please do the right things:

1) Refer to Seller’s Guide to Buyer’s Market report.

2) Check out Market condition report

3) Call Local-n-Global marketing specialist 877-770-5551 to receive professional consultation on market condition in your neighborhood, to assess your seller’s needs and strength.

4) List your house with Local-n-Global listing specialist

5) Sell it!

Good luck to all the sellers and the buyers.

Dear thinking-about-selling-the-home neighbors!

It’s never the time to sell the houses easily and without any worries and stresses.  It’s may be one of the toughest time now to start even thinking about making this move. Market is slow. Media keeps telling us the stories about housing crisis and recession. Mortgage troubles make the situation even worse. Real estate people are going out of business. We see more and more “For sale by owner” signs on our streets. So what? Keep your life on hold and wait until things turn better? Or maybe even worse?

Should we sell now or not?

My expert opinion is: sell ONLY if you really need it. You are the masters of your lives. You decide do you need to move up to a better neighborhood and enjoy a better school environment for your children. Do you need to slow down house spending and avoid the pitfall of paying-more-than-you-can-afford. Do you need to stay closer to your relatives? These are all NEEDS.

Attempt to “try the market” is not the need. If you are “just looking how much your house will sell for”, please do not bother to  put the sign on your front lawn. Please do not create unnecessary competition to those who really need to sell. Please enjoy your life without pre-mature “For sale” sign.

And - if you really willing to sell, please plan right and make a right choice. We in Local-n-Global Realty created a little presentation for the sellers to help you understand what you should look for when deciding about selling your home. It was published at my Active Rain blog. Please look at it here.

Good luck with all your plans! Happy Valentine Day!

Svetlana Stolyarova, Local-n-Global Realty,

Broker, licensed in State of Ohio

E-mail me: Realty@Local-n-Global.com

24/7 Local-n-Global Real Estate Hotline 877-770-5551

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Cleveland rocks! February calendar of events is so extensive that we in Local-n-Global Realty were kind of confused over which one of them to include in our Local-n-Global February Greater Cleveland Community Calendar. Please enjoy living in Cleveland!

Greater Cleveland offers many wonderful homes for sale. Prices are reasonable, interest rate is low. If you really need a home, please do not miss the opportunity. It’s a very good time to buy. Call us 216-548-4663 and get your Greater Cleveland Real estate Consultant assisting you.

Good luck and enjoy terrific February in Cleveland!

We are fortunate to have a pretty balances housing market in Greater Cleveland, OH. Balanced market means a constant meeting of minds of relatively reasonable sellers and relatively reasonable buyers combined with sufficient supply of money and strong professionalism of Real Estate consultants advising their buying and selling clients.

We still have great professionals among our fellow Realtors who diligently serve their clients despite all the troubles and rumors about housing crisis and death of the profession itself. Indeed, only the best survive and prosper on today’s market, so if you need a good Realtor to help you sell or buy the house, please choose the one who is active and successful TODAY, not two or three years ago.

Mortgage crisis of 2007 created situation of insufficiency in money supply. 2008 may be even worse as not only sub-prime or A- borrowers will be affected, but also good and even perfect borrowers will partially lose availability of mortgage financing because almost all the Greater Cleveland neighborhoods belong to “declining market” according to new Fannie May rules. All Cuyahoga County, Geauga, Portage Counties are declared declining market. Sad, especially considering that Real estate market is strictly local. How can they seriously compare markets in Cleveland and Solon or Mayfield Heights?

Speaking of reasonability of buyers and sellers: let’s compare the sales data for three cities - Mayfield Heights, Solon and Twinsburg. All three are on the East Side of Greater Cleveland. All have excellent school systems. All of them are great places to live and raise kids. All three have strong housing demand and good inventory of houses for sale. Let’s see what today’s sellers expect to sell their houses for:

Mayfield Heights - 171 house for sale; Average asking price $181,315

 In 2007 207 houses were sold for average price of $153,387. Sellers historically get 95-96 % of the last asking price (after all price reductions) in Mayfield Heights.

Solon                    201 house for sale; Average asking price $395,654

In 2007 245 houses were sold for average price of $368,829. Sellers get 95 % of the last asking price.

Twinsburg             124 houses for sale; Average asking price $242,612.

In 2007 251 houses were sold for average price of $225,527. Sellers get 97 % of the last asking price.

So, you - buyers -  decide: who is a champion in reasonability among the home sellers

Mayfield Heights sellers expect to get about $172,250 vs. $153,387 avg. sold price in 2007  

Solon sellers expect to receive about $375,870 vs. $368,829 avg. sold price in 2007

Twinsburg sellers expect to receive about $235,330 vs. $225,527 avg. sold price in 2007. 

