There are lots of purchases that are highly prone to impulse buying: shoes on sale, puppies at the pound, and carrot cupcakes with cream cheese buttercream frosting come instantly to mind. (But that's just me.)

But houses?  Not so much. Savvy, regret-free homebuying can take weeks or months of financial and lifestyle research and planning.  If you want 2011 to be the year you become a homeowner, here are 5 things you should be doing, as we speak.

1.  Minimize your holiday spending and save your cash. Instead of using the holiday sales to acquire a new winter wardrobe of cashmere sweaters, hold the discretionary spending down so you can give yourself the gift of homeownership!  If you are serious about buying a home next year, don't run up additional credit card debt on gifts this year. Instead, make homemade cards or write holiday letters this year for everyone except the kiddos.  And even for the kids, consider scaling back on the stuff, spending more of your time with them than your money, and getting started now saving toward your home purchase. (I don't think too many folks would argue that a less materialistic holiday season would hurt anyone, at any age.) 

Kickstart your 2011 homebuying resolution by starting a "Home" savings account at an high-interest, online bank (the discipline-boosting goal is a bank that isn't super easy to transfer funds out of when you run low on cash), and set up an automatic deposit into it every payday. To get specific about your savings goal, if you're cash-flush, obviously a 20% down payment will get you top notch interest rates and provide you with the maximum ability to manage your monthly payments. If you're going to be more of a bootstrapping buyer, an FHA loan might be right up your alley - they offer a down payment of 3.5% of the purchase price. 

All buyers should plan to have at least 3 percent of the purchase price saved up for closing costs, even if you want the seller to chip in.  The lower-priced the home you want to buy, the more percentage points you should be willing to chip in for closing costs.  It's easy for closing costs on an $150,000 FHA loan to run as high as $4,000 or more, considering transfer taxes, inspections, appraisals and mortgage insurance fees. So, even the scrappiest buyer should have a savings target somewhere around 6.5% of their target home's price.  To buy a $200,000 home, for example, that would mean a savings target of $13,000.

2.  Research financing, areas homes, prices, agents and online. Smart homebuying takes a lot of research and knowledge-gathering.  Since most buyers find it much harder to qualify for a mortgage than it is to find a home you'd love to live in, start with studying up on home financing and what it will take for you to get a home loan (note: FHA loans are preferred by the average homebuyer on today's market who has less than a 10% down payment, so start your research there). 

If you're considering relocating next year, now's the time to start narrowing down states, cities and even neighborhoods that may or may not work for you. Take into account the job market, housing and other costs of living, and income and property tax rates, as well as the critical lifestyle inputs that vary from state-to-state, like weather and whether the place is a personality fit for you and the life you want to live, be it urban sophisticate or outdoors adventurer. 

Also, start to develop a feel for home prices in a what-you-get-for-your-money type way, and start narrowing down the home styles and even neighborhoods that might fit your aesthetic preferences and lifestyle.  If you're one of those rare buyers-to-be who is not already obsessively house hunting, hop on Trulia and start regularly checking out homes and neighborhoods, making sure to take advantage of the neighborhood ratings and reviews feature, which empowers you to surface what other folks think and say about an area. 

3.  Rehab your credit, if you need to.  Go to AnnualCreditReport.com and check out your credit reports - from all 3 bureaus - for free. (Note - these will not give you your credit score for free - that costs extra, but it will give you the actual detailed credit reports.)  Audit them for errors and do the work of disputing inaccuracies to have them corrected. Pay particular attention to: accounts that are not yours/you never opened, derogatory information that should have "aged off" your report by now (i.e., 7 years for late payments, 10 for bankruptcies) and balances or credit limits that are inaccurate (i.e., your credit card balance is listed at $2500, but you actually only owe $250.)  These are the errors most likely to foul up your financing, so follow the instructions each bureau provides to correct them, stat. While you're at it, don't close any accounts, even if you are able to pay some down or off - actually, check out these tips for getting the bank to give you the best possible home loan, without unintentionally making your score worse!

