Any kind of home renovation, whether you are doing new kitchen cabinets, or a bathroom redo, or a new add-on on your place – it is can take a lot of your time, and may be very pricey if you don’t know what you are doing. You really need to consider hiring a good contractor or designer/planner.

The money that you will save by doing your home remodeling project straight from the get-go will be massive. There are numerous places where you can discover local contractors that are ready to give you free quotes once you name your project. You can locate many of these internet sites listed on this article. They are completely free.

When taking on a home renovation project, there’s numerous points to think about. Hopefully this article will bring to light some of those points you should be considering. It’s not a simple undertaking to do, and it’s definitely wise to employ someone that knows what they’re doing and has done home renovations before. You’ll gain greatly from their expertise.

To find out the real story, I had a conversation with Bryan Ellis, widely considered to be one of the originators of the concept of Virtual Real Estate Investing.

Ellis says he adopted the term “virtual real estate investing” sometime before Y2K after he realized that making money online is conceptually very similar to making money with physical real estate.

One example of the parallels between virtual and physical real estate Bryan Ellis cites is the similarity between the monetization of domain names versus physical property. “These types of assets – websites and physical real estate – can be monetized in very similar ways like buy lo/sell high, leasing/rental and advertising opportunities” he says.

The similarities really are obvious. For example, if you’re the owner of a desirable property, its desirability is (in a business context) largely due to its being in a location that is of interest to others. Similarly, ownership of a desirable domain name is valuable for the same reasons. In either case, you could sell or lease the asset and turn it into cash.

In our next installment of this series on virtual real estate investing, Bryan Ellis will share the internet analogies to the physical concept of real estate development.

Prior to entering into a Contract to sell real estate the Seller is required to disclose to the Buyer any latent defects the Seller is aware of. Failure to disclose will not affect the consent of the parties, but will have similar consequences as misrepresentation.

Technically speaking, latent defects are facts that :

1) are unknown to the Buyer and are so crucial to the enjoyment and value of the property that the Buyer might not have entered into the Contract had he known they existed and
2) cannot be discovered upon reasonable inspection of the property.

An example of a latent defect in one case was the presence of an underground water culvert which was not apparent from a normal inspection of the land and which the Seller was aware of and failed to disclose. If the Seller does not disclose the existence of a latent defect, the Buyer can rescind the Contract and/or recover damages. Other more typical examples of latent defects are the existence of urea formaldehyde foam insulation or asbestos insulation in a property offered for sale. However, the Seller will not be held liable for failing to disclose a latent defect he was unaware of unless a reasonable person would have been aware of it.

Some latent defects are out of the ordinary but must still be disclosed if known to the Seller. For instance, properties rumored to be haunted are one such example, as is a property previously used as a site for a marijuana grow operation. In one recent court case, a luxury condominium where someone had committed suicide was held as a property with a latent defect that the Seller had a duty to disclose to the Buyer. These are known as ’stigmatized properties’ because they are associated with a ’stigma’ , an unusual, distressing event or circumstance such as murder, suicide or criminal activity. These properties may be worth less or could be hard to resell because prospective Buyers might not consider them. As such, the market for stigmatized properties is drastically reduced – and so is their value.

Luigi Frascati

Luigi Frascati is a Real Estate Agent based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He holds a Bachelor Degree in Economics and maintains a weblog entitled the Real Estate Chronicle at http://wwwrealestatechronicle.blogspot.com where you can find the full collection of his articles. Luigi is associated with the Sutton Group, the largest real estate organization in Canada, and is based with Sutton-Centre Realty in Burnaby, BC.

Why take a secured loan?

Perhaps it’s time to take that amazing touring holiday, perhaps it time to replace the kitchen or even build an extension to your home, with unsecured lending normally restricted to amounts less than £25,000 if you need borrow more money then the best option will be a secured loan. Using a secured loan you could borrow up to £100,000 to spend at a low rate of interest because the lender has a second charge on your home.

Securing a loan on your home

Taking a secured loan is different to taking out an unsecured personal loan in several ways firstly the amount you can borrow is governed by the amount of equity you have in your home. The amount of equity is the current value of your house minus any outstanding mortgages and other loans.

After you have established how much you can borrow, the lender will make you and offer and undertake a survey on your house (usually a desk survey not involving an actual visit by a surveyor). If you progress the lender will then register a second charge on your home, this then gives them the right to receive money from the sale of your house should you fail to make repayments on the loan.

After you have taken out the loan you will then begin repaying the loan in small monthly payments, because the loan is secured against your property the loan can be arranged for a longer period of time and the longer the time you take the loan over the smaller the monthly payments.

Taking out a secured loan could be the answer to your dreams.

Rhodri James is the Consumer Finance Manager for Decision-Finance http://www.decision-finance.co.uk, a company that specialises in providing customers with on-line quotes for financial services such as secured loan and unsecured loan.