With the Traditional buying season coming up here are some tips that will be helpful to you.

1. Don’t be put off by bad weather. It’s a good time to check the potential property for leaks and poor drainage.

2. Visit the area to check out the proximity of schools, nightlife, transport, shopping centres, etc. These can have an effect on your lifestyle, both now and in the future (ie.children).

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Selling Tip for You.
A key part of the marketing plan is setting the list price. If a home is priced too low, it may cost you money. If a home is priced too high, potential buyers may be scared away. To determine the best asking price review the cost of recently sold homes, evaluate the competition and study marketplace trends.

Let’s assume you found a property from one of the foreclosure sites I mentioned in my previous post “How to Find Foreclosures - Where Do I Start?” or in a legal notice from your newspaper. You’re excited with the information you read about the property and you’re ready to start doing additional research. At this point it’s a good idea to go look at the property before you spend any of your time processing the legal work. Until you do that, you don’t even know what the neighborhood looks like,  the condition the property is in, and if it’s vacant or not. If you don’t know these simple things about the property, you’ll never know Read more »

Before we start, let us give you one reason to not buy a new home right now. How long do you intend to live there?
A rule of thumb is that it rarely makes sense to buy if you expect to move within two years. That’s because when you do sell, there are costs associated with selling. We’re not just talking about sales commissions to the buying and selling real estate brokers. Most owners rely on home appreciation to pay those costs and to provide the down payment and closing costs when they buy their next home. So buying a home when you expect to move before too long is a risk, especially in an uncertain market.
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Here are tips that could be helpful when looking at homes for Sale. Looking at homes for sale via the internet is fun and exciting.
At first. After a while, it gets a little frustrating, but you’ve learned a lot. You have a general idea of what homes look like in the area, prices, differences in costs for numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms and you have ideas about what community you want to search. Read more »

Step 1: Creating a Marketing Plan

Create a marketing plan for your home that will help distinguish it in your local marketplace and attract buyers to your property. This may include advertising in the newspaper, posting your listing on the Internet, holding an open house and more. CENTURY 21 Sales Professionals often use the CENTURY 21 Customized Marketing System to create a personalized selling program for clients. Its purpose is to sell a home at the best price possible in the shortest amount of time. Read more »

13 Questions Real Estate Agents Should be Prepared to Answer.

With so many agents in Canada’s real estate marketplace, many trying to win the same listing, it is important for realtors to take measures to stand apart from their competition.

As posted on RISMedia.com the other day, the Seller Agency Council went out and asked some home sellers what questions they would ask a prospective agent to help them determine who they would pick to represent them in selling their home. Here are their responses:

1. How many homes have you sold in the last ___ days, not your company or your office, but you personally? How long did they stay on the market?
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1. Don’t buy if you can’t stay put.
If you can’t commit to remaining in one place for at least a few years, then owning is probably not for you, at least not yet. With the transaction costs of buying and selling a home, you may end up losing money if you sell any sooner.

2. Start by shoring up your credit.
Since you most likely will need to get a mortgage to buy a house, you must make sure your credit history is as clean as possible. A few months before you start house hunting, get copies of your credit report. Make sure the facts are correct, and fix any problems you discover.
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