About Manatee County, FL

No matter how beautifully decorated the inside of your home may be, if the outside of the house does not reflect what lies behind the front door, you may easily lose the sale. Potential homebuyers frequently make a list of homes from various internet sites, advertisement listings or through a realtor that they wish to see and then drive by these homes to get a ‘feel’ for the property and the house. Bottom line, if your home looks unappealing from the outside there is a good possibility your home will be crossed off the list of potential purchases. Decide to spend a weekend fixing up the outside of your home and stick to a plan.

1) Call two or three local landscapers and ask them to come out for a landscape appraisal but most importantly ‘pick their brain’ for ideas of how best to show your home. Explain that you are selling the home and wish only to make the most of the exterior at minimal cost to you. In some cases, you might be surprised, particularly during slow landscaping seasons that you can afford to have a professional lightly landscape your property or at least modify a portion. For less than $500, an associate of mine had a local gardener come in and plant 12 tropical plants, 8 large flowered bushes, trim the existing trees to shape, pull the weeds, cut out sod to merge two planting beds, plant 20 small flowering bushes and throw down several bags of mulch in 2 afternoons. She also saved a little more money by having him transplant bushes from another part of the property to the front where she planned to create a more dramatic impact.

Further, his price included clean-up and removal of gardening debris, which saved her a lot of time after the work was complete. Her soil was very hard to dig into and it would have taken her twice as long to dig one hole as it did for the gardener to dig several; he was familiar with such difficult work and he had all the right tools to do it quickly. My associate only paid him to service the front beds while she saved money by cleaning up the smaller side beds on the side property by doing it herself. (The gardener even let her borrow his expert tools as long as she promised to return them the following day, which she did.) You might be surprised at the minimal but well-worth price of hiring a professional gardener, particularly if you find a local, one-woman/man operation with low overhead.

Someone starting a new business might also be less expensive in trying to build a clientele while my associate in turn offered to advertise the gardener’s services by keeping business cards on hand during real estate visits. Consider having him/her do a portion of the work and then do the less difficult areas of your home yourself. Even if you do not have a landscaping budget, call a few local gardeners to come out for a quote just to get some great landscaping ideas you can use yourself. Most are willing to spend a few minutes of their time even if you do not use their services. Take their business card anyway and offer to send them a referral. It is all part of doing business. So consider hiring a professional gardener to add curb appeal to a tired property.

2) Stand at the curb of your property and look the land from the perspective of the drive-by potential buyer. Get in the car and drive down your street and look at the way your property compares to your neighbors. If your neighborhood is well-cared for but your property is not; where the trees are overgrown and the weeds are hiding your front door is a clear indication your home will stick out like a ‘sore thumb’ and you may lose the sale. If you live in a neighborhood where your neighbors’ landscaping is ‘so-so’, this is your opportunity to shine. My associate explained that she once lived in a brand new home in an older neighborhood where few people took the time to landscape nicely so anything she did…add a border, plant a few bushes, and place a park bench near the front driveway with container plants, certainly looked amazingly better than the homes around her property.

When the time came to sell this home, she took a ride around the block and took the position of the potential buyer. As a drive-by buyer canvassing her own street, my associate noted that the viewer would see blasé curb-appealed homes and then come upon her own, where the flowers were blooming, the green grass was trimmed, the containers were filled with flowers and the inexpensive park bench at the end of the long driveway looked inviting. So plan your landscape to stand out from the rest and if your budget does not allow for the extras, then the next rule of thumb is to just make the property look ‘neat’….

3) Neatness in landscaping is important. If a property looks tidy, the impression you will give to the drive-by buyer is that the inside is neat and well-cared for as well. Even if you are not a neat person, make an effort to neaten up the exterior. Find someone who has a ‘neat’ eye and ask for their opinion. Trim the grass and if you have spotted, brown grass, invest in a bag of grass seed and water frequently to encourage growth. Baby-sit the seeds and if necessary, place a barrier around the area to keep children and pets from stomping on them. Cover new grass-seeded areas with hay or grass clippings to prevent blowing away, from birds eating the seeds and to keep moisture in. Water newly seeded areas daily. If you have time before you place your home up for sale, fertilize your lawn…it can make a huge difference in how healthy and green the lawn shows from the street. If you do not have grass, then create areas with grass.

Consider removing areas covered in stone or weeds and planting with either seeds or sod. It is a big project if you have little or no front lawn so elicit help from friends and neighbors if needed. Having some kind of greenery in the form of grass makes a huge difference to a buyer. Grass is a great canvas to making other areas of your property stand out and grass appeals to many who grew up with front lawns or always wished they had one. If you live in areas where it is impossible to grow grass, adding stone is another possibility however, be sure that stone works in that area of the country in which you are selling. Stone lawns usually fit in better in coastal properties where sand is the foundation and the cost of carting in topsoil is enormous.

