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It is common to look for ways to increase your home’s value when getting ready to sell. But there is another approach here as well. It is trying not to do the things that lower home value, or cost more than they return. What are these things? Let’s look at a few.

Unusual Decorating Schemes

We have made a disco out of our garage, complete with mirror-ball, colored lights, and flowers painted on the walls. As much as we like it, this probably lowers the value of our home. We can live with that, but if you want to maintain the resale value of your house, avoid unusual decorating schemes and other such “improvements.” That television room painted in the colors of your favorite football team may be appealing to you, but it almost certainly means selling your home for less.

Reducing The Number Of Bedrooms

I know of a family that decided to make two bedrooms into one large one by knocking out a wall. Doing this may or may not affect a home’s value if there are at least four bedrooms to start with. But if you make a three-bedroom home into one with two, you are going to have a lot fewer families looking at it when it is time to sell. Ask a real estate agent or two what kind of homes are most in demand before you ever reduce the number of bedrooms.

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So you want really cheap housing? Whether you are buying or renting, here are five ways to find a home that costs you less. Those are followed by a list of the real expenses you need to compare your options fairly.

If you can live where you like, you can start by looking at towns where houses or apartments cost less, and cut your housing costs by as much as half or more. For example, an apartment which rents for $500 in Tucson, Arizona might be $1,500 in New York or San Francisco. A house you would have to pay $400,000 for in California might be $120,000 in many other cities.

Once you know which city you’ll be living in, find the neighborhoods where prices or rents are lowest. If they aren’t clearly unsafe or otherwise undesirable, start your search here. Only move on if you can’t find what you need after carefully looking at what is for sale there.

Some types of housing are cheaper than others. Normally mobile homes on property are the cheapest options for buying or renting (although I have seen exceptions). Beyond that, the relative value of various types of houses can vary a lot in different cities. In some, classic old houses are valued more than new homes, while in other towns they′re seen for the trouble they are and priced lower. Start cheap and work your way up if you don’t find what you want.

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It just isn’t much fun to buy a new home and then discover that snakes are regular visitors in the living room.  And you don’t want to move into a house with a leaky roof or a wet basement. Or discover that you picked the worst neighborhood in town - after you buy. To avoid surprises like these when buying a new home, you have to learn about the town, the neighborhood and the house. Here are some ways to do that - before you make that offer.

Your New Town

An online search by city and state (Fresno California) will usually lead you to an official city site, or a chamber of commerce website. These sites can provide a lot of useful information, but they are “selling” the city. For the good and the bad, find a local newspaper online as well. See what going on in town, and check the classified advertising section to get an idea about home prices too.

Detailed statistics on almost every town and city in the U.S. can be found at city-data.com. Click on a state, then find the city you want on the list (it covers towns of 6,000 people or more). You’ll find more statistics than you can possibly use, ranging from population, average income, crime statistics, maps, photos and much more.

Visit weatherbase.com for climate information on almost every city in the U.S. Click on a state, choose the city you want, and see how many inches of rain or snow they get each year, how hot or cold it gets, etc. You’ll also find a link to the current weather forecast for the town.

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With the current economy families across the country are making the tough choice of continuing to make payments on their homes or save what little they have left to start over. The latter deteriorates your credit and will expose you to a possible foreclosure. So the burning question when faced with this dilemma is “Should I stay or should I go″ or should I refi my home?

The facts are that many people took cash out, borrowed more than they can afford, took teaser rates, or applied using some form of a stated income loan which would often over inflate the borrowers actual income through the home refinance or home purchase process. The economy may not have hit the bottom and a result is found with thousands of families unable to refinance or sell their homes. There are a lot of people that are leaving their homes and just giving the properties to lenders. Is this the right decision?

I don’t have the right or wrong answer here but I do know that up until the 90’s most people bought a house as a place to live and somewhere to stay and raise a family.That might be a Walton’s way of thought but sometimes the truth hurts.With national home values increasing faster than expected in the 1990’s to 7% a year; it started a trend.  Lending practices began to recover from the S/L crisis and a new way of thinking was born in the lending world. Are you still breathing?When was the last time you reviewed your credit report? Obviously you can afford a house.With that in mind you might be able to say stated income and teaser loans were common, due to a housing prices from the mid 90’s.Then the temptation comes in to play with values skyrocketing and homeowners using that money to buy expensive items. Most of us took money from our homes to purchase the things we could not normally afford, and this began a cycle of refinancing for the new toy everyone wanted that year.

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The Seattle area’s real estate market showed signs of stabilization in September, according to new statistics released Monday.  Especially in the critical market for single-family houses in the four-county central Puget Sound area, said Glenn E. Crellin, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Policy Research at Washington State University.

Sales of houses and condominiums in those counties rose nearly 4.1 percent in September compared with the same month in 2007, and nearly 4.2 percent in King County alone. The last monthly increase for the region was 4.8 percent in February 2007.

The main reason for the stabilization in year-to-year numbers is the mortgage crunch hit the Seattle & Redmond real estate area hard in August 2007, when the region already had an increasing number of homes chasing a shrinking pool of buyers. That crunch showed first in the data from September 2007.

The median sale price fell last month by 8.3 percent to $295,000 overall compared with September 2007 and by 3.7 percent to $380,315 in King County.
Total active listings at the end of September were 10,889, down by about 1,500 or about 12 percent from a year earlier.

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