Due to the U.S. military’s involvement in overseas conflicts from 2008 to the present, the government has extended the First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit until April 30, 2011, for some military personnel.Those who have been unable to receive this benefit due to military service now have the opportunity to utilize the $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers or the $6,500 tax credit for existing home buyers.Qualifying for the Tax CreditActive-duty military members who served at least three months outside the U.S. during the last year may be able to purchase a home with the tax credits. Service members have until April 30, 2011, to sign a purchase agreement on a home and until June 30, 2011, to close on the property.

The requirements to qualify for the tax credits are the same for military member as they were for the general public, including:* The home’s purchase price cannot be greater than $800,000* Individuals can’t make more than $125,000 per year; married couples can’t have a combined income greater than $225,000* First-time buyers and their spouses cannot have owned a home in the last three years* To qualify for the $6,500 tax credit, military members must also have lived in the same house for five of the last eight years.Why is a VA loan beneficial?With a VA loan, qualified borrowers will not only be eligible to take advantage of the tax credits, but they will also have access to the numerous financial benefits the VA loan program offers.The VA loan program has helped over 18 million veterans and active duty service members achieve homeownership since 1944. VA loans allow military buyers the opportunity to purchase a home with no money down and without the need for mortgage insurance. The program also offers competitive rates and no penalties for early loan repayment. Unlike most conventional loans, VA loans allow for a higher debt-to-income ratio and even permit borrowers with a history of bankruptcy or foreclosure the chance to obtain a VA loan.About a quarter of each loan provided by the VA Loan program is guaranteed by the Department of Veterans Affairs. That guarantee gives VA lenders greater confidence when lending to borrowers. This confidence means qualified borrowers are more likely to receive lower loan rates, which can save a family thousands over the life of the loan allowing for greater quality of life.

This article was written by James Kelley, who focuses on VA benefits for real estate at www.VABenefitBlog.com

        

You may have been introduced to Groupon from last week's $25 for $50 worth of Gap clothes offering. It sold 441,000 coupons across America and made "Daily Deals" the war cry of the new local advertising model for the Great Recession. We've always believed the best way to engage your community is to give them what they want. In today's economy, deep discount daily deals makes complete sense. Yet, most consumers don't know hundreds of these great deals exist right in their own neighborhood. Well, give the people what they want to see:

We've added a Deals! page onto our Breaking News Network that aggregates and lists all Daily Deals from Groupon, Living Social, Restaurant.com, etc. for every specific Breaking News city in map format. CentennialCoBuzz.com is the first place Centennial Colorado's citizens need to go to find every discount in their city. We also broadcast special deals automatically across the social media via Twitter and Facebook feeds:

Finally, heard of "365 Things to Do" on Facebook? It's a great way to engage your community on a personal level by providing valuable lifestyle tips. What's next? We think the community wants to know about deals, so we're developing "Daily Deal" Facebook feeds (like Centennial Daily Deals) across the Network. It's an automated ticker tape of every new deal that happens in a city, and we hope consumers will monitor it and "like" it.

How to Leverage Daily Deals for Community Engagement

How do you build strong relationships with your business community that translates into deal flow and referrals to your business? Give your business community what it wants: free advertising and promotion via Breaking News, and its associated Twitter and Facebook feed. There's a link on the Deals! page that allows businesses to develop their own coupon deals and have them displayed on the Deals map. Just direct them to the link, it's all self service so you don't need to help out with developing the coupon deal. You'll generate referrals from others who want to also add their own coupons and get promoted through Breaking News.

Best of all, all this is automated so you're not spending time with activities unrelated to real estate. We're believers in automation and syndication, and it's far more fruitful to engage your community by offering true value to them. We bluntly call it quid pro quo marketing; if you provide tangible marketing and financial benefits to your community, you'll get hired because you're valuable to your clients in the long run.

Next step: we're working on broadcasting daily deals of our own across the Breaking News Network. We'll start off by syndicating deals sourced by other couponing services like Groupon, and later, it will be easy to add deals from your business community (after all, you're now positioned as a local media resource like a city newspaper). It all creates revenue, and is just the beginning of a local media based business model.

(mockup)

For more information on Daily Deals and how to leverage this for real estate business development:

Follow my blog Media Transparent.com

Our example above, CentennialCoBuzz.com is developed by Vickie Hall-Drake, you may contact her via Facebook or Twitter.

For those who want to know more about setting up Daily Deals, please contact me at pkitano@gmail.com or on Facebook @pkitano

We hold free webinars every Tuesday afternoon that explain the basic mechanics and tools of community engagement - Breaking News, 365 Things, Daily Deals - and we're opening up registration to 20 more. You may register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/874378795

        

Real Estate and Lending industry has always been ridiculed for not doing enough towards educating the home buyers. In fact a lot of blame for the mortgage meltdown was placed on the fact that the buyers were not made aware of "what they were getting into." Now real estate professionals across 15 states have come together to put Home Ownership Workshops (called HOW in short) for First Time Home Buyers. These professionals are part of Breaking News Network and are already providing value to their communities by being their real time media resource.

        

We're having our first face-to-face gathering of our Breaking News Network participants at Inman Real Estate Connect between July 13-15 in San Francisco. Inman has generously offered us a 25% discount if you register here with the code BNN .

Register before the prices go up this Friday, May 21!