I often feel that all-stone frontage looks out of place in neighborhoods where lawns are more prevalent and gives the impression the homeowner really cannot be bothered to maintain a lawn. I feel that stone is not a warm product if used in large areas and should be contained in smaller garden beds if possible.

4) Once you have the grass, fix up the existing beds. (If you do not have any beds in your property, this would be an entirely different article. This article deals with homes, which have garden beds already in place that need sprucing up.) Garden beds help soften the hard lines of sidewalks, walkways, and the rigid angle of homes. Once you have weeded these beds, ask yourself, “Does the design of the current beds allow them to be connected in some way across the front of the home? Do my beds flow?” The reason that I bring this question forward in a Curb Appeal article is that my associate explained to me that she used to have to separate garden beds in front of her home; one ran right across the front left-side of the home and the other ran down the side of the driveway. Both beds were disconnected from each other separated by a walkway. This separated design made the frontage look severed and harsh.

So she cut out the sod from the bed in front of the house, around the walkway and made a connection to the bed nearest the driveway. It looked like one continuous snake-like bed and once planted with similar foliage the entire property looked really ‘pulled together’. In doing this she accomplished two things:

• Softening the hard angles of the walkway, which did not have a garden bed in front of it and,
• the property had the look of what my colleague refers to as ‘fluid design’. The eye now followed a soft flow from one end of the house where the bed began to the end of the driveway where the bed ended. And…there was a small surprise at the end of that bed too, which made the design interesting and appealing. At the end of the driveway, which is ordinarily dull space, the garden bed ended in a circular shape and she planted just a few extra eye-catching flowers there; just a nice little touch and the colors were appealing. The path up the driveway, followed around the walkway toward the entrance of the home was entirely landscaped and pulled together with like-flowers and shrubs. Not a whole lot, but it was consistent and it was neat.

5) Another lawn tip from my associate…she did not have time for grass to grow in some ugly, brown and bare spots on her front lawn and in some cases, the grass just never grew back at all. She cut around the bad areas and made a teardrop-shaped cut out on that spot and filled it in with a few container plants she had growing in the yard. My colleague arranged the containers on 3 different levels…small, medium and large and then filled around the containers with mulch to even things out. The arrangement looked very nice. One of her empty containers (she often picks them up in the dollar store or finds disposed of in construction sites), she cut in half and placed it cut-side down on the bare spot on the lawn in front of the 3 flower-filled containers.

She filled the cut container with soil and threw in a handful herb seeds, namely dill and in about 2 weeks; the container flowed with pretty green herbs and ‘spilled out’ the container onto the ground covering the area cut out from the lawn. It made a nice presentation and was not too ‘much’ and at the same time hid the very worse part of our property. My friend noticed that even after I sold the home, the new owners still kept the container area as it was when she had the home for sale.

6) Another consideration when taking control of curb appeal when selling your home is to remove or trim down those trees and bushes which hide the beauty of your home. So often buyers look at photos of homes, which show a huge tree in front of the house that hides any view from the inside to the street. If you cannot see the home in a photo or in a drive-by viewing, this again reduces the chances that a potential buyer may be interested in your home. No one wants to ‘guess’ what a home really looks like and if there are overgrown bushes and trees hiding the house, potential buyers do not want to envision having to clear the property themselves. So be bold and trim the bushes down and if necessary, remove whatever seriously blocks viewing the home’s charm and character from the street.

7) Along the lines of seeing a home from the street is the inability to do so if you have cars parked in front that do not always need to be there. Granted, we need to park our cars but if you have the opportunity to take your car to the street or to the furthest end of your property for a few hours on the weekends or, if you have a large driveway and can move the car away from the front of the home, then take the time to do this. Buyers need to visualize the home as it would be if they lived there and anything which detracts from this thought is a non-plus for you as the seller. Weekends are usually the busiest times for drive-by house viewing so if you can move your car to a neighbor’s driveway or off your own driveway for a few hours, do so.

It may make a difference in the curb appeal of your home. Also, as a reminder, if you have any cars, boats or trailers parked in front of your home, which really do not need to be there…a car you were going to work on or an inoperable vehicle without any registration and kept putting off paying to be towed away, make a decision as whether it really needs to be there or not. Call a charity to have it towed away and donate it. Put an ad in the paper or on craigslist for a free boat or project car, but by all means, remove any unnecessary vehicles, which really take away curb appeal and make the property look more like a car dealership or a parking lot than a home.