Let’s see what happens in three month.

Good luck to all sellers and buyers! Let’s keep it real!

Svetlana Stolyarova, founder and broker of Local-n-Global Realty

Buyers and sellers in Mayfield Heights, Solon and Twinsburg! Need an expert on your side?

Call anytime 877-770-5551 or e-mail Realty@Local-n-Global.com

New 2008 year is coming. It’s time to pay our property taxes. Many homeowners in Greater Cleveland are unpleasantly surprised by higher property taxes this year. It may be many reasons for tax increase - school levies, assessments, etc. It may be also a higher assessed value for your property.

As I’ve already posted in my Active Rain blog, Cuyahoga County had its regular property assessment in 2006. Many of us homeowners in Cuyahoga County were not happy with new property taxes. The timing was not perfect, as property tax increase came along with sub-prime crisis, growth of foreclosure rate and market price adjustment of 2007. Many homeowners notice that assessed value is much higher than possible market value of their homes. There is a way to reduce your taxes if you file a complaint with Cuyahoga County before the end of the day of March 31, 2008. You may find all the forms and information about the procedure at the web site of Cuyahoga County Board of Revision http://bor.cuyahogacounty.us/.

As we get a lot of inquiries from our clients regarding the market condition in their neighborhoods, we in Local-n-Global Realty decided to offer our clients and friends free Market snapshot services. Please go to the front page of www.Local-n-Global.com and fill in the Evaluate your house form. You will receive the most up-to-date information about house listings and sales in your neighborhood. If you see that your house is over-assessed in comparison with the market value of the similar houses in your community, you may go ahead and ask the County Auditor for tax relief based on real market condition in your area. Please do not hesitate to use this service. It is accurate. It is free. We are here to help you.  We want our communities to prosper, our schools to get stronger, and our neighborhoods to be better. We are responsible tax payers. BUT - if there is any mistake in your tax assessment which may be fixed - let’s try to do it.

Happy New Year!

If you think you have a deal, that may be impacted by the new risk based pricing or LTV hits in declining markets. Such warnings come to us from our local reputable lenders. Do we face another wave of broken deals because of new Fannie May rules?

We had a similar situation around April of this year when sub-prime crisis hit the low-credit-score buyers and  some neighborhoods. Few cities in Cuyahoga county suffered a lot. Richmond Heights and South Euclid are among them. Sales in these areas depended a lot on sub-prime and low down payment buyers. Let’s compare the statistics of single family home sales for neighborhoods belonging to Richmond Heights Schools system.

Serious decline in both sales volume and prices, huge inventory created a very unpleasant situation in this nice city which features a very convenient location and nice shopping-entertainment-medical facilities. However, lack of financial programs available to leverage sales in these neighborhoods was substantial, but not the only factor which impacted decline in sales. Let me mention how Cuyahoga County just timely reassessed the property values and increased the property taxes in 2006. We had so many deals this year when property sold for 20-25 % lower price than assessed value!

It is sad but don’t let this discourage us and our clients! The same statistics for other School districts  show much more optimistic trends:

What should we Real Estate profesdionals do:

1. Educate ourselves on availability and guidelines for available mortgage programs.

2. Work with right lenders and appraisers.

3. Qualify, qualify, qualify! Not every suspect is prospect, not every prospect may become a client. 

4. Educate our clients on risk management, on importance of maintaining a good (720+ score today!) credit, importance of savings for down payment, importance of working with right lender.

It will be another challenging year and another year of great opportunities to help people as professionally as we can.

Sincerely,

Svetlana Stolyarova, Local-n-Global Realty, Broker,

Real Estate consultant, multi-million dollar producer

Why blame so-called Subprime mess? Stupid adventurers and fraudulent practitioners should be blamed.

Being an immigrant - first buyer, then agent and now broker - myself and helping other people, including fellow immigrants, buy and sell the houses in Greater Cleveland, OH, I founded the Local-n-Global Realty to educate fellow immigrants in American Real Estate and help them reach their homeownership goals and avoid making fatally stupid decisions. According to late publication “How the Subprime Mess Hit Poor Immigrant Groups” By Jonathan Karp and Miriam Jordan From The Wall Street Journal Online :

“Various immigrant groups have long been subject to financial scams. The subprime-mortgage boom offered new avenues for mischief — by real-estate professionals as well as home shoppers. Potential buyers, especially those paying high rents, became embroiled in schemes to take advantage of banks’ easy-money policies.Housing counselors say they have seen this type of activity across the U.S. Among the vulnerable groups: Latinos throughout California, Caribbean and African borrowers in the New York area, and Russian immigrants in Philadelphia. “Immigrants with limited English just trusted what people from their country told them,” says Katrina Vizinau, a counselor at Community Housing Development Corp. of North Richmond, a nonprofit organization that educates homeowners in the East Bay area.”