4.  Run your numbers. In the past, some overextended homeowners complained that they felt pushed into a mortgage they couldn't afford. Pundits blamed that on the real estate and mortgage industry, but I have witnessed firsthand many a homebuyer push themselves or their spouses into buying too expensive of a home. Eliminate this issue entirely by doing this - run your own numbers, before you ever even talk to a salesperson or start looking at homes beyond your means. (I assure you, once you see the million dollar home you think you can afford, the $250,000 home you can actually afford will be underwhelming.)

Get your monthly finances in order, and get a clear read on how much your monthly bills are - outside of housing. Decide how much you can afford to spend every month for housing, when you buy your home.  Get clear on exactly how much cash you plan to have at hand to put into your transaction up front.  When, in the next step, you begin working with a mortgage broker, you'll want to share these numbers with them, early on in your conversation, to empower them to tell you what home price you can afford - not based on their rubrics, but based on what you say you want to spend every month and what you want to put down.

5.  Talk to a real estate and mortgage broker (1 of each). Trulia is a great place to find an engaged, communicative, tech-savvy real estate broker or agent in your area....  asking your questions and tagging them for the town where you plan to buy a home, and paying attention to the agents who give timely, thorough responses to your questions, and communicate in a language you understand. 

Drop one (or a few) an email, letting them know you'd like to work on putting an action plan together for buying a home next year, and would like to talk with them about what action steps need to go on the list. Ask them to brief you on the timeline of a transaction in your local market, and to point out for you things like when along the process you'll need to bring money in, when you'll need to miss work and come into their office or the closing office, whether they offer conveniences like digital document signing, and generally the local standard practices about which buyers you'll need to know.  Depending on your target home purchase timeline, they might even want you to take a spin with them and look at a few properties to reality-check your expectations or narrow down a broad wish list. 

In addition to chatting with them about timing your purchase vis-à-vis your other life events and plans for the year, make sure to ask for referrals to a local, trustworthy mortgage broker or two - preferably one that has worked with them and closed a number of transactions with their clients.  (In fact, many busy real estate pros will want you to talk with their trusty mortgage partner before they get too involved in your planning process.  You may think you only need a month to get ready to buy, but once the mortgage folks weigh in, it might turn out that you actually need a few.)  When you do get in touch with the mortgage maven, if you're serious about buying, you will want them to actually pull your credit report, check the actual FICO scores that come up on their system and give you their professional recommendations for what final tweaks you can do to your debts to get your credit score where it needs to be.

It's resolution time, folks.  Last week, we offered some immediate action items for those who want 2011 to be the year they become homeowners.  By popular demand, this week it's sellers' turn!  Whether you are simply trying to decide whether to sell your home next year, or it's been on the market before and you are trying to revamp your approach to get it sold next year, here are 5 things you can do during what's left of 2010 to position yourself for home selling success in 2011.

1.  Reality check yourself . . . before you wreck yourself (and the sale of your home, that is). The age-old real estate advice to wanna-be sellers is to get real about pricing - and like my sweet Grandma's advice about always rinsing the cake batter out with cold water, never hot, the caution against overpricing is advice that will stand you in good stead. (And that cold water trick works, btw - rinsing with hot starts to cook the batter to the bowl!  But I digress)  Before you even get to pricing, though, first you should get real about what your goals really are. Why do you want or need to sell?  And how badly - how important is it to you?  What would it take to make selling make sense?  If you even think you may want to sell your home next year, get clear on these items in your own head before you even talk to anyone outside of your household. Your very next step is to look at your mortgage account statement online and find out what you owe, and find out what your payoff amount would be.