So the main items to consider when creating curb appeal are to:

• Neaten up the property • Plant grass or sod wherever possible – if not possible, hide bad spots with container gardens.

• Trim and cut away trees and shrubbery which prevent drive-by buyers from seeing your property and the home to its fullest.

• Remove cars on higher drive-by traffic days and permanently remove any cars, boats or trailers, which will not be sold with the home.

• Call a landscaper for his/her opinion and talk about a quote for neatening up the property. See if you can afford at least a portion of it to be professionally ‘neatened’ and if not; get ideas from a professional that you can use later on your own.

Have you spent years renting homes or apartments and have grown tired of paying all that rent money to someone else? If so, then it might be your time to consider purchasing a home, and keeping that cash for yourself. However, you do need to ensure that you are prepared on more than one level before jumping into the equity market. There are many financial considerations to make note of before you start looking for a home.

But, if you can arrange your finances into a sensible plan and secure a mortgage then this can ultimately be the most rewarding purchase you have ever made or will make. Finance plays a huge role in the decision to purchase your first home. This is to be expected as if you are purchasing your first home you will not likely have a few hundred thousand dollars sitting around and will have to find a mortgage of some sort.

You should really make sure that you are prepared for the application for a mortgage as it will involve a thorough investigation of your past credit history. If there are any issues that you know of with your credit then you should take care of them before you apply for the mortgage. Sometimes this is a simple case of oversight, some things have been taken care of and not recorded as such, and sometimes there can be some debts that you will need to see to. Once these are taken care of, be sure to get a letter of release that you can show to the mortgage broker or company if necessary.

If there are no issues with your credit then that will only make the process easier. There is no stronger tool in the home buying process than having all your financing in line before you start shopping. This is a great attraction for sellers as they want their homes to sell quickly and without incident or trouble in the money phase, a buyer with ready-to-go financing's offers will hold greater favor with almost any seller. If you are mindful of these things then when the time comes to make your offer, the whole affair will go much more smoothly and you will be able to dedicate your time to what is important. How to decorate your new home.

Buying a house is a big investment. It really puts a dent on your financial resources. Of course, the expenses do not end with the down payment. You still have to contend with the monthly payments for the mortgage. This is a financial situation that you will have to live with for years until you have fully paid off your loan. But what happens if you get behind in your mortgage payments?

A delay in payment can have very serious consequences for your mortgage situation. If the delinquency in payments has become too severe then your home could be in danger of foreclosure. A foreclosure means that your property will be repossessed by the lending institution that gave you your mortgage. Fortunately, even if you have defaulted on your payments, it does not necessarily mean that your property will be foreclosed. There are various alternatives to a foreclosure that you can take.

Some of these are: Paying the delinquency. Generally, all lending institutions are required to accept all the payments that were delinquent and reinstate the loan. The delinquent payments that you have to pay may also include some legal fees especially if you are already in the foreclosure stage. There are also lending institutions that require certified funds in order to reinstate the loan. Forbearance and Repayment. One of the most common ways of resolving a delinquent mortgage is to work out a plan with your lending institution where in you get to pay a part of your delinquency every month on top of your regular monthly payments.

If you are in a situation where you are not able to meet the monthly mortgage payments, your lender can elect to extend the forbearance by suspending payments for a certain period of time up until you can start a repayment schedule. Payment Assistance. Some state and local governments and also private charitable organizations have instituted programs that help people with delinquencies pay all or part of their mortgage obligation for a certain period of time. Reamortization. In a reamortization, the delinquent mortgage amount is added to the loan balance as a way of bringing the mortgage payments up to date.

This move increases not only the total loan amount but also the monthly payments. Of course, the increase in payment will not be as large if the life of the loan is also extended. Private sale. A private sale of the property affected by the delinquency can also be done as it will allow you to meet your obligations as well as get any equity that may have accumulated. In private sales it is usual that the amount is greater than the stated amount owed on the loan. Most of these alternatives presume that you will be able to pay your mortgage payments at some point. But there is also a particular foreclosure alternative called a loss mitigation program.

The federal government as well as the mortgage industry established this type of program as a way of stopping foreclosures. Under this program you are given options that will not only assist you in keeping your home even if you do not have the financial capability to pay for the mortgage payments. With these types of programs, it becomes so much easier to address the problem of foreclosures.

