Welcome to the Trank Real Estate Blog!

When you own the Western New York home your family lives in, you are by definition a real estate investor: it comes with the turf. Your investment is essentially a passive one. Until the day you decide to sell and move on, any improvement in its value is secondary to how well it serves to shelter your family.

How you think about your investment—and how you proceed to manage it—is altogether different when you buy an Erie County home purely as a financial venture. For one thing, you face an imme...

It can be a true three-ring circus as you close in on signing day for your new East Aurora home. Sometimes there’s a near-simultaneous sale of the previous house that demands attention. There are the timing issues connected with moving out and then moving in. You may be dealing with furnishing the new house, school schedules, and sometimes work requirements have to be juggled; and everything seems to be happening at the same time.

Amidst all the details you are attending to, there is one that a...

Would you buy a house where someone died? Would it make a difference if the death was peaceful or…otherwise?

You might never have considered such questions, but the answers can become a serious issue for an Elma house for sale—especially if it has a history that could be right out of a CSI episode. And what if you are the owner of a Southtowns house for sale with this kind of issue? It may be labeled as stigmatized—the unpleasant term that can attach to a house for sale which buyers or tenants...

This was the  “hot home-buying tip” splashed all over the airwaves at the end of last month—one that East Aurora real estate watchers probably assumed had to be one of those weird, crazy coincidence feature stories that crop up from time to time. I was a little surprising that Zillow, the big national real estate firm, was said to be the source. It was all over the TV and radio newscasts, usually providing the cutesy end-of-broadcast segment. It hit dozens of news blogs, led by headlines like “S...

The first day of spring! The vernal equinox! This year, March 20 is the red-letter day on Western New York’s real estate calendar. It’s the nominal kickoff to the traditionally rambunctious spring selling season—historically, the go-go time of year. It’s when more homes come on the market, more prospective buyers come out to see them, and more sales are launched than in any other season.

But this year, what happens three days later might well turn out to be nearly as noteworthy.

The 23rd may n...

This March has been such a busy one on the East Aurora real estate calendar that I thought it would be a good idea to double-check everything just to be certain I wasn’t overlooking any important happenings.

It wasn’t just that the first day of spring on the 20th is the traditional start of what’s regularly the busiest time of year for East Aurora real estate activity. This is a reliable phenomenon, further reinforced by the 61 million results you get when you Google “Spring Real Estate Selling...

When it comes to selling your East Aurora house, the first attributes that will bring in prospective buyers will be found in your listing description: size, location, and all the details that either match prospects’ wish lists (or don’t). Price is in there, too. Next comes curb appeal, which can turn on or turn off prospective buyers. Although it is often the second “at bat” you get when you are selling your East Aurora house, it’s not usually decisive. The third attribute can be just that—a bun...