—North Port, FL

A:  If you need a home, then keep looking. If you find a home that suits your needs and is reasonably priced compared to similar homes, make an offer. It doesn’t make sense to try to time the market—because nobody can. Unless you plan to stay in your home for only a year or two, you eventually will accrue some equity, even if you buy before housing in your area hits bottom. In the meantime, you will enjoy federal tax breaks, and avoid the rent hikes that are inevitable as demand for rental housing grows, fed by millennials entering the workforce, former homeowners who have gone through foreclosure and would-be homeowners like yourself who are waiting for home prices to fall.

Right now, the picture is too mixed for me—or anyone for that matter—to say with certainty where Sarasota County is in its housing cycle. But rest assured that it is a cycle, and that when it does become clear that the market is headed up, buyers will jump off the fence, prices will stabilize and interest rates may rise. So you may as well take the plunge now while there are still great deals to be had!

Trying to sell your house? Many sellers put their home on the market at a wishful-thinking price, figuring that they could just lower it later.

That strategy could be a misfire. According to a new analysis by RedFin Corp., a Seattle-based brokerage that operates in nine states, a listing gets the most attention online when it’s new to the market. The week that a listing hits the market, Redfin estimates that it gets nearly four times more visits on real estate websites than it does a month later, likely the earliest time that a seller will consider cutting the price.

Redfin looked at traffic to listings in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Irvine, Calif., Washington, D.C., Boston and Chicago. They considered listings that debuted in the first three months of 2010, sat on the market for at least 60 days and had undergone at least one update. The site used its own traffic data to estimate what traffic would be like to other real-estate sites.

Redfin’s graphic, below, tells the story:

The red line represents visits from the day of debut. Green shows visits to the listing after it’s updated.

Back when most folks looked for a new home by getting in the car, the freshness of a listing didn’t matter very much. But now a new real-estate listing works almost like a news story. When the news hits, people flock to read it. The next day, traffic drops off.  Your home listing, says Redfin chief executive Glenn Kelman, “is just another momentary media phenomenon in an ADD-addled world.”

It hasn’t worked out that way, at least not yet.

The legislation makes the USDA’s Single-Family Housing Guaranteed Loan Program self-sufficient, the National Association of Realtors reports. Borrowers will have to pay a higher “guarantee fee” of 3.5%–essentially upfront mortgage insurance–but the fee can be folded into the mortgage.

Buyers won’t mind paying a bit more in fees, says Sue Botelho, a senior mortgage advisor with Waterstone Mortgage Corp. in Ft. Walton Beach, Fla. “It’s great news,” she said. “It’s a huge part of my business. I am thrilled.”

Also happy is LGI Homes, a Texas builder that caters to USDA buyers. Chief Executive Eric Lipar estimates he’s lost 100 sales in the last few months.

“Once funding’s officially in place, we’ve got customers waiting,” he said.

The USDA wasn’t immediately available for comment.

As we’ve reported, the program offering no-money-down loans in certain parts of the country for low- and middle-income borrowers, exhausted its $13.1 billion funding earlier this year, leaving some would-be buyers fearful their financing would fall through. USDA loans were particularly popular this year as first-time buyers tapped the government’s federal home buyer tax credit. They have until Sept. 30 to close.

Despite the last-minute save for USDA borrowers, industry watchers haven’t stopped criticizing zero-down deals-given the role they played in the housing crash. The USDA program is considered safer because up to 90% of the purchase amount is guaranteed, meaning the agency will pay should the borrower default.

The USDA has previously said that last fiscal year’s foreclosure rate was 1.72%, well below the Federal Housing Administration’s 3.32%. Borrowers also can’t make more than 115% of a county’s median income, preventing McMansion-sized loans: The average USDA loan is $112,000.

The strong guidelines weed out potentially troublesome borrowers, Ms. Botelho said. “When they approve a loan, it’s a very, very good loan,” she said.

But some might not be as trapped as they think.

Record-low mortgage rates and a new slump in home prices are presenting unusual opportunities in the housing market these days—even for so-called underwater borrowers.

A  real-estate broker in Sarasota, says none of her clients kicked in cash when selling their home last year.  This year, “about half are willing to bring money to closing, anywhere from $5,000 to $45,000,” she says.

Are these people crazy to be tying up even more of their cash in their homes, in effect doubling down on what has been a losing bet thus far? After all, any number of variables, from the employment picture to the credit markets, could weigh on housing for years to come.

Yet economists say trading up to new homes or refinancing existing ones can be smart—even if it means plunking down more cash to get out of old mortgages. People living in less-desirable neighborhoods might be able to find better homes in tonier ones that offer better appreciation potential. And with mortgage rates so low, such buyers can keep their monthly payments manageable, even though the new homes are more expensive.

