5 Tips Easy For Selling Your Home During the Holidays

Even during the real estate high season, somewhere between the end of February and the month of June, selling a house is not an easy task. Many factors come into play and different elements need to fall into place for a property to be sold quickly. It is only natural and understandable that it becomes increasingly difficult to get a property to sell for the same price as the year progresses. However, it is possible to use the holiday season to your advantage and manage to get your house sold before the year comes to a close. The following five tips will be sure to help your sale: decorate your house for the holidays, bake when you have a visit, have festive music playing in the background, be tasteful and religious decorations, and finally be available for visits. Let's have a more detailed look at each of these tricks.
To begin with, a house that is decorated for the holidays will always be more appealing to a potential buyer. You can start setting up you holiday decorations as early as the month of November. Although the Halloween mark has barely been crossed, many stores have already had their holiday decorations on the shelves since early October, so there really is no harm in you decorating your house this early. You will notice that once November comes along, people are generally in a festive mood. Your decorations should include outdoor lights, indoor lights, a tastefully decorated Christmas tree, colorful garlands and perhaps stockings hung by the chimney with care. Your goal is to give your visitors that warm fuzzy holiday feeling that goes along with these decorations. Remember, if it puts a smile on your face, chances are that it will put a smile on a buyer's face too.
Secondly, you will want to engage the potential buyer's sense of smell. This is true throughout the whole year. You have probably heard of the "bake banana bread when you have a showing" trick. The reason for this is that the smell of baked goods is very appealing and comforting to people. It creates a feeling of comfort and coziness. This becomes especially true around the holidays. So dust off that old recipe book, find your gingerbread cookie recipe and start baking. Offer your visitors to have a taste when they are viewing the house. If you are not a very talented baker, don't despair! There are scented candles that will give your prospective buyers the same feeling while saving you from the hassle of having to bake cookies or cupcakes. Choose a scent that is representative of the holiday season and preferably are similar to the smell of baked goods. These can be easily found in stores as early as October. Do, however, have something sweet such as store-bought cookies, to offer the buyers when they visit.
Next, you will need to invest in a nice holiday music CD that has the classic holiday songs on it. You may have noticed that year after year, all the shopping malls in the country play holiday music as of early November. There is something about this kind of music that actually compels people to make a purchase. The same is true when house hunters are visiting homes. Having holiday music playing in the background will emphasise the ambiance that you are trying to create and will pull it all together. Make sure the music is loud enough to be heard but low enough that it is simply pleasant background music.
Keep in mind that when it comes to dressing up your home for the holidays, your decorations and music needs to be tasteful. Not everyone who walks through your house will be celebrating Christmas during the holidays, and you want your house to be appealing to the greatest number of potential buyers. It is very important for you to be very careful in choosing your decorations and the music you will have playing while buyers are visiting. Keep the nativity scene put away, until your house is sold and you know you won't have visitors anymore, or until it is actually time to celebrate. The same thing goes for any other religious or cultural symbol. You can keep those items for when the particular holiday is only a day or two away. For the general decorating that you can start as early as November, keep it simple and stick to lights, garlands and a decorated tree.
Lastly, and most importantly, you need to be available to open the door to your house when a visitor would like to see it. Rest assured that most people will be very busy on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, but in the weeks leading up to the holidays, you will need to be available to open the door. Keep in mind that most people will want to visit during the evenings and on the weekends. Make sure your plans are flexible enough to allow you to be present when a buyer wants to have a look at your house. Avoid scheduling too many family functions or holiday parties that will keep you from being able to show your house. Remember that if you don't show it, you can't sell it.
In closing, it isn't because the real estate high season is over, that you should give up on the idea of selling your home and try again next year. Many homes are sold during the holiday season and one of the biggest reasons for this is that the holiday season is one that compels people to make purchases in general. In addition to this, many buyers actually want to celebrate their holidays in a new home. So give them a glimpse of what that might look and feel like when they come to see your house. Get the lights and decorations up, have your house smelling like the holidays, let the buyers enjoy beautiful holiday music, be mindful of your decoration and be there to greet your guests. You may just be celebrating your holidays in your new home too.

