• Get an appraisal of your house, and research nearby sales prices of houses with the kinds of improvements you’re considering. If your house is already at top price for your area, then it’s highly doubtful you’ll get back any of the money you might spend on a remodel.
• Evaluate the costs of remodeling versus moving, figuring in the average cost of a house with the new features you want in a neighborhood to which you would considering relocating.
• While it’s seldom worthwhile to undertake a major remodel just before putting a house on the market, homeowners considering a renovation should consider the tastes and needs of prospective buyers when deciding which improvements to make.

Full story is available on Orlando Sentinel

The tables have finally turned on the buying versus renting debate. During the housing boom as home prices became insanely high, it was far cheaper to rent than to buy a home, unless of course you got one of those great one percent teaser loans, but that didn’t work out well for most people.

It’s now cheaper to buy a home rather than rent one in 72 percent of the 50 largest U.S. cities, according to Trulia’s rent vs. buy index, which compares the total cost of home ownership to the cost of renting.

“Since the start of the ‘Great Recession,’ many former home owners have flooded the rental market,” Pete Flint, CEO of Trulia, said in a news release about the index. “Following the principles of supply and demand, renting has become relatively more expensive than buying in most markets.”

Full story is available on LoanRateUpdate

Did you know you only need a 3.5 percent down payment to buy a home if you’re eligible for FHA financing? If your tax refund is a sizable chunk of change, now’s a great time to buy because it’s a buyers market, no doubt about it. For first-time homebuyers, now’s an especially advantageous time to take the plunge.

The most common loans for first-time buyers, without a doubt, are Federal Housing Administration loans. FHA loans require only a 3.5 percent out of pocket down payment. For instance, on a $100,000 loan, the buyer would only need to come up with $3.500 and the seller could pay the rest of the closing costs. Still a bit short on funds to close? The nice thing about FHA is that it allows gifts from blood relatives. So if you need some help, Daddy can close the gap. You are limited to a base loan amount on average of $200,160, but that doesn’t usually pose a problem for first-time buyers.

Full story is available on knoxnews.com

Real estate website Zillow.com has named Tulsa the fifth best metro area in the nation for buying a home.

The website, which released its Best Places to Buy 2011 survey this week, said it based its rankings for 125 metro areas on affordability, unemployment, foreclosure frequency and price appreciation.

Zillow noted that the average value of a home in Tulsa, as of Sept. 30, was $114,000.

It indicated that Tulsa area home values dropped 3.6 percent in the 12 months preceding that date.

The website regularly estimates the value of all homes in an area, and used that as the basis for Tulsa’s depreciation.

At the same time, Zillow’s report noted Tulsa had the most affordable homes in the top 10, and offered home buyers a “good bang for their buck” with a median value per square foot of $73.

Zillow estimated the national average at $108 per square foot.

Zillow computes affordability by using the number of years of income a typical house costs using Zillow’s home value index and median household income data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Full story is available on  Tulsa World

The foreclosure crisis has made buying a two-bedroom home cheaper than renting one in the nation’s largest cities, but San Francisco continues to buck that trend.

The latest report by real estate website Trulia found that San Francisco is one of only four cities in the country where residents save money by becoming tenants instead of homeowners.

“San Francisco has been in that position for quite a while,” said Ted Gulickson of the San Francisco Tenants Union. “Buying is so expensive in San Francisco that it is truly a place to rent. It seems unlikely that it would ever change.”

Trulia’s study — which only took into consideration two-bedroom apartments, condominiums and townhouses — used a price-to-rent ratio to calculate its rankings.

Full story is available on sfexaminer.com

DataQuick’s year-end stats on the Orange County real estate market found these homebuying patterns in 2010:

• 26 local ZIPs had both sales gains and price gains in 2010 vs. 2009. (Highlighted in green below!) These double-gainers had combined sales volume equal to 32% of the Orange County market.
• 63 of O.C.’s 83 ZIP codes with gains in their respective median selling price vs. 2009. Overall, buyers’ prices were +4.8% vs. a year ago.
• Taking sales volume in consideration, home-sale pricing was up vs. 2009 in ZIPs representing 44% of the Orange County market.
• 6 of 83 O.C. ZIPs with median sales prices above $1 million in 2010 vs. 11 million-dollar ZIPs when the county median price peaked in June 2007. Current million-dollar ZIPs were 4% of all sales in the year.
• Compared to that pricing pinnacle, there’s been a 33% drop in the countywide median price!
• 49 of 83 O.C. ZIPs had a yearly sales declines vs. 2009 — or 59% of the market.
• Overall, countywide sales were down 1.1% vs. 2009.
• Below is a look at the 83 ZIPs and how they fared in terms of median selling price and total sales for 2010 vs. 2009.

Full story is available on OCRegister

As a potential first-time homebuyer, Kelly Steward has kept a close eye on Calgary’s residential real estate market for the past six months.

She admits she’s pretty “picky” because she is searching for a property that either has a suited basement or has a basement that can be converted into a legal suite. That makes it more difficult to find the right property and is one of the reasons her plunge into home ownership is taking so long.

“But a lot of things also just seem overpriced on the market still. I’ve been watching it. This month looks like there have been less sales. Hopefully that will help my position a little bit,” says Steward, as sales remain sluggish in the real estate market in Calgary at the beginning of the new year.

Mortgage rates are at a rock-bottom 5 percent, and home prices have tumbled as much as 20 percent – making North Jersey homes much more affordable.

But the region remains one of the costliest real estate markets in the country. Buying a home – including the cost of property taxes – remains more of a stretch than it was even a decade ago. In a recent analysis of property sales data, The Record found that a North Jersey household with the median income is further away than they were in 2000 from being able buy a median-priced house – a traditional measure of affordability.

Full story is available on NorthJersey.com

When the residential real estate market is soft, people wanting to sell their homes look for any edge they can find.

Competitive pricing is always an advantage.

But many also turn to professionals to help them “stage” their homes to make them more appealing to potential buyers. For almost two years, Deena Cottingham has helped homeowners and realtors do exactly that through her company GreenApple Staging and Images.

The company began two years ago in March and contracts work out to people on a regular basis depending on the assignment.

“What I do is style and stage properties for sale and I also do interior photography, which could be for the real estate world or I have clients who are home builders as well for their marketing efforts,” says

Cottingham. “I also do pre-market consultations. So a homeowner may call me and say ‘we want to sell our house, tell us what we need to do to make it look great so it will sell’.”

Home values are falling at an accelerating rate in many cities across the U.S.

The Wall Street Journal’s latest quarterly survey of housing-market conditions found that prices declined in all of the 28 major metropolitan areas tracked during the fourth quarter when compared to a year earlier.

The size of the year-to-year price declines was greater than the previous quarter’s in all but three of the markets, the latest indication that the housing market faces considerable challenges.

Inventory levels, meanwhile, are rising in many markets as the number of unsold homes piles up.

Home values dropped the most in cities that have already been hard-hit by the housing bust, including Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, and Chicago, according to data from real-estate website Zillow.com. But price declines also intensified in several markets that so far have escaped the brunt of the downturn, including Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Full story is available on The Wall Street Journal