The refinancing equation is changing, too. Thanks to rock-bottom interest rates and liberal lending terms for Federal Housing Administration loans, a person who plunks down cash to retire a higher-rate mortgage might be able to reduce his monthly payments, even as he shortens his loan term to 20, 15 or 10 years.

In the past, financial planners typically recommended that homeowners devote as little cash to real estate as possible, and to invest it in the financial markets instead. But with stocks essentially where they were 11 years ago and market volatility seemingly on the rise, people are rethinking that wisdom. Devoting extra cash to repay a mortgage early is among the safest ways to produce an investment return.

 Your home is underwater. You owe more on the mortgage than the property is worth. Maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars more. You cannot afford the mortgage payments, the homeowners’ association dues, the property taxes, and the upkeep. Why not let the Bank take the property? Why shouldn’t you just mail the keys back to the Bank and let the Bank sort it out?

With thousands of mortgage foreclosure lawsuit being filed each month in Florida, it appears that not just a few homeowners and investors are choosing to ignore the problem and head for the hills. Many of these lawsuits are won by default for failure of the homeowner to file a response to the complaint of foreclosure.

Be careful.  Ignoring this particular problem could have consequences you could not possibly have imagined.

For example, pursuant to Rule 1.560(b) of the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, the lender may request that the Final Judgment of Foreclosure include an order requiring the judgment debtor to complete a Fact Information Sheet (Form 1.977) within 45 days of the entry of the Final Judgment. The Fact Information Sheet is a form of interrogatories in aid of execution that was adopted by the Florida Supreme Court in 2000. The information sought includes the judgment debtor’s income, employment information, bank account information, motor vehicles owned by the judgment debtor, real estate assets, paycheck stubs, income tax returns, and any other such financial statement or loan applications submitted within the last three years.

Most importantly, this Rule specifically states that “Failure to obey the order may be considered contempt of court.” Civil contempt is defined as the failure to do something ordered by the court for the benefit of a party to a civil action. Accordingly, it is within the court’s power to issue an arrest warrant against a judgment debtor who refuses to complete the Fact Information Sheet. It is becoming increasingly common for aggressive lenders to pursue entry of an order of civil contempt against a party who continues to ignore a judgment creditor’s legal right to discovery of the debtor’s financial condition as part of the creditor’s efforts to collect on deficiency judgments. In other words, the legal system does not let you simply ignore or walk away from the problem.

While your situation may seem hopeless, relief may be had by attacking the problem head-on. Keep open communication with your lender and explore loan modification options. If that doesn’t work, hire a Realtor that specializes in short-sales immediately, to assist you in the sale of the property.  And if you decide to pursue a short sale, with some persistence, your lender may even agree to waive their right to pursue the loan deficiency balance remaining after the sale of the property or negotiate a lesser amount.

If you have been served with a foreclosure lawsuit, hire an attorney. Your attorney can assist you in defending the foreclosure, buy you additional time to obtain a short-sale, and also assist with your negotiations with the lenders. Making this effort to mitigate your damages can result in a reasonable settlement and may help you escape liability for a large amount of debt.

Some of the largest mortgage servicers and lenders in the country are gearing up campaigns to reach out to carefully targeted borrowers with cash incentives that sometimes range into five figures, plus a simple message: Let’s bypass all the time-consuming hassles of short sales and foreclosures. Just deed us the title to your underwater home and we’ll call it a deal. We won’t come after you to collect any deficiency between what you owe us on the mortgage and what we obtain from the home sale. We might even be able to wrap up the whole transaction in as little as 30 to 45 days.

Most analysts expected housing might hit a rough patch after the home-buyer tax credit expired in April.  But is the plunge in demand becoming worse than expected?

It’s a fair question, given Wednesday’s report that new home sales plunged 33%  in May from April and were off 18% from one year ago.

Moreover, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that mortgage rates fell again, down to 4.75% last week from 4.82% two weeks ago. By comparison, rates were slightly higher one year ago, at around 5.3%.

Yet demand for refinancing or for taking out new loans is tepid. The index that tracks new purchase-loan activity was down 2.3% from last week and nearly 37% from one year ago.

That weakness is also showing up in home sales contracts signed in May, which the National Association of Realtors estimates is down 10% to 15% from one year earlier.  Those deals won’t close until later this summer, which means that we could be in for several more months of gloomy housing indicators.

One big question is how quickly demand will bounce back as the market works through the post-tax credit hangover.  Another big question: How quickly will new supply come onto the market in those intervening months? If more banks put homes on the market this summer and more sellers list their homes, that pushes up inventories and pushes down prices.

Housing economists are gloomier about the prospects than just a month ago, which suggests that there may be more evidence that the tax-credit lull won’t be as temporary as once believed.

The answers to those questions could foretell whether housing prices drop just 5%, or if there’s truly a “double-dip” in store, that would mean drops of around 10-15%.

Home buyers may get an extra three months to finish qualifying for federal tax incentives that boosted home sales this spring.