Sellers

Buyers will simply flock to your home if you tackle these value adds.

Planning on selling your home soon? Take an objective look around your home from a buyer’s perspective. What would stop you from making an offer? What do you need to do to put your home’s best face forward?

Here are some  projects to jump on now in order for your home to be in tip-top shape for a spring sale:

#1 Update Your Curb Appeal

“Curb appeal is important,” says Steve Modica, sales associate and property manager at HomeXpress Realty Inc. in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla.

• Make sure the bushes are all trimmed.
• Re-mulch or replace stone walkways and paths.
• Remove any dead plants and trees, and aerate your lawn so it will be lush.
• Pressure wash the driveway,

Real Estate App Offers Answers to 12 Common Consumer Questions by RPR

Providing immediate answers to client concerns and questions, while in the car or at the curb, will turn the tide in any agent’s favor. And there’s an app for that.

Here are the top 12 reported ways that agents use the RPR app to educate buyers. Download the app on your smartphone today and be prepared to respond to your client’s questions tomorrow.

1. “How is the market doing?”

What Realtor hasn’t heard this question while with buyers or in the checkout line at the grocery store? Give them the facts by swiping to the left from your app’s home screen. Local Market Conditions will display estimated home values, sale prices, changes in market, and days in RPR. Then ask for

Sixty-one percent of U.S. adults believe home prices in their local area will rise over the next 12 months, the highest percentage since Gallup began collecting such data in 2005. That also marks a big difference between 2008 and 2012, when no more than one-third of Americans believed home prices would increase.

Residents in the western region of the U.S. are the most optimistic, with nearly three-quarters of residents saying they expect price increases compared to slightly more than half of Midwestern and Eastern residents, according to the Gallup poll. With mortgage rates sitting below 4 percent, consumers may have more incentive to act now before home prices rise even more.

Sixty-seven percent of U.S. adults say now is a good time to

by Steve Sinovic /Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer

In more good news for the real-estate market, thousands of Albuquerque-area residents have regained equity in their homes.

At the end of last year, 5.3 percent of all residential properties with mortgages in the metro area, or 9,359 homes, were in negative equity. That compares to 9.5 percent in December 2015, or 16,701 homes, according to home-equity data from CoreLogic. Having negative equity, often referred to as being “underwater” or “upside down,” applies to borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Negative equity, one of the long shadows cast by the housing bubble, can occur because of a decline in home value, an increase in mortgage debt or both.

The growth

By: G. M. Filisko

Make your home warm and inviting to boost your home’s value and speed up the sale process.

The first step to getting buyers to make an offer on your home is to impress them with its appearance so they begin to envision themselves living there. Here are seven tips for making your home look bigger, brighter, and more desirable.

1.  Start with a Clean Slate

Before you can worry about where to place furniture and which wall hanging should go where, each room in your home must be spotless. Do a thorough cleaning right down to the nitpicky details like wiping down light switch covers. Deep clean and deodorize carpets and window coverings.

2.  Stow Away Your Clutter

It’s harder for buyers to picture themselves in your home

G.M. Filisko, Contributor | HouseLogic

While you'd like to get the best price for your home, consider our six reasons to reduce your home price.

Home not selling? That could happen for a number of reasons you can't control, like a unique home layout or having one of the few homes in the neighborhood without a garage. There is one factor you can control: your home price.

These six signs may be telling you it’s time to lower your price.

1. You’re drawing few lookers.

You get the most interest in your home right after you put it on the market because buyers want to catch a great new home before anybody else takes it. If your real estate agent reports there have been fewer buyers calling about and asking to tour your home than there have

Updated Servicing Rule Provides Surviving Family Members and Other Homeowners with Same Protections as Original Borrowers

Washington, D.C. (August 4, 2016) – The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) today finalized new measures to ensure that homeowners and struggling borrowers are treated fairly by mortgage servicers. The updated rule requires servicers to provide certain borrowers with foreclosure protections more than once over the life of the loan, clarifies borrower protections when the servicing of a loan is transferred, and provides important loan information to borrowers in bankruptcy. The changes also help ensure that surviving family members and others who inherit or receive property generally have the same protections under the

By: Lisa Kaplan Gordon

Upgrading your outdoor spaces? Here are upgrades that landscape architects rate as most popular.

If you’re thinking of sprucing up your yard, install what you love; but also pick upgrades that will increase your home’s value and, someday, attract buyers.

The new "2014 Residential Landscape Architecture Trends Survey" by the American Society of Landscape Architects clues you in on what outdoor features are trending up: 

1.  Outdoor lighting (98.3% of architects rated this as very popular): With today’s solar and LED lights, it’s a low-cost upgrade, too. 

2.  Terraces, patios, and decks (97.7%): Adding any of these features is like adding another room to your home for much of the year.

3.  Low-maintenance landscaping

Source: HomeOwnershipMatters.realtor

Fast Fact: The National Association of REALTORS® Issues Mobilization grants help keep you and your neighbors aware and informed about public policy changes that would impact your wallet and your home.

Too often, legislators target homeowners when seeking to fund federal programs. Even recently, some tried to put the financial burden of highway and transportation programs on the backs of homeowners.

A proposal in Congress would have diverted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s guarantee fees (sometimes called “G fees”) to pay for these long overdue national highway and transportation improvements. Each time G fees are used for unrelated government spending, America’s homeowners wind up paying more for their

Phishing, hacking, wire fraud  these are all ways people attempt to steal from others online. As real estate searches and transactions move more and more online, the chances of being caught up in a cyber scam have become even greater.

“By now most people have heard of the Nigerian prince scams or phishing emails asking for social security or banking information, but many people don’t know that they need to watch out for possible scams when buying or selling their home,” said Jon Schnoor, 2016 President of the Greater Albuquerque Association of Realtors®. “Cybercrimes have become increasingly sophisticated over the years and the people perpetrating them focus on situations where a lot of money is changing hands, making real estate transactions an