The Real Estate Blog is on Hiatus

We are not currently adding new blogs to the Real Estate Blog but we welcome you to explore the many blogs here and participate in the Homes Forum here at Families.com.

First Time Buyers: The Three Home Types

Congratulations on deciding to buy a home! It is an exciting time filled with so many choices. One of those very basic choices is figuring out exactly which one of the three types of homes to buy. Here is a quick easy guide to those types. Single Family Home Most people first think of a single family house when buying a home. The designation of a single family home means a house that sits on its own piece of land and is detached from any other home. The land is sold together with the house. With a single family home, … Continue reading →

The Basics of Staging

In an earlier blog, Do It Yourself: Staging Your Home to Sell, I talked about our decision to forego a professional staging expert and stage our home ourselves. In getting ready to show our home, we first needed to get down to basics. Here are some of the first things, the very basic things we did to stage our home: De-personalized: We needed to give the sense that no one actually lived in the home; that it was just waiting for the right people to simply move in. Anything personal that could connect our house specifically to us was removed … Continue reading →

Do It Yourself: Staging Your Home to Sell

In this buyer’s market, staging your home may just be the key thing to make it sell quickly and for a good price. Right now, buyers have a lot of homes to choose from, so anything that can give your house an edge in the market is good. Staging is basically arranging the contents of your house, and doing some cosmetic work on the house, to show the house at its best, There is a whole industry devoted to staging, from certified staging consultants and coordinators, to companies that will rent furniture just for the purpose of staging. A professional … Continue reading →

What to Do When You Get A Low Offer

You get the call from your realtor. The time has come. Someone actually wants to buy your house. You are exited and ready to pack. But when the offer comes your happy bubble pops. The offer is too low. So what do you do? Your first response might be to just refuse the offer, which is your right, but you might miss the opportunity to sell your house. After talking with two different realtors, I have some solid advice to offer. 1. Don’t take it personally. It is easy and natural to be insulted by a low offer. After all, … Continue reading →

Decluttering with Kids

The biggest challenge for me this past summer was keeping my house decluttered in case potential buyers came to view the house. With a six-year old boy on my hands and my husband out of town, I wasn’t sure how long it would be before my hair was pulled out in its entirety. The truth is that the atmosphere became somewhat militant. The initial decluttering went fine because I had the adrenaline to keep me motivated. My realtor telling me that she decided to use our house as one of the weekly realtor reviewed homes certainly gave me an extra … Continue reading →

How Much House Does Your Family Need?

Without even taking into account how much stuff each family member has, determining square footage needs may seem like a mathematical formula that doesn’t exist. It can become more confusing when one also considers that sometimes it’s not just the square footage that you get in a house, but the way that it’s divvied out that really matters. Giant master bedrooms and tiny living rooms seem to be the norms for creating unused or over used areas. You can also find families trying their best to fill up a house that has much more space than they could ever use. … Continue reading →

The Real Estate Forecast vs. the Real Estate Calendar

Everyone is trying to predict what the real estate market will do. Optimism never hurts, but neither does knowing the much more predictable real estate calendar and planning your investments accordingly. If you sold a house this past summer, rather than this past spring, you may already have a certain skepticism about the market, therefore you’re already resigned to going more with the realtor flow next time. For example, in Chattanooga, TN, almost everyone who put their house up for sale in the early spring had sold it by early summer. They were the lucky ones. For us it seemed … Continue reading →

Your Checklist for Renting a Place

In the next couple of years you want to buy a property, but what do you do until then? Not everyone is at the point where they can afford to put a large sum down for a house. Even with no money down options, you may have to compromise by coping with a high interest rate or other catches. Until you are ready to weigh all the options for making a real estate investment, find a place that is nice to rent and your buying moment will come. 1. Ask yourself what you want. This seems simple enough, but it … Continue reading →

Buying a Cul-de-sac House

We’re on our third house in four years. Luckily, we have been able to make some upgrades along the way. Our first one didn’t have a fence and was on a very busy road, near a stoplight. The second one was a step up because our neighborhood was a small ‘p’ shape without an outlet, but unfortunately, it still had enough teenage drivers coming through it to make me think about rallying for speed bumps. Now, we finally have it – the cul-de-sac house. Although it is perhaps the biggest indicator that one is far gone into the suburban realms, … Continue reading →