The Cascade Team Blog - Selling A Home

Smart Budgeting Checklist: Annual Home Maintenance

  Planning and budgeting for annual home maintenance projects is just plain smart. First, it ensures that you’ll have money on hand to perform routine maintenance when it’s required. And second, it keeps your home in tip-top shape — helping you avoid costly, unexpected repairs.

Use this checklist to plan and budget for your routine seasonal projects. It’s an easy way to stay on top of year-round home maintenance!

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Home Buyers and Sellers Being Rewarded During "Intense" Holiday Market

• Inventory Critically Low.
• Housing Market "Red Hot" this holiday season.
• Buyers finding less competition and are taking advantage of rates before they increase.
• Pending sales increase by 10% continuing drop in available inventory.

KIRKLAND, Washington (December 4, 2015) – Inventory remains "critically low," but there are fewer house-hunters in the hunt during this holiday season so motivated sellers and buyers are seeing success, according to brokers with Northwest Multiple Listing Service. Its just-released statistics for November show year-over-year gains in pending sales, closed sales, and prices, but a steep decline in inventory.

"The housing market continues to be red-hot on a seasonal basis, but this…

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Surprising Holiday Home-Buying Trends

By Yuqing Pan

Thanksgiving evokes certain unshakable images: Long tables crammed with too much food. Beloved and bickering family members consuming way too much of that food. Overstuffed family members staggering away from the table to watch football. And once the crumbs and turkey bones and cranberries are cleared away, just about everyone gearing up for the biggest shopping day of the year: Black Friday.

While prowling the malls for fantastic deals has become enshrined as a traditional part of many Americans’ holiday season, it has long been considered conventional wisdom that this sales fervor doesn’t extend to shopping for a home—that there’s no deluge of would-be buyers surfing the Web for listings or slogging through the (presumed) snow to…

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The Sweet Spot of Pricing Your Home

Written by Blanche Evans          

When you and your Real Estate Professional sit down to price your home, you'll be looking at competitive homes that are the most similar in size, location and amenities as your home. You may find that prices can be thousands of dollars higher or lower. It's tempting to pick the highest price and say, "Let's list it here." But what if your home doesn't sell at that price?

High prices are a strategy that can work in an accelerating market, but it's risky. Your home can sit for months without selling and you'll end up marking the price down, perhaps lower than it should have sold for in the first place.

Pricing your home is a science. The science is choosing the right price at which your home will sell…

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FREE Smart-Home Checklist

The growing number of smart-home devices in houses has begged the question of security. These devices can be particularly vulnerable to hackers who may want to break in to home owners' private networks.

In response, the Online Trust Alliance recently created a "smart-home checklist," which provides consumers with information to increase the security and privacy of their home. For example, homes that use smart apps and devices to monitor security, temperature, and lighting are collecting personal information about the home owner.

"Although we enjoy the benefits of a connected lifestyle, we must not lose sight of the risks a smart home may pose to our privacy and physical safety," says Craig Spiezle, president and executive director of the Online…

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Real Estate Market Update Nov 2015: Real Estate Brokers Expect Only a Modest Holiday Slowdown

• Prices up 7.3% YOY
• Pending Transactions up 7.8%
• Closed Sales up over 7%
• Only 1.29 Months of Inventory for King County
• 2015 is Busiest October in 10 Years
  

Real estate brokers expect only a modest holiday slowdown, saying strong economy, low inventory make this year "different"

KIRKLAND, Washington (November 5, 2015) – With holidays approaching, real estate brokers usually expect a slowdown as buyers and sellers shift their attention elsewhere. "This year is different," say some industry leaders.

"Today we have one of the best markets we’ve ever seen for sellers," observed Ken Anderson, managing broker and owner at Coldwell Banker Evergreen in Olympia. "Buyers are still surging to the market and…

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Sammamish Ranked The 39th Best Suburb in America by Business Insider

39. Sammamish, Washington

Population: 47,766

Great Schools score: 8 

With an official motto of "Building Community Together," the city of Sammamish in King County, Washington, is as friendly as it gets. The unemployment rate is a low 5%, the median household income is $143,919, and, according to Forbes, the city's crime rate is approximately 90% lower than the national average.   

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Are we cusp of a housing market slowdown even as prices in most areas are still rising?

Housing market slowdown expected, but prices in most areas are still rising

KIRKLAND, Washington (October 5, 2015) – Scarce inventory, new rules for mortgage closings and affordability concerns will likely slow home sales around Western Washington during the remaining months of 2015 and into early 2016, according to spokespersons from Northwest Multiple Listing Service. 

The latest statistics from the MLS show a double-digit drop in inventory, a double-digit jump in closed sales, and a near double-digit increase in prices from a year ago, prompting one industry leader to say the trends aren’t sustainable. "We simply can’t sustain double-digit increases in sales when inventory levels continue to drop every month," remarked OB Jacobi, president…

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10 Lighhearted Facts About TRID

• TRID spelled backwards is DIRT

• On October 3rd 1789 George Washington designated the date of the first Thanksgiving

• TRIDactyl [trahy-dak-til] adjective, Zoology 1.having three fingers or toes, as certain reptiles.

• Title reps love talking T.R.I.D. Totally Ridiculous Illusions of Drama (sorry, couldn't resist)

• 10/3/2015 = .000165425971

• The first CD was a recording from 1979 of Claudio Arrau performing Chopin waltzes 

• OJ was acquitted on October 3rd (1995)

• TRID Wheels make excellent Frisbees

• Chubby's Checker and Gwen Stefanie's birthday's are both on October 3rd

• October 3rd in Polish is pazdziernik trzecia 

This lighthearted reminder is to reassure you that…

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Top 5 Real Estate Myths Debunked

Even if you’ve never bought or sold a home before, we’re willing to bet that you’ve heard of some of these popular Real Estate myths. They may have come from relatives, friends or even the media but like many facts floating around on the internet, they just aren’t true. So, here are the top 5 Real Estate Myths that most home owners believe, and why they are just plain wrong.

1. Your Renovations Will Always Pay Off

While most renovations will add value to your home in long run, there are some upgrades that could have the opposite effect, and these will have you wishing you never invested the money when it comes time to sell.

When it comes to adding value to your home it’s always best to stick with upgrading the most permanent and…

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