Whether it’s an investment or a much-loved, long-held family home, dwellings should look their best when on the market to ensure sellers receive a great price. Enter: home staging. This temporary revamp of a property, which can be undertaken by professionals or sellers themselves, is essentially a marketing strategy to improve the selling price of…
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Selling a home is a highly stressful experience and it can therefore be easy to make some common mistakes. Setting an unrealistic price An overly-low price could result in the seller losing thousands of dollars while one set too high could mean it doesn’t attract buyers. Thus, a home’s offering price should be realistic and…
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The profile of property buyers is changing across America as Millennials and Gen Z start to replace Baby Boomers in the market. Buyers aged 18 to 43 now make up 38% of all Americans who bought a property in 2023, according to the new Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report from the National Association…
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The biggest question in real estate in America today has nothing to do with property and everything to do with money. More accurately, the cost of money. The health of the property market is always precariously balanced by the direction of the money markets, the Federal Reserve’s prevailing view on inflation, and how it uses…
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As we approach the middle of the year, questions about performance of the real estate market nationally remain top of mind for most buyers and sellers. As an experienced real estate agent in your neighborhood, I have experienced this market uncertainty before, and I assure you it will pass. Many property market experts continue to…
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Even as the Reserve Bank of New Zealand retains interest rates at a stubbornly high 5.25%, the momentum of the real estate market is swinging towards the buyers. More than 40,000 homes are now for sale across New Zealand, an annual increase of 13.5%, according to the latest OneRoof-Valocity House Value Index. New listings for…
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There are a thousand questions to be asked when buying property, but one query dominates them all right now: when will interest rates come down? The current Official Cash Rate (OCR) is 5.5%, and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) is giving little hint of when it will start making cuts that will boost…
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There are few things more emotionally distressing – to say nothing of financially difficult – than cleaning up a home after a flood. Finding badly damaged, much-loved items is particularly heart-breaking. Yet even the unprepared should take heart: while some damaged items will have to be thrown away, others can be restored. Clothes and linen…
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Home buyers who are parents of school-aged children, or who plan to be in the future, rightly consider school catchment zones important when purchasing a home. The general rule of thumb around these geographical areas is that parents wishing to enrol their children in a particular state or government school must live in this school’s…
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Amid all the fees and charges of a home loan comes stamp duty. Also called transfer duty, this one-off state and territory government tax levy applies to several everyday situations, such as vehicle registrations and insurance policies. However, stamp duty is most well known for its application to property purchases, including holiday homes, investment property…
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