Step 3? Get a reality-based idea of what your home is worth - by talking with several local real estate agents who have a strong, recent track record of succesfully selling homes in your area; these are the folks who'll have a strong idea of what recent sales are the most comparable to yours, and what a local buyer would agree to pay for your home, as well as what it might appraise at. If 3 agents give you one range, and one gives you a bizarrely higher number, be skeptical about the outlier; there are rare bad apples out there in the agent world who will tell you whatever it takes to get the listing.  Get real and stay there - don't fall prey to the fallacy that your home is worth more than others, for no substantive reason beyond the fact that, well, it's yours.

Then, move toward making a decision about whether selling actually makes sense for you. Whatever you do, don't let your mental GPS steer you anywhere near that fantasyland where all your plans for selling, moving, etc. rest on the hypothetical that you can get 25% more than your home's actual fair market value. That sort of magical thinking costs you and your agent the time, inconvenience and money it takes to try to conjure up a sale that just ain't gonna happen, and that doesn't even count the opportunity costs of other things you could be doing with those resources. If your home's current value is bizarrely less than you want or need to move on, consider a short sale and price it appropriately or consider staying put and sprucing up your home so it better suits your needs - but don't price it at your "wishful thinking" price and set yourself and your agent up for failure.

2.  Figure out the lay of your local land.  National blogs and media outlets offer all sorts of useful advice about whether, how and when to sell your home, but there's one thing that sort of advice cannot convey: what's going on in your local market. Get active in Trulia Voices, ask questions and read blogs in your local market and start talking with the real estate brokers and agents from your area who are actively blogging, listing properties and answering questions. They can give you the hyperlocal essentials you need to knows.  Sure, it's a buyer's market nationwide, on average.  But if you live in Omaha, that may mean that homes sell at or near asking in 45 days or less; in Mesa, Arizona, your home could stay on the market 6 months and sell for 30% below asking.  In my neck of the woods, it's not bizarre for homes to sell at 5 percent above asking, in two weeks - and that's still a buyer's market compared to the 20% above asking sales that were common in 2006.  

Every market is different, and you can neither know what to expect when you list your home for sale, nor implement smart strategies for getting your home sold without knowing what's going on in yours. 

3.  Tour nearby Open Houses. Your job, as the seller of your home, is to present a compelling package to buyers - compelling enough to make them sign away 30 years of their lives and the vast majority of their worldly possessions in exchange for your home (kinda ups the ante, doesn't it?). To do that, it helps to get inside the minds of your home's target buyers.  And to do that, you need to think how they think and see what they see.

Visiting the other homes your target buyers will also see online and/or in real life will give you a sense for how your home's price and condition will measure up to the competition.  Go view other homes that are for sale in your area, making sure you see at least a few that fall into each of these categories: (a) properties in your neighborhood or similar neighborhoods, (b) homes in your home's general price range, all around town, and (c) homes that have similar numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet - no matter what the price. You'll likely end up seeing homes in a wide range when it comes to price and condition; know that your home, to sell, will need to beat these on one or both measures. Also, if you try to go to at least a few open houses, rather than just asking your agent to show them to you at your convenience, you'll also get a sense for what sort of buyer traffic you can expect from open houses, and you can even chat with those home's listing agents about local market dynamics and what factors they believe may help or hurt that particular listing.

4.  Formulate a plan: in A-B-C order.  Collaborate with your broker or agent to put an action plan in place.  Make sure you address: list price, list date, showing arrangements and the property prep work (see #5, below) that your agent recommends you do prior to listing the place. To minimize the stress of a somewhat inevitably stressful experience (i.e., selling your home!), work with your agent on Plans B and C now, too!  What is the average number of days a home stays on the market in your area before it sells (DOM)?  (Hint:  don't look at the ones that never sold, because you don't want to be part of that group!)  Decide up front if your home sits on the market for X number of days with no offer, you'll lower the price to Y.  Also cover alternative marketing plans/vehicles for your home, and even calendar when you might start to offer transactional incentives, like closing cost credits, interest rate buy-downs, throwing in personal property and even making reverse offers to buyers who have expressed an interest but can't seem to get off the fence. At some point along the timeline, include a pause where your agent can interview buyer's brokers who have shown your home to collect buyer feedback, so you can course correct your pricing, marketing or staging strategies accordingly.

