When should you start to plan buying a house? The answer is that you can plan long ahead, and it can only help you when the right time comes. I coach my clients to buy a home that will serve them — given their best guesses about the future – for the next seven to
Where are all the sellers? The big issue in Boston area real estate is inventory. There are not enough houses for sale. We have a stalemate about inventory here. These are the factors: Empty-nesters are staying longer in their houses. This is a demographic and cultural shift. They are holding on to their houses, partly
The Federal Housing Authority, or FHA, provides mortgage insurance for people who purchase properties with less than twenty percent down. Some borrowers can only get their low down-payment loans through FHA, because no other institutional lender will qualify them. There is a difference with FHA loans. They weigh the condition of the property more than
The most common mistake that consumers make when setting up an MLS search is to limit their search too much or too little. The ideal search yields properties that are closer and closer to the goal. Bad searches yield either too few options or properties that don’t work, in the same way, over and over.
I started working in real estate in the Stone Age. Well, actually, it was the Paper Age. In 1991, I was the only agent I knew who read the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data at home from my computer. Now, everyone has MLS on their home computer, agents and the public. The access to listings