The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has its new guidelines on how to ensure you get either the “first time” home buyer or “repeat” buyer tax credit.There’s specific documents your Tax Advisor needs to submit in order to get it!

If you forgot, the federal tax credit for home buyers was extended and expanded late last year, and will be for good either first time home buyers or repeat buyers that purchased and closed their escrows by April 10, 2010. Qualified first-time buyers may be eligible to receive a tax credit of up to $8,000 and repeat buyers may be eligible for a tax credit of up to $6,500.

To receive the tax credit, home buyers must comply with the IRS’s documentation requirements, including a fully executed IRS Form 5405.  On the form, which is available on the IRS’s Web site, taxpayers provide information supporting their claim of eligibility, such as income and home purchase date.

The IRS also requires home buyers to submit a copy of the closing or settlement statement that proves the transaction took place. The IRS previously said that the statement should show “all parties’ names and signatures, property address, sales price, and date of purchase.”  However, since closing or settlement statements vary by state, and in some cases the form does not include both the seller’s and buyer’s signatures, the IRS has revised this requirement.  As long as the closing or settlement statement conforms to prevailing local practices, the IRS will accept it.

One stipulation for repeat buyers is they must provide documentation they lived in their former property for a consecutive five years out of the previous eight years. Accepted documentation may include property tax records, hazard insurance records, or copies of annual mortgage interest statements filed with their federal taxes.

I’ve included the link below so that if you’re doing it yourself, you can look into it or you can forward the link to your Tax Advisor.

First-Time Homebuyer Credit: Answers

Good news, home sales in San Francisco has risen 18% from January 2009 for Single Family homes. The findings from the local market report I get each month issued jointly by the Rosen Consulting Group and the San Francisco Association of REALTORs also noted that “Sales at the high end of the market continued to be dominated by all cash or large down payment transactions.”

I can attest that I’ve come across a number of all cash buyers at the low end of the spectrum in both the East Bay and within entry level Studio/1 bedroom condos in the city, but hearing that the high end of the market is also experiencing this trend is surprising, and I wouldn’t expect to see this trend continue much longer.

High down payment buyers understand that is the “safest” way in order to make your monthly mortgage payments easy on their pockets and won’t allow them to get into the foreclosure situation so many people have been a part of the past two years.

They also found that “at the current sales rate, the months of supply inventory for single-family homes dropped to 3.5 months from 5.8 months while the months of supply inventory for condominiums show a more substantial decline during this time, dropping to 4.1 months from 9.5 months in January 2009. Rosen Consulting Group believes this to be another positive sign in the market.”

Today’s San Francisco Examiner has an article about how the city of San Francisco is mailing fines to property owners who “fail to register vacant or abandoned buildings.”

I bet you probably didn’t know about this little rule from the city did ya?

“Under rules introduced late last year (2009) by city leaders in an attempt to reduce neighborhood blight, a property owner is required to pay a $765 annual fee to register a vacant building and maintain it in a secure and good condition”.

Source: SF Examiner

I found this information informative from SFGate.com, as within the decade in the Bay Area, homeowners with Asian surnames (I wonder if they counted Lee’s in that list?) have risen up 15% from 2000. Census Bureau gathered the data and the Wall Street Journal also found that the 10 most common surnames in the Bay Area were populated from people of Vietnamese, Chinese or Korean decent.

Quite amazing to see as Nguyen was the number one spot in the list and not a more generic last name like Smith or Johnson…who knows, maybe this is the start of John or Joe Nguyen.