Tag: real estate

9 Tips to Successfully Rent Out Your Home

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During the pandemic, many home buyers — as well as homeowners who refinanced their loans — attained exceptionally low mortgage rates. As of the third quarter of 2023, an estimated 60% of homeowners reported that they had a mortgage rate below 4%, and more than 20% had a rate under 3%, according to a Redfin analysis of data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. 

If you’re a homeowner with a rock-bottom mortgage rate and you’re looking to move, now could be a good time to purchase a new home and turn your current home into a rental property. Or, if you’d rather stay put, you could take some of the equity you’ve built up in your home and buy an investment property. Although rents decreased slightly in 2023, the national median rent is still almost $250 per month higher than it was three years ago, hitting $1,379 last December, according to Apartment List. 

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What You Can Negotiate When Buying a Home

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Good news, house hunters: Home buyers are getting more negotiating power.

Buyers received concessions from home sellers in 45.5% of home sales by Redfin agents between December 1, 2022 and February 28, 2023. That’s up from 31.1% in February 2022, according to a March 2023 Redfin report. And we’re not just talking about price cuts. As mortgage rates rise and home buyer demand cools, more sellers are picking up closing costs for buyers and footing the bill for home repairs to close deals. 

Still, most buyers don’t know what bargaining chips are on the table. “Many times, home buyers aren’t aware that they can negotiate for things other than a home’s sale price,” says Jason Gelios, a real estate agent at Community Choice Realty in southeast Michigan. 

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How Homebuyers Can Win a Bidding War

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If you’re buying a home right now, you might find the competition is stiff: More than 60 percent of homes faced a bidding war, a recent Redfin report found, thanks to low mortgage rates and scarce inventory.

Your offer will need to rise to the top. But how? We asked some real estate pros how to make an offer that will win a bidding war.

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A Leap of Faith: How Real Estate Rookies Make it Work

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Wendy Wright of Washington, D.C., was ready to take her real estate license exam last March—just as the term “novel coronavirus” was becoming part of the national conversation. After a 20-year career in IT project management, she had recently lost her job at a nonprofit because of funding cuts. Real estate offered an enticing new career path.

But the onset of the pandemic one year ago forced real estate testing centers in her area to close temporarily, requiring Wright to wait two months before she could sit for the test. Instead of just biding her time, Wright joined Katie Wethman’s real estate team at Keller Williams in Washington and began shadowing agents on socially distanced appointments with buyers and sellers. When Wright passed the exam and received her real estate license in June, she was able to hit the ground running at a time when the pandemic was turning many business practices upside down. The result: She closed 10 sales in six months.

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A House of Giving

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Grant House died at the age of 25, but his legacy lives on through a foundation in Lafayette, Ind., for children and young adults with special needs that would not exist without his mother, Tamara.

Losing Grant, who was born with mental and physical disabilities from a brain tumor in utero, motivated House to turn her son’s vision of helping children with special needs into a reality.

When Grant died in December 2015, his friends and family donated nearly $40,000 in his memory. The House family—Tamara, her husband Jay, and Grant’s four siblings gave the money to Wabash Center, a local nonprofit that provides supportive services for individuals with special needs.

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Spring Clean Your Real Estate Business

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock—or a pile of clothes from the eighties—you’ve noticed decluttering gospel is everywhere. You can thank (or blame) home organizing superstar and best-selling author Marie Kondo, whose Netflix reality show, “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” preaches that people can improve their lives by getting rid of all the things they own that don’t “spark joy.”

Naturally, some folks find the decluttering craze annoying, but real estate practitioners know the value of reducing clutter, especially when selling a house. “A lot of home buyers simply can’t see through a cluttered home,” says Nancy Newquist-Nolan, SRES, with Coldwell Banker in Santa Barbara, Calif., who specializes in helping people downsize. “They just can’t visualize themselves living in a seller’s house if it’s a total mess.”

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You’d Better Ask These 5 Crucial Questions Before You Buy a House

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No matter how many episodes of “House Hunters” or “Love It or List It” you’ve watched, buying a home inevitably comes with surprises. Though a sharp real estate agent will help you navigate these hidden challenges, before you start shopping for a house, you should take account of some important things that you probably haven’t considered.

Curious what you might be missing? Here are five questions you’d never think to ask yourself but totally should before buying a home.

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How to Get a Mortgage With No Credit

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Trying to buy a home with bad credit is hard. 635699433608611976-credit-score_2513595_ver1.0But what about trying to buy a home with no credit at all?

There’s a name for these people: “credit invisibles.” It means they don’t have a credit report or score on file with the three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion), usually because they don’t have a traditional credit trail such as a credit card or college loan. Far from being anomalies lurking on the fringes of society, credit invisibles are shockingly common.

According to a recent report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, roughly 45 million Americans are characterized as credit invisible. Meanwhile, 19.4 million are known by another equally ominous label: “credit unscorable.” That means they have some credit history, but not enough to generate a score. For example, they might have had credit cards or loans at one point but then stopped, usually due to financial difficulties.

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5 Things Sellers Should Never, Ever Say When Closing a Home Sale

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Selling your home, as we all know, Giving house keysis a process: months of hard work alongside your listing agent to primp your place, market the property, and reel in a buyer. So by the time the big day arrives to close the deal and hand over the keys, you’re probably so ready to be done—which is all the more reason to tread carefully during this final step of the process.

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7 Cheap Landscaping Ideas That’ll Rake in Cash Later

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A home with a gorgeous yard isn’t landscapingjust easy on the eyes: Well-landscaped homes also sell for 5.5% to 12.7% more, according to research at Virginia Tech. Only problem is, professional landscaping costs an average of $3,219, according to HomeAdvisor.com. But pros aren’t the only way to go. Here’s proof: seven cheap landscaping ideas that provide all the lush greenery you need without your gushing greenbacks.

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