As Summer heats up and the kids are out of school, we turn to ideas for entertainment. What can you do that will not cost a ton of money and keep everyone entertained? Why not try "Camping at Home"? This is the perfect time to put down our phones (exception -> photos) and spend quality time together playing games. I promise you that this is the stuff that kids will remember. I used to buy a few outdoors toys in the Spring and hold off giving them to my kids until a hot day and I heard the ubiquitous phrase, "I'm bored". Here you go, let's set up this ladder toss game and have some ..read more

The winters in Rochester, NY will put any home to the test.  Winters are cold and snowy which in turn can wreak havoc on your home if you are not prepared.  If you are new to living in cold weather or a new homeowner, figuring out how to winterize your home is a key component of basic maintenance and preventing major damage. One of the most common problems you might experience if you skip out on winterizing your home is burst pipes.  Especially those pipes that might be exposed in your basement or attic, not just the interior wall pipes. When water freezes in pipes, it naturall ..read more

Erin Rossi (00:00): Welcome to Hamlin, New York, a waterfront community that celebrates both history and agricultural alike. Established in 1852, it was originally known as Town of the Union, but was later changed to Hamlin after Abraham Lincoln's Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin.   Erin Rossi (00:17): Hamlin also serves as an agricultural community thanks to its mild climate due to its proximity to Lake Ontario. It also is the home of Hamlin Beach State Park, which serves as a space to enjoy the beauty of Lake Ontario as well as its sandy beaches and now is your chance to experience the ..read more

Today, we're going to talk about painting. It's one of the best things that you can do to your home, to make it actually worth more money. And everybody gets in their new home and obviously wants to paint. Step one, is actually prep. You want to make sure that you do a lot of great things, to make sure that the stuff under the paint looks really good too. Number one thing is to fill nail holes. We're probably going to have some nail holes from the last person that lived there. The one tip that I'll give you on that, is you want to make sure that when you fill a nail hole, and unfortunately I ..read more

Hey guys. Today, we're going to actually talk about probably the most important thing we do talk about, which is real estate. We're going to talk about the steps that you take when you're looking to buy a home. So what are the logical steps someone takes when they're buying a home? That's what we're going to talk about today. So, number one step is, you need to identify a real estate agent that's going to be able to help you through that process. The first thing you're going to want to do is, you're going to want to actually find somebody that's going to have a meeting with you, what we call ..read more

Hey guys, step three. So I'm super excited about this step, because this is the most fun step. This is actually when you actually start going out and identifying properties that you love. So we're going to start that search obviously on the internet nowadays. We're going to dig into it and find out what is going to be an important property or important property features that are going to be important to you. Sometimes that can be driven by location, features, a particular need. It could be a second home that you're looking for waterfront properties that are easy to rent. So we're going to help ..read more

So step two in the process of buying a home will be to actually meet with a loan professional and go through your actual particulars. Now, if you're paying cash, obviously you're going to be able to skip this step and go right to step three, but we're going to sit down and help you through that process, if needed. We have some great resources, some great companies that we work with and professionals that we've hand selected with our 20 plus years of experience here in this market. So we've particularly picked people that actually are really great at what they do, and aren't doing it as kind o ..read more

Hey, I'm Nora from NORCHAR Real Estate, and today I'm going to show you around my hometown, Brighton in Rochester, NY! I've lived here practically my whole life, so let me show you around my favorite spots. Okay. Now we're headed to Bagel Land. Brighton has the best bagels, in my opinion, and Bagel Land is my favorite place to get them. Hi, so now we're at R's Market, it's my favorite local grocery store. I love the local ingredients, and it's just great to go in a pinch if you got to get eggs or something. Let's get our masks on and go in. I didn't get any clips of me talking about it, but t ..read more

Craig Schneider from NORCHAR Real Estate here! Today we're going to talk about first time home buyers, our most exciting thing. And our first call is actually from Sally, from Greece. Her question is, is what is the minimum credit score you need to qualify for a new home? It does change a little bit based on actually the bank you're using. So that does have an effect on things, but there's also a bunch of compensating factors that play into it too. So we have seen people get qualified as low as 550, but the average person or average consumer is going to need to have at least a 620 to 640 credi ..read more

Craig Schneider from NORCHAR real estate: Hey, guys. We're on our second question, and this one is actually from Allie in Irondequoit. Her question is, is right now a good time to buy a house? Well, that's going to be completely driven on your particular situation. But I will tell you, what normally is a reason to buy a house is most people are taking a mortgage out. So there's never been a better time, because we are once, again, historically low interest rates. They're very, very low, and that affects your buying power, giving you more opportunity to buy more homes. We live in what's called ..read more