Great Tips for Home Sellers from Elizabeth Weintraub over at About.com. 

Selling a House with Pets at Home

Almost everybody loves pets except the home buyer who is buying your house. Don't ask me why, but that's often how it works out. Home sellers who adore their pets — and I count myself as a huge pet lover — have a hard time imagining the negative attitudes others harbor against pets. So, while this might be a bitter pill to swallow, if you want to get top dollar for your house, pay attention to how much you might lose with a dog or cat in residence.

Top 10 Home Showing Tips

How to Show Your Home to Buyers

When you show your home, you want to engage the buyer emotionally because the decision to buy is based more on emotions, and less on logic. Give the buyer permission to say, "Yes, I want to buy this home," by staging, accentuating your home's positive attributes, and do not draw any attention to the negative aspects.

Top 10 Myths About Real Estate Agents - Debunking Real Estate Agent Myths 

The Truth About Agents: What's True and What's Not

Just when you think you've found out everything you need to know about the "dirty, little secrets agents don't want you to know" from a bazillion of misinformed and, in all fairness, probably well meaning Web sites, here's what you really need to know:

Forget the hype. Forget the books you need to buy, the online services you need to subscribe to and start looking at what's really going on. Here's the straight story:

The Harper Team specializes in residential real estate in the communities of San Ramon, Dublin and Pleasanton, CA. We work out of the Danville office of Keller Williams Realty.

You can chat with us in real time through the Instant Messenger widget in the side bar of our blog.

Jim Walberg & Ann Marie Nugent – Keller Williams, Danville, CA

Here’s my buddy and mentor Jim Walberg standing in the Keller Williams office in Danville, CA. Jim told me he was just outside playing crossing guard on the corner of La Gonda Way and El Cerro.

If you look closely, you’ll see he has tired eyes. He’s been in the middle of a few crazy deals the last couple days and is not getting all the beauty rest a gent his age needs.

Jim’s a great asset to KW Danville. He mentors new agents and he is always sharing his experience and knowledge with the 200 agents that work out of our office.

The Harper Team feels blessed to have him as a friend and colleague. If you’re ever heading over to see him, he loves a good Pinot Noir.

Jim’s married to Ann Marie Nugent and as you can see he dresses up nicely enough to be seen in public next to Ann Marie.

If you’re considering that second home in the Caribbean, Jim and Ann  Marie can help you get the keys. They spend a lot of time in the Virgin Islands and have been selling real estate on St. Thomas, St. John and Water Island for years. Working out of their base in St. Thomas, USVI, they can help you with your real estate needs on any island in the Caribbean.

Jim and Ann Marie are associated with International Luxury Estate Sales. Through ILES they can work with you to find property worldwide.

So, that’s my 2007 plug for Jim Walberg and Ann Marie Nugent of Keller Williams in Danville, CA. Good people and good friends

Dublin, Pleasanton, San Ramon, CA

Is there hope for first-time buyers of California real estate? 

“California has a limited supply of land in private hands that can be developed and very high costs of government regulation and impact fees, which means we really can’t see new home prices dropping significantly. While there remains great pent-up demand for lower-cost homes, government constraints now make it all but impossible to build homes for first-time buyers, so most builders have no choice but to build homes to meet the demand in the higher price ranges,” Robert Rivinius, CBIA’s President and CEO, said.

BusinessWeek.com

"In so many of these markets, housing became extremely unaffordable," says David Stiff, chief economist at Brookfield (Wisc.)-based financial data processor Fiserv Lending Solutions (FISV), who expects average U.S. home prices to appreciate only 0.1% overall in 2007. "Prices moving back in line with household income sets the stage for price appreciation in the future."

First-time buyers in San Ramon, Dublin and Pleasanton have been taking advantage of zero-down  financing programs to get into their first house. With foreclosures & lending fraud on the rise it is imperative that first-time buyers read the fine print and choose reputable agents to work with.

