Homeowners who neglect routine maintenance heading into the colder months may find themselves faced with an expensive repair bill. For example, forgetting to clean the gutters could cause ice to build up and damage your roof. Windows and doors not properly sealed could cause your heating bills to surge.The New York Times recently highlighted a few maintenance chores for homeowners to do before the weather gets chilly, including:Examine the ext
Homeowners should not become overconfident in a seller’s market, or they might end up sabotaging their sale. Realtor.com® recently featured common home seller negotiation tactics that can backfire, including:Starting a bidding war.“If mishandled, people may assume the worst, and the best offer may walk away,” Sep Niakan, broker-owner at HB Roswell Realty in Miami, told realtor.com®. For example, bidding war problems can surface when fai
Children in Oregon may get the most treats this Halloween. Households in the state spend the most per person on Halloween sweets, according to shopping app Ibotta, which looked at candy purchases across the U.S. the week before Halloween in 2015 and 2016. Oregonians spend a whopping $40.29 per person on candy.The app ranked the following as the top states that spend the most per person on candy: Oregon Washington New Jersey Utah California New Y
Researchers in a new study appearing in the Journal of Housing Research investigated whether an agent’s looks could influence buyers’ overall impression of online property listings. About 1,500 home buyers took an online audiovisual tour of a typically priced home in their area hosted by one of eight agents varying in gender, attractiveness, and pathos—or how they enhance “the verbal description of the property with superlatives,” the
Tom Ferry: the main pitfalls that drive the huge failure rate among agentsImagine if a deadly disease hit earth causing a mortality rate even remotely near the failure rate of real estate agents — people would live in complete, utter panic.The failure rate in real estate is high — extremely high. Many people who were in your real estate class are unlikely to be in the business five years from now. While that sounds alarming, it’s your livel
realtor.comFarmhouse chic is all the rage in home decor these days, thanks largely to Chip and Joanna Gaines from "Fixer Upper," who play up this style in many of the homes on their show (Hello, "barndominium"). The recent news that "Fixer Upper" will soon be ending for good provides all the more reason to embrace this trend. Soon, it'll be all we'll have left of Chip and Jo! (Sniff.)But before you go all Beverly hillbillies on us, reme
A home insurance policy won’t cover every thing that could possibly go wrong with a home. The details are all in the fine print within the policy.“Insurance policies are like snowflakes; no two are exactly the same,” Ashleigh Cloud Trent, an insurance adviser with Swingle Collins and Associates in Dallas, told realtor.com®.Many standard policies do not include a few things that homeowners may assume they cover. Homeowners may need to inves
Many real estate professionals have become keenly aware of targeted wire fraud scams that include email impersonation tactics. A growing avenue cyber criminals are using to get highly sensitive financial data is known as spear phishing, according to Asaf Cidon, vice president of content security for Barracuda Networks, a data protection company.Spear phishing is a highly targeted and researched personal attack that is difficult to detect. Ha
Improved educational performance, higher civic participation, lower crime rates, and improved health remain the biggest social benefits linked to homeownership, according to a new research paper by NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun and research economist Nadia Evangelou, which appears in The Journal of the Center for Real Estate Studies. Some findings from the latest research cited in the paper include:Health. Children of homeowners tend to b
Painting can be one of the most cost-effective ways to spruce up a listing. But homeowners can also make a lot of mistakes with this common DIY job. Realtor.com® recently spoke with staging and color experts to find out some of the most obvious mistakes that they see most often.1. Choosing the wrong finish.Homeowners need to select a paint finish that correlates with the room’s purpose. "Many homeowners are nervous about using shiny semigloss
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