• 
  
  

  How to Use Comparable Sales to Price Your Home

  Before you put your home up for sale, use the right comparable sales to find the perfect price. Read

• 
  
  

  Keep Your Home Sale from Falling Apart

  After finding a buyer, all you have to do to make it to closing is to avoid these five traps. Read
• 
  
  

  7 Tips for Staging Your Home

  Make your home warm and inviting to boost your home’s value and speed up the sale process. Read
• 
  
  

  Find the Best Agent to Sell Your House

  Ask detailed questions about their experience and skills to help you find the right agent for your home sale. Read
• 
  
  

  5 Tips to Prepare Your Home for Sale

  Working to get your home ship-shape for showings will increase its value and shorten your sales time. Read

• 
  
  

  Small Home Storage: Maximize Your Storage Space

  Your small home has more storage space than you think. For relatively little money but a lot of common sense and ingenuity, there’s space to be found. Read
• 
  
  

  Low-Cost Kitchen Storage: Cheap Stress Reduction

  Low-cost storage strategies bring calm to your kitchen, banishing stress-inducing clutter and leaving the space orderly. Read
• 
  
  

  Under-Stairs Storage Stomps Out Clutter

  Sweep out the dust bunnies. Clear away the clutter. Time to put wasted space beneath the staircase to work with customized storage solutions. Read
• 
  
  

  Laundry Room Storage: 5 Naked Truths

  Unless you do your laundry in the buff, it’s one chore that’s never really done. Follow these laundry room storage ideas, however, and you can breeze through your dirty duds in no time. Read

• 
  
  

  7 Ways to Have an Eco-Friendly Christmas

  With a few conscious choices, your merry Christmas can also be an eco-friendly Christmas. Read
• 
  
  

  Real Christmas Trees vs. Fake Christmas Trees: Which are Greener?

  How do real Christmas trees and fake Christmas trees stack up when it comes to the environment and cost? We’ve got the dirt. Read

Visit houselogic.com for more articles like this.

Copyright 2011 NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®

While home sales in September were down slightly from a relatively strong month in August, they were up from a year ago, giving encouraging signs of a strengthening market and potential for stabilizing, if not appreciating, home prices. These signs include an increasing demand, shown by the number of people shopping for homes, and the decreasing inventory of homes for sale, in conjunction with some of the lowest levels of new housing construction since the 1960s when the Beatles first came to the United States.

Of the 3.48 million homes sold in September, 32% were first-time home buyers. With more and more people entering the market, the persisting obstacle for most is still the restrictive lending environment. In a plea to banks and policy makers, NAR President Ron Phipps said, “We need to remove the roadblocks to a housing recovery—not place more obstacles in the way of financially qualified buyers.”

With an increasing demand and shrinking inventory, it is hoped that banks will begin to see the market potential and start to lend to otherwise creditworthy home shoppers, opening the road to a more rapid recovery. While consumer confidence still remains at all-time lows, retail spending increased 1.1% last month, a positive sign of growth fueled by the approaching holiday season, which could propel the U.S. into a promising new year.

Green Your Home Did you know that the housing and building industry accounts for nearly 40% of the world’s energy and raw material consumption? Our ability to “green our homes” truly has the ability to change the world. The principles of green are really about understanding priorities for a well-lived life—living healthy, being smart with money, and acting more sustainably.

We typically spend more than 80% of our nonworking or commuting hours inside our homes. Because we spend so much of our lives inside, it only makes sense we make a healthy inside zone the first priority. Here are a few DIY tips from Green Your Home to get you started:

1. Cross-Ventilate. An average adult takes in more than 14,000 breaths—or about 3,000 gallons of air—a day! Surprisingly, you are more likely to breathe polluted air inside your home than outside—even in cities like Los Angeles, which aren’t known for air quality. Opening one window won’t cut it… you need cross-ventilation so the breeze actually blows though your home, taking the pollutions back out with it. Open a front door and a back door, or one window upstairs and one downstairs.

2. Lighten Up. Simply swapping out the five most commonly used incandescent bulbs for CFLs or LEDs in your home can save you $60 to $100 a year. Combined with well-designed artificial lighting, natural lighting is also a great way to boost efficiency.

3. Low Flow. American families use about 400 gallons of water a day, and 70% of that is used inside the home. The majority is used in the bathroom: the average person flushes the toilet 2,500 times a year. Transform your home’s toilet from water-waster to water-miser for cheap. Place a brick or 2-liter plastic bottle filled with water into your toilet’s tank. The volume of these objects means less water will be needed to fill your tank—you’ve just created your own low-flow toilet. Also, be sure and have a leaky or running toilet fixed by a plumbing professional immediately.

For more tips, buy your copy of Green Your Home now at www.kellerink.com/greenyourhome