Dustin McClure

First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit

- An $8,000 tax credit, or 10 percent of your home's value, whichever is less, is nowavailable to first-time homebuyers.

- Buyers may not have owned a home for the past three years to qualify as "first time" buyers.

- You must purchase the house between January 1 and November 30, 2009.

- To qualify, buyers must make less than $75,000 a year (or $150,000 per couple). The credit begins to phase out for people with income levels of up to $95,000 a year (or $190,000 for couples).

- You don't have to repay the credit as long as you remain in your home for at least 36 months after the purchase date.

- The credit is refundable, meaning tax filers see a refund of the full $8,000 even if their total tax bill was less than that amount.

- You can claim the credit on your 2008 tax return.

- If you take advantage of the $8,000 tax credit and then sell your home or it no longer remains your principal residence within 36 months of the purchase date, you will have to pay back the full $8,000.

- If you're a first-time homebuyer and you purchased your home on or after April 8, 2008, and by Dec. 31, 2008, you do not qualify for the $8,000 first-time homebuyer's credit. You can still take the $7,500 tax credit, but you have to pay it back because it's a 15-year, interest-free loan from the Internal Revenue Service.

- As with the $7,500 credit, if you sell and your gain is less than the credit, you only have to repay up to the amount of the gain. If you die before the credit/loan is repaid, any outstanding amount is forgiven.

- If your status is married filing separately, you can't get the full $8,000 credit or

$7,500 credit. Instead, you get $4,000 of the $8,000 credit and $3,750 of the $7,500 credit. People filing as single are eligible for the full credit.

- Commercial real estate is impacted primarily through those provisions of the bill focused on green building and energy efficiency as well as business tax incentives.

H.R. 1 provides significant funds for state energy programs, which could be used to support commerical property owners' investment in energy efficiency upgrades while commercial property owners seeking to invest in alternative energy systems for onsite power generation would benefit from the Department of Energy Renewable Energy Loan Guarantees Program. Of particular benefit to small businesses would be certain provisions of the bill that provide tax relief in the area of bonus depreciation and capital expenditures, as well as the 5-Year carryback of net operating losses for small businesses.

Mossy Oak® Properties Expands to North Carolina

Mooresville Location Opened August 15th

Mooresville, NC - Mossy Oak Properties is pleased to announce the opening of its first franchise in the State of North Carolina.

Franchisees, Nick Marinelli and Dustin McClure, chose Mooresville based on its centralized location in the Carolina region. McClure provided details, saying: "There are plenty of companies that focus on residential real estate, but there's a shortage of land brokerage and rural real estate firms in our area. We had talked about pursuing that sort of business, and when we heard about the Mossy Oak network, we pursued this aggressively. I've known the Mossy Oak name brand for as long as I can remember. We're in the midst of a robust real estate market and, with the office being located just north of Charlotte, we're positioned to do business in a large geographic area."

Marinelli stressed the value of the Mossy Oak network, adding: "What really attracted me to this was the group of successful franchises already in place. We know that if we have a question, or need some advice on a particular issue, there are existing franchisees to call and consult with throughout the country. That means a lot to us, we feel like we're part of something here."

Lannie Wallace, Executive Vice President for Mossy Oak Properties offered his assessment of the new location, stating: "We've seen our network take off this year in both Wisconsin and Texas - North Carolina offers similar opportunities and is a perfect match for our business model. The approach Nick and Dustin are taking is just fantastic, the real estate market in their area has remained strong, and they're set up to capitalize on that in several facets - residential, recreational, and commercial. We're thrilled by this announcement, and we look forward to rapid growth throughout the new region."

For additional information, please visit www.mopcarolinas.com, or contact Mossy Oak Properties Outdoor Realty, at 1-800-287-1523.

Mossy Oak Properties was launched in 2003 to assist landowners, sportsmen, and investors in their pursuit of the perfect piece of property. Since its initial multi-state launch, the Mossy Oak Properties network has grown to 44 offices in eleven states throughout the country. Offices are currently located in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin. For more information about franchise opportunities or to find a qualified Mossy Oak Properties agent near you, call 1-800-287-1523 or go online and visit www.mossyoakproperties.com.

Today many Mossy Oak Properties' folks have discovered the wisdom of planting fruit and nut trees for wildlife and humans. To have more game on your property, you can plant green fields and wildlife openings that will feed deer, turkey and other game for a season or two. Too, you can plant fruit and nut trees that will continue to feed wildlife for a lifetime.

Although landowners recognize the expense involved with managing deer, you can manage deer inexpensively. Some wildlife researchers for Mossy Oak's BioLogic, a well-known wildlife planting, developed a deer-management plan for $30 or less. They suggested that landowners spend:

• $10 for gas and oil for a chainsaw and create wildlife openings. You'd be surprised at how many openings you could create with that amount of gas.
• $5 for matches and fuel oil and burn 1/4 of the property each year.
• $5 to buy bullets to use to reduce the number of unantlered deer on the land.
• $10 to buy a bag of fertilizer to use on naturally-occurring plants like blackberries, Japanese honeysuckle and nut- and fruit-producing trees.

A $30 wildlife-management plan can and will drastically increase the amount of food on your lands for deer. If your area is overpopulated with deer, you need to reduce the number of deer consuming that food. If you grow pine timber on your property and want to increase the amount of wildlife in those pine stands, consider planting green strips through the pine plantation after the first thinning. Timber harvesters generally will remove every third row when they thin a pine plantation. Many of the new available green-field plantings can grow and produce food for wildlife when they only receive diffused sunlight like that found in a third-row thinning. Planting those third rows where timbermen have harvested pine trees will increase the amount of available food for wildlife drastically and won't disrupt your timber-management plan. With these wildlife strips planted in those vacant rows where pine trees once have grown, deer, turkey and other wildlife have an abundance of food in an area that also offers cover. More wildlife managers use this third-row wildlife strip planting as a part of their wildlife-management programs to grow the amount of wildlife on a property while increasing the value of those lands.

To see more wildlife on your property, use feeding stations like stationary feeders that contain some type of small grain that deer, turkey and other wildlife will eat. Today many landowners opt to use spin feeders. Usually suspended off the ground, spin feeders have automatic timers. When these timers go off, the feeder will sling corn, soybeans or a mixture of corn and soybeans out on the ground for the wildlife to eat. If you enjoy watching wildlife before you leave for work, set your spin feeder to go off while you're having your morning cup of coffee. To see wildlife in the afternoon, adjust the spin feeder to start then, and plan to sit in a place where you can watch the game come out to eat. More and more landowners have begun to use spin feeders to observe wildlife at times convenient for them. How many deer do you have on your property? Do you know the number of bucks and does on your lands? When and where do those deer move? Do you know the size of the bucks on your land? Do bucks only move across your property during the rut? You can inventory deer, turkey and other wildlife on your lands with motion-sensor cameras that you set up along game trails. These cameras will take pictures by day and by night of the game utilizing those trails. You can watch individual deer grow from year to year, you can see young bucks put on their first sets of antlers, and over several years' time, you can observe these young bucks growing to maturity. Too, you can record the growth of their antlers year after year with the photographs that you take and keep from these trail cameras. Also many landowners have found that using trail cameras in combination with spin feeders aid them in inventorying the game on their properties quickly and easily. The spin feeders will attract deer, turkey and other wildlife to a specific place at a certain time, and the motion-sensor cameras will photograph the wildlife that comes to those feeders.