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Five Key Areas to Pay Attention to When Buying a Home
 Looking for a new home can be exciting and frustrating. You can help alleviate the frustration by paying close attention to five key areas of the homes you're considering buying; it may save you money in the long run.
Don Walker is an inspector and owner of Ace Home Inspections. He says there are five areas in homes that he frequently reports problems with. They are electrical, foundation, plumbing, the attic, and landscaping.
Electrical. Walker says sometimes homeowners assume with newer homes that all will work just fine but that's often
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not the case. "I inspected a brand new house-four years old but the electrical was all done incorrectly," says Walker.
Having a complete home inspection will help to rule out any problems and
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Deploy A Strategic Assault On Your Mortgage Application
 Today's volatile housing market demands that home buyers take an exacting, almost surgical approach to completing a mortgage application in order to speed the paperwork through the narrowed arteries of the home loan pipeline.
Profusely sweating the details of a mortgage application gives lenders fewer reasons to reject your quest for the American Dream. And the need for speed is crucial if you want to beat today's realty market clock which frequently resets itself.
The real estate market's mortgage credit squeeze tightens one day then eases the next. So there's no room for vagueness or foot dragging when completing a mortgage application.
Here are your marching orders.
Tighter underwriting regulations, fewer mortgage options, appraisers trying to keep tabs on value changes, and several recent federal interventions to help cure the housing hangover this year alone, are all conditions that reflect the
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Too Much To Store And
Too Little Space
 Do you have too much to store and too little space? If you're like many homeowners, finding enough storage space can be a challenge. Thankfully, remodeling professionals can help you create new ways to tuck away your family's treasures in a resourceful and sophisticated way, according to the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI).
Finding storage solutions doesn't always mean undertaking a major remodel. Sometimes it's about using the square footage you already have. Remodelers can help you plan and reallocate storage to accommodate your family's changing lifestyle. Getting creative with storage can improve daily living and boost the resale value of your home.
Look in Unusual Spaces
Veteran remodeler Don Van Cura, CR, CLC, CKBR, and owner of Chicago-based Don Van Cura Construction, recently won a regional CotY Award for a clever storage solution he designed for stashing canned goods under a kitchen staircase. "I'm a space freak and I don't believe that any part of the house should be wasted," he explains. "Almost every section of home has a void in it that can be made into storage -- and the older the house, the more nooks and crannies you
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What Is Appraised Value
1. Appraisals provide an objective opinion of value, but it's not an exact science so appraisals may differ. 2. For buying and selling purposes, appraisals are usually based on market value - what the property could probably be sold for. Other types of value include insurance value, replacement value and assessed value for property tax purposes. 3. Appraised value is not a constant number. Changes in market conditions can dramatically alter appraised value. 4. Appraised value doesn't take into account special considerations, like the need to sell rapidly. 5. Lenders usually use either the appraised value or the sale price, whichever is less, to determine the amount of the mortgage they will offer.
Courtesy of the National Association of Realtors
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