Help, advice and practical how-to-guides for home remodelling, maintenance and construction
The Department of Veterans Affairs has narrowed the list of property conditions that can hold up a VA-backed purchase. Under an update to the VA’s Lender’s Handbook, appraisals ordered from May 1, 2026, no longer require repairs for peeling paint on homes built in 1978 or later, or for defects in detached sheds and garages. ...
In most housing markets, a pipeline of several thousand new units would raise concerns about oversupply. In Chesterfield County, south of Richmond, that construction is being absorbed without visible pricing pressure – a dynamic that Matthew Henry, who leads the Henry Team and focuses on residential listings in the Chesterfield and South Richmond area, attributes ...
Recreational land in western Wisconsin now splits into two markets: properties with established food plots, trail systems, and documented wildlife activity sell within weeks, while raw, unimproved parcels with comparable acreage and location linger for months. According to Mike Law, owner of Coulee Land Company, this gap is widening as buyers increasingly refuse to pay ...
In Colorado’s foothills real estate markets, buyers are increasingly using the inspection contingency to mask hesitation rather than address real property defects. The inspection contingency is the contract clause that lets buyers back out of a purchase based on a home inspection. Jillian Petrash of Jump Living, a boutique brokerage serving Evergreen and the broader ...
Property management has a familiar relationship with new technology. A tool arrives with a promise of efficiency, operators adopt it, and the costs surface later: platforms that don’t talk to each other, staff re-entering the same information in two places, workflows that bend around the software instead of the other way around. Artificial intelligence is ...
Most home-search platforms filter by round numbers, such as $200,000, $250,000, and $300,000. A home listed at $249,900 shows up for buyers searching up to $250,000. It disappears for buyers searching from $250,000 and up. On paper, the seller saves the buyer $100. In practice, the seller loses an entire bracket of potential offers. In ...
When sellers in the South Bay beach cities need new paint, fresh flooring, or updated landscaping before listing, many resist. They would rather offer the buyer a credit at closing and skip the hassle. It feels logical: give the buyer money to do the work themselves and avoid spending cash on a home you are ...
State disclosure laws vary widely. Some states require sellers to complete detailed property condition forms. Others require sellers to volunteer almost nothing. But in most states, those laws alone don’t decide whether an agent is liable. Liability usually comes from negligence and misrepresentation rules, which are legal standards built through court decisions rather than statutes. ...
For decades, construction and trades businesses have operated on a simple model: complete a job, collect payment, find the next one. Revenue arrived in irregular bursts tied to project timelines. That model now works against owners at the moment they most need to show value: when they try to sell. Industry transaction data supports this ...
In New Orleans, insurance costs are high, and homes are old. As Richard Hébert puts it, every house has “had a termite walking through it as a resident at one point.” Many sellers respond by playing down a home’s problems. Hébert, a luxury real estate advisor with Crescent Sotheby’s International Realty in New Orleans, says ...
Buyers who stretch to win competitive bids on distressed properties often discover that banks will not renegotiate once a highest-and-best offer has been accepted. As a result, the deals collapse before closing. Bank-owned homes, known as REO properties, often draw multiple competing offers because lenders price them to sell quickly. That bidding pressure can push ...
When comparing two similar condos in competing HOA communities, the one with lower monthly dues looks like the better deal. The opposite is often true: artificially low dues are one of the clearest warning signs that a community is headed for a special assessment. Joe Braun, co-founder and CEO of Solume, an Atlanta-based platform that ...
National headlines describe a housing market frozen by high rates, but Charlotte doesn’t fit that picture neatly. Homes are still selling there, and close to their asking prices. What has changed is how much separates the winners from the rest. A well-located, well-kept, realistically priced house still moves, while one that needs work or overreaches ...
When a home seller in Southern California gets sued over a property defect, the assumption is usually that they failed to mention something entirely. But the more dangerous pattern is subtler: sellers who disclose part of a problem, thinking they have covered themselves, while leaving the full scope hidden. That half-measure, according to Zachary Schorr, ...
A self-employed borrower whose business deposits fifty thousand dollars a month can look, on a conventional mortgage application, like someone earning three thousand. That gap between actual cash flow and qualifying income is pushing business owners in the Chicago area out of the mortgage market entirely – not because they lack the money, but because ...
