Fairfield Financial Services, Inc. - Private Money Loans, Lending & Borrowing

Real estate market general

Where do we go from here?

Friday, January 22nd, 2021

S. Clay Sparkman What the…what just happened? Was that 2020 that just ran over our nation like a buss out of control, knocking down everything in its path? Uh, yes. Today is January 22nd, 2020! We have a new POTUS and VPOTUS in The White House. We have a new congress ruled by a razor […]

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Covid-19 be damned!

Monday, October 12th, 2020

S. Clay Sparkman Okay, so here we are. Halloween is just around the corner. (I wonder how that is going to work. One good thing: There should be plenty of masks.) But let me not deter my own intentions. So here we are: We’ve crawled through 7+ months of unanticipated and unpredictable Covid DMZs and […]

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Covid-19 and real estate markets

Tuesday, March 17th, 2020

S. Clay Sparkman Clearly these are unusual times worldwide. We have very little precedent to draw on in in speculating about how Covid-19 will affect real estate markets in the US. Most investors, of course, don’t like uncertainty. So many will tend to take their chips off the table when things get weird. At the […]

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National home pricing and supply

Friday, January 24th, 2020

S. Clay Sparkman A recent article (“Supply of homes for sale hits record low, and prices suddenly jump,” penned by Diane Olick at the CNBC site, posted 1/22/20) discusses the current numbers and issues related to home supply, demand, and pricing. It seems that in general, high demand for housing coupled with a precariously low […]

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Real estate values – what's next?

Tuesday, January 29th, 2019

S. Clay Sparkman It has been quite a challenge this past dozen years predicting the movement of real estate market values. Values spike. values crash, values spike again, and then … maybe get a little squishy. Also, note the strange happenings in the national political machinery. It might be perilous to ignore this entirely. For […]

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House flipping wisdom worth noting

Wednesday, August 16th, 2017

Clay Sparkman I try to keep an eye out for good information on the status of property flipping. Here are a few things that I have come across recently. With regard to the best cities for home flipping (as of May): The 25 Best Cities for Flipping a House Taylor Tepper at Money May 25, […]

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Ask an Investor

Wednesday, December 21st, 2016

Clay Sparkman I came across the following blog posting by Jersey Digs, and felt that it would be worth passing along to interested borrowers and brokers: Ask an Investor: How did you get started? How do you make money? I hope you found that to be useful. Any feedback would be much appreciated. If you […]

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Visualizing the industry

Thursday, May 19th, 2016

Clay Sparkman With regard to forward thinking (that is, how is the industry changing?): I thought you might appreciate this article, Private Lending Sector Making Big Noise for Real Estate Investors, by Ben Stoodley: Here Certainly he is correct with regard to his interpretation of current trends, and one must wonder how far this might […]

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Three potentially useful indicators of the likely movement of value

Wednesday, May 11th, 2016

Clay Sparkman Any good real estate investor should be attempting  to assess whether property values are rising, falling,  or holding in the area of his/her latest potential investment. After all, the core question when buying investment property (particularly short-term) is, “what is value likely to do in the next year or so?” If you sense […]

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Minding the gap

Wednesday, August 27th, 2014

Clay Sparkman This article was originally posted at this site in May of 2013 at this site. Since then, we have seen the number of construction and fix/flip loans that we do increase significantly. This seems to be a sweet spot for the private money market. That is, we are able to fill what would […]

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