The Leasing Team at Foundation Rentals and Relocation just LEASED another property in San Rafael for $4,100. Thanks to everyone for a great transaction.  For any questions about San Rafael property management or buying or selling investment properties in San Rafael, call Broker Christopher Barrow at (415) 637-8934! 03/01/2018

The Leasing Team at Foundation Rentals and Relocation just LEASED another property in San Rafael for $3,400 Thanks to everyone for a great transaction.  For any questions about San Rafael property management or buying or selling investment properties in San Rafael call Broker Christopher Barrow at (415) 637-8934! 02/09/2018

1984 Look, I realize I should be so lucky to think that someone from the Van Halen camp is going to bust me on a copyright infringement for using the image above.  So if they come a calling, this is what I would tell them: It was 34 years ago today that Van Halen's 1984 "album" was released.  I was a dark-skinned, plenty-awkward eighth-grader settling in for a long Illinois winter.  With no discernible basketball talent, no academic prowess and zero interest from the cute, middle-America girls who hailed from the Arrowhead subdivision and peopled the halls of our junior high, the basement my Dad built out for us threatened to be a pain cave of epic boredom proportions for at least the foreseeable future.  That is, were it not for the crackle of the phonograph needle that succumbed to th... 01/09/2018

The Leasing Team at Foundation Rentals and Relocation just LEASED another property in San rafael for $4,950. Thanks to everyone for a great transaction.  For any questions about San rafael property management or buying or selling investment properties in San rafael, call Broker Christopher Barrow at (415) 637-8934! 12/15/2017

The Leasing Team at Foundation Rentals and Relocation just LEASED another property in SAN RAFAEL for $3,400. Thanks to everyone for a great transaction.  For any questions about SAN RAFAEL property management or buying or selling investment properties in SAN RAFAEL, call Broker Christopher Barrow at (415) 637-8934! 10/13/2017

The Leasing Team at Foundation Rentals and Relocation just LEASED another property in SAN RAFAEL for 3,750.  Thanks to everyone for a great transaction.  For any questions about SAN RAFAEL property management or buying or selling investment properties in SAN RAFAEL, call Broker Christopher Barrow at (415) 637-8934!   08/31/2017

Can I Consolidate My Student Loans with My Mortgage? Let's face it, buying a home is hard enough.  But if you've been able to do so while still holding some of the debt accumulated during your college and post-graduate years, your life is about to get a little easier. New cash-out refinance guidelines make it easier for homeowners with student loan debt to refinance and consolidate their educational loans along with their mortgage, so long as the following requirements are met:  At least one student loan must be paid off. Loan proceeds must be paid directly to the student loan servicer at closing. Only student loans for which the borrower is personally obligated can be paid through the transaction. Student loan debt must be paid in full with proceeds – partial payments of student loan d... 06/01/2017

Consolidation Refinances Reign Supreme  "Someday I'd really like to see these loans together." No, that was never a hit song in the '60's but it is a situation that we encounter frequently in the world of loan origination.  It's a scenario that occurs where a homeowner has both a first and second mortgage and would like to consolidate the two into a single, usually fixed rate, loan.  We'll call this a consolidation refinance for now, and we'll distinguish it from a "debt consolidation" refinance for the purposes of this discussion because a debt consolidation refinance usually implies combining the existing mortgage balance with other types of debt; credit cards, student loans, an auto loan, etc. Why do people look to consolidate multiple mortgages on a property?  The most common reason... 04/21/2017

First Time home buyers catch a break with the Homeowners Association Dues Payment Assistance Program. You must buy a condo/townhouse and or Single Family Residence with a licensed Realtor and get up to $2500 or 6 months of HOA Dues paid for.   I have the form if you are currently working with me and you are a first time home buyer. You can also go to  Details And Requirements. If you or someone you know that looking to sell or buy I'd like to speak with them!  02/27/2017

Sold today off market 12/19/2016Congratulations to Obaid the new home owner of this gorgeous duplex in San Rafael. 2358 total Living square feet 3 bedroom 2 bathrooms downstairs. One bedroom one bathroom upstairs.  High ceilings downstairs with ample room for parking with an attched 3 car garage.  12/19/2016

Most of us favor a high degree of predictability when it comes to things like the interest rates on mortgages. In that realm, “poised” is a bad word. When anything is poised, it means it’s about to do something different: change. For those who like predictability, change is unwelcome.But this week should provide both good and bad news when it comes to change and Marin mortgage rates. For once, a change in the immediate future is pretty nearly a sure thing. Although rates are poised, they’re poised for a comfortingly predictable change.What happens after that is a different story.Up until very recently, the mortgage interest rates offered to Marin home buyers has been an island of calm in a sea of…well, less calm, if the year’s turbulent election cycle is any example. Predictability has ... 12/12/2016

