HomeKeepr Blog

Real estate can be a tricky business. You put your home on the market, people make offers and there’s a lot of back-and-forth to make sure that everyone gets what they believe is the best deal. There are a lot of gray areas that make things more confusing, too. What if you’re selling your home to one of your own children or another relative and don’t want them to have to pay a bunch of fees and down payments? Maybe you don’t even want to profit off the sale at all… you just want them to be able to cover the remainder of the mortgage. Depending on the situation, using a gift of equity may be a better option to help make the sale happen.

Everybody likes the idea of a little DIY. Whether that means unclogging your own sink drain or putting in a few shelves in your pantry, there’s a lot of satisfaction that goes along with doing it yourself. Maybe this is why homeowners often seriously consider selling their homes on their own. Although going FSBO has the potential to save a few bucks, there’s a lot to know before jumping in.

It’s easy to tell yourself that your house is just a building made of walls and ceilings and light fixtures and flooring, but when it comes time to sell, you may start to feel the sting of grief.

As the snow starts to melt, revealing the brightly colored flowers of crocus, and robins bop merrily around the yard, another cycle of the real estate market begins. If you’re considering listing your home this year, it’s definitely not too late to get started. March and April can be great months for putting your house in front of prospective buyers, but the summer months are also great times to sell.

The day is not that far away when you’ll hear a tippity tap at the front door and open it to find your friendly neighborhood pizza drone just waiting for you to collect your order (pineapple optional…). After all, it’s already happening in Australia.

You just found out that you’re being relocated by your job, or maybe you were offered a job that was too good to be true in another state. Either way, you’ve got a big move ahead of you and there’s a lot to think about before you even start. Moving far away from home can ultimately be a hugely positive experience, even if it is a bit of a hectic process.

There you sit, watching “The Vanilla Ice Project” on the DIY Network when a thought bubble forms over your head. If Vanilla Ice can remodel houses on television, you could probably save yourself the expense of a pro home stager and take the job into your own hands. Your Realtor will be so impressed that she’ll probably put it on her Instagram account right away.

Home values are determined through a complicated series of calculations roughly based on the cost of actual construction plus value-adds like proximity to shopping and other conveniences. The prices that other nearby homes have sold for in the past are also taken into consideration. Formulas are applied, mysterious algorithms are run.

Now that you’ve bought a home of your own, you might be thinking that you’re kind of good at handywork and you want to give flipping a go. It’s certainly one way to make money in today’s somewhat volatile market, provided you know what to look for in an optimally flippable property. Of course, the house that flips best in downtown Newark probably won’t be the same one that flips amazingly in Dallas, but there are some general things you can look for in a fantastically flippable house.