Selling your home can be one of the most exciting times in your life. An opportunity to move to a new location and hopefully make a profit from the sale of your home is important. Before you get too excited about seeing the “Sold” sign out on your lawn there are several common mistakes that many home sellers make.

There are certain things everyone is looking for when house hunting. They make a home more valuable and, as a result, they also increase the price. Some prefer these things to already be present in the space they’re considering to buy while other would rather do them themselves.

For the first time, the Chinese have become the biggest foreign buyers of apartments in Manhattan, real estate brokers estimate, taking the mantle from the Russians.

China’s great real-estate bust has begun, says Nomura. A combination of a huge oversupply of housing and a shortage of developer financing is producing a housing market downturn that could drive China’s GDP to less than 6% this year.

Billy Gasparino and Jenna Dillon-Gasparino were savvy enough to wait out the housing boom of a decade ago as renters. Not until 2010, well into the bust, did they buy a house in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, less than a mile from the beach, for $810,000. Only four years later, the couple see new signs of excess in the housing market and have decided to go back to renting. They are close to a deal to sell their house – for $1.35 million, a cool 67 percent gain.

After excavating your mega-basement in Holland Park, it’s cheaper and easier to leave the JCB entombed down there with the pool, personal cinema and staff quarters.

This 420-square-foot studio in Manhattan can transform into five different rooms and is on the market for just under $1 million.

The buyer, an Italian, was in town for a week, with a million or so dollars to spend. We met one Sunday morning at 20 Pine, a Financial District condo building. She wore a red scarf, jangly jewelry, and a pair of lime-green sunglasses perched atop her curly hair, and she told me she would prefer to remain anonymous. Working through a shell company, she was looking to anchor some of her wealth in an advantageous port: New York City.

Would you like to own an entire town? If you have $400,000, you could be the new owner of Swett, South Dakota.

If you ever wanted a little slice of Italy, here's your chance. An entire alpine village is up for sale on eBay. The auction for the town of Borgata Calsazio, just a few ski runs away from Turin, is real, with a "Buy it Now" price of a mere $333,057.

New York City moved just a little closer to all-out class warfare over the weekend, when the Department of Housing Preservation and Development approved a plan for an Upper West Side condo building with a separate door for the poorer people who are being allowed to live there

If the old saw about houseguests being like fish is true - after a few days they begin to stink - imagine what it must smell like in poor Cory Tschogl's 600-square-foot condo in Palm Springs, California. Tschogl entered into an agreement through the popular Internet site Airbnb to host a man and his brother for a 44-day period from May 25 through July 8. (Airbnb connects travelers looking for low-cost accommodations with locals who in turn rent them rooms in their homes.)

Maksym Pashanin and Denys Pashanin. The man refusing to leave a Palm Springs, California, condo rented through Airbnb has been involved in a number of other questionable activities, including a Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $40,000 but hasn't delivered the product. He appears to regret nothing, telling Kickstarter backers that he would "squat again."

How to Make Your Home Stand Out to Buyers. How can you sell your home fast? Here are several ideas that you probably never thought of.

Housing prices have skyrocketed in a residential area of Pyongyang where the foreign embassies are located as North Koreans are scrambling to move to that area, expecting to use the embassies’ Wi-Fi, North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity (NKIS) — a Seoul-based think tank — reported on August 6. The world wide web has long been totally banned in North Korea.

Like many cities, Buffalo, New York, is facing a glut of abandoned homes and lots. There are roughly 16,000 vacant lots and 4,500 vacant homes throughout the city.

A Washington man who recently closed on a home in Northeast Portland was shocked to find a family had recently moved in and changed the locks. Rod Nylund said he learned about the occupants, who he assumes are squatters, last week when a contractor he sent to do work at the home called to tell him it was occupied. Nylund called police and confronted the occupants, but said the officer was unable to do anything about it.

So many of us are clueless about business and finance. Here's why that's just the way the investment class likes it

It's where the Waldorf salad was invented; it was the first hotel to offer room service; and it has its own railway platform to Grand Central, large enough to fit FDR's car. The historic tidbits about

Daniyar Nazarbayev, the ultra-rich nephew of Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, is now leasing his equally ultra-luxurious four-bedroom at The Plaza Hotel for $55,000 a month, reports the N

Rendering by AvoidObvious | Spector Group A new 16-story residential sliver tower will squeeze its way skyward from a narrow lot at 10 West 17th Street, situated just a block from foodie-hub Union

Three million dollars can barely buy a new townhouse in Brooklyn these days, but it could be enough to purchase a bundle of more than 6,000 foreclosures up for auction in Detroit.

One Wall Street firm has an idea that's raising eyebrows: forgive some student debt for first-time homebuyers.

Rental prices for Moscow's most expensive apartments fell 17 percent last year, according to a forthcoming IntermarkSavills report, with analysts blaming multinationals fleeing Russia and a collapsing ruble for the dip in rates. Demand for high-priced apartments — properties with monthly rental rates between $4,000 and $10,000 — fell 9 percent last year, compared with 2013, according to the IntermarkSavills report, which blamed the drop...

According to a recent international report, Vancouver has the second most affordable housing market in the world, but some people are beating the prices by going small. Really, really small.

Jay Shafer has been designing and building tiny houses since the late 90s. Through his company, Four Lights Houses, he sells tiny-house plans, from a 98-square-foot miniature Craftsman called the Zinn to the 288-square-foot Marie Colvin, whose pint-sized columns are embellished with stonework. Shafer, who also leads workshops and offers his services as a builder, has been written up in the New Yorker and even once welcomed Oprah into his 96-square-foot home for a video tour, in which he...

An ornate apartment, reinvented by the interior designer Howard Slatkin as his own urban sanctuary, is poised to enter the market at $10 million.

In China, it’s hard to find a city that has not built ambitious new districts on its rural periphery. But overbuilding has led to ghost towns: Towering rows of luxury apartments sit completely empty, especially in smaller cities in China’s hinterlands. The lifeless streets seem to contradict official claims that these new developments will become booming, globalized cities. In this Op-Doc video, I profile one interesting solution: the rent-a-foreigner industry.

Carnegie Mellon students partner with Ford on a conceptual scanner that catalogs your stuff, making packingand unpackinga cinch.

Troubling inequities are revealed when you look at the country by total property values.

In modern-day Vancouver, policies at all three levels of government are leading to another great generational wealth transfer – not on Russia’s scale, perhaps, but certainly the largest in the city’s history

The famed Waggoner Ranch stretches “as far as the eye can see.” Now, after 20 years of litigation, two brokers are courting prospective buyers.

One family hoped their new home would bring a fresh start. But the house held secrets that would cause them years of heartache. By Will Hunt and Matt Wolfe.

The 300-room hotel in Italy has had more than one “grand opening,” but it hasn’t hosted a single guest. Italy is well known for its delizioso pasta, bello countryside, many beaches and often dysfunctional politics. But it also boasts at least one “ghost” hotel. Most Americans have never heard of Grande Hotel de Calogero. But the hotel complex in Sicily has been under construction for decades and has never hosted a single guest. The story of this hotel offers a window...