Sunday, August 26, 2012


Basements can frighten homebuyers

August 26, 2012, BY  JENNIFER V. HUGHES

As Irene Bressler lists her Ridgewood home for sale, she's touting the updated kitchen, the luxurious great room and the large wall of windows that overlook the half-acre property.
What she won't be bragging about is the basement — there isn't one. And that's just fine with her.
"I think it's a blessing that we don't have a basement," said Bressler, whose home is in the town's Salem Ridge neighborhood, which has many basement-less homes. The five-bedroom colonial is listed for $658,000.
Bressler loves the fact that she never worries about flooding and jokes that it helps her keep a lid on clutter.
"Everyone has stuff they haven't used in five years, but I think we have less stuff," she says, noting that the home has ample storage in the upstairs bedrooms and closets as well as the garage. "It forces you to not use your basement as a catchall."
Basements can be somewhat polarizing in the world of real estate.
"People have very definite tastes about basements," said Bressler's real estate agent, Beth Freed, a broker-associate at Prominent Properties Sotheby's International Realty in Ridgewood.
For every buyer who worries about flooding, she says, there's a buyer who desperately wants the basement for a home-entertainment room or a play space for the kids, a man cave or extra storage. Still, many real estate agents say buyers are wary about basements, especially when they are finished, wondering what lies behind that drywall.

 Read the rest of this interesting article HERE and don't hesitate to let us know how we can help you and protect your legal interests.
-Daniel Barli, Esq.



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Sunday, August 19, 2012

Tax consequences of selling your property depend on if you lived there

 - August 19, Bergen Record
Q. I recently sold a town house and was concerned about how much tax I would be responsible for paying. I sold it for $375,000. There was no mortgage on the property, and I hadn't lived in it since 2007.
I had done a lot of improvements on it to increase its value for sale and had hopes of claiming it on my taxes for 2013. Is there some sort of estimated formula I could use to estimate how much I could expect to pay in taxes?
If this had been your primary residence, we would be happy to tell you that you don't owe any tax. In fact, if you had simply lived in the home for two of the last five years, or through 2009 if you sold it in 2012, you still wouldn't owe any tax as long as your profit was less than $250,000 if you're single or $500,000 if you're married.
However, that doesn't seem to be the case here. You didn't supply all of the information we need to assess your situation, but we can make some educated guesses about what has happened and point you in the right direction.
Let's start with how profit and the cost basis are calculated. When you sell a home, the IRS wants to know not only how much you paid for the property, but what capital improvements you made to the property (adding a room or replacing the roof, as opposed to painting a bathroom), and how much it cost to sell. If you add up the costs of purchase, sale (including the commission) and capital improvements, you will get your cost basis. The profit is calculated by subtracting the cost basis from the total sales price....

Read the rest of the article here and let us know how we can help you in the sale (or purchase) of your home!


-Daniel Barli, Esq.


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