What is the True Cost of Home Ownership?  Most potential homeowners begin their planning with the down payment and monthly mortgage amount in mind.  It's an excellent start but anyone who is planning on buying a home needs to be ready to take on the total costs and look beyond the mortgage payment. If you want to effectively determine a home's affo […]

Remember that.  It's like, "Lefty loosey, righty tighty."  Universal.  It works every time.  Well, maybe not EVERY time. I got a call from a frantic Realtor.  We had an inspection about 2 months ago.  She asked if I could call the clients who could not seem to get the gas range to work.  "It worked during the home inspection and again the […]

What kind of agent are you? I have always been of the notion that my humor, rants, raves, wee people spoofing, music, art and other categories of writing would either connect with an audience or not... As bloggers, we create original content to be discovered by random people using search engines to look for the things that they are interested in (that we som […]

Buying A Home From The Home Inspectors Perspective, Rural Homes Part 4 - Buying A Rural Home, From The Home Inspectors Perspective I love living in my rural home. There is plenty of space to raise cattle, horses, chickens ( which my wife loves ), a garden and kids. My nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away. The nearest town is 5 miles away. The main city ar […]

There's so many thoughts that go through my mind when I read blog after blog of real estate professionals considering "throwing in the towel". When I look up, more doom and gloom news about the real estate market. The rain for over 24 hours now in Frisco TX isn't helping very much either. It's funny how sunshine can affect one's […]

Why You Should Check Your Blog for Plagiarism If you've been around Active Rain very long, you probably know all about plagiarism.  This is when someone copies your blog and then puts it out as a new blog like they wrote it.  There are several excellent free Plagiarism checkers you can use now to check your blog.  All you have to do is to search Google […]

We got word last week that a past client's loan modification was approved. As happy and relieved as they were, my beleaguered clients had to swallow a rough pill: on the terms of the approved loan modification, their mortgage payment would be several hundred dollars higher than their original payment.  It had been a long process. First, they had a job l […]

Flipping, flopping and the potential future lawsuits with short sales                                                                                                                                                       If you are a Realtor and work with short sales you may want to check out the article I wrote about one type of short sale fraud. The blog a […]

  I just spent a few hours watching a PBS Frontline special “Growing Up Online.” It is a documentary about the wired society of today and how children have adapted to it. The point was repeatedly made that the contemporary kids have no life experience in a non-connected world. Their ONLY reality is one that exists in a virtual universe. I feel that we are de […]

[POST UPDATED] This post is inspired by Broker Bryant.  My apologies for the title.  I don’t know if your business is broken or if you perceive it as such, but since you are now reading it, I’ll assume that it could be better. This post is my experiment in keeping things simple for once, as I am told most of you don’t have the time or the patience to wa […]