Home Decoration & Real Estate

Archive for February, 2010

Some landlords commit many legal mistakes which can be costly for their property rental business.  Such mistakes can be avoided by simply hiring a professional San Diego property manager.  The downfall of some landlords is not due to lack of tenants or sluggish property markets but because they have been embroiled in a very expensive and costly legal battle with tenants, state regulatory authorities, and other housing institutions.  So if you are planning to become a landlord, the first thing you need to do is to get the services of property management San Diego professionals.   

Using generic or standard rental and lease forms is one of the most common legal mistakes that you can commit.  Using these standard forms, which you can buy anywhere, can cause future legal headaches for you.  For one, these generic forms are totally outdated and may not reflect existing statutes, state laws, and housing regulations.  You are actually not complying with existing regulations if you use such generic rental and lease forms.  But if you hire a professional San Diego property manager, your legal documentations will be handled by the service.  A professional property management San Diego service has the right legal staff to take care of your legal documentations such as contracts, lease forms, and tenant application forms.  

Most legal mistakes committed by landlords happen during tenant interviews.  Interviewing tenants is a good way to assess their personality and background.  But if you are not careful with your questions, you can become the subject of a Fair Housing Act complaint.   A simple question such as asking a couple if they are married may seem harmless to you.  But if those prospective tenants will not get the rent, then your seemingly harmless question could haunt you in court.  That is why you need to have a professional San Diego property manager that should do all the tenant screenings for you.  A good property management San Diego service has a firm grasp of the Fair Housing Act and will be very careful when interviewing prospective tenants.  

In your eagerness to close a deal with prospective tenants, you may give a promise that you cannot deliver.  This is also a subject of litigation because the tenants may feel that you ripped them off with false claims.  The tenants can abrogate the contract and sue you in court.  You can avoid this if the one dealing with the negotiations is a professional San Diego property manager.  As long as you have a clear understanding with the property management San Diego service about the terms of lease and the amenities that you will provide, negotiations with tenants will be trouble free.  So make sure that you keep your self away from the negotiation table and let the professional property managers do their jobs.  

Legal mistakes are very costly.  A lawsuit can bankrupt your property rental business and you may not recover from such loss.  That is why it is important to have a professional property manager that will work for your best interest.  This way, you can effectively avoid costly legal mistakes because a property management service has the necessary expertise to handle every aspect of property rental business.

We’ve all been hit in the pocket by rising electricity costs, at work and at home. The price of electricity is beyond our control, but it’s within our power to curb the amount of energy we consume. By following our power saving tips, you’ll be helping to reduce the impact on our fragile natural environment and preserve our planet’s resources.

First off, if you’re not using Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs), you should be. Compact fluorescent lamps use only about a third as much electricity as standard incandescents. According to some experts, if you substitute compact fluorescent bulbs for a quarter of the incandescents used in high-use areas, you can cut the amount of electricity you use on lighting by half. I have CFLs in every fixture in my house, except for the fridge, oven, microwave and two fluorescent tube fixtures that are built in.

Use task lighting instead of area lighting. If you’re doing something at a fixed location, such as your desk or workbench, you don’t need to have the entire room brightly lit. Use an LED task light, one of the excellent units, or some similar small fixture to put light only where you need it. A 25 or 40 watt CFL can provide ambient light in the room, and you’ll reap the savings.

Use appliances that are efficient and no larger than needed to do the job. For many cooking tasks, a microwave oven will do what you want to do and save a lot of energy doing it. If all you’re doing is heating up some fish sticks, don’t heat the huge oven in your range, just use the toaster oven. Save heating that big space for something that won’t fit in the toaster oven. It saves money to make two and freeze one for later. You can save even more money by not preheating your oven, just let the food bake a little longer.

You’ll use a lot less energy in the winter if you put a programmable thermostat on your heater and let the temperature in the house drop quite a bit at night. In winter, set the thermostat to 21 degrees C when you are awake and 17 degrees C when you are asleep. In summer, set the thermostat to 26 degrees C and use a ceiling fan to cool your place. When the temperature outside falls to at least two degrees lower than the temperature inside, you should “vent” your home – that is, open your windows to let cool air in.

