I have a friend that recently asked me for a list of foreclosures. He was sure that was the best way to get a good price on a home. I had written an entry about this subject about a year ago and figured it was time to repeat it.

Now I sometimes get calls asking for foreclosures, or HUD owned homes. I think these calls are motivated by some late night television infomercial that is trying to sell books or DVDs or computer programs that supposedly help you make huge amounts of money in Real Estate. I have always thought that the “huge amount of money” those infomercials make is in sales of their product.

Real Estate can be a great investment for all of us. If you ask your grandparents what the best financial investment they ever made was, chances are they will tell you about how they bought their home (for what now seems like a very small price), raised a family in it and years later they sold the home to help fund their retirement. Their payments averaged out much less than they would have paid in rent and they had tax deductions besides!

When you are buying a home for your family or property for investment you should look at the location most heavily and also look at the condition, and price. Who owns the house and why they are selling it might help you figure out how to best structure your offer but it should never influence which house you buy. The house that best fits your needs may happen to be a foreclosed property, or it may be one that someone is selling so they can move to Indiana or to a larger home, or maybe they divorced or maybe you have chosen to buy a new home from a builder.

What I am saying is Still Brothers & Associates has all of these homes available to show you. Look at the entire market and see what property is going to give you the most value for your money. I have seen foreclosed homes sell for way over what I felt fair market value was, just because the buyer had an unrealistic idea that it was the best way to buy a home.

When I last bought a new car, the dealer showed me something called “total cost of ownership”. It included the estimated resale value for the car four or five years down the line. We all know that some cars retain their value better than others and that should figure into what we estimate the car cost us. It should also figure into how good of a buy a house is. Since you can’t easily move a house, look at the neighborhood (how well are the surrounding houses and yards maintained?), the schools (do they educate the kids well?), the parks (are they kept up and inviting?), the libraries (do they appear to be up to date and popular?), and all else that surrounds the house you are thinking of buying. What do you think the neighborhood will be like in ten years? Buy in a neighborhood that you believe is going to be desirable while you live there and also in the far future when you sell. If you pay a little more for a quality home and neighborhood, you will enjoy it more and it will resale for a better price. I can't predict the future but I can give you advice and help you find information on most of your concerns. Give me a call here at Still Brothers 817-496-9484 and I will be happy to talk.

Years from now when your grandchildren ask what the best financial investment was you ever made, look at your family home.

I get a lot of questions about leasing your mineral rights. This is very new to all of us and can be very confusing. Until very recently no one thought there would ever be any drilling that would affect any subdivision home. If you had asked any attorney or title company you would have come away with the impression that it did not matter if you owned your mineral rights or not because no one would ever be allowed to drill under your house anyway.

With the advent of the horizontal drilling and the Barnett shale under the western part of the Metroplex we have found that some of us own at least a part of our homes mineral rights and so we are able to lease them and get money! There is a signing bonus and a production royalty. The signing bonus seems very large. For a normal city lot they are anywhere from $800 to $5000! No one seems to know how much production there will be but based on how small our lots are it looks like the checks will be to small to bother writing except on a quarterly or yearly basis.

When it comes time to sell your house you will probably need to tell the buyer about your mineral rights and what you have done. You could decide to sell the house but not sell the mineral rights--if you simply remain silent then whatever mineral rights you have become the buyers, so that lease now would become the buyers lease.

At this moment the Texas Real Estate Commission and lawyers have not really come out and set up a standard phrase that we need to put in contracts and so there is some confusion about what to do if you want to keep those gas checks for yourself. I hope that soon we will have a form put out by someone that takes care of all this, but like I said at the first of this article, this urban drilling is brand new for everyone.

I deal with this stuff every day so I think everyone knows these things!

I had someone ask me about paying income tax (capitol gains tax) on any profit from the sale of their personal home. I had great news for them!

Several years ago I had a couple that were closing on their first home and it happened to be on October 31st. The seller had asked that we close at a title company I was not familiar with but they seemed to have done a very good job getting everything together.

We arrive for the closing and were met by a very flustered lady closing officer. She was dressed as a giant jack-o'lantern but was not happy! She said that everyone had agreed the day before they would all come dressed in costume today for Halloween, but when she showed up she found that no one but her was dressed up!

It was a smooth closing but every time we looked up we saw this lady helping with all these complicated legal documents was really a giant orange pumpkin! It was hard to feel reassured.

I think she went home at lunch and changed.

I just read a story about an apartment complex in San Antonio that turns down applicants that have large tattoos visible on their arms, legs, neck or face.

The newspaper was telling the story as a discrimination story, and of course it is, but it is not illegal to discriminate against people unless you are discriminating against a protected class:race,ethnic background,country of origin,familial status, and a few others. Some cities add sexual orientation but that is not part of the federal law. My point is that people that have tattoos are not in this list.

I think it is unfriendly and bad business to discriminate based on tattoos but it is not my apartment complex.

When you choose to date someone because they are blonde, or because they went to the same school you did or the same church thank goodness the government does not say you are breaking the law! A mortgage company discriminates based on credit scores and how much money you make. Movie studios discriminate based on looks. This is all legal but it isn't always pleasant.