Welcome to the Trank Real Estate Blog!

Something new is stirring in the ordinarily hidebound world of residential mortgage offerings: a new way of approaching the financing of home purchases. If successful, it might well shift the way some Elma mortgage contracts are written.

The experiment is known as the “Wealth Building Home Loan,” and it addresses a home-ownership problem that has been talked about for a long time, with little being done to solve it. The issue in question is how to unburden new homeowners from spending years in...

They don’t teach this in high school, but maybe they should. The difference between an East Aurora buyer’s agent and an East Aurora seller’s agent can be pivotal, yet first-time home buyers have to figure that out on their own. You can read quotes on the web that say things like, “I looked for a buyer’s agent instead of a real estate agent” (true story!) that illustrate how little knowledge is out there. It wouldn’t take much classroom time to explain that buyer’s and seller’s agents are both re...

East Aurora area home buyers may not have been watching the Patriots’ squeaker victory in Sunday’s Super Bowl for the purpose of learning something about real estate, but at least one useful piece of wisdom did become evident: the enduring value of minding the fundamentals. Despite the harrowing last 20 seconds, when the power of Seattle seemed sure to win the day, New England had confidence that their team was steeped in the fundamentals. Elaborate plays or complicated strategies didn’t seem im...

One of the most effective ways to maximize your chances of achieving the best residential real estate deal possible lies in your ability to partner effectively with your choice of a Holland area real estate agent. Your agent is your local guide through the complexities of Western New York’s market—your assistant, tutor, and trusted right arm in the enterprise of buying and selling a residence. It’s your Southtowns agent’s job to make the team an effective one—but for all parts to truly work as a...

  People approach the whole idea of owning a second home from a hundred different perspectives simply because a second home can answer so many different purposes. If you are an East Aurora homeowner at the stage in life where making retirement plans is becoming a more immediate imperative, you might want to buy a second home as a vacation destination—but one which is also a tryout for your family’s future center of operations. Those who have spent a good part of their lives in cities sometimes...

 Erie County mortgage interest rates have been so low for so long that there is the definite possibility that the real value they represent—for both South Towns home buyers and sellers—may now be being taken for granted.

It’s only natural. If you believe that past history is the best predictor of future performance, Last years’s common wisdom that mortgage interest rates in 2014 would head up to at least 5% or more wouldn’t have fazed you a bit. One quick glance at the squiggly lines on a char...

 

ABC’s Nightline recently aired an interesting segment about house flipping, which included a magic number that’s probably never been seen before. Western New York house flippers would have been glued to their TVs if they’d stayed up late enough to catch Nightline, because if authentically magical, it’s a good number to know.

The segment was part of a series called “Realty Check.” This one was about new strategies in the “ever-competitive world of flipping.” The show started with some backgr...