For most of our clients in eastern Massachusetts, their property taxes went up for 2018. In many towns and cities, the tax rate stayed the same, or even went down. Example: In Somerville, the tax rate for residential property went down slightly from Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 and FY2018. It was $11.67 per thousand dollars
Snow season! Here we go. As a real estate agent, I get asked about who is responsible to shovel -- the landlord or the tenant? Since that's a legal question, I depend on Attorney Richard Vetstein for accurate legal answers to general legal questions. He keeps an eye on legal changes that affect homeowners. Here
What projects should you take on, and which are better done by someone else? It's a personal choice. That choice changes, depending on your time and your health and flexibility. With all of the pressures of modern life, it’s easy to forget about your house. That’s too bad since your home is probably the biggest
A Somerville moment to celebrate Christmas. Merry Christmas to our Christian clients and readers. P.S. Hanukkah is already over. Solstice is tomorrow. Kwanzaa is December 26th. Best to you and yours in 2018, whoever you may be!
Who wants to buy a house in the winter? People who want to be in a house before the spring. People who hate the hoopla of the competitive spring market. People who want to save money. This autumn, 4 Buyers Real Estate has been rocking it in the softer, less competitive market. Since the end
If you have an unheated attic that is not insulated, the house heat will rise through the top floor ceiling into the cold attic. (Meanwhile, the heavier, cooler attic air will make its way down, if you have an open or uninsulated stairway.) If you have a finished attic, with no heat, the household heat
4 Buyers Real Estate puts our money where our mouths are. As a company, we make charitable contributions every year. We don’t put our money into the Salvation Army. This sets us apart from other brokers and agents in the Cambridge Community of Realtors®. The Cambridge Community of Realtors®, as a group, supports the Salvation
What is in a house affects the way you feel about it. That’s the reason that staging is used to seduce buyers into purchasing. Staging is the practice of setting out furnishings in houses for sale in order to give the impression of livability and high fashion. Our agents scratch the surface of this façade;
At a recent Realtor® education course, someone seriously floated the idea of teaching agents to use guns and advising agents to carry them when doing open houses. This is not a paranoid notion. Why do real estate agents get attacked? Because we are alone in houses with strangers. I got my first adult lesson in
All’s fair in love and business, right? Nope. One of my competitors is doing something to deliberately use my work (and web presence) to assist his own business. He didn’t ask me. I found out because he was bragging about it at a convention last week. (Another agent told me.) After a few hours of