Buying a home is a big deal, and is typically an involved process, especially during the time between offer acceptance and the actual closing. “Escrow” is basically when a neutral third party holds on your earnest deposit until all contingencies are met in a real estate transaction. It might sound like a fancy, intimidating term, but if you dot all your “i’s” and cross all your “t’s” leading up to closing, it should be a straightforward process.

Escrow is important because it essentially protects the public and lowers the risk involved in a real estate transaction. By having an experienced third party holding all the legal documents and funds, all parties involved can safely deal with each another and have the peace of mind knowing that no funds will be released and no legal documents will be recorded until all the conditions of the agreement are met.

Opening Escrow

After you choose an escrow company, opening escrow is pretty simple. All you need to do is send the purchase agreement to the escrow officer, which should include the following:

• Address of the property
• Purchase price
• Closing date
• Name and contact information of the seller
• Name and contact information of the buyer
• Name and contact information of the real estate agents (if involved)
• Commission to be paid to any agents

These pieces of information will help the escrow officer to get the process moving.

Disclosure Preparations

Ideally, sellers should fill out and sign a Seller’s Disclosure package when listing a home. This will outline in detail any pertinent information about the property that a buyer will want to know before submitting an offer. If this step is tackled before the transaction enters escrow, it’s one less thing that will need to be done during the escrow process.

Complete the Escrow Package

You will be sent a package usually within a few days of opening escrow. Within the package are a number of documents that you need to carefully review, fill out, sign, then send back to the escrow officer. Make sure that the instructions in these documents match up precisely with the terms of the purchase agreement.

Obtain Financing

You may have been pre-approved for a mortgage for a certain amount before you even started looking for a home, but once you put in an offer that’s accepted by the seller, this is when the real work for your lender begins.

Your lender will verify your income, credit, debt-to-income ratio, loan-to-value ratio, and will verify if any changes to your credit and debts have changed since you initiated the mortgage application.

If everything is satisfactory to your lender, you’ll be approved for a mortgage for a certain amount. You will be given three business days to carefully read through your Closing Disclosure and compare it against your Loan Estimate to make sure the deal you were offered in the estimate is the one you’re actually getting.

Home Inspection

Buyers typically include a contingency within a purchase agreement to have a home inspection conducted on the property in question, which they are usually given about a week or two to complete from the time of offer acceptance. The exact amount of time they have to do this can be negotiated in the offer.

It’s recommended that sellers have property inspections down before an offer is on the table, which can help avoid any unpleasant surprises that may be uncovered during a buyer-appointed inspection.

If anything is discovered that requires attention, you can request to have certain repairs made within the inspection period. However, it should noted that sellers are under no obligation to make these repairs. It’s simply something that can be negotiated within the escrow period. Ideally, an agreement will be reached between both parties that will allow the deal to go through, whether the seller agrees to make these repairs or not.

Remove Contingencies

If everything checks out, the contingencies can be removed from the contract. However, if something creeps up during escrow that is backed up by a contingency, you have a legal right to bail out of the deal without any financial consequences. A list of recommended contingencies to include in a purchase agreement include:

• Financing
• Home inspection
• Title search
• HOA document review
• Appraisal

The moment that each contingency is either fulfilled or expires, they should be actively removed from the agreement and signed by both parties.

Final Walk-Through

Within five days of the close of escrow, you can do a final walk-through of the home to make sure it is still in the same condition as when you agreed to put an offer on it and confirm that all agreed-upon repairs are made.

Close Escrow

At this point, you will receive confirmation that the deed is recorded and title is transferred. The seller gets your deposit money, and you will be funded by your lender with the money needed to cover the purchase. The seller will then get a final settlement statement from escrow that details all associated selling costs which are deducted from the purchase price.

The Bottom Line

The escrow process might seem like a long one, and it can be. Typically, the more contingencies in an offer, the more involved escrow will be. Escrow is often the intimidating part of buying and selling, but your real estate agent can help you navigate this otherwise complex process to successfully get you from offer acceptance to closing escrow.

Regardless of how long you’ve lived in your first home, selling for the very first time can be a daunting task if it’s not done right. While there are certain factors that you can’t do much about – such as the current market conditions and your location – there are plenty of other components to the selling process that you have total control over, which can significantly impact the end result.

If this is your first time selling a home, take the following suggestions into consideration to help make the process a smooth and successful one.

1. Stage Your Home

First impressions go a long way, so the better your home looks in the eyes of buyers, the better. Make sure to take some time to declutter your home and clean it up, and consider investing in professional home staging. These professionals will neutralize your decor and arrange your furniture appropriately so that buyers will be more attracted to the style and be better able to see themselves living there.