        

Melissa Tamura approached me to write an article about a collegiate perspective on real estate. The best thing Melissa has done in this article is to tangibly describe how college students think about real estate, and she has outlined a mission statement that can be applied to any college student. I wish Melissa all the best. In the future, with the experience of purchasing a home under her belt, she could use her blog Zen College Life to guide other college students to do the same. In fact, we have a national network of Breaking News sites run mostly by Realtors that can support her message.

What do many college students desire? Freedom, independence, and perhaps, some cash in the bank. One of the best ways college students can achieve these ideals is by purchasing real estate. Yes, what once was impossible is now a very possible reality for many college students. Real estate can allow college students to be savvy investors and gain incredible amounts of money by renting rooms out to other students. This article will explain how you too can buy real estate while in college.

As a future law student, personally, researching real estate in Florida has become my own hobby. My goal is to purchase a property, rent it out to other students, and thus grow a healthy profit on the property while I am in law school. Investment properties can help students pay off hefty student loans later in life.For students without a regular income, purchasing a home may seem impossible. However, it does not have to be. The key is to get your parents involved. Parents can take out a mortgage on a home, and then you pay your parents back on the mortgage payments. Of course this plan holds some risk, however, risk is what life is all about. Your parents will be the ones able to most likely qualify for a mortgage, and then you can simply hand cash over to your parents every month when the payment is due.Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the mortgage system and this seems confusing. Don't worry, this was once very confusing to me as well! The bottom line is, a mortgage is a type of loan you take out on a home.

Mortgages can come in two kinds of terms: 15 or 30 year mortgages. This simply means you pay back the loan over 15 or 30 years. People often stress out about mortgages when they take out loans that are too expensive for them to afford.As a student, however, in your case you are in a great position. As the only individual in your home, you can purchase smaller starter homes. With the current housing crisis, many sellers are putting homes on the market with incredibly low prices. For example, in Florida (where I'm researching real estate as a student), you can find gorgeous 3 bedroom condos and homes in Fort Lauderdale for anywhere between $50,000 to $120,000. For homes only 5 minutes from the beach, this is incredibly cheap!So, let's start with a hypothetical case, to illustrate how this works for college students. Let's say I want to purchase a home that is $100,000 as a student. Typically, a person needs to place 20% of the price as a down payment on the home. Since I am a hard working student, I have been able to save up and accumulate $20,000 over a couple summers of working. This would mean I pay $20,000 in cash or check to the seller which I have. Then, let's say that $20,000 totally wiped out my account. Here is where I would need to take out an $80,000 loan or "mortgage" as it is called.Over 30 years, if I had my mom or dad take out the $80,000 mortgage, I would pay about $250 to $300 in monthly payments on my new 3 bedroom home. Typically for the Fort Lauderdale area, however, renting a 3 bedroom home would cost me anywhere between $1,000 to $2,000 a month. Not only are my payments incredibly cheaper, but I am able to own my own home.If students are really savvy, they will find roommates on campus to live with them. Having only 1 or 2 roommates can mean you make your monthly payments in excess and can pay off your loan sooner! Or, if you have already paid off the home, you can make a healthy $600 to $800 in profit every month!Buying real estate in college is a very possible dream for many students these days. The key is to be open to letting your parents be involved and to have drive and determination to pay off your mortgage.

Melissa Tamura writes about online degrees for Zen College Life. She most recently ranked the best online colleges.

        

        

At the recently concluded Virtual RE Bar Camp, I was on the Mortgage Panel with Mark Madsen, Chris Brown, Scott Schang and Justin McHood.

Mortgage Panel at Virtual RE Bar Camp

View more presentations from Shashank Shekhar.

        

I'll be presenting next week at Jim Cronin's brilliant Virtual REBarCamp. Register here and meet me on April 6 at 2:15 in room #4.

My new presentation is on "The Impact of Geolocational Media"

Geolocation is the new social buzz with Foursquare and Gowalla, butTwitter and Facebook are closing in with mobile services. What is the impact of theseservices beyond "checking in"? We'll discuss their strategic importanceand predict their futures.

This won't be a mechanics course on how to log in at your neighborhood Starbucks, it's a high level discussion on the power of geolocation and how it will impact local advertising, online presence and... real estate.

        

Chris Thorman who blogs about real estate technology at Software Advice shares leading edge concepts that are aligned with what I see coming down the mobile social media pipeline. Turnkey / automation / service delivery and execution are critical to mass adoption, and when service companies can provide this instantly in one click, they will get customers.

Chris' guest post on an automated mobile service concept:

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The real estate technology market has been flooded in recent years with "location-based" applications to help buyers find properties in their area. With little variation, they all work in about the same way:

• Start an application on your mobile phone;
• Utilize your phone's GPS to determine your location; and,
• Have the application retrieve location-based real estate data.

What if a prospective real estate buyer didn't have to initiate an application to get real estate data? What if the data just came to their phone automatically?

Sound far-fetched? Well it isn't. Advertising company Placecast has developed a service called ShopAlerts and we think it has very interesting implications for the real estate industry. ShopAlerts allows users to opt in to receive marketing message on their phone from retail stores that are nearby. For example, a person would sign up for alerts from Old Navy and would automatically receive tailored text message marketing notifications each time they were close to an Old Navy store.

This could work in the same manner for the real estate industry. Users could opt in to receive alerts about specific types of properties. And when they near those properties, they cross a "geo-fence" which prompts an automatic notification to be sent to their mobile phone. 

Essentially, a person lives their life and in the meantime, receives notifications about properties they're close to that match what they want. Is this ideal marketing technology or what?