Home staging—a popular trend in the competitive housing market—is often the next step in selling your house more quickly, and sometimes at a higher price. Staging is preparing the home before it goes up for sale. The practice has become somewhat of an industry—there are certified stagers, staging assessments, and a spattering of literature on the subject. Since the ’90s, staging has been practiced by designers and now increasingly by homeowners themselves.

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Encouraged by a weak dollar and a belief in the resiliency of the U.S. economy, individuals like Reddy, along with institutional investors such as pension funds and private equity groups, are seeking investment properties and development opportunities in the United States. Their markets of choice include New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Seattle and San Francisco.

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Lower energy costs, healthier living and improved indoor and outdoor environments are increasingly demanded by and available to home buyers at all income levels, according to preliminary findings from a survey released by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and McGraw-Hill Construction.

Families and individual homeowners with the lowest incomes are overwhelmingly satisfied with their green home, more likely to recommend a green home to family and friends, and strongly prefer green homes as a purchasing option. The survey found that 78 percent of homeowners earning less than $50,000 per year say they would be more inclined to purchase a green home.

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Beside price, the best way to sell your home in a down market is to:

• Hire an aggressive agent who shows you a plan for selling your house - and make sure they follow through.
• Give your house a facelift with new paint and repairs.
• List it online with such sites as eBay and Craigslist.
• Offer to pay the buyer’s closing costs.
• And finally, take any reasonable offer.

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People selling preowned homes will be lucky to sell it, because the U.S. is in the worst slump in more than two decades, and it is getting deeper.

The National Association of Realtors released the latest numbers, which found sales of existing homes in June fell more than twice the expected decline.

The report shows existing home sales dropped 2.6 percent. That is 15.5 percent below what they were a year ago.

The Commerce Department also released June’s numbers for sales of new homes. They are also down, but did not fall as badly as existing homes.

New, single-family homes dropped just 0.06 percent.

This decline is slightly smaller than had been expected, but compared to last year, they are down by 33.2 percent.

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House prices are falling at the steepest rate on record, but for some buyers, the attraction of a home is overcoming the anxiety of buying a depreciating asset.

From October through April, North County homes lost about 3 percent in equity —- per month. Right in the middle of that slide, which some analysts expect to continue through the year, Steve and Shelby Nowak pooled their savings and made the biggest purchase of their lives, a $447,000 house.

The Nowaks are among a growing group of people buying houses who say they believe they not only got a good deal but also believe their dwelling ultimately will grow in value.

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Mortgage rates jumped this past week, making it even harder to purchase a home. But if you think it’s hard to buy in today’s real estate market, with jump-through-hoops loans and the fear of overpaying, try selling your home. Home sales are the lowest in a decade, and median home prices fell 6.1% compared to this time last year.

You’ve got sleepless nights thinking about how much you can afford to let your price drop, all the while working with a real estate agent who’s trying to juggle a notebook of unsold inventory and can’t even remember your first name. And on top of that, you have the average 6% commission you’ll pay this person to sell your home. For a home that sells for $500,000, that’s $30,000.

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Even as a huge bipartisan majority in the Senate voted Saturday to send a sprawling housing bill to the White House, economists, consumer advocates and other analysts said the package of programs for cash-strapped homeowners and shaken mortgage lenders is unlikely to relieve the foreclosure crisis that is driving the nation toward recession.”This is not the end of the housing crunch,” said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Housing prices have already fallen 15 percent and they need to fall 10 percent more. This bill isn’t going to change that.”

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