2. Price Your Home Right

A lot of sellers believe their homes are worth more than they really are. At the end of the day, your home is only worth what buyers are willing to pay for it, which is dictated by the current market in your local area. If you price too high, you’ll end up with a stale listing that’s doing nothing but scaring buyers off.

Instead, if you price appropriately, you’ll make your home more competitive in the market and attract more attention without having to make price reductions after the fact.

3. Disclose Pertinent Information

As the seller, you’re obligated to disclose all issues with the home that you are aware of, and you need to communicate these facts though disclosure statements. If you fail to reveal a problem with the home that you knew about and the issue comes up after the new buyers move in, you could be stuck ironing out these issues in court.

4. Be Flexible With Showings

The easier you make it for buyers to come and see your home, the more showings you’ll get. Try to be as flexible as you can when it comes to showings. Don’t severely limit the days and times that buyers can make appointments to visit. Their work schedules and family responsibilities can make it tough to work around your strict viewing times; instead, make showings flexible enough for buyers’ schedules.

5. Emotionally Detach Yourself

The home selling process is an emotionally charged one. After all, it’s your home we’re talking about, and is perhaps where you’ve dwelled for years, raised a family, and made memories. Letting go of it can be hard, and receiving offers for significantly less than what you believe the home is worth can be disappointing and even insulting.

Try not to take anything personally. While it may be a home to you, it’s essentially just a building to buyers until they move in and start making their own memories there. Don’t let your emotional attachment to your home cloud your judgment and your ability to make the right decisions, especially when it comes to staging and pricing your home, as well as how you handle offers and negotiations.

6. Be Open Minded Through the Negotiations

Speaking of negotiations, it’s crucial to keep an open mind during these discussions. You might not like what you see with an offer, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be a meeting of the minds and an eventual deal that both parties can be satisfied with. Consider what’s most important to you: the asking price, the closing date, the deposit amount, and so forth. These are all things you’ll need to consider as you evaluate offers that come in.

Don’t forget that you can always counter an offer, rather than just toss it out the window if you see something you don’t like. Entertain the offer to see how far you can go with it.

7. Hire an Experienced Real Estate Agent

Forget about going solo on your home sale, especially if this is your first time. A real estate transaction is typically a complex one that involves a lot of little details that you may not be familiar with. A professional real estate agent will have the education and the experience to handle the process diligently so that there are no holes in the deal. 

The Bottom Line

You’re ultimately in the driver’s seat when it comes to choosing a listing price, accepting/countering offers, and plenty of other factors. Selling your first home can be challenging and even emotionally draining, but if you heed these suggestions, you can make the process much more streamlined.

When you’re renting your home, your landlord doesn’t need to know what brand your television is, what you stock your fridge with, or who you invite over for dinner; nor does your landlord particularly care.

However, there are things that your landlord would certainly be interested in knowing about. After all, as an owner, your landlord’s best interests are to ensure the property is well cared for while trying to keep you comfortable and happy. And in order to ensure a positive tenant-landlord relationship is fostered, you’ll need to be upfront with a few things, or it could wind up costing you.

Here are a few things you shouldn’t keep your landlord in the dark about.

You Have a Pet

If the lease you signed stipulated a no-pet policy, then you’ve got to abide by it. You can’t pretend that you have no intentions of bringing a pet on board when you’ve got Fido waiting for you along with all of your belongings. It can be challenging to find a pet-friendly rental unit, but that doesn’t mean you can make the rules up as you go.

Perhaps the unit you are renting does allow pets, but the lease outlines an extra deposit needed in case the animal causes any damage to the place. Many renters might conceal their pets in an effort to avoid having to front this money. Either way, hiding pets from your landlord is a bad idea, and can cost you if you’re ever found out. Not only could you be slapped with extra expenses, you might even find yourself on the verge of eviction.

You’re Subletting

If you have plans to sublet your unit in the near future, you better make sure that you and your landlord negotiate these terms and include them in the lease. Otherwise, if the lease clearly states that subletting is strictly forbidden, then this arrangement is off the table.

If you’re planning on going on a month-long vacation, you might think you can get back that month’s rent by subletting your unit to another individual. After all, how will the landlord find out, right? Aside from being unethical and against the rules of the lease, subletting can really land you in hot water if you happen to hand over the keys to someone who’s less than reliable.

There’s a reason why your landlord conducted a credit check on you and called your previous landlords. If you happen to let someone in your home on a short-term rental without doing the same types of checks, you’re putting yourself – and everyone in the building – at risk. If you break that trust with your landlord, you’re breaching the lease and can really get yourself into a lot of trouble.

