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Articles & Books From Ray Brown
The top choice among home buyers in need of assistance Home Buying Kit For Dummies is your one-stop guide to navigating the housing market and buying a home. This updated book helps you through the largest—and most complex—purchase you're likely to make, offering a map to navigating the occasionally choppy waters of home buying.
Article / Updated 07-05-2023
Good news. It doesn’t matter whether you buy a log cabin, Cape Cod colonial, French provincial, Queen Anne Victorian, or California ranch-style house. You can make money on any property by following three fundamental principles to select the home you buy. As you read the following home-buying guidelines, remember that they’re not hard-and-fast rules — exceptions do exist.
Article / Updated 07-10-2023
Nearly everyone seems to have an opinion about buying a home. People in the real estate business — including agents, lenders, property inspectors, and other related people — endorse homeownership. Of course, why wouldn’t they? Their livelihoods depend upon it! Therein lies one fundamental problem of nearly all home buying books written by people who have a vested interest in convincing their readers to buy a home.
Article / Updated 07-07-2023
When you’re looking for the right house, it’s good to know the fair market value. This article helps you determine the fair market value of the properties you’re interested in.Believe it or not, houses are like Red Delicious apples. Most houses are green and need more time on the real estate tree before they’re ready to pick.
Article / Updated 03-30-2022
When you own a home, the odds are extraordinarily high that someday you’ll sell it. People who live their entire lives in their first home are rare. Selling a house is generally somewhat less complicated than buying one. But just because selling a house may be easier than buying one doesn’t mean that most people sell their houses properly.
Article / Updated 12-10-2021
Negotiation is an ongoing process — a series of steps without a neatly defined beginning and end. Think of water flowing as you approach the process for negotiating house prices.Each step in the negotiating process begins by gathering information. Once you understand the various aspects of buying a home, then you can translate your information into action that generates more information that in turn leads to further action.
Article / Updated 12-10-2021
Finding house inspectors is usually quite easy. One good source of property inspectors is either online or printed phone directories under “Building Inspection Services” or “Home Inspection Services.” You can also ask friends and business associates who’ve either bought or sold a house recently for the names of their property inspectors.
Article / Updated 05-03-2021
Even the simplest house sale involves many details that must be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction before the sale can be completed. Without someone to bridge the gulf between mutual buyer and seller distrust that exists in most transactions, deals would grind to a halt.Bridging that gulf of distrust, real estate (like other team sports) engages the escrow officer, a referee who keeps the game civilized.
Article / Updated 12-10-2021
You don’t have to become an expert in property values, mortgages, tax and real estate law, title insurance, escrow, pest-control work, and construction techniques to play the house-selling game well. Instead, you can hire people who’ve already mastered the skills that you lack.House selling is a team sport. Your job is to lead and coach the team, not play every position.
Article / Updated 07-21-2021
When you’re ready to get down to the nitty-gritty specifics of selecting your own agent, we recommend you interview at least three agents before selecting the lucky winner.To help you find three good agents to interview, tap into the following referral sources:
Friends, business associates, and members of professional, social, and religious organizations to which you belong: In short, anyone you know who recently sold a house or is in the process of selling a house in your neighborhood is a source of agent referrals.