South Florida Real Estate and...

Wellington Horse Shows bring a lot of people here to Wellington Florida each and every year for the Polo Season and the Winter Equestrian Festival that starts in January and ends in April.

Fl Horse Properties come in small one acre parcels to 20 plus acres.

Join us as we take you along for a video tour of some of the Wellington Horse Properties. You will enjoy the journey. Please leave a comment in the YouTube comment area!

Our first stop is a new construction custom estate home that is listed for $6 Million dollars right next to the Polo Fields and within hacking distance to the Palm Beach Equestrian Center for all the Winter Equestrian events that include hunter jumper and dressage competitions.

The Stables are attached to the house. The main living area of this estate is above the stables. There are fenced in paddocks and a turn out or exercise ring in front of the estate. The video tells the story better than I can here. You have to see these horse stables. I am sure many of you would say this is good enough for your teenagers to live in!

When people tour FL Horse properties in Wellington Fl they most often say that you can not tell the difference between the house the people live in and the stables the horses live in. Actually some of our friends keep their stables and barns cleaner than their homes.

Wellington Florida Homeschool- Making History Come Alive or Not So Alive!

Some of my favorite subjects to teach our son are history and geography. One of the perks is that you get to choose your own curriculum. Because we have homeschooled 6 children it is much easier this time around. We use a biblical time-line and teach history from a biblical perspective which is much different than my secular education in Germany and in Stanford Elementary.

One of our neighbors also homeschools her children and it just so happens that our son is about a year younger than one of her sons. Needless to say; they are very good friends and we do a lot of coop teaching.

We are learning about Ancient Egypt right now. With the internet and the public library there is no lacking in materials and references about Ancient Egypt. In fact, there is TOO much- most parents get information overload. So we do unit studies with full immersion into a subject. So when we study Ancient Egypt we spend two hours a day on this area. We incorporate music, math, science, art, language art, reading, history and geography.

Part of our hands on learning section was science and art combined. The two boys mummified chickens. They each got their own chicken. The Museum of England has really good instructions and lesson plans.

We found out that in Ancient Egypt most people mummified their loved ones. The difference was in how fancy of a funeral you could afford. The poor people just placed their loved ones in the sand in the desert. The salt in the sand mummified them perfectly. We had to buy a lot of salt for this experiment.

Oooh! We also found out why you use all those spices! To cover up the smell of decay! We realized that such a small animal as a chicken smells pretty bad as it is drying out. You can only imagine how bad the humans smelled!

The museum instructions said the initial drying out process would take about 4 to 6 weeks. Every week the boys would have to take the salt off their chickens, re-spice them really good with cloves and Cinnamon and then salt them again. They wore plastic gloves since we did not want to get those germs on us!

What we failed to realize is that we live in Florida and it is very humid here. The drying out process took 8 weeks!
The boys were very patient.

Finally they wrapped their dried out chickens with glue ( to substitute for the resin) and gauze. The cashier at Target was looking as us strange when we bought so many rolls of gauze- we explained that we were making chicken mummies,LOL! 

Now the chickens were given an Ancient Egyptian funeral, placed in 'Gold' coffins they made from shoe boxes and then buried in our back yard. In one year they will dig them up and check them out!

Are You Tired Of The Buyer Walking? Short Sale Listing and Selling Strategies.

As I move around reading Active Rain comments and posts and cruise the internet I find a lot of listing agents lamenting about the buyer walked in the midst of the negotiations or right as the acceptance letter arrives for a short sale listing.

Well, that used to be one of our biggest complaints also, but that changed as the market changed.

We are in the business of helping our clients. So we need to be proactive in providing our sellers with alternatives to situations that may arise.

 Anything listed under $400,000 is going to have multiple offers within the first 30 days on the market. That brings into question whether this is still a buyers' market.

Disclosure: every state is different so check with your state about contract law. This article is about Florida short sale contracts.

The last straw was when on three different listings after we had gone through the entire short sale process of negotiating with lenders that do not allow buyer substitutions- and after getting the short sale approval letters- the buyers walk using the home inspection clause in our Florida AS IS contract. One buyer withdrew their offer because the garbage disposal was broken even after the seller offered to put a new one in for them.

We discussed all this with our attorney who then drafted up a short sale contract addendum. We do not use the FAR short sale addendum. It is basically useless. I don't know one attorney that likes that addendum and I have no idea why the attorneys at FAR drafted that addendum.

Do we have buyer agents call us and flip out over the addenda? Of course! But we then explain the reasoning behind our addendum.

What does our short sale addendum consist of? Some of these items were already on our previous short sale addendum. We are just listing everything here so you know what is in our addendum including prior items.

1. The buyer's deposit becomes hard at execution of the contract between buyer and seller.  NOT at lender's acceptance. We tell the buyers' agents that our sellers and us will no longer work on files without the buyer committed to the deal.

