Posts in Sell Your Home Fast
Thinking About Selling Your Home As A For Sale By Owner? The Fair Housing Act And You: Don’t Get Caught On The Wrong Side Of The Law

Thinking About Selling Your Home As A For Sale By Owner? The Fair Housing Act was designed to protect people looking for housing from discrimination. Could you be violating the law?

Most of us assume there’s no way we could violate Fair Housing laws because we don’t discriminate based on color, sex, or religion. But the Fair Housing Act is much more complicated than that, and subtle, unintentional words or actions can result in steep fines. Below are three ways you may be unwittingly violating the law.

Adopted in 1968, the Fair Housing Act prohibits discriminating against anyone in the sale or rental of a property based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, handicap, or national origin. Most people think they know what that means and believe that as long as they avoid using overtly discriminating phrases, they’re safe.

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9 Things To Look For When Touring A Home

Are you in the market for a new house? Don’t get overwhelmed right out of the gate when starting your home search; peruse your options with confidence, knowing you are comparing apples to apples as much as possible.

House hunting can be exhausting, frustrating, and down right stressful if you don’t know what you’re looking for before you start. Instead of going directly to a house tour, prepare yourself with a list of things you must have, then only look at homes that meet all your criteria.

These 9 items top the list of things to consider whenever you tour a home:

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How to Reduce Your Mortgage Wait after a Foreclosure

Think you have to wait three to seven years after a foreclosure before you can get a new loan? You may be able to cut that in half.

Typically, you have to wait for years after a foreclosure to get the financing necessary to buy a new home, but you may be able to get a loan much sooner if you improve your credit score, budget and save. Throw extenuating circumstances into the mix, and your wait time could be even less.

Were you one of the millions of Americans that suffered a foreclosure in the last several years? If so, you are well aware that it leaves a black mark on your credit and prevents you from obtaining the financing to purchase another home for three to seven years, or longer depending on how you handle your money after the foreclosure.

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7 Features That Date Your Home and How to Update Them Fast

When preparing to sell your home, you want it to stand out from the rest. What out-of-date features could prevent your home from selling faster?

With real estate booming, you'll want to do everything that you can in order to woo potential buyers. This is no easy task, but a great starting point involves identifying those things that instantly date your home. By tackling the yesteryear characteristics of your home, you'll amp up your competitive edge and draw more interest.

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6 Tips for Removing Kitchen Clutter While Selling Your First Home

Preparing your home for a sale can be an overwhelming process. You might not be sure where to even start, that's why de-cluttering the kitchen is a great place to begin.

So much of life takes place around the kitchen. It's where people come together to cook, share about their day, and make memories. A well-staged kitchen will not only help you attract potential Oregon buyers, but it will showcase one of the most frequently used spaces in your home.

Carla Hill of Realty Times suggests, “ Kitchens are integral to entertaining and in today's age of open floor plans, they're a focal piece of many family rooms. It's because of this that kitchens play such an important role in the buying and selling process.”

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6 Dos and Don’ts of Basement Home Improvement

When you’re preparing your house for sale in Oregon, the basement is often overlooked when it comes to home staging. While rooms such as the living room and bedrooms take staging center stage, any smart buyer will want to explore all the rooms of your home – and that includes the basement. A clean and finished basement is an excellent addition to any home in Oregon, and can really add some zeros to your home’s market price tag. It’s clear that it’s in your best interests to get your basement up to speed with the rest of your home staging efforts, but where should you start? And what should you stay away from?

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4 Ways to Pull-off the Shabby Chic Trend in Your Downtown Oregon Apartment or Condo

The term 'Shabby Chic' was coined by British Designer, Rachel Ashwell. One of the main reasons people are drawn toward the Shabby Chic style of decorating, is simply because of its versatility. With a backdrop of primarily white, you can incorporate an array of different pieces into one space with ease.

Whether you're a Shabby Chic expert, or you simply love the style but struggle with how to incorporate the look into your home, here are 4 distinct ways to achieve this classic style in your space:

Creative Collections

If you are a lover of flea-market finds, Shabby Chic might be the perfect style for you. When decorating your home, consider the artful statement pieces that you already have. Shabby Chic is all about vintage finds, modern accessories, and feminine fabrics all working in tandem for a pulled together. Tara Nolan of styleathome.com explains, “Don't let the word “Shabby” fool you when

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Kitchen Photography Tips Perfect for Oregon

Kitchens are one of the most difficult areas of the home to photograph – and they are also one of the areas of your home that potential buyers will be most interested in. These tips will have you photographing your kitchen like a pro in no time, so that it looks its best in listing photos both online and in print.

Getting a home ready to be shown is a huge undertaking, but it will pay off big time by impressing each potential buyer who tours it. This same prep work should be applied for taking the best real estate photos, which will pull in more interested buyers in the first place. It's a little bit more complicated than just pointing a camera into each room and shooting one or two pictures – the tips below will take you from novice to photo-taking natural in no time.

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3 Ways to Make Your Living Room More Functional

3 Ways to Make Your Living Room More Functional

Whether you have a large open floor plan or a small cozy space, having a living room that you can function in is so important. What can you do to better utilize your space?

The living room is the main space in your home where people gather. It's a high traffic room and it has a lot of jobs. Creating a space that meets the needs of your family, but is also beautiful and desirable to be in, is no easy task. You might find yourself wondering where to even start, but with a few simple tricks, you'll be headed in the right direction.

Here are three significant ways you can create more functional space in your living room right now:

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3 Things that are Key to an Equity-Boosting Bathroom

Believe it or not, there’s a right way to renovate your bathroom and a wrong way. Done right, a bathroom can boost the equity of a home, recouping up to 70 percent of the renovation costs. Done wrong, no matter how attractive, it can be a loss. Here are three things that are key to boosting the value of your home through a bathroom renovation.

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According to the 2015 Remodeling Cost vs. Value Report issued by the National Association of Realtors in conjunction with Hanley Wood’s Remodeling Magazine, a bathroom remodels can add up to 70 percent of its cost to the home’s value. But, you shouldn’t expect to recoup anywhere near that if you don’t make smart renovations.

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Why you should list your home with a Realtor and get into the Oregon MLS. Multiple Listing Service

What is an MLS, or Multiple Listing Service? 

It's a cooperative organization made up of real estate brokers, with homes, land and commercial properties for sale in a certain area.  The MLS is set up to provide certain rules and standards of cooperation among the brokerages. Oregon has several there are three larger MLS that include the Regional MLS or RMLS, Central Oregon Association of Realtors or COAR, and the Willamette Valley Association of Realtors or WVMLS.

The Cascade Realty Solutions team belongs to a total of 4 MLS in Oregon giving your property more exposure in Oregon than an agent, Realtor, or brokerage that just has one or two MLS designations. This is just one more way we do more for you as a seller. As a Buyer, this gives our customers more availability of inventory and the advantage of learning about properties that may be coming soon and that are not on the market yet. Let’s learn more about the MLS.

The activities of the MLS include:

development of standards for property listings and marketing;

providing a cooperative commission-sharing structure among brokers;

publishing online and printed listing compilations for brokers; 

an association to enforce rules, ethics and hear complaints of the public; and

foster sharing of full listing information for the benefit of both buyers and sellers.

What does all this mean to you, an owner who wishes to sell their land or home?  It means quite a lot. Usually, hundreds to even thousands of real estate agents and brokers are members of a local MLS.  All of these members make their living brokering real estate. The MLS is their system for sharing information efficiently and quickly.  It's all built from the ground up to bring together sellers and buyers. Since its inception, there has never been a more efficient method devised to accomplish this mission.

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