Understanding the Process of Home Staging

For most people selling their house is one of the biggest business deals of their life. Unfortunately, not everyone tries to get actively involved in the selling process and instead feels overwhelmed watching its complexities. Eventually they enter into a deep state of boredom and apathy. At the end they simply hire a professional real estate agent and prefer sitting with folded hands, waiting for the results. Well there is no harm in hiring a professional agent, as they apparently have better knowledge about real estate than you do. But do make sure that your house is staged the right way. It has been proved than staging a home leads to quicker sales, better offers and better returns on your money. The process of home staging is complicated and focuses on beautifying each and every aspect of the house, in such a way that it wins the heart of the buyer at the very first glance.
You can begin to work from outside to inside. Cleaning the landscape is an easy job. Just clearing the dry leaves, spread across the land and simple pruning would be enough. However, to fix the major damages such as broken gutters, cracks in driveway etc, you may need professional help. Enhancing the appearance of the exteriors is crucial because it would be the foremost thing people would see, before entering into the house. The look of your exteriors would, in fact, set a particular tone or mood for the entire viewing.
If you want to work on the staging process yourself, make sure you remove everything which may clutter up your house. Presence of your personal items may not offer a welcoming feel to the buyers. Remember a buyer wishes to purchase his "new" house and not your "old" house. So, remove family photographs from the house walls and instead replace those pictures with some nice artwork. You may find such little details to be unimportant but they certainly make a big difference in the mindset of the buyer. Make sure the bathroom or kitchen is not clumsy with used soap bars, hand towels etc.
The process of home staging is also about focusing on the arrangement of furniture. To show your home's potential you can change the setting of your sofas, chairs, tables etc. If your furnishings are old, you can also consider borrowing furniture from friends or renting it for some time. The idea behind home staging is just creating an appeal and telling the buyers about the real potential of your house. There are professional staging companies, which have stylish designer furniture and can create a compelling look in your house. They would place their furniture until your house sells. Besides, these companies also help in enhancing the appearance of your house in every aspect. Though they may charge a good amount of money, but the results you get are worth it. If you are willing to spend on home staging, you can indeed get your house sold in no time.

Harji Realtors is one of the leading real estate agents in the region of Chandigarh, Mohali and Kharar. For more information on great deals in Flat in Mohali and the best Plot in Sunny Enclave check out our website.

Into the second half of 2012

The FASB recently updated their project timeline for the new lease accounting standard, and they've now officially pushed back the date for release of the revised exposure draft (RED) to the second half of 2012. This is at least a 9-month delay from the original plan: last July they expected to finish the redeliberations in September 2011 with the RED to come shortly thereafter. But, of course, the whole project has been a story of delays; it's mind-boggling to think that when they announced the project in 2006, they expected to be finished in 2008.

Yet another delay

As previously mentioned, the last substantive issue the boards are discussing is the expense profile of lessee leases. Capital lease accounting under FAS 13/IAS 17 results in more expense in the early months/years of the lease than at the end, because interest expense is accrued on the remaining obligation, which declines over the life of the lease, while depreciation expense is usually equal through the lease's life. Operating leases, on the other hand, show level rent expense throughout their life (even if the rent increases).

There has been a great deal of pushback from lessees about applying this expense profile to all leases. They argue that front-loading the expense doesn't reflect actual usage and costs; it also means a mismatch with likely benefits, since income tends to rise over time. If managers are reviewed based on profitability, front-loaded expenses may skew the view of how well or poorly they're actually doing.

At the FASB/IASB meeting Feb. 27-29, the boards considered two alternatives to current capital lease accounting, each of which would reduce or eliminate the front-loading of expenses. The alternatives are:

• Interest-based amortization: Depreciation would be based on the "present value of remaining economic benefits." As a practical matter, unless there's a reason to think the benefits provided by the asset will dramatically change in value during the lease, the depreciation recognized will be equal to the reduction in the obligation balance if the rent is equal over the life of the lease. If rents are unequal, the depreciation will be equal to what the reduction in obligation would be if the rents were leveled.
  
