Last week the City of Airdrie mailed out the property assessments and this week we usually get a lot of phone calls.  It's important to understand that your property assessment value is not necessarily the current market value of your home.  

The City of Airdrie includes a pamphlet that describes how they determine your assessment value.  It clearly states that they use "mass appraisal techniques".  When we do a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) we have a more focused set of criteria because we are not trying to determine the value of hundreds of properties we are just looking at ...

Here is a Video Blog for making an inviting entrance to your home!

I often hear people say that they were told to take down all of their personal photos when staging their home.  I don’t agree!  If I took down all of my personal photos there would be next to nothing left.  You may need to pare down the number of photos you have displayed or edit out some that are “distracting”.  Buyers will look at your photos so you don’t want to have ones that they will spend too much time staring at and not enough time looking at the actual house.

I strongly believe that you still need ...

There are many different staging tips and tricks out there but there are three things one should never, ever forget to do!

1.) Hide your personal information.  If you have a home office you will want to keep it neat and tidy so that it looks good for showings but you should also be tucking things away so you don’t have personal information lying out in the open for everyone to see.  Things like bank statements are an obvious thing to have put away but you don’t want to leave your computer open with an email from your ...

At the end of the day both the deposit and the down payment go towards paying for your home but knowing when you pay them is important so you aren’t caught off guard.

The deposit is paid when your offer on a house is accepted.  Generally you write a cheque to the Listing Brokerage (ex. RE/MAX Rocky View) and then when the paperwork is exchanged between REALTORS the cheque is included.  If the offer isn’t accepted and the deal “dies” the cheque is returned to you or destroyed.  If the offer is accepted the Listing Brokerage will ...

The reality of buying a house is that you just can’t look at them all.  It will eventually become confusing and you start to look at properties to see why they won’t work instead of why they will and that’s just counterproductive.  Finding a home is kind of like finding a partner.  You are going to go through some bad ones and some that look good on paper but aren’t great in real life.  With a home you may find a couple of really good ones and have to make a choice – if you get to ...

When you are selling your home it’s very important to make it approachable.  You have to treat it like any other “good” for sale on the market.  Kim Kardashian doesn’t sell perfume with a picture of her in sweatpants – she’s all sultry and makes it look good.  I’m not suggesting you plaster a huge poster of yourself looking sultry to entice buyers but there are obvious things you can do, such as maintaining your lawn and planting flowers, but what else can you do and how do you make a home approachable during the bleak winter ...