2. BofA files all have a 120 day acceptance period, no less. If your buyer needs less time than that, this is not the home for them.

3. The terms and conditions of the third party lender must be approved by our seller.  If the bank comes back with a cash contribution demand from our seller and our seller does not have the money- they can not close.  BTW- that has not happened because we negotiate terms that our sellers can meet.

4. The buyer is to do their home inspection within 30 days of buyer and seller signing the contract, not after the third party acceptance. Of course, the sellers must keep the home in the same condition as the home inspection states.

5. If this is a cash transaction; we need to see proof of funds in the form of a bank letter, stock report, CD statement, etc.  About 60% of the offers that come in on our listings are ALL CASH buyers.

6. If this is financing: then the buyer must be approved for the loan- not pre-approved.

Since this is new to most agents, we always get the response: " Well, I never heard of that before!" To which we say, "Well, now you have!" There is a first time for everything.

When a buyer does not want to pay $200 to $300 for a home inspection upfront because they don't know it the short sale is going to get approved or not- we tell the buyers' agent- that the buyer must not want the house if they are not willing to gamble a couple hundred dollars to get the home they want. Typically a family of four here is spending $200 going out to dinner every month. So the "buyer does not have the money" does not wash with us.

We have also had the seller pay for half of the inspection and the buyer pay the other half. That creates a win/win with a buyer who is hesitant because they see the seller is putting something forward also.

Disclaimer: Now I don't recommend listing agents to use this type of addendum if they do not know how to close short sales. This is for experienced short sale agents. The biggest reason we can get this addendum agreed to by buyers is because we have a reputation of closing short sales. Any of the agents here can check with our MLS to see that we close our short sale listings and that our CTG status listngs change to Pending and then to SOLD. Our closing ratio is at 98% and that is after a lot of short sales. If an agent only has one listing that closes as a short sale and they only have that one listing they can say they close 100% becuase that is true, however that is based on only one closing!

Avoid Foreclosure! Call Nestor and Katerina Gasset for Short Sale Information Today- 561-753-0135 or learn more at Short-Sales-Florida.com.

The Short Sale Closing That Was Saved In The 11th Hour!

Short Sale- West Palm Beach Condo- The Slade  

Short Sale Lender: BankUnited Florida - One Mortgage

Condo Fees- Current

Mortgage- Lis Pendens

Source Of Listing- Referral from our attorney- she does not do short sale negotiating.

• Bank approval in less than 60 days.

• Cash buyers

• Hardship- Investment underwater, business decision

• Seller had to pay for HOA fees, attorney fees and a few minor title fees. 

The first buyers were a group of investors who failed to perform on their contract at the end of the day.
We went through the whole short sale process, negotiated the short sale with the bank and the sellers.
This was an investment purchase. Our attorney who was doing the closing and the buyers' attorney went back and forth settling title issues.
The buyers then failed to wire the cash to our attorney's trust account within the time frame. We felt worst for their agent who could not even reach the buyers!

The date to close was coming up fast so we put the condo back on the market right away with the accepted price as an approved short sale.
This lender allows substitutions of buyers.


With less than a week to meet the lender's deadline for closing- we hoped for the best.

We were racing against the clock! Could we do it? It would have to be a cash buyer to close that quickly.

So to work we went and:

Within 24 hours we had another cash buyer. The buyers' agent stepped right up and their buyer did the home inspection within hours of signing the contract, wired the money into our attorney's account, Milet called the negotiator to tell her that we were sending her a new HUD for approval because we changed out the buyer and then we set the closing time!

So we closed this West Palm Beach short sale in the 11th hour, the day of the deadline to close on the approved HUD!

Then the buyer's agent called us right after closing to ask us to list the property sold in the mls straight away because his buyer was putting the condo back on the market- he is flipping the property.
Sold price $139,000. He put it back on the market for $190,000.

There are some good flipping opportunities for skilled and experienced investors in our West Palm Beach Condo Market!

Avoid Foreclosure! Call Nestor and Katerina Gasset for Short Sale Information Today- 561-753-0135 or learn more at Short-Sales-Florida.com.

Our 7 year old son participated in the 3rd annual Track and Field Meet put on by the Christian Homeschool Athletic Association of Florida- more commonly known as SAINTS. 

This is such a fun event for the kids. As homeschooling grows faster and faster and parents are pulling their kids out of public schools on a monthly basis it is such a blessing to have good, wholesome physical fitness group programs where the kids can compete with politeness and focus on what is important.

 A teacher I know told me that parents are pulling their kids out of public school to homeschool on a daily basis in Florida. Florida is a homeschool friendly state. Governor Chariie Crist issued a homeschool proclamation and declared that March 30 - April 6 is Home Education week in Florida.   

I am always impressed whenever we go to any homeschool field trip or event with how well behaved the kids are, even the teenagers! 