You’ve Brought in a Roommate

There is plenty of information that you need to fill out on your lease, including the full names of all people who will be living on the premises. Your landlord fully screened you before allowing you to be a resident in the unit; if you sneak in a roommate, your landlord will not be given the chance to do them same with this new individual.

As the owner of the unit, your landlord has a right to know exactly who is living there. Not only that, there may be restrictions on how many occupants are allowed to live in one unit, depending on the property or the local jurisdiction.

You’ve Got a Plumbing Problem

Whether it’s a clogged toilet or a leaky faucet, your landlord needs to know about it so the problem can be fixed without it causing any major damage. You might be afraid to tell your landlord about a problem like this with the fear that you will be blamed for the issue and will have to cough up the money to fix it.

However, your landlord is ultimately responsible for repairing just about every plumbing issue. If that particular problem turns into a catastrophe because of your neglect to inform your landlord right away, you could be stuck contributing to the cost.

You’re Running a Business Out of the Place

Running a business out of your rental unit without letting your landlord in on this important piece of information is a big no-no. Not only will you be breaching the lease, you just might be going against specific restrictions in the zoning of the property that strictly forbids operating a home-based business – depending on what type of business it is. Going against the lease and the laws in your jurisdiction can result is a temporary shutdown of your business for a little while, while can really hurt the pocketbook.

The Bottom Line

The best way to go is to be completely honest and upfront with your landlord. You might try to keep hide certain things, but secrets have a way of being found out. And when it comes to breaching your lease, you could wind up being responsible for added costs, or even find yourself having to look for a new place to live. Honesty is certainly the best policy when it comes to your rental.

Bathrooms might be tucked away from public view, but they are one of the most important spaces in a home, especially when it comes to property value. And just like any other room in the home, they need to be updated and spruced up every so often. But if you’re not in the mood for a total overhaul, or simply don’t have the budget to accommodate a complete renovation, you can still revamp this underestimated space into something fabulous. Here’s how.

1. Make Smart Use of Paint

Sounds like your obvious starting point, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless. It’s amazing how much a difference a simple coat of paint can make. The color you choose will also provide a certain aura to the room: choose something soft to create a soothing space that appears lighter and more spacious, or something darker and richer to create a more sophisticated vibe.

You don’t have to limit the paint just to the walls, either. You can extend the paint job to the ceiling, and even go so far as to paint a faux sky if you’ve got a creative hand. You can even paint the shelves and the vanity to change things up without having to replace everything. Just make sure that you use a water-based primer and mildew-resistant paint to help keep the moisture off of the drywall and prevent mold and mildew.

2. Change the Light Fixtures

Good lighting in he bathroom is an absolute must, and if it’s currently dark and dingy in this space, swapping your currant lighting for something updated can both improve your task lighting and create a new look in the space. Consider adding a dramatic statement piece, such as a chandelier, to add a sense of style.

Replace the vanity lighting with something more updated while still providing you with that important task lighting needed when getting ready in the morning. Last but not least, add dimmer switches to give you the flexibility to adjust the amount of lighting as needed, and to help create a more serene setting when you just want to relax in the tub.

3. Change the Hardware

Just the simple act of changing up the hardware in the bathroom can make a world of difference, and it’s probably the simplest and cheapest way to update this space. It really comes down to the details, and the hardware – such as drawer pulls and door knobs – is the perfect detail to adjust when a total overall in the bathroom is off the table.

While you’re at it, spruce up the accents too, such as the soap dish, toothbrush holder, or wall art. Consider going a little bold with these small pieces, which can be easily changed if you start growing tired of their colors.

4. Update the Faucets

To really make a big splash in the bathroom, swapping your old faucets is a must. New sink faucet fixtures can turn your bathroom from drab to fab in no time without any major remodeling, and changing your showerhead and knob can make it seem as though you’ve done a lot more work in the bathroom than you really did to make it look and feel more luxurious. Take things a step further and consider splurging on a functional handheld showerhead to make your bathroom more spa-like.

5. Add a Towel Warmer

To top off the luxurious feel in the bathroom, consider adding a towel warmer. There’s nothing more cozy than stepping out of the shower to be greeted with a warm and toasty towel to drape yourself in. There are all types of towel warmers that will fit just about any space, including tight ones. If you don’t feel like getting into the electricals, there are plug-in versions available for quick and easy installation.

The Bottom Line

There’s no need to splurge on an in-depth remodeling job just to update your bathroom and add a sense of luxury to it. Consider one – or all – of the above tips to transform your bathroom without having to break the budget and spend oodles of time and effort revamping your bathroom.