Greg Snow - Southwest Florida Real Estate Expert provides real estate services to Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Sanibel and Captiva Islands

Lovely August, 2010, arrives with the typical summer heat and humidity, lack of steady business for most vendors, and the promise of football very soon. In taking a view of our local real estate market, we still see a large share of short sales, foreclosures, and cash transactions as staples, with changes in any of these three being some time away.

Our southwest Florida housing market is still attractive from a pricing option, variety of choices, and quality of life mantra, so where have the buyers gone???? Could it be ability to obtain financing?? Many an expert here would say it is so, Joe :). Today, attempting to secure a loan is more difficult in most cases than it was as little as 3-6 months ago. Credit scores are under seige, and even FHA loans, traditionally more forgiving on credit, have average FICO scores around 693. One may have a sizeable down payment, however, "willingness" to pay a loan back evidenced by a mediocre credit rating will doom any application for a reasonable interest rate. A few more issues that get in the way of 2003-2006 lending practices are heavy current debt, insufficent liquidity, lack of verifable income, unemployment, self-employment, and using one's imagination in filling out the 1003 (sometimes referred to as Lying...) round out the reson most bankers just say NO!

If we as agents for buyers do not have a back-up plan for them being turned down for traditional financing, we better try somethng different, like being a Cowboy :) Eric Wohl of www.NoteFlo, has just launched this site as a FREE service to buyers to post funding requests and allow several thousand private lenders an opportunity to bid to fund them. This form of non traditional lending has been around for awhile, and Greg thinkS NOW is a wonderful time to see if this helps some people get housing.