Spring Clean Before You List Your Home for Sale

With Spring upon us, and now that Daylight Savings Time is here for most of the country, it is time for home sellers to start thinking about the spring housing market. One of the best ways to prepare for putting your home on the market, even if it doesn’t feel like spring yet where you are, is by an early spring cleaning.

The best place to start spring cleaning in any room is at the top. With a cloth or a microfiber mop, dry dust the walls and pay particular attention to the corners of the room where cobwebs tend to collect. Depending on the type of wall covering or paint, you can also damp wipe the walls to help remove any sort of cooking residue or fingerprints from the walls. Pay particular attention to the corners around doorways and the vicinity around switches; these areas tend to get the dirtiest. If plain water won’t remove smudges, use a mild vinegar solution instead.

Take care of your windows next. Check the washing instructions on any fabric drapes and wash or dry clean them as required. Dust your window blinds carefully so they don’t get bent. Wash the inside and outside of your windows to let the spring sunshine in. You may want to wait on doing this until after all the Spring pollen has cleared in your area. One of the best ways to clean glass is with a spray bottle of vinegar and newspaper to wipe it down. The outside of windows might require a ladder or a window washer’s squeegee to get high enough. In some areas it’s also possible to hire a company to come and clean your outside windows.

If you have carpet or rugs you have a few options. Area rugs can be sent out to have cleaned and wall to wall carpeting can be steam cleaned if it’s really dirty; but if your carpets or rugs are just a little stale you can sprinkle a liberal amount of baking soda over them, let them sit for a few hours or overnight and then vacuum it up. This will pull any smells out of them and leave them fresh and clean smelling.

There are probably more areas of your home you can think of that might need a good cleaning when the bright spring sunshine peeks in your windows, but these steps will give you a good place to start. Another benefit to giving your home a good cleaning before you put it on the market is that you can see where repairs might need to be made or painting might need to be done to help perk up your home.

Happy cleaning!

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Pending Home Sales Down - Severe Weather To Blame

Pending home sales are down and additional declines are expected from abnormal weather conditions, according to the National Association of Realtors®.

Moreover, the abnormally severe and prolonged winter weather, which affected large regions of the U.S., hampered shopping activity in February.

The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator based on contracts signed in January 2010, fell 7.6% to 90.4 from an upwardly revised 97.8 in December, but remains 12.3% higher than January 2009 when it was 80.5.

With prolonged bad weather in much of the nation, abnormal swings in housing data is not all that abnormal. The real question that remains to be seen is, what happens when the first time homebuyer tax credit expires at the end of April. Stay tuned…

Underwater on Your mortgage? Thoughts to Consider

In the fourth quarter of 2009 another 600,000 homeowners found themselves "underwater" or owing more on their mortgages than their homes were worth. In fact, the total number of households in this situation is now over 11 million people or 24 percent of all properties that carry a mortgage. This information, reported by First American Core Logic, a real estate research firm, tells us that many people are still really struggling.

The first choice for many homeowners in this situation is to try to restructure their existing mortgages. However, this can be a very long and painstaking process and many people find that they do not qualify. As a result, more and more people are thinking about walking away from their existing homes and mortgages.

Aside from the moral considerations, which are great, what are the points you need to consider before you think about walking away from a mortgage?

First, you need to understand that this is a huge decision. It might seem like this option would solve a lot of your problems, but in reality, it generally just adds more. Probably the biggest impact is that you will not be able to get a new mortgage for quite some time — five years is typical. This means you need to prepare to be a renter for at least that amount of time.

Your credit score and record will be adversely impacted for about seven years. During that time, your ability to get any other kind of loan will be negatively impacted. Car loans, assuming you can get them, will be at a very high interest rate. Same for any other type of consumer loan. Finally, there may be adverse tax implications as well.

Walking away from a mortgage is certainly not without its costs. If your financial life is going to be impacted for five to seven years anyway, it just might make more sense to hang in there and keep making the mortgage payments. No one can accurately predict what the real estate market might look like in 2015 — perhaps by then your situation could be dramatically different.

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