5.  Do your prep work - fix and pre-pack.  If you are sure you're selling in 2011, and want to put your holiday vacay time to good use, make a list of all those little repairs you've been wanting to do forever, call up your neighborhood handyperson and get 'em done. Loose knobs and handles, double-hung windows that are painted shut, the frayed carpet on the steps, that broken bathroom tile - fixing those things can give your place just the patina and polish it'll take to compete with the ample, low-priced competition you'll have next year.

It may be tough for non-distressed home sellers to compete with foreclosures and short sales on price.  But one area where individual home sellers usually can best the competition is CONDITION! Your home can present to buyers in tip-top  condition in a way that most foreclosures and short sales cannot.  And this includes staging - most foreclosures will be shown vacant, and/or with the debris of the former owner's lives tragically littering the premises.  Short sales are usually (but not always) a bit better, but are most often shown fully occupied, furnished and cluttered - just as the owners live in them, because of the distressed nature of the sale.  As a non-distressed home's seller, it behooves you to ensure that your home's curb appeal is at it's best and that throughout the interior, the buyer is able to visualize the lovely life they can, scratch that, WILL live once they buy and move into your home.  Depersonalizing and decluttering are essential to this staging effort; in fact, one wise Trulia Voices contributor tells her sellers to go ahead and start "pre-packing" - put most of the personal items that make your home yours in a box, like you're getting ready to move (which you are!) and leave your place in as close to model-home move-in condition as possible.

"May your home always be too small to hold all of your friends."
--Author Unknown

Courtesy of Scott Levitt of Oakley Signs & Graphics.

With every holiday season comes the opportunity to reunite with friends and family. From those we don't see too often to those who we live with (but might take for granted), this is the time of year we can reset ourselves and reconnect with our most important people. If we are truly lucky, we have more friends than we can reasonably host in our home.

But thousands are not so lucky this holiday season, and as we count the blessings we have, we should be doubly aware of the blessings others don't have. Let's put aside the deals of Black Friday and Cyber Monday for a moment and honor those who can't be home for the holidays.

Let us remember those who serve our country. Let us remember those who must work for the companies who transport us safely home this season. Let us remember the law enforcement and emergency service workers who protect our homes. Let us remember those who are working through the holidays to keep their homes as well as those who lost their home in the past year.

Home is not just a house. Home is a sense of belonging, a sense of well-being. Turn to your community this year and seek out those who are "not home." Find opportunities in your food banks and find organizations who support those who are far from home or without the feeling of home in their lives.

Let us hope that the coming year is one in which we can collectively bring people home.

 Selling your home quickly at the best price isn't difficult if you pay attention to the following essential tips:

1. Hire a real estate professional with experience. We've been around for a while and know what your local real estate market is doing. We have the experience and expertise to market your home to get it sold for the best possible price.

2. Don't chase the market. Sales prices from two months ago, even two weeks ago, are history. What buyers are willing to pay for homes today is based on today's factors alone.

3. Price under your competition. If you want offers and action on your home, price your home lower than the competition's prices. You'll likely sell quickly for at least list price -- possibly more, if multiple bids come in.

4. Make your home shine. If there are a number of foreclosures and short sales in your area, make sure your home is picture-perfect and move-in ready in comparison to distressed homes.

5. Know what your home's issues are ahead of time. Get a home inspection done before you list your property for sale. Take the time and energy to address all the issues that need repair or replacement before your buyer finds them.

6. Be careful with negotiations. We'll assist you in crafting attractive counter offers to buyers, if needed, but consider the holding costs (mortgage payment, insurance, utilities, hassle, etc.) of holding out for an extra few thousand dollars versus accepting the offer in-hand and selling quickly.

7. Offer incentives. If you want buyers to consider your home above the rest, throw in extras that other sellers may not offer. Prime items are larger things you may not want to move to your new home or that may not fit there, such as a backyard children's play set, a patio/deck set, garden tools, a lawn tractor or mower, area rugs or window treatments, a pool table, piano, etc.