The Harper Team works with several highly qualified mortgage agents, all with proven track records. There are still some great zero down programs out there fro first-time buyers.

if you're looking for your first home in Pleasanton, San Ramon or Dublin, California, give us a call and see what a professional team can do to help you get into your dream home. 

The housing market is showing signs of stabilizing. We wrote about this less than a week ago. It's time for buyers to consider moving or losing - negotiating currency. As the real estate market returns to "normal" in San Ramon, Dublin and Pleasanton, negotiating leverage will also normalize.

Right now, many sellers are still feeling the crunch of too much time on the market, decreasing home prices, and too much inventory for too few buyers. This is about to change and buyers that thought they could wait a couple more weeks to make a better deal are going to experience the "Huh, what happened?"

Our advice continues to be - buyers & sellers - educate yourself. Keep abreast of the housing market trends in your areas of interest. The Harper Team monitors over 50 Real Estate and News Feeds daily to bring you information pertinent to the San Ramon Valley & TriValley real estate market including the communities of Danville, San Ramon, Dublin and Pleasanton, California.

Fortune.com - 6 Strategies to Survive the Bust

• Lower Your Expectations
• Drive a hard bargain
• Consider renting
• Step away from the exotic mortgage
• Shop for a rate drop
• Keep an eye on your equity

First-Time Home Buyers Look at Houses Again by Ruth Simon • The Wall Street Journal Online

Dow Tops 12,500 after Upbeat Housing Data • BusinessWeek.com

Another Sign Housing Slump May Be at End by Bob Willis • Bloomberg News

Search our blog articles via the Tag Cloud - just click on a word that interests you.

In my short time in real estate, I have met agents who are doing fifty to one hundred transactions a year solo. They do, of course, rely on an assistant or other staff in the brokerage. But the majority of the Realtor work is being done by them. I applaud them, but I'm not looking to go that route. 

In fact, I wasn't even thinking of getting into real estate a year ago. I was into my 32nd year at Delta Airlines and things in the airline industry were deteriorating faster than a Country/Western-song relationship. So,I bailed out of that and took my brother, Craig, up on his offer to move to San Ramon, California and join him and his wife, Tracey, in their real estate business - The Harper Team at Keller Williams in Danville, CA.

It turns out that we have different, yet at times, overlapping skills and talents that create a great foundation for teamwork. I read a lot in blogs and books that the move toward teams is the future of a successful real estate business. I'm sure there will always be the Lone Rangers, but it seems to me if you want a life beyond the cell phone, a team makes more sense. 

Of course, working closely with people has it's rewards and challenges and there are those times when one needs to seek guidance outside the conventions of your local office water-cooler-therapy group. I found The Five Dysfunctions of a Team to be a worthwhile read. When you throw a few family dynamics into the mix, things can get very interesting at times. Fortunately, as the older brother,I learned to be respectful of a younger brother who taught karate!

Let me introduce you to each of us and give you a little background. I do this because we want your referral business. I think there is great potential in networking and we want to make it clear that we are looking for other like-minded business people to work with.

Tracey Harper, the good looking one in the middle, puts the REAL in Realtor. Tracey grew up in the area, so she brings the invaluable asset of intimate knowledge of the local area to the team. Tracey's business background is as a bookkeeper. That's another big plus.

She worked for Standard Pacific Homes, a big builder out here in the San Ramon Valley. Tracey moved up to assistant comptroller and decided it was time for a change. She went into sales and closed escrow on over 300 homes for Standard Pacific before deciding to move on.

To me, Tracey is a little weird - she loves contracts! Tell me that isn't an asset in this business. I've never seen anyone get excited about going to a seminar on lender fraud.

Tracey's biggest asset to the team is her - her personalness, her soul. She is just a nice, friendly, engaging person which makes it easy for my brother and me because all we have to concentrate on is getting clients in front of Tracey. It takes about ten minutes for a client to start offering Tracey all future business from their young children.

In the next segment we will discuss what sibling rivalry brings to a team.