Selling your home may appear deceptively easy, but it’s filled with complexities. You home will not sell itself, no matter how great of a gem it is; it will take a significant investment of time, knowledge, and ability to market effectively. A skilled agent can make the process much easier and can help you get the most money for your home, so you can move on to other things in your life.

Home buying can be an exciting experience. Who doesn’t like shopping for a house? But sometimes it can be very stressful, especially if you are a first-time home buyer. Read these four tips to avoid getting caught off guard with surprise expenses and other unfavorable circumstances.

So, you’ve decided to sell your home on your own instead of hiring a qualified professional, and your decision was probably motivated by several seemingly compelling reasons. First, you don’t want to pay a commission, which is a chunk of change that can look like a huge bite out of the proceeds from the sale of your largest asset. Second, you feel like real estate agents get paid for barely doing any work. You may be thinking, “What an agent do to earn a commission? They show up once for the listing appointment, and then they call occasionally to shoo me out of my house so they can show it people that I don’t even get to see and decide if I want them in my house!” Third, you may have had a bad experience with an agent in the past, and you no longer trust real estate agents in general, especially when they keep bugging you with their pesky calls on a daily basis and sounding like a tenacious telemarketer.

According to Bloomberg News, James Stack, a money manager, who predicted the last housing crash is getting nervous again. Should we be worried?

If you are a first-time homebuyer or if it’s been a while since you’ve shopped for a new home, you may not know or remember what’s involved in one of the most important steps in the process of shopping for new house: obtaining a mortgage loan. To help home buyers understand what to expect, I recently interviewed with a couple of local mortgage loan originators, Seton Zappala of Prime Lending and Rick Riggs of Acopia Home Loans. You can get to know them and find out more about what they do on our Featured Local Home Service Providers: Video Introductions page.

Is buying a house better than renting? As a realtor, I am tempted to say “buy!” After all, this seems to be the conventional wisdom. For decades, we were told to buy as soon as we can because it is ‘a great investment.’ But as an economist, I will urge you to not blindly follow the common wisdom and instead take a more in-depth look at some of the most important factors.