8. Be flexible. Buyers may need more time to get their home loan closed with today's tighter requirements. Focus on getting to closing/settlement with your buyer, no matter what the date.

9. Ask around. If you've lived in your home for even a short time, you may know others who want to live in it! Ask all your friends, relatives and coworkers if they know anyone looking to buy your home.

10. Stress the positives. You've lived in your home and you know how great it is. Create a flyer, poster or photo album to leave in your home for showings and open houses outlining all the great amenities of your home and neighborhood. Include proximity to parks, jobs, schools, shopping, recreation areas, etc. Highlight energy-saving features, how new the systems are, remodeled/updated elements of your home (date and contractor). Buyers will appreciate the complete picture you provide!
    

If your budget is feeling tight around the edges, you might be looking for ways to save some money. Here are some great tips to help you save some energy -- and in the process a few dollars too!

Lower your thermostat. For each degree you lower your thermostat in the winter, your heating costs are cut by about 3%.

Get clean in a flash. A 10-minute shower with a low-flow showerhead will save you about $100 per year. Cut it to five minutes and save another $100.

Stop drips. If you have a leaky faucet, don't delay calling a plumber or look online for instructions on making the repair yourself. A drip a second wastes over 6,000 gallons of water per year -- adding to your water bill.

Keep the freezer full. Improve your freezer's efficiency by keeping it full -- stuffing it with bags of ice if necessary. A more efficient freezer uses less electricity.

Condense your landline. If you don't use the extra phone services much, consider dropping call waiting, call forwarding, three-way calling, etc. and save around $60 per year.

Raise insurance deductibles. Check with your home and auto insurance agent to increase your deductibles from $500 to $1,000 (or more, if your budget allows). You can save up to 15% on premiums each year.

ONLINE SEARCH WORDS: saving energy at home

Below are some helpful tips to help prepare your home for winter!

Open kitchen and bathroom cabinet doors to allow warmer air to circulate around the plumbing.

Be sure to move any harmful cleaners and household chemicals up out of the reach of children.

When the weather is very cold outside, let the cold water drip from the faucet served by exposed pipes. Running water through the pipe - even at a trickle - helps prevent pipes from freezing because the temperature of the water running through it is above freezing.

Keep the thermostat set to the same temperature both during the day and at night. By temporarily suspending the use of lower nighttime temperatures, you may incur a higher heating bill, but you can prevent a much more costly repair job if pipes freeze and burst.

Locate your water main in the event you do need to shut it off in an emergency.

If you will be going away during the cold weather, leave the heat on in your home, set to a temperature no lower than 55°F.

Close vents in unused rooms to prevent heat from being circulated into areas unnecessarily.

Make sure your home is sealed. Extensive drafts around doors and windows are chief culprits of heat loss.

Try to find air leaks and use weather-strips or weather caulking to reduce the airflow through these areas. This is especially important with waterfront condos, as the drafts coming off the water are often much more intense and cooler during the winter.

Use venting fans sparingly. Fans that vent air from the inside to the outside are great at moving bathroom steam or kitchen smoke out of the condo and or home. Unfortunately, they are also great at moving heat out of the condo and or home at a rapid pace.

Use room fans to circulate air instead of turning on these devices. 

Let the sun in! If you own a waterfront condo, chances are you have some large windows for viewing the beautiful landscape. Take advantage of the sunny day time period to allow sunlight to naturally warm your home through these windows. Make sure to close the blinds and shades in other areas of the condo to keep heat in.

Just some helpful hints, courtesy of Dawn Gaul an At-It's-Best Property Management: 910-458-0818

Mortgage applications to purchase homes increased 14.4 percent last week on an adjusted basis compared to the previous week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association weekly survey.

The unadjusted Purchase Index increased 9.6 percent compared with the previous week and was down 7.4 percent compared to the same week a year ago.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, this is the highest Purchase Index recorded since the week ending May 7, 2010 in the middle of the tax-rebate push.

