Home

Dos and don'ts of holding home's title in LLC

By Benny Kass, Sunday, April 20, 2008.

DEAR BENNY: I own several single-family rental homes .In talking to advisors, one says I should put the houses into LLCs for liability protection. Another said, don't bother. If you get sued, your liability protection on your homeowners policy plus your umbrella policy will cover you. Obviously, the latter provides only attorney and possible judgment costs, but does the LLC really keep you from being sued, or protect you if you are sued, so that you would not need to use the umbrella policy? --Bruce  more...

Why needless foreclosures happen anyway

By Jack Guttentag, Sunday, April 20, 2008.

John X had his home foreclosed this year. It cost the investor who held the mortgage about $40,000 to foreclose. It would have cost only $25,000 to make the mortgage affordable to the borrower through a reduction in the interest rate. Modifying the loan contract in this way would have kept X in his home and saved the investor money. This is not an isolated case; preventable foreclosures are happening all around us.  more...

Price it right when selling in today's market

By Dian Hymer, Sunday, April 20, 2008.

We're in the midst of a challenging home-sale market in many areas. However, soft markets can provide opportunities for some home sellers. The trick is to price your home right for today's market.

The most difficult reality for most sellers to face is that prices in their neighborhood may have dropped during the last year or two. Some sellers will find that it may not make sense to sell if the probable sale price is too low.  more...

VFlyer offers more options for service levels, pricing

By Inman News, Sunday, April 20, 2008.

Real estate brokers can now use vFlyer to push listings out to sites like Google Base, Yahoo Classifieds, Trulia, Zillow and Oodle, while leaving it up to individual agents to decide whether they want to create their own subaccounts under their broker's umbrella.

San Francisco-based vFlyer today announced the release of vFlyer Agency Edition, which supports multiple accounts and users, providing more flexibility to delegate work and choose levels of service and pricing.  more...

Rookie searches for chametz

By Alison Rogers, Sunday, April 20, 2008.

Like Easter, Passover is always a spring holiday. One of the lovely things about it is that there is not only a tradition but also a religious requirement to clean beforehand. Since Passover commemorates an escape that took place so quickly there was not time for the bread to rise, the cleaning takes the form of getting rid of bread and bread products. It's the time of year that stray Cheerio behind the couch gets vacuumed up -- but there tends to be a lot of auxiliary dusting and polishing too.  more...