Home Buying Tips

• Is private mortgage insurance good or bad?
  Unless you are involved with real estate you probably have never heard of PMI. No. It's not a serious disease. In fact, PMI can be extremely beneficial if you are a "cash challenged" home buyer without a sufficient down payment. Continue article...
• Determining Your Offer Price
  When you prepare an offer to purchase a home, you already know the seller’s asking price. But what price are you going to offer and how do you come up with that figure? Continue article...
• Try selling home without agent
  About 85 percent of home sellers use real estate agents to list and sell their houses. Continue article...
• House Inspectors: Choosing The Right One...
  A qualified house inspector is the surest way to discover a house's not-so-obvious problems. Most professional inspectors are from some type of construction background, such as engineering, architecture or contracting. Their responsibility is to crawl beneath the floors, squeeze through the attic and generally comb the house's structure and mechanical systems for shortcomings. They give the buyer a complete report; with this, the buyer can decide whether or not the house is a good deal, or at least put together a "punch list" of items that must be fixed (it isn't unusual for this report to contain about 50 items). The fee for this service generally runs from about $300 to $500 and up. Continue article...
• The Biggest Home Defect To Watch For
  Water damage is the biggest defect to watch for. Continue article...
• Do You Know The Real Price Of Your ARM?
  Adjustable-rate mortgages are complicated instruments. No one characteristic fully describes one. Continue article...