“The increase in purchase applications last week aligns with other incoming data suggesting that consumers are feeling somewhat more confident with their financial situation,” said Michael Fratantoni, the association’s vice president of research and economics.

“The level of purchase applications on a seasonally adjusted basis is now at its highest level since the expiration of the homebuyer tax credit,” Fratantoni concluded.

Interest rates were mixed, with 30-year fixed-rate mortgages rising to 4.50 percent from 4.46 percent and 15-year fixed-rate mortgages decreasing to 3.83 percent from 3.87 percent.

Source: Mortgage Bankers Association (11/24/2010)

Provided courtesy of Trulia.com (a great website) and Tara-Nicolle Nelson

Buying or selling a home is a funny endeavor (but not ha-ha funny - puzzling funny!).  It's your biggest purchase ever, but unlike many smaller purchases, making an offer on a home can feel like pulling numbers out of a hat.  And selling's no easier - the stakes are so high, and the market's so tough that you want to take any offer you can get, but at the same time, it's difficult to know whether you're leaving money on the table when you do finally sign on the dotted line.

Buyer's remorse often arises as soon as you get the contract back with the seller's signature on it - that desperate hope that your offer will be accepted instantly plummets into an "oh no - they took it - I must have offered too much!  I'll bet I could have gotten it for $X thousand less!"  If you've experienced this, rest assured that the same evening, the sellers were feeling the same thing: "Oh no, if I'd held out, I bet I could have gotten more!"

The best way to manage the emotional freak-out of both buyer's and seller's remorse is with information;  here's how to know whether or not you're getting a good deal when you buy or sell your home.

1.  Know what 'good deal' means TO YOU:  Is a good deal getting the home of your dreams, over multiple offers, at a price you can afford? Is it buying a home for 30% less than its current owner paid for it?  Is it getting a bargain, meaning you get a discount off what the home is worth on the open market?  That's what people call having instant equity, and is possible when the seller's situation, the property's condition, your shrewd negotiating skills or your exceptionally good looks (!) enable you to get a home for a price lower than the price similar properties in the area are selling for or lower than it appraises for (the latter of these is less frequent, as many appraisers simply do not make a practice of appraising homes for much more than the purchase price agreed to by the buyer and seller in the transaction.  Oh, and btw, you won't know what it appraises for until you agree to a price and get into contract!)

If you're selling your home, know what your own top priority is - is it to move your home quickly, so you can buy at today's bargain basement prices and interest rates?  Is it to get every single dollar you can out of the house?  Is it just to divest of the home and get closure as soon as possible, because you're struggling to keep up with the payments? 

What is a great deal to one buyer or seller may not be to another, because real estate is about life - and whether YOUR real estate outcomes are good or bad is about YOUR life!  So, the first step to knowing whether you're getting a good deal is to know what your own personal priorities for the transaction are.

2. Do the math - compare "your" price to other benchmarks.  The price you agree to pay or accept for a home is meaningless in a vacuum; to understand whether it's a "good" price, you've got to compare it with a few pricing  benchmarks. 

The most important of these benchmarks is also the most difficult to get a handle on: the market value of the home.  The definition of 'market value' is the price a qualified buyer is willing to pay for the property in an arms-length, open-market transaction; the best way to estimate market value is to look at what similar homes in the area have recently sold for. (The more similar, the more nearby and the more recent - the better.)  To compare the price you've negotiated with the fair market value of the home, check out recently sold, similar homes on Trulia. 

Also, ask your real estate broker or agent for what's called a Comparative Market Analysis on the home you're making an offer on (if you're a buyer), or an updated CMA using recent neighborhood sales (if you're a seller).  If you're buying, the ideal situation is for your negotiated purchase price to be at or below the home's value as indiciated by the comparables and the CMA; if you're a seller, your goal is to receive a price at or above the market value.  (To be sure, if you're a seller on today's market, it's an equally worthy goal to get your home sold - at all! - in many markets.  So don't get hung up if you're not getting right around - or even slightly below - what you think your home is worth.)