Few important notes.

1. No wonder that extended subprime lending caused so many less-than-legal activities in real estate and mortgage industries. I don’t think that banks’ easy-money policies were created to start scams or other criminal practices. However, subprime lenders specifically targeted people with low credit score, which means they sold mortgages to not really financially responsible people. And they offered a much better compensation to loan originators for selling subprime loans vs. selling conventional loans. This compensation  schedule tempted few originators along with real estate agents to: a) offer subprime loans to those who qualified for normal conventional loan; b) convince ignorant consumers to buy more expensive homes and borrow a way more money than they could ever afford; c) advertise unrealistically low re-fi interest rates without making proper disclosures for dragging people into short-term ARMs (also paid very well by banks!) out of normal fixed rate loans; d) start fraud by signing applications for consumers, making counterfeit checks, bank statements, etc.

2. Immigrant groups in different states and regions are different. San Francisco mentioned in quoted article has a very high immigrant population and high housing pricing as well. We in Cleveland have none of these factors. Probably because of this, we did not face many of such stories of fraud and disaster among immigrant groups in Cleveland like described in quoted article. However, we know about fraudulent mortgage companies who actively defrauded other minority groups whose first language was English. So, poor English language skills are not the main reason for becoming a victim of dirty practitioners, and not an excuse for being a part of fraudulent scams.

3. Real Estate companies and agents working with immigrant population should be more educated and more knowledgeable not only in Real estate, but also in specifics of legal ways to get favorable financing for immigrants. It is crucial to team with knowledgeable and credible immigration attorney when working with immigrant client, especially with one who is not naturalized US citizen yet.

4. Dear immigrant buyers! Please do your home work! You need to work with professionals, you want to trust your advisors, but NO ONE will pay your bills for you, NO ONE will be responsible for your home and your mortgage payments. There is nothing easy in home buying or home financing. There are no free money or free services. If something sounds too good to be realistic, please step back and do not let anyone ruin your dream and your life.   

P.S. Is anyone familiar with any numbers about how many of  subprime related foreclosures  were caused by fraudulent actions of RE or mortgage professionals and homebuyers? I will appreciate you sharing these numbers with me.

Svetlana Stolyarova, founder and broker of Local-n-Global Realty. 24 Hrs. Real Estate Hotline 877-770-5551.

Actively serving home buyers and home sellers in Solon, Mayfield, Willoughby, Mentor, Twinsburg, Lyndhurst and other East side and West Side suburbs of Greater Cleveland. Working for immigrant communities of Greater Cleveland. 

Statistics know everything. Here are the numbers provided by Realist and NORMLS regarding house and condo sales statistics for Cuyahoga County, OH:

Analyzing the fact that we experience obvious decline in sales, especially in condominium sector of market, I think about the rise of competition in Real Estate. One side of the problem is how hard it is for sellers to compete with each other, how frustrating and expensive is to market the houses for sale, and how unpredictable and spoiled the buyers are. Here is the other side of the problem: Real Estate professionals who still try their best to serve their seller and buyer clients. Just think about this: we have about 4,000 licensed professionals belonging to Cleveland Area who managed to close a little bit over 1,000 deals in October 2007 and less than 1,000 deals in September 2007. 

Both buyers and sellers should chose the best agents to work with. Sellers depend on marketing money spent by their agents to gain the highest price possible on today’s market or to minimize the loss from not selling timely. Agents should at least earn some money  to spend on advertising. Simple assumption shows that half of the agents are literally jobless today (2,000 transaction sides / 4,000 agents = 1/2 of agents earn $0 commission on sales)!

It is time to make a tough decision for many of my fellow Realtors. It is time to self-check the level of professionalism, knowledge, dedication to profession. It is time to finalize our business plans for 2008.  I am afraid it is time for many to quit.

Optimistic side of this situation is that buyers and sellers today have a chance to win by hiring (and supporting!) the best of the best in our profession. Buyers and sellers have a chance to get undivided attention from their Realtors. Supply of great service providers is high. We in Local-n-Global Realty just published new on-line homeownership guide for immigrants. It is indeed a great time to buy!

Dear clients! It is your time to benefit from this.