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Understanding Captial Gains in Real Estate

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When you sell a stock, you owe taxes on your gain — the difference between what you paid for the stock and what you sold it for. The same holds true when selling a home (or a second home), but there are some special considerations.

How to Calculate Gain
In real estate, capital gains are based not on what you paid for the home, but on its adjusted cost basis. To calculate, follow these steps:

1. Purchase price: _______________________ The purchase price of the home is the sale price, not the amount of money you actually contributed at closing.
2. Total adjustments: _______________________ To calculate this, add the following:

Tips for Lowering Homeowner's Insurance Costs

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1.   Review the Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange (CLUE) report on the property you’re interested in buying. CLUE reports detail the property’s claims   history for the most recent five years, which insurers may use to deny coverage. Make the sale contingent on a home inspection to ensure that problems identified in the CLUE report have been repaired.

2.   Seek insurance coverage as soon as your offer is approved. You must obtain insurance to buy. And you don’t want to be told at closing that the insurer has denied your coverage.

3.   Maintain good credit. Insurers often use credit-based insurance scores to determine premiums.

4.   Buy your home owners and auto policies from the same company and you’ll usually qualify for savings. But make sure the discount really yields the lowest price.

9 Easy Mistakes Home Owners Make on Their Taxes

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Watch out for the common tax-filing errors, and you'll get a maximum return without raising any red flags with the IRS. As you calculate your tax returns, consider each home tax deduction and credit you are — and are not — entitled to. Running afoul of any of these 9 home-related tax mistakes — which tax pros say are especially common — can cost you money or draw the IRS to your doorstep.

 

Sin #1: Deducting the wrong year for property taxes                                                                                                                                                                                        

Customers for Life!

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Prospecting is short term, but maintaining the account, continually meeting your commitments and exceeding expectations is the way to success.  There is a fine line between selling and servicing.  Selling and servicing are not independent variables.  Instead, they are two sides of the same coin—one drives the other and each is of equal importance.                    

10 High Impact Home Improvements You Can Do for $10K or Less

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For all the focus we put on transactions – buying and selling – the truth is that for most of your life as a real estate consumer, you’ll be a homeowner.  And because your home is so much more than just a transactional asset, a widget to be traded and tweaked only for financial reasons, it makes sense to spend some portion of your time, energy and money making it really work for you.

Unfortunately, what too many of us do is wait until we can save up or pull out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a major move: build on an addition, gut and remodel the kitchen, turn the basement into a media room extraordinaire.  And many times, that means we never do the project, or we only do it when it’s time to sell and move.

Business Travelers Beware

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According to the FBI, hotel internet connections present a new cyber risk.  The FBI, together with the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), has released a report alerting travelers about malware infections on devices connected to hotel Internet services. Cyber criminals are targeting travelers abroad with malware infections through pop-up windows. The windows appear when they connect to the Internet using the hotel's connection service.

Laptop and other Wi-Fi device users have experienced pop-up windows informing them that an update of well-known software is available to them. When the user clicks on the pop-up to accept and install the update, a malicious software program is installed.

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