You might give some thought to a “ solar clothes dryer” like Grandma used to do – using indoor or outdoor clotheslines to dry your clothes. It’s low maintenance, no moving parts and the sheets flapping in the breeze give the puppy something to play with. It’s not for everybody, but if you don’t mind going back a few years, the initial cost is lower and the energy use much less than an electric or gas dryer. Doesn’t work well on rainy days though. Not using an electric clothes dryer can save $50 per year.

One last thing you must do to save money on your electric bill is to eliminate phantom loads. What, you ask, is a phantom load? A phantom load is any device that is consuming energy when you think you’ve turned it off. It all started with “instant on” televisions back in the vacuum tube days. When you “turned off” the TV, the tube filaments still had power applied to them, and were costing you money. When you turned the TV “on”, you were only turning on the high voltage and the warm tubes went to work instantly.

It’s even worse today. Anything that has a remote control is a phantom load. Think about it. There has to be a circuit inside there waiting to get the wake-up call from the remote control. The clocks on VCRs, ranges, microwaves and other gadgets are all phantom loads. And they are costing you money.

The way to cure phantom loads is to put the devices on a switched outlet or a power strip. Or simply unplug them. Unplug your toaster, coffee maker, hair dyer, some televisions, and power strips. It is good to note that some appliances have memory stored in the IC chips within the units. If you do unplug these units you may loose stored information. One of the really nice aspects of energy conservation is that you get to choose how much you want to save. It’s up to you which, if any, phantom load devices you leave connected when you’re not using them. Just balance convenience against savings.

You now possess the knowledge to cut your monthly electric bill. It is difficult to say how much you can save by making these ten simple changes, but here is an example: A friend of mine, living in an apartment at the time, followed these same recommendations and saw a 30% reduction in his bill the first full month. It can be done. And you can do it.

There are many reasons to lower your electricity consumption: saving money now, preparing for future rate hikes, helping to improve air quality and limit global warming, or just reducing waste. With increases in the price of electricity and gas bills, these methods help you try and get cheaper bills and save money.

If you’re among the thousands of people who got a real estate license when the market was hot, are you starting to think it might not be as easy to make money as it looked back then?

According to the 2007 Real Estate Trends Report, there is one licensed Realtor® for every 90 Americans. There couldn’t possibly be enough work for all of you, especially in today’s real estate market.

With such a saturated market of Realtors, it’s hardly surprising that they aren’t making much money either. According to Realtor.org, the median salary for a sales agent in 2004 was $37,600 and for 2008 that number is down to $31,000. For newer agents, salaries can be as low as $13,000 a year.

Instead of heading to McDonalds® for an application, (a manager at a fast food restaurant earns $30,000 to $35,000 per year and doesn’t have to work 24/7) if you’re not making your fortune as an agent you might consider a career in home staging.

Home stagers can grow their businesses regardless of whether the real estate market is hot or not, because people will always want to make more on the sale of their property. And in a buyer’s market, they need our help even more, if they want to sell quickly.

Even the FSBO (for sale by owner) market is open to us as home stagers. The same sellers who don’t want to pay real estate commissions, and instead try and sell their homes privately, will invest in home staging services to decorate their home to sell faster and for more money.

As a real estate agent, you already know the real estate market and you’re probably used to giving home owners tips on getting their homes ready to sell. I hope you’re not making the fatal mistake of staging your vendors’ homes for free as an added service.

You could actually be making more money on giving staging advice than you do right now in real estate commissions!

In my second year as a home stager I was making up to $10,000 a month staging my clients’ homes and that was starting from the ground up without a real estate license. It’s interesting to note too, that the majority of these home sellers hadn’t chosen their agent yet when they hired me. Had I had a license I would have had many of those listings myself rather than recommending them to other agents.

If you’re a real estate agent accustomed to driving around all day showing properties and not getting paid until you actually sell something, the income you can make as a home stager may surprise you. For example, $300 to $600 is close to industry standard for a home staging consultation, depending on where you live.

Assuming the low end, at $300, if you were to do four of those a week, that’s over $60,000 at the end of the year. At the high end you could be making $124,800 a year and that’s just doing home staging consultations where you walk around the client’s home and give them staging advice so they can do the rest of the work themselves.

