Kelsey's Real Estate Tips and Tricks

Go With Your Gut Buying a house is just like any other important decision you'll make in your life. Yes, it's important to do the research, and it's important to explore your options, but at the end of the day, the most important thing is to go with your gut. When you find the right house for you, you'll know it. Don't hesitate. Think about it this way: when you found the right man or woman for you, did you say, "I think you're the right one, but I'd like to go date 10 more guys just to make sure"? Do you think he'd wait around if you did? I think not.  The past few days that I've spent with my current clients have reminded me a lot of my own home-buying experience. Just as I had, they spent months looking at properties online in all different areas, planning where they would buy, when they buy, and what they would buy. They had their must-have lists, their budgets, and their timeline. And then... an opportunity presented itself. T...

One Benefit of Buying vs. Renting It's that time of year again. You go out to the mailbox to pick up your mail, and what do you find? That lovely W2, which tells you how much (or little!) you earned this year. That can only mean one thing: it's tax season. Tired of cutting a check to the IRS every year? Buying a home can help with that.  Of course, I'm not saying that buying a home will ease all of your tax woes, but there are tax benefits to  home-ownership  that can lessen the burden. The biggest benefit is that you are able to deduct the interest you pay on your mortgage (which I will explain in detail below), but you can also deduct the Real Estate taxes you pay each year. These things can easily become the difference between writing a check to the IRS and  cashing a check  from the IRS. There are a few things that are important to understand here. First of all, the interest on your mortgage is amortized in your payments throughout the life of th...