But this track and field event could not have been possible without 'Coach Rick' who started the CHAA program. The first year he had 13 kids in he program, today he has over 2,100 kids in the PE program and he just opened up a new program in Austin Texas. I thought about Jason Crouch and how this would be a great program for his homeschooled children in Austin. 

Rick Andreassen was also named the National Teacher of the Year in 2008. You can read the story on a post I wrote here. He has since been inducted into the Who's Who of American Teachers. Rick is the first ever homeschool teacher to be awarded with teacher of the year. 

But there is something we did not know about Rick that really got the kids excited. He was one of the torch runners for the Summer Olympics held in Salt Lake City Utah. Our son held the Olympic torch in his hand! That was really cool! 

If you are new to Florida and homeschool your children- check out CHAA for your PE part of homeschool. The sessions are held once a week at different geographical park locations all around Florida. You can go from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. for a half day session or your child can enroll for a full day program. Our son loves it so much that he is in the full day program. That gives you as a homeschool parent a day off during the week! He looks forward to going every week and has made some good friends also. It is the one subject I never have a problem getting him ready for! 

MISSION STATEMENT For CHAA: 

• To teach fair play, good sportsmanship, teamwork, goal
setting, develop Godly character, and instill Christian
values
• To teach "Safety First" in all activities
• All activities are designed to be a "learning time"
• To encourage growth in each child's special talents and
help to develop new ones
• To stress RESPECT to God, parents, leaders, self, one
another, equipment, and the environment

For more information regarding SAINTS, CHAA, Christian Homeschool Athletic Association Of Florida's programs and locations check out the their website at www.ChaaSaints.com or call Rick Andreassen who is the Founder and director at 954-717-4428.

To  view Florida Waterfront Condos For Sale - Click here. We know Palm Beach County Short Sales and Port St Lucie Florida Short Sales and will help you get your home Sold if you need to Sell your home and help you buy your home in Palm Beach County Florida: Call us today.

Copyright © 2010 By Katerina Gasset, All Rights Reserved.*Olympic Young Hopefuls- Track and Field Events Kick Off For Florida Homeschool Athletics Program!   

Florida Oceanfront Living! South Ocean Blvd Boca Raton Florida. 

Have you been dreaming of moving to the sunshine of South Florida?

Are you tired of the shoveling the snow up north?

How's this for a view of where you could be living right now: 

Boca Raton Florida waterfront properties are the perfect match for vacation resort living. Even if you are moving here for the winter seasons- these views will make you want to stay here year round. This is also the perfect place to live for anyone who loves the waterfront living that south Florida has to offer! 

Not only is this Boca Raton waterfront condominium right on the ocean where you can watch the sun rise on a morning walk along the beach, you can also entertain around the pool that looks out over the Atlantic ocean. Life doesn't get much better than this! 

People from all over the world come here to enjoy these beaches! You can live right on the Boca Raton beach! 

This South Ocean Blvd Condo is ready for you to move into. There are 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms in this condo on the water in Boca Raton Florida with Ocean views and City views. Located at 3000 S Ocean Blvd Unit 1101 Boca Raton Florida 33432 

The amenities include an exercise room, a game room and clubhouse area. The lobby that welcomes your guests is immaculate. This location is right down the road from the world famous Boca Raton Resort and Club where every imaginable amenity awaits you. The Boca Raton Resort and Club offers some of the best restaurants in the area and the massage and spa are top of the line. 

South Ocean Blvd Condo has elevators conveniently located to the entrances of each condo unit for easy access. 

A picture speaks a thousand words so sit back, relax, enjoy the show below and then reach for your phone and call Nestor and Katerina Gasset at 561-753-0135 to set up your private showing of this condo unit and the amenities. 

Active Rain Meet and Greet in South Florida- A Great Success!

Tonight we had our first area Active Rain Meet and Greet hosted by Steve Hoffaker and Lou Ludwig.

It was held at our Realtor Association of the Palm Beaches board office.

We had a great turnout. There were about 35 people in attendance, mostly real estate agents but there was also a loan officer, a home inspector and an attorney.

The attorney was none other than Richard Zaretsky. Richard is a member of Active Rain also. He blogs about real estate legal matters and writes about very important topics.

About half the people in attendance were members of Active Rain and half were not. Out of those Active Rain members only one or two actually have done any blogging on Active Rain.

This is something that seems to happen a lot. People start an Active Rain blog and enter their email address, name and company and then never come back to do anything else with it. We networked with the agents and answered questions. One of the agents came up to us after the meeting because he had placed an offer on one of our REO listings. Some of the agents there subscribe to our blog but don't actively write on their blog and so we encouraged them to start blogging. 

Nestor and I gave a talk about how Active Rain is working for us and how it would benefit them to start blogging on Active Rain along with some tips to start blogging. 