  The expectation is that if this method is chosen, it would not apply to all leases. More or less all leases that currently are considered capital would be accounted for the same way as they are now, to keep their accounting more consistent with purchase accounting.
  
  
• Underlying asset approach: Depreciation would be based on a combination of the portion of the underlying asset expected to be consumed during the lease term plus unwinding the discount on the expected residual value. The effect is that for a real estate lease, where the expected future value is the same as or more than the current value, depreciation would be the same as for interest-based amortization, and the expense profile would be flat. For an asset expected to be fully consumed by the end of the lease term (zero residual), the expense profile would be the same as current capital lease accounting. A residual value in between would give a proportionally interim result.

Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, both practically and conceptually. Interest-based amortization is simpler in most cases, but is different from typical amortization of PPE (property, plant, & equipment). The underlying asset approach in some ways seems more conceptually correct, but is dependent on determining the expected consumption of the asset at the end of the lease term, which many lessees will have no simple way to determine, and there is concern that trying to determine it will be 1) an expense that serves no other purpose, and 2) a subjective exercise that is difficult to audit.

The boards split in their positions. Some board members want to maintain capital lease accounting for all leases, but a majority of the FASB favors interest-based amortization, while a majority of the IASB favors the underlying asset approach. However, the overall conclusion was that more "outreach" is needed, discussing the options with both statement preparers and users; the underlying asset approach in particular is a very new concept which has received little review. Therefore, the boards are going to take two months to meet with interested parties, and plan to continue discussions in April with the results of their outreach.

Given that once this is settled, the boards need to decide if there is any impact on lessor accounting, and then they need to talk about final details such as the comment period and interim disclosures, it looks like we're not going to get a revised exposure draft before June.

IASB/EFRAG meeting
The IASB met March 9 with EFRAG, the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group, to discuss several current IASB projects. EFRAG wants to keep the current distinction between capital and operating leases, with just minor improvements to determining when leases ought to be considered financing transactions and therefore capitalized. That seems unlikely.

How to Make Your Home Eco-Friendly?

"Green" is actually the buzzword at present. Unlike a few years back, today people have really become a lot more conscious about the impact that they leave on environment. There are many popular production companies that are focusing on creating eco-friendly products. Along with the efforts of big companies, the general public is also ready to take the responsibility of making the planet a safe place to live. People are looking for different ways to make their home eco-friendly.
The very first step to go green is the simplest of all and emphasizes on saving wherever possible. This implies cutting back on usage of things, like electricity and water. You can conserve energy by using energy-efficient LED lights, disconnecting the phone chargers and switching off the lights if they are not being used. It is also important to buy domestic appliances that can offer high energy efficiency. Simple actions as such are not only economical but also quite potent to protect the environment.
For any property to be regarded as green or eco-friendly, it must have minimum impact on environment by making use of resources which the environment offers. Things like wind and sunlight are one of the most important sources of energy which would never get exhausted. Thus, a good amount of research is being done on how to use these elements in different ways. To lower down the utility bills, installing solar panels and wind turbine generators are already gaining popularity.
Being an environment friendly home buyer, you must thoroughly consider the size, as well as location, of your new house. Choose a location where your home would have the least harmful impact on environment. Usually, it is considered better if you build upwards rather than expanding on ground. Besides, the design of the house also plays a significant role in making a property green. It is advisable to get all the windows strategically installed, so that maximum natural light and heat can enter into the house. For hot water, solar panels can be used which are a popular means to generate energy. Likewise, when it comes to materials and technologies to be used in a house, the options that you can have to go green are endless. The materials used must be easily reusable, renewable and recycled.
Use of sustainable products, like bamboo and other recyclable products for flooring, makes an excellent choice. Landscaping with native plants is also a good option to reduce the requirement for fertilizing and watering. Besides, it is also viable to look for houses that are created with low quality paint products. Products that contain toxins, chemicals and off-gassing are not only harmful for the environment but also for your health. Especially people, who are seriously sensitive to such chemicals, must avoid buying houses painted with highly dangerous paint materials. These small modifications can considerably reduce your energy bills, decrease water usage, bring down your building's total carbon footprint and improve the air quality inside your house.