Blog
Will a Bath Remodel Increase My Home’s Value?
Spring is just around the corner and the lure of a new home has you thinking about putting yours on the market. Your neighbor added a new bathroom last year and you’re wondering if you should upgrade yours before you…
Curb Appeal for Condo Sellers
You know that curb appeal is important to buyers of single-family homes, but you are selling a condominium in a large building full of similar units. How do you make yours stand out? Here are a few tips for prompting…
Capturing Clutter
Whether you’re preparing your home to sell, or your packing up to move to your new home … clutter can be your worst enemy. But, getting chaos under control isn’t always easy. The problem isn’t that you lack resources. In…
Fascinating Home Technology — Run Your House on a Battery
The biggest challenge to solar energy is the inability to both capture it and store it in any meaningful way. In fact, while efficiency in capturing solar power has increased from about 15 percent of most solar panel models to…
Protect Your Home-Buying Budget
You know you love house hunting, and shopping for the perfect home is a fun pastime, but to move from being an open house and model home butterfly requires that big initial financial outlay … the dreaded downpayment. In fact,…
Are You Ready to Buy a Home?
Okay, it’s one of the biggest decisions of your life, so when do you know if you’re ready? Homeownership readiness can come at any age … there are young twenty-somethings that took the plunge, and there are empty-nesters that buy…
The Best Place to Raise a Family
We all have our own idea of the perfect place to raise a family. We want our kids to grow up with all the opportunities available to them. That might mean a large backyard or nearby parks, great schools, sports…
Hack Your Downpayment
The biggest hindrance to home-ownership for most young couples is the dreaded downpayment. In fact, may couples believe that between living expenses and school loans, they’ll never be able to save up enough for a downpayment on a house or…
Counting Chickens
If your house has been on the market for any length of time, or if you need to sell because of an out-of-town job change, you may be tempted to accept a contingency offer on your home, or anticipate the…
Keeping It In Balance: Knowing Your Credit-to-Debt Ratio
Many potential new homebuyers find themselves unable to secure a loan, confined to a smaller home ? or at least to a smaller loan ? because they don’t understand the ins and outs of their credit score. First of all,…
Spooky or Spectacular?
Sometimes, a neighborhood appears awesome…but might be hiding some spooky, ghostly elements! You can’t know, for instance, how welcoming some neighborhoods are to families with small children unless you see small children there. If you’ve only visited the neighborhood during…
Your House and Elections
With the national elections ramping up, many voters already have voter fatigue (also called voter apathy). That is, we’re already so tired of hearing about the elections that we don’t bother to vote at all. In fact, voter apathy is…
Nifty Clutter-Freeing Hints & Hideaways
Whether you’re planning to sell your home and want to make it show-ready, or just want to get organized to simplify the holidays, check out these creative options for extra storage: Under Bed Locker That space under your bed is…
Slash Your Energy Bill
We don’t think about our heating bill much in the summer, but this is the time to make some upgrades to your home that will see you through the winter, such as adding insulation, changing out windows for double or…
A House for the Whole Family
While multigenerational families sharing a home is common nowadays, finding a home that works for everyone is a little trickier. If you’re searching for the perfect house to share with both young children and aging parents, you need to consider…
How to Survive Transition
Timing the closing of your new home purchase with the end of your lease agreement or sale of your existing home is tricky, to say the least. Rarely does it work out that you move directly from one home to…
Condo? Co-Op? Apartment? Townhome?
Which is which? Although all are part of the common-interest housing category, condos, co-ops, townhouses, and apartments may mean different things to different buyers, so here is a breakdown of what each word means and the advantages or disadvantages of…
Open House Pitfalls, Tips and Etiquette for Buyers
So, you’re thinking of buying a home … where do you begin? Potential buyers new to the real estate market may not know exactly what they want in a home, or where they want to live. The dream homes in…