Now, let’s assume only a quarter of those consultations turn into full blown staging projects. You’ll earn another $4,000 to $8,000 per month, or between $48,000 and $96,000 a year on top of the consultation fees you were already making! And you don’t have to share any of that income with a broker.

If you’re making less than the average fast food restaurant manager, watching your meager income get eaten up by fees and large advertising budgets and you’re tired of being on call for your clients 24/7, isn’t it about time you started looking at other options that leverage the real estate knowledge you already have while allowing you to make double or triple what you’re earning now?

Consider the current economy and slow real estate market your wake up call. Maybe you should recession-proof your real estate career by enrolling in a home staging training program and start earning the kind of money that lured you into the real estate profession in the first place!

Quite a few American central heating designs implement a furnace that directs forced hot air through ductwork. This kind of equipment has for ages been preferred by contractors in America by reason of their cheaper installment price ranges, particularly when combined with central cooling. On the other hand with rising fuel costs, the continuing expenses for fuel consumption must be also thought-about.

Yet another problem with forced hot air is that it’s the established most uncomfortable heat delivery process, because it just isn\’t going to ward off the loss of body heat of the people in the room in comparison to alternative methods.

Several property owners also use the term furnace to refer to their boiler, while the 2 aren\’t identical. A boiler heats up h2o, and strictly speaking, a furnace warms and blows air.

The hot water heating designs which use boilers can include hot water baseboards or radiators. These kinds of heating distribution products are next on the comfort and ease levels. Although an improvement over hot air blowing through ducts, they also depend on some air movement also known as conduction, to supply heat in the room.

One more heat technique that makes use of a boiler or hot water heater is radiant panel heating. These radiant panels might be constructed into ceilings as well as walls, but are most commonly used as a radiant floor system.

Radiant panel heat stands out as the confirmed most comfy kind of central heating, because it warms every one of the surfaces within the space to match the skin temperature of the people in the room. The end result is no loss of body heat, as well as a natural feeling of easiness.

As a result of the principles of physics which are ideally put into use by radiant panel methods, they\’re likewise considerably more fuel efficient than forced hot air. Therefore not only are you going to enjoy the finest degree of comfort and ease within your own home, you can rest easy that your utility personal savings will last for the lifetime of the house.

History and introduction of LED lightings

LED’s have been around since the 60s, but have mostly been relegated to showing the time in an alarm clock or the battery level of a video camera. Its use as a source of illumination was a challenging one for scientists. Light Emitting Diodes or LED Lightings- differ from traditional light sources in the way they produce light. In incandescent bulbs, a tungsten filament is heated by electric current until it glows or emits light. In a fluorescent lamp, an electric arc excites mercury atoms, which emit ultraviolet (UV) radiation. After striking the phosphor coating on the inside of glass tubes, the UV radiation is converted and emitted as visible light. On other hand LED’s are diodes made from semi-conductor materials. This is why they are referred to as “solid state” devices and relies on indium gallium nitride to convert electricity into photons with help of direct current (DC) instead of alternating current (AC) There are other types of Lights which on the principle of solid state objects like semi conductor but LED’s are the most relevant for general illumination. It consists of a chip of semi-conducting material treated to create an electric circuit. An LED is usually a small area source, often with extra optics added to the chip that shapes its radiation pattern. The specific wavelength or color emitted by the LED depends on the materials used to make the diode. It depends on the composition and condition of the semi conducting material used, and can be infrared, visible, or near-ultraviolet. Red LED’s are based on aluminum gallium arsenide (AlGaAs). Blue LED’s are made from indium gallium nitride (InGaN) and green from aluminum gallium phosphide (AlGaP). “White” light is created by combining the light from red, green, and blue (RGB) LED’s or by coating a blue LED with yellow phosphor. LED based lights are still under development but it is predicted it will radically change the energy consumption patterns of the world over the next few years. As such there’s a phenomenal amount of resources being devoted to improving LED technology worldwide. The U.S. has committed an uncharacteristically large amount of industrial policy support for LED research and development. Asia is a hotbed of cutting-edge manufacturing technology and Europe and Canada have led the way in energy efficient initiatives accompanied by some of some of the most innovative design styles you can find anywhere.

