Buyers

For area house hunters seeking to capitalize on today's buyers' market, Dominic Levis has a question: Got plasma? The four-story, 3,000-square-foot home he and a friend are selling in Butchers Hill has seven flat-screen plasma televisions already installed in several rooms, including three 15-inch television-DVD units -- two in bathrooms and one in the kitchen. In Levis' mind, throwing these in as incentives gives his place an edge over the record number of other properties on the market these days.

Buyers looking for expensive homes in the Baltimore metropolitan area need to remember one rule: Bring your checkbook, and if it looks good, buy it.Don't mull it over during dinner. Don't even walk outside to gather your thoughts. Just sign on the dotted line, and for good measure be prepared to offer more than the asking price.As low mortgage rates and a healthy economy keep the housing market hot, the inventory of upper-end homes -- which brokers commonly define as those starting at $300,000 to $400,000 -- in Maryland and the nation is shrinking while prices are increasing.

OWNING a home is a cherished American symbol of upward mobility. Yet many people are unsuitable to be homeowners. They do not earn enough for payments and repairs, or they are simply too irresponsible.Sun reporter John B. O'Donnell painted a devastating picture of what happens when unscrupulous speculators get their claws into people who lack a full understanding of their obligations. The con men reap huge profits overnight by reselling substandard homes at inflated prices to ill-informed buyers, who soon face foreclosure.

Buyers are snapping up homes in the Baltimore metropolitan region seemingly faster than Realtors can get the signs in the ground.With February statistics for existing-home sales showing a 21 percent increase over the same month last year, area Realtors are reaping the benefits of a robust market, but are increasingly wary that dwindling inventories are squeezing the market."

The angry cries of suburban new-home buyers -- including those who belatedly discovered noisy highways next door or methane seeping into basements -- are prompting a spate of consumer-protection bills in the General Assembly.Legislators from Cockeysville to Columbia to Pasadena are pushing bills that would regulate homebuilders, force disclosure of environmental hazards, require carbon monoxide detectors in new homes and compel real estate agents to tell buyers to check local master plans.

FIRST and foremost, give me a quiet neighborhood with low traffic flow, in a setting that feels "small town." Give me readily accessible bike and walking paths, with plenty of natural open spaces and gardens scattered here and there.Give me street designs that emphasize courts, circles or cul-de-sacs rather than through streets. And wherever possible, preserve local historic structures or features that help define the community and give it a distinctive personality.Much lower on my wish list, according to a new study of American homebuyer preferences: tennis courts; outdoor swimming pools; a fancy, gated entrance to the development; and a golf course within the community.

There's a chill in the air.The suspense of when the hot-running real estate market in Baltimore would finally begin to cool ended yesterday when existing home sales recorded their lowest month-over-month gain since August 1997.Sales in September rose 1.9 percent over September 1998, according to statistics released yesterday by the Metropolitan Regional Information System, the housing database used by real estate agents and brokers.Since the summer of 1997, sales of existing homes in the Baltimore metropolitan area have risen steadily, turning a market had been driven by buyer demands into a seller's market, with multiple contracts and escalating home prices in many sought-after neighborhoods.

Homebuyers in April continued to compete for houses on the market, as Baltimore-area sales climbed 7.6 percent and average prices inched up from a year ago.The sales gain, reported yesterday by Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc., marked the first increase of less than 10 percent in the past year and a half.Strong consumer confidence and low mortgage interest rates have driven home sales to double-digit increases, on a year-over-year basis, since October 1997.Real estate experts yesterday attributed April's smaller, yet still healthy, increase to a siphoning off of the pent-up demand that existed throughout much of last year.

Two years ago, when Sheila and Lance Brown were looking for their first home, they wanted an open and airy design that was within their price range, but also offered family potential for the children they hope to eventually have.The couple, both in their early 30s, settled on a home built in style that's been around since before they were born: a rancher.Though it is still commonly built out West, where it originated more than a half-century ago, and in the South, where it is a stalwart of retirement living, the popularity of the one-story house has declined in other regions of the country, including the East.

First-time buyers need Maryland mortgagesYour Feb. 17 article on a mortgage broker's fiduciary responsibility to one's client is of utmost importance to Maryland's consumers, especially minority and inexperienced home buyers.Discrimination in mortgage lending today remains an enigma. People say it still exists but no one can find the smoking gun. Maryland lenders say minority home-buyers shun them; real estate agents say Maryland bankers discriminate against minorities.Most minority and other first-time home-buyers use mortgage brokers to secure their mortgages.

