Home Staging Can Help You Sell Your House Quickly

Real estate prices have hit record levels in the United States during the last five years. In some parts of the country, prices have tripled. For those selling houses in the first half of the decade, business was very good, indeed. Rising interest rates and sticker shock have slowed the market down, however. In some parts of the country that used to be hot, sales have slowed to a crawl. In those markets, people who want to sell houses are now waiting months when homes used to sell in days or weeks. What can a homeowner who wishes to sell as quickly as possible do to accelerate the process?

A relatively new service called home staging may be the answer. Staging a home essentially means setting it up so that it makes its best possible presentation to the market. Professional home stagers will, for a fee, come to your house, examine your property, and make recommendations as to what you might do in order to make the house as sale-friendly as possible. In some cases, they will simply recommend a coat of paint, a bit of landscaping, or some new drapes. In other cases, more dramatic help may be needed.

It is often difficult to sell a home that has been vacant for a while. Buyers have a hard time imagining what their belongings might look like in an empty house. A good staging company will have in their inventory a selection of different types of furniture, lamps, decorative accessories and more so that a vacant home can look like a showcase. A fully and tastefully decorated home is much easier to sell than a vacant one.

The service isn?t necessarily inexpensive. Homeowners might expect to pay several hundred dollars for an initial consultation as well as a fee of several times that amount for the first month of a fully furnished, professionally decorated home. Rates for subsequent months tend to be lower than for the initial month, but many homes that have been professionally staged aren?t on the market much longer than a month. In fact, studies have shown that staged homes often sell in half of the time of other comparable properties.

Having your home professionally decorated in order to sell it isn?t something that everyone needs to do. But in markets with slowing real estate sales, staging a home may be the difference between selling the house this week and selling it three months from now. For many sellers, the investment is more than worthwhile.

?Copyright 2006 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier is the owner of Retro Marketing, a firm devoted to informational Websites, including http://www.HomeEquityHelp.net, a site devoted to information regarding home equity loans, mortgages and lines of credit.

Financing With A Home Equity Loan

by: Joseph Kenny

If you have good credit, a homeowner, your mortgage is paid on time every month and you are thinking about borrowing money, the home equity route may be the way to go. What this allows is suppose your home is worth substantially more than your current mortgage, for example, your mortgage is for £100,000 but your home is worth £200,000, you will have an equity of £100,000 in the value of your home that you can borrow against.

A home equity loan can be used for many purposes:

-Paying off other debts;

-Taking a holiday;

-Paying for university;

The loan is secured over your home, and therefore, the interest rate will generally be lower than for other types of credit that may be available. This makes them a good option for paying off higher interest debts, so long as you don’t rack them up again, or taking on a larger project such as a house extension. It is often a good idea to use a home equity loan to renovate your house, as the house value increases as a result, and often by more than what you pay to renovate it. You can also receive a tax credit on the interest paid on the loan.

However, it must be remembered that such loans are not appropriate for everybody in every situation. They should generally only be used for large projects of long term needs. For smaller loans, it may be better to look at other options such as personal loans. The rate and terms, as with all loans, will vary depending on your payment history and the amount and length of the loan.

The loan can be offered as a lump sum or as a credit line. The lump sum gives you the whole amount of the loan all at once and interest is payable on it immediately. With a credit line, you only use the money as needed, up to an agreed maximum, and interest only accrues on the amount you use.

You should always carefully review your finances before taking on more debt, especially if it is to be secured on your home. Using your home as security means that if repayments aren’t made on the loan, you could lose your house. It is therefore important that you are comfortable with the amount you are borrowing. You should also look at the differences in costs between a lump sum and a line of credit and decide carefully which one better suits your needs.

About The Author


Joseph Kenny writes for the loan comparison sites, http://www.ukpersonalloanstore.co.uk and also http://www.selectloans.co.uk. The latest loans are reviewed in detail at the Loan Store.

Home Equity Loans: Abusive Lending And How To Avoid It

by: Dan Johnson

Home Equity loans were initially designed to allow individuals who had not yet paid off the full amount of their home, the ability to borrow against what portion of the home they had paid for. So for example, a couple who had been making monthly payments for many years on their 30 year lease, could use the money they had already put into their home as collateral when they needed a loan to send their child to college. So, while the initial intent of the loan is regarded by some as noble, in practice it has served as a free-for-all for unscrupulous lenders and other scam artists.

Explaining Sub-Prime Lending

Home Equity Loans fall into a broad category known as sub-prime lending. Unlike prime lending, which is heavily regulated and offered to those living in good neighborhoods with fair to good credit, sub-prime lenders target those in bad neighborhoods with worse credit ratings. Because they offer loans to individuals who otherwise might have difficulty finding a loan, they were and are able to justify to the government the need to have greater free reign when it comes to setting the interest rates and finance charges associated with their loans.

This window, combined with the deep pockets of Home Equity Loan firms able to grease the campaigns of politicians, has prevented the industry from coming under the heavy scrutiny and regulation of prime lending. Consequently, what is seen in this industry is widely varying interest rates, and charges that are completely disproportionate with the risk incurred by the lending institution.

How to Protect Yourself

For the investor interested in taking on a Home Equity Loan, there are a few measures which can be taken to radically diminish the chances of being taken advantage of. The first precautionary step is to request a copy of the loan a full week before you sign it. The lending institution is required by law, to provide you with a copy of the loan many days in advance of you signing it. It is a rather simple task to ask for the loan, and the lending institutions response often reveals much about the quality and legality of the loan. If the lending institution says, that either the loan paperwork is not yet ready, or otherwise fails to produce the paperwork inside of a week prior to the signing, you should walk on the loan.

The catch-22, and consequently the reason why Home Equity Lenders are able to take such advantage of borrowers, is that often they are facing foreclosure and desperately need the loan. While your need may be very real, signing a sub-standard loan will ultimately put you in far worse shape than you ever were before.

Recognizing the Hidden Charges

The second, and potentially most important technique to prevent predatory lending, is to demand that all loan costs not be rolled into the APR, but be listed and paid by you up front. What predatory lenders do to entice individuals into taking a loan, is to soak up the equity in a home and offer you a small kickback on the side. So, taking the example of our couple above, let us imagine that they have $50,000 in equity in their $100,000 home and have a fixed mortgage rate of $650 a month. They then go to a Home Equity Lender who tells them that upon signing the loan they will get $20,000 in cash and their new interest rate will be $580 per month. What they do not tell the borrower is that they have also cashed out the other $30,000 dollars in equity and paid it to themselves in "refinancing fees." In addition, the new mortgage they receive may either be variable, meaning that as interest rates climb so will their new payment, or be back loaded, meaning that by the end of the loan the payments may reach $1,200 a month.

Can Home Equity Loans be useful? Yes, but only under ideal circumstances. By and large, they are a product designed by unethical lending companies to take advantage of those desperate for a little cash now. If you plan on applying for a Home Equity Loan, it is vital that you take the two steps outlined above as well as have an experienced independent third party go over the loan and its convoluted terms with you.

About The Author


Dan Johnson enjoys writing about home equity loans. Visit http://www.homeequityloanlowdown.com/ to learn more.