Advantages and disadvantages of LED lightings

They have extremely low power consumption. LED lights use up to 90% less power than normal lights, which has many more advantages than you would ever assume. Firstly electrical running costs are reduced, not only reducing the demand placed on your household energy consumption but feel good knowing you are saving energy and becoming green, the global warming factor. Along the same line, the other major advantage of LED lights is that you can connect multiple sets of LED lights together from only one plug or socket, more sets than non LED lights due to the lower power consumption. This is not only practical resulting in the requirement for less power sockets, but you can lit larger multiple area with little drilling of your walls. Just imagine powering a string of lights ½ mile long from a single electrical socket. With LED’s you can use more light than ever before and still save money. While the small energy draw of LED’s would indicate many more could be strung together, until the UL listing is changed for the standard plug connected light sets, it is prudent to adhere to the current regulations for risk management. Since LED lights don’t contain any energy hungry materials, they are very efficacious-convert energy to light, not heat as non LED’s lights do. These make them intrinsically safe and are generally cool to the touch. LED’s lights can provide with 50,000 hours or more of life, which can tremendously reduce maintenance costs and time. This means, assuming an average twelve hour night, you will not need to change your LED lights after a good eleven year. In comparison, an incandescent light bulb lasts approximately 1,000 hours. Fluorescents are rated for 10,000 hours under ideal conditions. Along with this LED lights are incredibly bright, 3 times brighter than traditional lights, this makes them ideal for a wide range of situations, offering much greater impact and appeal than subdued traditional bulbs. The known problem of replacing blown and the inconvenience and undesired appearance of multiple failed bulbs isn’t an issue with LED’s. With such a long bulb life you can be sure of a fully functioning set of lights, which can be happily left outside requiring no maintenance and minimal routine care. Further mentioning the longevity of LED lights, LED’s are manufactured as one solid piece, with no glass or filaments to break. As such these lights are resistant to shock and vibration, which makes them more durable than non LED lights. Plus they have better quality light output since they have minimum ultraviolet and infrared radiation. LED lights have much greater design freedom in terms of color flexibility including many “whites” – without the use of filters, fully dimmable, new form factors for fixture designs which give us innumerable options to look for. Lastly the most important benefits if you are environment conscious is LED’s unlike Fluorescent and mercury vapor lighting which contains mercury, a hazardous waste to the environment and must be disposed of properly, LED’s don’t contain mercury and are not considered hazardous waste designating them environmental friendly.

Shopping guide for LED lightings

LED lights have started flooding the market but before purchase see to it what are you looking for. LED lights were initially started to be used in commercial environments like entertainment shows, theaters etc. Also, LED lights are already the best light source for traffic signals, vehicular tail lights, emergency lighting and flashlights. Increasingly nowadays, Home LED lightings such as accent wall LED lights, task, landscape and even outdoor LED lighting such as garden Pole LED lightings have arrived in the market. After deciding upon the type of LED lighting, check the prices around various online shop. Price is a hard thing to remain constant since most companies post retail type prices online and are willing to accept your bargain call for bulk purchases. Your best bet is to have a specific LED lighting type in mind and browse through several LED light shop. Check the kind of warranties the selected shop is giving you in terms of lamp life span and durability of LED lights. The light output declines over time so at some point, though the lamp is technically lit, it is not providing the same effect as intended in the beginning. Market pitching shop owner will seem to claim very high lamp life, while more honest LED shop will opt for the lower numbers. A reasonable lamp life for most LED’s seen in the market is around 50,000 hours but if it is more see what kind of warranties and return policy is in place if the claim is not fulfilled by the seller.

As we can see LED lightings have so many benefits compared to other form of lightings that sooner or later its usage will be common. More widespread use could lead to big energy savings and a revolution in the way we think about lighting. And We at For your Home would be part of these revolution, would you like to join?

You can also read this article in our news and article section at;

http://www.foryourhome.co.uk/led-lightings-lighting-revolution-on-the-way/articles/36.html