The idea of “fake news” and how to tell it from the real thing has gotten scads of attention lately, so Novato web users are entitled to be more skeptical than usual of news items. Last week, there was one of those “come hither” headlines you run across on the web—but with a byline from The Washington Post, it looked like it would contain actual news.Sure enough, this one was for real: “How to Spot a Housing Rental Scam.” Housing rental scams aren’t totally unknown in California—so dispatches about how to spot any new kind of Novato housing rental funny business figured to be worth checking into. It turns out that the article originated in the Washington Post for a good reason: it centered on a surge in housing rental rip-offs being attempted right now in the nation’s capital.It seems t... 12/12/2016

Some breakthrough good news has come to light. It deals with first-time home buyers.Across the U.S., first-time home buyers have been staging a disappearing act for a worrisome long time. The causes were pretty universal across much of the country: a sluggish economic recovery and tight labor market contributed to the national phenomenon. Rises in Corte Madera residential prices haven’t helped those seeking to become new homeowners locally.For Corte Madera homeowners who follow such things, the phenomenon was slowly becoming a worrisome fact—one that didn’t look like it was going away anytime soon. When you own a home, its value as collateral and at sale depends on a healthy real estate market—one that supports sustainable activity.That means that new buyers should appear in numbers at ... 12/12/2016

Real estate articles that are really just lists are now being called “listicles”—and there are certainly plenty of them around. The other day one appeared that just had to be read: Bankrate’s “7 things that could turn off homebuyers.”The actual listicle may not have been the product of much real research into houses for sale, but it was amusing. In the best social media tradition, I’d like to add a few thoughts in order to come up with a modified/improved “7 things” (for starters, there are 9):9 Things Bound to Offend Nicasio Homebuyers           Monkeys.           All right, that first requires an explanation. It headed up the Bankrate list, with a picture of a rhesus macaque clinging to a balcony railing. I’d have to agree that monkeys freewheeling around a Nicasio house for sale migh... 12/08/2016

You don’t have to be beyond your 40s to begin plotting a direction for your retirement years. Most younger San Rafael residents know this full well but (truth be told) do precious little about it. For most of us, we’re all so busy tending to career and daily living concerns that most of the time it seems like self-indulgent wool-gathering to go daydreaming about retirement plans. Besides—who has extra cash to be doing more than the bare minimum about financing retirement? It’s so far off in the future…That may be the 21st-century reality for most San Rafael adults who aren’t close to retirement age, but in fact, some of the real estate decisions we make early on can set the stage for satisfaction in later years. That’s one of the takeaways from the brains at Age Wave, a think tank who c... 12/08/2016

If you listen to the Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poors-Dow Jones, the nation’s housing market has reached an important milestone—one likely to be appreciated by real estate holders—Stinson Beach homeowners and investors included.The gentleman in the spotlight is David Blitzer, who is the head man when it comes to the S&P Case-Shiller Index, the most widely-respected measure of housing activity.Mr. Blitzer’s comments were aimed at the latest report, released last Tuesday. It covered three-month price averages for the quarter ending in September. They notched a 5.5% higher average residential price over the previous year.Now at this point, Stinson Beach real estate observers might wonder what is so newsworthy about yet another appreciation in residential real estate pric... 12/08/2016

If you were one of the brave Nicasio real estate investors who decided a few years back that the real estate meltdown was an awfully good buying opportunity, congratulations on being able to resist any naysayers. The fact that real estate has always lived up to its name (“real”) is easy to forget when prices have hit the basement—especially when the surrounding economic news is dire.Those were days when Nicasio fixer-upper opportunities were available for shockingly low asking prices—and before long, the shockingly low asking prices began to look normal and reasonable. “Bank owned homes” became a hugely popular search term as foreclosure numbers skyrocketed. It’s hard to recall the way it really felt, but any buying into that real estate market seemed like a swashbuckling act of raw cou... 11/17/2016

 If you weren’t among those who were surprised by last week’s election outcome, you were among very few. Opinion leaders in every corner of the media are still scrambling to explain why their prognostications had been so wide of the mark. When your job is to help people understand the fine points of current events, it’s just plain embarrassing when you get the big picture 180 degrees wrong!For both San Rafael homeowners who will be considering putting up a ‘For Sale’ sign within the next year or so—as well as for potential San Rafael real estate buyers they will need to attract—any shift in the currents in Washington are very likely to affect the market conditions they’ll encounter. There are three areas that can have profound impacts on the strength or weakness of residential home sale... 11/17/2016

Diana Olick is a well-known industry writer. Anyone with an interest in Marin County real estate can usually find something of value when she comes up with a new entry in her CNBC column (the one with the pun-worthy title, “Realty Check”). This month she commented on the rising housing market across the nation and its repercussions in terms of homeowner equity.The piece points out that in the U.S., home equity has doubled over the last five years!It’s hardly news that home values have been steadily on the rise—that’s been a trend long seen in the asking prices in California and our Marin County listings. But the idea of homeowner equity actually doubling could be hard to believe.That’s a claim that sounds a like quite an exaggeration…until you stop to think about what is actually being ... 11/17/2016

The Leasing Team at Foundation Rentals and Relocation just LEASED another property in San Rafael for $5,975.  Thanks to everyone for a great transaction.  For any questions about San Rafael property management or buying or selling investment properties in San Rafael, call Broker Christopher Barrow at (415) 637-8934!  10/12/2016