Newsletter

How To Conduct a Virtual House Hunt That’s As Good As the Real Thing: MABA Massachusetts RealEstate HomeBuyers  If you’ve been thinking about buying a home for a while, you may have marked your calendar back in the winter to start your house hunt right about now. After all, spring typically kicks off the busiest home-buying period of the year. But what a difference a few months make! Now, the coronavirus pandemic probably has you worried about how to safely check out homes without risking infection. Our new series, “Home Buying in the Age of Coronavirus,” aims to help you […]

Should Home Sellers Get a Pre-Inspection? The Pros and Cons: MABA Massachusetts HomeOwnership RealEstate  Every home buyer knows hiring a home inspector to check out a property before closing is a good idea. In fact, a home inspection is often a requirement for a mortgage. The trickier question is this: Should home sellers also hire a home inspector to conduct a pre-inspection? That’s where you have an inspector scrutinize your property for problems before it’s even listed. Is a pre-inspection worthwhile? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons. Pro: A pre-inspection means fewer surprises  Regardless of who’s doing the hiring, a certified […]

Markets Where Homes Linger the Longest, and Buyers Gain an Edge MABA Massachusetts HomeBuyers RealEstate  In the fraught, pressure packed, scarily unpredictable summer 2022 housing market, home sellers and buyers are compulsively tracking key real estate metrics like baseball obsessives tracking box scores only with way more on the line than the galling perfection of the New York Yankees. Everyone is desperate to get a grip on where things are going in U.S. real estate. Are prices continuing to rise? Is inventory going to keep falling? And where on Earth are mortgage rates going to top out?  But one stat […]

Ways First Time Homebuyers Ruin Their Credit Score,Their Odds of Buying a House: HomeBuyers MassachusettsRealEstate MABA  When it comes to shopping for a mortgage to buy a house, one critical factor to check is your credit score. Lenders use your credit score (aka FICO score) to decide whether to loan you money to buy a home and at what interest rate. “Lenders grant credit based on their confidence you can be trusted to pay back what you borrowed,” says Stephen Rosen, head of sales at mortgage company Better. “If you are worthy of a lender’s financial trust, you are said […]

How to Save Money for a Down Payment and Closing Costs on a New House: Massachusetts MABA RealEstate HomeOwnerhsip  When you’re wondering how to save money for a house, it can start to feel like you’ll never scrape together enough for a down payment. Yeah, you already know that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Well, the same holds true for building a down payment. It takes time! How to save money for a house  Still, as long as you grease the gears early (like now), you’ll barely notice you’re saving until boom! One day in the foreseeable future you’ll be […]

What If Your Home Inspector Missed Something Huge?: Massachusetts HomeBuyers HomeOwnership  Your offer has been accepted, and there’s just one more obstacle between you and your new home: the inspection. It can be a stressful event for both buyers and sellers as they wait for the report, hoping no major issues will surface that could sideline the deal. But what if you make it through that day, let out a big sigh of relief, seal the deal, and then a few weeks or months later find an issue in your new home a bat infestation, a leaky roof, a CDC […]

Lovely Listing Photos With Hidden Flaws You’ll Regret Falling For: Do You Spot Them?: Massachusetts HomeBuyers HomeOwnerhsip  Finding your dream home today all starts with the photos. Odds are, if you surf real estate listings (and don’t we all?), you’ve been seduced by gorgeous images of cozy wood-burning fireplaces, luxurious marble bathrooms, or home offices cleverly closed off by jaunty barn doors. I, too, have fallen hard for listings, then even followed through with purchasing these properties. Yet once I’ve visited or even lived in these picture perfect homes, I can tell you that many of the features I loved […]

America’s First Period Homes Explained To Home Buyers: Massachusetts Homeownership Homebuyers We Americans love old homes. We turn them into museums, tour them, and some of us even live in the oldest of the old, known as First Period Homes. They were built primarily in Massachusetts and later, in other New England states by the first generation of English settlers and their descendants, way back in the 1600 and early 1700s. Of course, Indigenous people built many homes way before the Colonial era, yet the term First Period refers to homes built by early European settlers. Cut to 2022, and […]

First Time Homebuyer Hopes and Dreams That Are Completely Delusional Today: Massachusetts HomeBuyers HomeOwnership  Every house hunt starts with a dream, one that can easily escalate into pure fantasy. Homebuyers, particularly first timers, often harbor visions of purchasing the perfect house, in a great neighborhood, for a bargain price. All that might have been achievable with some luck in the past. But in today’s hot seller’s market, once buyers move beyond mooning over listings to making an actual offer, things can get jarringly real all too fast. As a real estate agent, I see this wake-up call regularly. So do […]

Reasons Pending Sales Fall Through in Real Estate: Massachusetts Homebuyers Homeownership When a home’s status changes to sale pending, it means the seller has accepted the buyer’s offer and both parties are ready to move forward. Hooray! But even when all signs point to go, sometimes a home sale just never takes off. While a failed pending sale isn’t common, it can happen, even in a thriving real estate market. Last year, existing home sales totaled 6.12 million, an increase of 8.5 percent year over year. However, a number of purchases didn’t pan out. About six percent of all purchase […]