Bob Stewart sent over a video welcoming the newcomers to Active Rain and thanking the rest of the members for being a part of Active Rain.

If you don't have a meet and greet going on in your area, we encourage you to get one going. It is a great way to meet the people who are blogging and deepen the connections. It is also a good way to help pay it forward by encouraging other agents in your area to start blogging. We plan to meet on a quarterly basis and offer some short tutorial type classes to help the new bloggers along. 

Copyright © 2010 By Katerina Gasset, All Rights Reserved.*Active Rain Meet and Greet in South Florida- A Huge Success! *

Stop The Banks! The Banks' Lobbyists Are Trying To Change The Foreclosure Process! 

It is not a good thing to give the banks more power.

If you are a real estate agent or a homeowner in the state of Florida please contact your Congress men and women today, please contact your state Senators today! Do not let this plea go unanswered. 

I just wrote a post about how if you are in the business of real estate you need to be involved with the political process and this call to action is NOW.  

If you are a short sale agent, if the banks get their way with this, this will directly impact your short sale closing ratios. This will also put more of your sellers at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure. Make sure you read the 53 page bill.

Get your Board of Realtors® involved with defending the very essence of NAR and state boards- the protection of homeowners' rights. 

Already Palm Beach County has stopped the foreclosures "on the courthouse steps". Actually the foreclosure sales were held in the court's cafeteria but now in order to facilitate so many foreclosures, the county clerk has put all the foreclosure auctions online. This is yet another hurdle to us agents who are scrambling to get the foreclosure stopped because we have a bank that does not know how to talk to their other departments! 

The Florida Supreme Court just made a ruling that all banks that are filing foreclosures must offer the homeowners mediation from now on. This new rule started to be in effect on January 1, 2010.  Well, this bill slaps the Florida Supreme Court right in the face! It would be a mute rule. 

So the banks have now pulled their resources together and are lobbying the Florida house and congress to get this new bill passed. The Florida Bankers Association is a 400 member lobby.

They are trying to undo decades of Florida law by undoing our judicial foreclosure process and change it to a non judicial foreclosure process where homeowners could be foreclosed on in as little as 3 months. Florida has been a judicial state for decades. They want to get this on the books by July 1 of 2010. This would been that they could bypass the judges. Of course they want to bypass the judges. After all, the judges are making the banks show proof of ownership of notes and making the banks obey the laws of service in the state of Florida. The judges will 99.9% of the time rule in favor of the homeowner postponing the foreclosure when we have an offer for a short sale. 

37 states have fast track foreclosures. But Florida is and has always been a state where homeowners' rights matter. 

• 172,894 South Florida homeowners were served with foreclosure lis pendens notices last year. 

This 53 page bill states that the non judicial foreclosures must be completed in no less than 3 months and no more than 1 year. 

Here in Florida in a judicial process it takes 18 months or more to foreclose on a property and longer if you hire an attorney for foreclosure defense. 

I love how they try to sell this bill as doing some good for the people. That is a bunch of loaded boloney.  The bankers also put in the bill to keep their right to deficiency alive and well in the state of Florida.  But then the bank throws a little morsel to the homeowners saying they will waive the deficiency if the homeowners do not wreck the house. 

It amazes me how they package this bill. The name is so deceiving. They must hire a marketing company to come up with the names for bills so that they sound good to the people.

The name of this bill is:

The Florida Consumer Protection and Homeowner Credit Rehabilitation Act!!!!

What a joke! How in the world do they get to put a name like this on a bill that is just there to protect the banks' interests? 

They mask this with pretending that this bill is really helping! The sponsor of the bill said that this is to help break a foreclosure crisis caused by mortgage fraud. Excuse me? How is taking away judicial rights helping break through fraud????? 

He also said that this bill protects the innocent victims- the neighborhoods. How is that going to happen? Agents- please send your congress men and house representatives photos of homes you drive by that are BANK OWNED!!!!  

The bankers spokesperson said that getting the foreclosures into the hands of the banks and out of the homeowners' possession will help with blighted urban neighborhoods and help relieve the judges who are overworked and have too many cases. He also said that this will help the HOA's and keep the houses nice and neat. What a good scam to get you to believe that taking away more rights is somehow a good thing. 

Governor Charlie Crist would also have to sign this Pro Banker bill if this bill becomes law. He is under a lot of pressure from the populist movement and they are not happy with the bankers right now. This may not be a move he is willing to take to risk the Senate race he is in. 

The Florida legislature resumes again on March 2. Please get the word out to all the attorneys you know, all the homeowners you know to stop this bill. You never know when you may be in the same situation as these people we are helping to save from foreclosure. 

Avoid Foreclosure! Call Nestor and Katerina Gasset for Short Sale Information Today- 561-753-0135 or learn more at Short-Sales-Florida.com.