Enhancing Your Home's Curb Appeal

Once you have identified and addressed your trouble areas, you can then focus on items that enhance your homes curb appeal. Even with a limited budget your can greatly enhance your homes visual appeal by focusing on a few key areas. Items you may consider include:

• Adding colorful seasonal plants to existing flower beds.
• Purchasing new house address numbers and mailbox.
• Installing a new door with glass inserts.
• Placing a new welcome mat and a grouping of potted plants at the entrance.
• Installing lighting along your driveway or sidewalk.

Photographing Your Home's Curb Appeal Make sure the photographer takes the best pictures. Great pictures of your home increases your changes of a successful sale. According to the National Association of Realtors, 70 percent of home buyers view a home for the first time from a picture on the Internet. Most Internet shoppers will skip listings with no pictures, and many will skip listings that only have a few pictures. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is 20 or more pictures worth?

Here are few tips from professional real estate photographers:

• Make sure your lawn is mowed and edged.
• Remove cars, pets, and toys before shooting.
• Request shots from multiple angles and levels.
• Find angles that show most of your property without looking cluttered or untidy by the surrounding landscape. Relay this information to the photographer.
• Include as much as of the front lawn and landscape as possible. If your lawn or landscape is not at its best, request the photographer shoot from an angle that includes more sky.

Please visit Electronic Appraiser - www.electronicappraiser.com - for more information.

Real Estate Market Watch for June 2007

Stricter lending standards and a decline in a subprime mortgage originations have contributed to somewhat lowered expectations for existing home sales in NAR's latest housing market outlook, compared with its earlier forecasts.

• Existing-home sales are likely to total 6.29 million this year and 6.49 million in 2008, compared with 6.48 million last year.
• New-home sales, projected at 864,000 in 2007 and 936,000 next year, will be lower than the 1.05 million recorded in 2006.
• Housing starts should total 1.46 million units this year and 1.52 million in 2008, down from 1.80 million last year.
• The national median existing-home price is forecast to slip 1% to $219,800 this year, and then rise 1.4% in 2008. The median new-home price is expected to be essentially unchanged at $246,400 in 2007, and then rise 2.2% next year. "If it weren't for a favorable economic backdrop, housing would probably have a hard landing," says NAR Senior Economist Lawrence Yun. "As it is, we see this as a soft landing with home sales rising gradually in the second half of the year and prices recovering a bit later."

Please visit Electronic Appraiser - www.electronicappraiser.com - for more information.