Investing in foreclosures is no doubt one of the best opportunities to make money in today's economy. As with any type of business venture, there are risks involved. Investing in foreclosed properties offers great opportunity to buy homes significantly under market, but there are some risks such as considerable research, under lying lien problems, long-term carrying costs and several others. If you are willing to take the chance on a property or two you may prosper in the end. Foreclosed homes can be purchased at several stages. First is the pre-foreclosure phase, then the auction phase and finally the REO phase each of these presents their own set of pros and cons. Familiarize yourself with each of these different types of foreclosures, weigh the pros and cons for each, you may be able to avoid a costly mistakes and headaches through the process of investing in home foreclosures.

Take a look at the possible pros and cons at the various stages of a foreclosure:

Pre-Foreclosure Phase. This is the stage where the homeowner is still in control of the property. Although the loan is in default and the pressure from the lenders is just beginning. The homeowner is usually in a position to sell the property quickly and avoid the foreclosure process all together. This means huge savings and large potential profits for you. Pros 20-40% discounts on the estimate value. Low or no down payment, due to the built in equity. Research and inspection opportunities Sales agreements that are flexible. Cons Home owner may not be reachable. Fierce competition, many investors are trying to buy these type foreclosures. Time to research documents and court filings. Undisclosed or underlying liens against the property.

Auction Phase. Possibly the most profitable stage of a foreclosure. Auctioned properties usually offer the best potential profit when buying foreclosures. An auctioned property is sold during a public auction to the highest bidder. If you have done you, research these types of properties are sometimes sold way under market value. Pros Greater discounts can be as high as 35-50% Great ROI, return on investment. Greater potential profit. Cons Property inspection is generally not available. Postponed auctions mean valuable time lost and research wasted. Large down payments that must be paid at the time of auction. Incomplete research can cost you a lot of money. You may not win the auction at all REO Phase. An REO occurs when the lender retains the property after the auction phase.

If the bids are not high, enough during the auto the lender will bid on the property to seize control and resell it themselves. In most case, the property has no value to the lender until the house sells; in this case, the lender is usually motivated to sell the property fast. Pros Discounts of 5-18% Clear title, free of all liens. Back taxes are up to date. Lenders may do the repairs, or offer additional discounts. Cons Low ROI, return on investment Research must be very through. Potential for loss in the end.

When investing in real estate, especially in foreclosures there is great risk involved. While the potential to make a substantial profit in foreclosures you need to make sure that, you do your research and fully understand what your risks are. Properties that offer the greatest profit potential are often times the risky investments.

Mortgage foreclosure can occur if homeowners, who have taken a VA, conventional loan, or an FHA insured loan, default on the mortgage payments. Foreclosure can lead to the lender gaining possession of a borrower’s home. If the value of the home is less than the mortgage amount, the homeowner may have to pay the balance amount to the lender under a deficiency judgment. Foreclosures have a negative impact on the credit score of a home owner. In order to avoid foreclosure, there are several things that a homeowner can do.

These include communicating to the lender one’s inability in making payments as soon as possible and requesting assistance. If necessary, homeowners should back their communication with relevant financial figures such as expenses and income from various sources. They should not abandon their premises or they may not qualify for the assistance. There are several housing counseling agencies approved by the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development; they offer up-to-date information on the various programs initiated by government and private organizations that are designed to help homeowners facing the prospects of foreclosure. Housing counseling agencies, which also provide credit counseling services, provide their services at no cost.

In order to avoid forbearance, homeowners can try and apply for Special Forbearance. This may lead to a revision of the repayment schedule and in some cases the payment may either be revised or suspended. A rise in expenditure and a fall in the monthly income may enable homeowners to qualify for a new monthly plan. Similarly, mortgage modification may result in extension of the period of repayment and may open up refinancing options.

Homeowners who have undergone a financial crisis stand to benefit from mortgage modification as they can chart out a more manageable repayment plan. Homeowners can also take recourse to a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure. This entails voluntarily handing over the property to the lender. Such a deed does not hurt a homeowner’s credit rating as much as a foreclosure. A homeowner, who is a defaulter on payments, and does not qualify for other alternatives, has not been able to sell the house, and is not in default with respect to other mortgages, qualifies for a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure.

A homeowner’s qualification for any of the above mentioned alternatives is determined by the lender. However, homeowners should be aware of solutions that are not genuine. It is highly advisable to take the help of housing counseling agencies in such matters. Homeowners in financial difficulties are liable to fall prey to scams such as equity skimming in which a homeowner is tricked into signing the deed of the property to another person. There are several counseling agencies that are not genuine and often charge homeowners for services that can be done for free. It is imperative that homeowners check the background of the counseling agency before deciding to go with a particular firm.