The housing market slump means sellers are agreeing to cover some or all of buyers' closing costs. A big savings for buyers - and a big expense for sellers. Doris Hall-Scheeler, senior vice president at Sage Title Group in Baltimore, sees sellers contributing up to 6 percent of the sales price to buyers in closing-cost assistance. That's $18,000 on a $300,000 house. And it's just part of what homeowners have been paying to move on. Add taxes and real estate commissions, and sellers can end up forgoing more than 12 percent of their sales price, Hall-Scheeler said.

Homebuyers - many staring down a deadline to get the $8,000 tax credit for first-time purchasers - signed about 30 percent more contracts in the Baltimore metro area last month than they did a year ago. That's by far the biggest increase all year, according to numbers released Friday by Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Inc., a Rockville company that runs the region's multiple-listing service. It's also the most contracts signed in the month of September - 2,662 - since 2006. These pending deals don't count as home sales until they close.

The first home Mette Ramanathan and her husband considered buying was a 2,200-square-foot, five-bedroom place. It was too big for the couple, who were interested in space efficiency and lower utility costs. So they settled on a considerably smaller three-bedroom Cape Cod in Baltimore's Hamilton neighborhood. The larger house was "not only expensive but you're using and wasting an awful lot of space," said Ramanathan, who moved in May. "Even if we start a family, we don't need five bedrooms to start a family."

The MacDonalds' Glen Burnie house sold four days after they listed it with an agent. And the Baltimore home the couple moved into? They had to outbid another buyer for it. Not in the bubble days. This year. Falling prices and the $8,000 tax credit for new homeowners are tempting buyers back into the fray, in what could be the early signs of a turnaround for a housing market that's been declining since late 2005. In a third of the metro area's city neighborhoods and suburban communities, more homes changed hands in the first half of the year than during the same months last year, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis.

Near the peak of the housing frenzy four years ago, 75 percent of homes sold in the Baltimore metro area went to buyers with conventional mortgages - loans not insured by government agencies. Now such deals are much fewer and farther between. Thirty-five percent of Baltimore-area buyers got conventional loans last month, according to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems. The share of buyers turning to Uncle Sam - particularly for Federal Housing Administration-insured mortgages - is way up in these post-bubble, post-subprime times.

Maryland was posting some of the steepest drops in home sales nationwide not long ago, but now it's among the gainers. Home sales from April to June were up 4.4 percent compared with a year ago, the ninth-biggest increase in the country, the National Association of Realtors said Wednesday. The trade group said sales increased about 15 percent from the previous three months, topping all but six other states and Washington, D.C. The numbers are adjusted to try to account for typical variations in buying from one season to the next.

Buyers snapped up 10 percent more homes in the Baltimore metro area last month than they did a year earlier, the biggest increase since 2005 and a sign that the long-depressed housing market could finally be turning a corner. July was the second month in a row that home sales rose year-over-year, according to numbers released Monday by Metropolitan Regional Information Systems. In June, the increase was 2 percent. The Baltimore-area housing market hasn't seen two back-to-back months of improving sales since the peak of the buying frenzy four years ago. But home sellers eager for values to follow suit could be in for a long wait.

If a real estate agent seems to size you up the next time you walk into an open house, don't take it personally. He or she would love to sell you the home. But they also want to stay safe. Personal safely isn't a subject that real estate agents like to talk about, but it's there in the back of their minds. A quarter of real estate agents surveyed by the National Association of Realtors say they've been involved in an unsafe or harassing situation. With unemployment high and an increasing number of homes falling into foreclosure and sitting vacant, there's even more cause for the real estate community to be on its guard.

If you're trying to sell your home, you probably don't need to be told the yada, yada, yada of real estate: Keep it clean. Eliminate clutter. Use neutral colors. That's all true. But there are things that sellers do - or refuse to do - that can jinx a sale. We asked agents to tell us what sellers do to shoot themselves in the foot. And we got an earful. Here's how not to sell your home: Refuse to get real about price: : "If you don't have a motivated seller in this market, you're not going to have a deal," said Honore Frumentino, a Prudential Preferred Properties agent in Chicago.

If you wanted to buy a home for less than $250,000 three years ago, three-quarters of the market in the Baltimore metro area was out of your price range. Then sellers got walloped. Housing slump. Mortgage meltdown. Recession. Now you under-$250,000 buyers - classic first-time home purchasers - have a lot more to choose from. Properties with asking prices in that range made up 43 percent of the metro area's housing market in May, up from 24 percent in May 2006. More under-$250,000 homes were for sale at the end of May - 8,149 - than in any previous May since 2001, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis of Metropolitan Regional Information Systems data.