Short Sales, Press, Housing Numbers - A Recap

Hi All,

   Can you believe that it's already Friday? We are headed into our last few weeks of summer, and from whatever corner of the globe that you are reading this, the summer here in the Northeast has been brutal! Time to polish up the snow shovels...yes, it won't be long !

   Today, we just wanted to recap a very eventful week for HomeRun Homes/Lease2Buy, as well as to take a look ahead at next week.

   Over the past week, we have provided you tips and strategies on the Short Sale Process, provided a free widget that shows all current Ads on our website in "Real Time", and we have humbly received some great write-ups in a new American Express Magazine Article, as well as another write-up in AOL's Patch.com.

   We hope that over the past few days, we have given you some great investing tips, a handy new utility for your website, and have brought multitudes of people to our site to either offer you a Rent to Own Home or to Buy your Rent to Own Home ! In the process, I hope we have also made some new friends and helped many others to meet their goals.

   Next week, we have some additional goodies coming along (Stay tuned to this Blog). Further, there are important numbers coming out next week:

   Tuesday 8/24: NAR Existing Home Sales
   Wednesday 8/25: New Residential Sales & FHFA Quarterly House Price Index
   Friday 8/27: Revised Building Permits

   As you can imagine, these are all key numbers that will give us a sense of where we are headed in terms of the housing market and an economic recovery (recovery? lifeline?).

Have a Great Weekend, and Happy Rent-to-Owning !

HomeRun Homes Knocks it Out of the Park

Hi Folks,

   We just wanted to alert you to some great publicity that we just received on Patch.com. The article is titled, "HomeRun Homes Knocks it Out of the Park", and it is located here: http://sachem.patch.com/articles/home-run-homes-knocks-it-out-of-the-park

Here is an excerpt from the story:

"By focusing on the rent-to-own segment of the real estate market, Eisenstein's business has made impressive strides. Generating a considerable amount of web traffic through its site - over 1.2 million hits to date - HomeRun Homes has also expanded in other markets of real estate"

   This is just another reminder that we are out here bringing more folks to your Ads, whether you are Buying a Rent to Own Home or Selling a Rent to Own Home.

Please read the Full Article at Patch.com

Have a Great Day, and Happy Rent-to-Owning !!




 
 

Grandma's Lesson, HR 5623, and More...

Hi Everyone,

Happy last day of June to all of you! I cannot believe that we are turning the page into July. Time truly flies !

I wanted to share a funny story with you from my younger years (way, way back!), when I was a big collector of baseball cards. Everyone knew that I loved collecting baseball cards. One day, my grandmother knew that I was looking for a Pete Rose rookie card, which I knew as quite a pricey item. She went to her local hobby shop, and they had the card, so she kindly asked for the price, and they said two fifty. Not wanting to make the purchase without having me checking the card first, she called me up and I was on my bicycle to her house within minutes. Once we got to the store, I saw that it was definitely the card I wanted. My grandma dug deep inside her little purse, and she pulled out two dollars and fifty cents. The guy behind the counter looked at her like she was crazy, and said, "Sorry, two fifty means two hundred and fifty dollars". After giving my grandma adequate cold water to snap her back to reality from the "sticker shock", I came to realize a very valuable lesson: "In Writing".

I just cannot say this enough. I referred to it a while back (Mortgage Horror Story Blog Post), when I had to re-learn that lesson the hard way. May you all learn from this so that it may never cause you heartache and problems.

On another front, some good news came across the wires yesterday, which basically stated that the House OK'd the extension of tax credit closing deadline. This Bill, the "HR 5623", would give people some breathing room, should the Senate pass it when they vote on it. Per the Inman News Website, there are approximately 200,000 people who were under contract by the tax credit expiration of 4/30, but they will miss the closing deadline, which was today.

On the website front, we had our Rent to Own Home Blog posts streaming on our home page. however, there were some errors coming up from the Content Aggregation service, so we have removed it for now. As always, you can read, follow, and interact on our Blog right here !


Have a great day, and Happy Rent-to-Owning !

Tips for Saving Money On Your Electric Bill...

Hi Everyone,

We just wanted to wish everyone a happy and peaceful Memorial Day. We hope that you are spending some quality time relaxing and enjoying your day. It is certainly a hot one here in New York, and the Air Conditioners are running at full blast. This leads me to a tip that we wanted to share with you that might save you a few dollar per month.

Basically, rates are constantly on the increase from the electric company, and they give you every reason under the sun (no pun intended) for these increases. However, there are two options that you can look into that might save you some money, so let's address them both here:

Your first option would be to call your electric company/utility (on Long Island, ours is LIPA), and ask them what it would cost per month to be put on a "budget billing plan". What they will do is to calculate an average monthly payment, and with your permission, will change you to that fixed monthly payment. The benefits of this are immediately obvious if you take this plan when the summer begins. The reasoning is that if, for example, you spend $300 per month during the summer (air conditioner, pool filter, etc), and you pay $100 per month during the winter, your summer payments will drop dramatically. The drawback is that when the winter comes, your payments will be slightly higher (there are less months of running the Air Conditioner vs. not running it). Also, it makes it easier for your own personal budgeting, in that you know what the payments will be each month, and there will be no "surprises". We have been doing this, and when the 12-month billing cycle was over, we were actually faced with a surplus, which was credited back to us. That is actually a great surprise!

Your second option, which you can do concurrently with the first option, is to speak with your neighbors and get a sense of what they are paying. If you see a large disparity between what they are paying for a similar type of home and similar type of appliances (important!) and what you are paying, contact the electric company and request an audit. They will do some back-end review, and will probably send someone out to your home to review your infrastructure, as well as send you a link to their website to run a manual energy audit.

These are all good ideas for you to look into and we hope that they save you some money.

Do you have any other tips that we did not touch on here? We would love to hear. Please send us your comments to this post.

We will be posting more this week, as there are a lot of very exciting things going on here that will have a significant impact on your search for a Rent to Own Home, or to help you Rent to Own your home.

Have a Great Holiday and Happy Rent-to-Owning !