Scrutinize your existing budget and determine your capacity to meet mortgage payments.

Before having yourself pre qualified by any lending institution, it is a good idea to do a “self-examination”. What are the things that I spend my money on? are they essentials? or could I put my money to better use? or are my expenses trivialities I can do without? Do I make timely payments on my monthly rent, bills and other utilities right now? Or buying my first home with a bigger mortgage not to my best interest at the moment? What are the debts am I paying off currently? Will I still be able to pay them if I buy a home right now? Have a lifestyle check and think about how it will impact on your choice of home and neighborhood. Ask people whose judgment you trust if they know experts who can help you in buying your first home. Go shopping for your choice of home and neighborhood. You could start by reading the real estate section of the local newspaper of the area you have in mind or its newsletters. The internet is also a great place to take a look at possible choices.

The digital camera is one effective equipment in the real estate business. It provides a fast, efficient , cost effective way of promoting properties for sale. It doesn’t matter whether you are a pro photographer or not, anyone can take pictures and either upload it to the personal computer and post it on the site, or simply print the digital image right on. Most people rely on images or photos and easily gets attracted to it all with just a simple image. So how do you take that selling shot? The first and most important factor is a good source of light.Make sure you clean the house of clutter. Make good use of the best features of the house. Highlight them. Take more pictures of them. Lastly, there are simple photo editing software you can try out to enhance and modify images you took. Voila!

Image Source:finegermanhousecleaning.com

If you can buy only one piece of property and you are presented with a condominium or a house and lot package, what will you choose?

If location is not much of an issue, a wise move would be the latter. Being ‘wise’ is relative, though. It may be wise in terms of money for value but there are other considerations as well.

Commonly, condominiums are located in the heart of the city. The reason behind building a condominium is accomodating more people in less land space in the same area.

House and lot, on the other hand has more value because of the land you also own, but usually it is located farther and farther away from the community center because more likely than not, those within the center circle are already owned by someone.

That leaves two general ideas:
1. If you need to be within the center circle, buy a condo unless you can withstand the travel to and from your routine.
2. If you don’t have to be within the center circle, buy a house and lot which gives you real value and not mere air space.

NEW YORK No doubt the collapsing housing market has played a huge role in the downturn of real estate classified advertising. For the third quarter, the Newspaper Association of America reported that real estate ad revenue plummeted 24.4% to $1 billion compared to the same period a year ago.

But for those who think this is all cyclical — the housing market will bounce back at some point and so too will print ad dollars — a new report from Borrell Associates suggests that once the spending flows again, it’s going to the Internet.

The firm forecasted that in three years, agents and brokers will be spending more on online media than on newspaper advertising. By 2012, Borrell anticipates that newspaper real estate ad revenue will hit $3.2 billion while online real estate ad revenue will surpass that at $3.4 billion.

So far this year, total ad spending on real estate dropped 3%, the report found, but online advertising soared 25.8% to $2.6 billion most likely due to a shift of those dollars from print to online. The rate of online growth is expected to slow over the next year — estimated at around 12% but it should still eclipse newspaper real estate ad revenue.

Borrell suggests newspapers are going to suffer the most when compared to other media. The firm projects that after last year’s high of $5.2 billion in print real estate ad revenue, there will be a 6.8% decline this year and an identical drop in 2008 before the decline truly accelerates at 16% in 2009.

Analysts do point out that that newspapers stand to gain something from the shift of dollars to the Internet. In 2006, the industry generated $380 million from online real estate advertising or about a 19% share. If the share holds for this year, newspapers stand to gain almost $100 million in additional real estate ad revenue. However, it’s unlikely the gain in online dollars will offset print losses.

The study nods to the very recent announcement of 11 newspaper companies partnering with Zillow.com in addition to the Yahoo consortium, which could help more real estate ad dollars flow to the newspapers.

At the same time, brokers and agents are shifting their ad budgets to maintaining their own Web sites. By 2009, Borrell anticipates that Web site design and maintenance will represent 47.6% of broker and agent online spending. “The clear implication of this change is that brokers and agents are increasingly taking control of client communications and hence the client relationship,” Borrell analysts wrote. “While they will continue to advertise in commercial media, they see their own web operations as growing in significance.”

By Jennifer Saba
Source: editorandpublisher.com

Learning the basics is very important, because you can’t learn anything else above them. And if you do learn something advanced, you won’t know how to use it properly. That’s why we are giving some tips on how to invest in real estate:

For those with poor credit history and those who cannot outright buy a residential property, the best selection for you would be the lease option. It’s like rent-to-own, but you’re still given the option to either rent or buy the property.
Here are the benefits:

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Despite the slowing down of the US real estate market, investors see this as an opportunity for them to do things they wouldn’t have thought of doing when the prices were high. For instance, the Los Angeles real estate firm, CB Richard Ellis just closed a $2.1 billion investment fund. The money will be used to buy properties nationwide.

Through this fund, the firm will be buying both properties that are only in need of minor repairs and those that need more improvements. The latter will fund real estate development.

CB Richard Ellis Investors is an independently operated affiliate of Los Angeles-based CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., the world’s largest real estate brokerage.

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It’s hard to read the news lately about the real estate in the US. It’s been down for quite a while now and it won’t get any better soon. So in the meantime, what can the real estate do to alleviate this sickness? According to Jennifer Allan, real estate broker, author and consultant, here are tips on making sure that what you sell won’t be sitting on the list forever:

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For those with poor credit history and those who cannot outright buy a residential property, the best selection for you would be the lease option. It’s like rent-to-own, but you’re still given the option to either rent or buy the property.
Here are the benefits:

Source