JustListed

This stunning 4 level home located in the popular community of Stonehouse Glen offers you the opportunity to own a home which has the feeling and appearance of being better than brand new. Upon entering this home you are welcomed with an abundance of natural lighting flowing throughout. The open foyer presents itself well showcasing the dining and living room areas. Entertain with ease in the large kitchen which opens to a great room and overlooks the morning room. The second floor offers an impressive master suite, 3 additional nicely sized bedrooms, and a laundry area. The 3rd floors (flex floor) offers many uses and is currently utilized as a 5th bedroom with a separate full bath and separate sitting area. When the time comes, finish the 1272 square feet of the basement area. In the meantime, it's perfectly fine to be utilized as an organized storage area. Schedule your appointment today to tour this stunning home in the awesome community of Stonehouse Glen, a community full of amenities.

Buying a house should be getting easier.

For most people who are looking into buying a house in Williamsburg for the first time, the two greatest obstacles appear to be financial, and—for lack of a better word—emotional.

Let’s deal with the second barrier right off the bat. Emotional may not be an apt adjective because most of the emotions that accompany the process of buying a house are positive. The potential of joining your Williamsburg friends as a homeowner is certainly a positive goal. Accompanying your chosen Williamsburg REALTOR® on house-hunting tours in search of your dream house takes energy—but they are also some of the most interesting shopping trips imaginable. And the pride of ownership that comes with unlocking your own front door for the first time is a truly satisfaction-producing moment.

Stacked up against all those positives is one strong negative for first-time buyers: the instinctive impulse to avoid the unknown. The process of buying a house is full of legal, technical and procedural details that can appear to be all but impenetrable to those who’ve never weathered them before. That makes it understandable why you’d want to put off tackling the whole can of worms—especially since buying a house is such a weighty transaction.

The reason this first barrier is ultimately overcome is probably also why nearly 90% of U.S. residential real estate transactions involve a real estate professional. It doesn’t take long before most future buyers learn that they can enlist the services of a professional like me to act on their behalf…for free! With a Williamsburg REALTOR to guide and advise on all aspects of buying a house in Williamsburg, the technicality obstacle disappears. Veteran homeowners don’t give it a second thought.

Which leaves that other barrier: the financial one.

But here, too, buying a house should have gotten somewhat easier. Not because it’s any easier to make money—and not because having enough of the green stuff isn’t still a prerequisite to getting a front door key of your own—but because there are so many readily accessible ways to track and control personal finances. Keeping up with household expenses once meant conscientiously stacking incoming bills and mailing out payments at the end of the month—then having to wait for the bank statement to arrive to verify household balances.

Today all that information can handled online—and any number of personal finance software solutions like Quicken, Microsoft Money, and iCash make it easy to track and schedule just about everything. That means it’s a simple matter to keep on top of all the income and expense flows as their deadlines come and go month-by-month. This doesn’t make any expenses disappear, but it does make it much less likely that due dates will be accidentally overlooked—or that credit score damage will result. It also makes it a whole lot easier to project income and expenses into the future—and to plot a savings trajectory that produces the down payment you need when you need it.

Buying a house in Williamsburg becomes a less daunting prospect when your financial picture is organized for clarity—and when your house-hunting team includes an agent with wide local experience and personal knowledge of the current Williamsburg offerings. That’s me!

For most Williamsburg celebrants, the holiday season hasn’t been a single non-stop flurry of activities (even though that’s what sticks in our memories). In fact, the holidays usually include more stretches of free time than we generally experience. Probably because our regular schedules get shredded over the holidays, you can usually count on injections of unclaimed time—whether spent in airport departure lounges or at home, awaiting waylaid deliveries or overdue guests.

Such moments provide a disguised benefit. Especially this week, as we begin our voyage into Williamsburg’s New Year, there is no more apt time to steal the moments needed to consider what fresh initiatives might be possible.

It is New Year’s Resolution time, after all—and if a change in Williamsburg real estate matters could be due, that’s something that probably belongs near the top of the list. With that in mind, here are the most frequently named real estate-related subjects in popular New Year’s resolution lists:

1. Make extra mortgage payments — even a single extra payment a year makes a surprisingly large financial impact

2. Downsize — recognizing when family living space requirements shrink can mean significant cash savings as well as property maintenance time and effort

3. Upsize — sometimes the extra elbow room yields major quality of living gains

4. Save Up for a Down Payment — even if a new home isn’t contemplated in the near future, the sooner a regular saving plan is put into action, the easier it will be to meet the goal

5. Tackle Deferred Household Maintenance Items — for efficiency and pride of ownership

6. Buy an Investment Property — a thoughtful Williamsburg real estate investment can yield both cash flow and long-term growth benefits

7. Get Organized — de-cluttering is a near universal New Year’s resolution

8. Get Efficient — cutting energy consumption and/or water usage by converting outdated household systems should result in net operating outlays

When it comes to Williamsburg real estate initiatives, a list of your own New Year’s resolutions may be minor or monumental. If it’s the latter (and a possible change of residence is nearing) you might add one item to your New Year’s to-do list: call me!