Many buyers try to compare the end price of their home to (a) the list price, or (b) the price per square foot.  Comparing your negotiated price to the list price is interesting, but a big gap could indicate a number of things:  you could be getting a great deal, you (or your agent) could be a great negotiator, or the seller could be very unrealistic or motivated. Same on the seller's side - an over-asking price usually indicates an aggressively low list price and multiple offers from buyers.  If the list price is wildly different from the market value of the home, the list price-to-sale price gap may have nothing to do with getting a good deal, on either side. 

Price-per-square-foot can be overly sensitive when you look at it on homes that are much smaller than larger than the homes to which you are comparing it.   A home could be 20 percent smaller than neighboring homes, but that doesn't mean it will - or should - be worth 20 percent less; it's still in the same neighborhood and may be in better condition.  Unless you're comparing very similar homes that are in very similar condition, price-per-square-foot can provide a misleading picture of a home's value.

3. Factor in the specifics of your situation: seasonality, market dynamics, affordability and the competition.  If you’re buying a home in Wisconsin in the winter, buyers should expect to get a better “deal” than in the summertime.  When market dynamics indicate prices are trending upward in your neighborhood, what seems like an ‘okay’ deal based on yesterday’s prices may actually be even better than you thought - search Trulia’s Stats and Trends pages for your area for up-to-the-minute price trends in your neighborhood, or even zip code!

If you’re buying a home at a trough in prices for the last five years, with a 4.5 percent loan, that home will be much more affordable to you than it would have been in another time. If you’re a seller of a home where every other home on your block is for sale, and half of them are dirt-cheap foreclosures, that should cause you to upgrade your opinion of a slightly-below-asking offer! Buyers: if you best a dozen other offers, even an above-asking sale price can be a great price, assuming the home appraises at the purchase price and you can afford it!

4. Don't forget any extra "bang" you're getting for your buck.  Buyers: if the seller is paying some or all of your closing costs, HOA dues, throwing in extra furniture/appliances, or otherwise sweetening the pot, keep that in mind.  Sellers:  if the buyer has agreed to a fast or slow close, at your request, or even came up a few thousand on their offer price to empower you to pay all your mortgages and liens off, don't forget that, either.

In today's real estate market, where sellers are constrained by their upside down mortgages and buyers are constrained by what many see as too-conservative appraisal standards, sometimes a "good deal" is simply one where the other side gives, even a little, to get you something that you want or need to make the deal work for you. 

It's interesting to observe both local and national/international real estate trends. For example, on the island, sales have increases 22% year-over-year. This is huge!

Globally housing prices are tending up - real estate is one of the most local businesses around, but it's helpful to take a look outside and see what's happening. What are sales and price trends like in the world's other top economies?
 
A recent round-up from The Economist shows that prices are on the rise in most markets across the world. 16 of the 20 markets tracked by the publisher saw inclines in the third quarter from a year ago. Only Ireland's worsened.

According to the National Association of Realtors, over $40 billion in U.S. real estate was sold to foreign buyers last year. When you think about that, it suddenly becomes really interesting to see how foreign markets are performing and how various markets can affect purchase decisions for intercontinental buyers. This year we have SOLD homes to BUYERS from Canada, South America, Europe & the Middle East.
 
To make sure Coastwalk clients' are ahead of the curve, we syndicate all property listings on top distribution networks, providing our clients' homes with maximum exposure locally, and internationally.

Nationwide, existing-home sales rose again in September, affirming that a sales recovery has begun, according to the National Association of Realtors®. November Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said the housing market is in the early stages of recovery. "A housing recovery is taking place but will be choppy at times depending on the duration and impact of a foreclosure moratorium. But the overall direction should be a gradual rising trend in home sales with buyers responding to historically low mortgage interest rates and very favorable affordability conditions," he said.