I just stuck my cuttings in a blue wal-mart freezer bag, and carried it on the plane back to Texas. If you get a chance to walk down the subdivision streets in Key West, You can get all kinds of tropical plant seedlings. It rains almost every day there, I found Jacaranda Tree seedlings where the street pavement meets the curb, on the street, I just pulled them up, with the dirt, and put them in a paper towel until I got back to the room. I went to Home Depot and bought some potting soil, and potted them in small coffee cups. They also came back to Texas in the blue Wal Mart bag, with 4 desert roses, and my cuttings. Barbra

I think you've gotten some good advice regarding the photos. Yours are much better than your agent's, and you could touch them up just a bit to reduce the glare (very fast & easy to fix in Picasa, which you can download for free). Your MLS photos are what are going to bring most buyers to see your house. Get your agent to showcase your house! (I hope there are exterior photos as well, or else it looks like you're hiding something) Surprisingly nobody has mentioned price here. I hate to say this, but it is a good possibility that your house is priced incorrectly for the market. If barely any houses in your neighborhood are selling, it might just be that the market is just dead and you'll have to seriously underprice the house if you really need to get it sold. (Case in point: my neighborhood, two houses similar to mine have sold in the past 6 months; 4 in the past 12 months. That's dead. Everybody else expired or withdrew. Most of the sold houses were estates, where the heirs just kept dropping the price until it sold, because they have no equity to lose, therefore dropping everyone else's property values even further.) I don't know where you are located, but I'm assuming that you don't live where houses sell seasonally (i.e. mountain homes don't sell during the winter much). If your market is moving, and your house isn't showing, then something is wrong. Check your MLS listing to ensure everything is correct - #BR, #BA, #garage, etc. - because it seems like your current agent isn't a stickler for details (flier address wrong? yikes!) and perhaps your MLS doesn't auto-fill from public records, or public records are wrong. Have your agent do another CMA for you and compare to the current listing price. Hopefully he/she will pay more attention to details when choosing comps. Around here (Florida), practically everyone is dropping their listing prices monthly to keep up with the dropping values. It's awful. (My most recent appraiser subtracted 5% per month from each sale over the past year to arrive at "current value".) Think about the type of search a buyer will do. What I mean is, dropping a listing price from $325K to $310K isn't going to pick up on any new searches, even with a shocking $15K reduction. You'll have to drop to $299K to get the buyers who are searching in the "$250-300K" range. Hope this makes sense. I'm only putting this out there for consideration - I hope you won't have to do anything this drastic. But these are the type of things that your agent should be thinking about. Your agent is a professional. You should be able to express your concerns and get good answers. It takes more than "marketing" to sell a home. A good agent doesn't just send out postcards and place ads and sit back and wait for buyers to come to the door. You can do that yourself. You are paying good money for expertise, and if you're not getting it, talk to your agent's broker (boss), and if you're still not happy, you can break your agreement for lack of performance. A professional will not take it personally. Some customers are not a good match. Move on. Disclaimer: I am a Realtor.

Hi Sunny, My DH and I are under contract to sell our NYC area condo and are about to go under contract to buy a townhouse in central NJ. Our condo was on the market for just about a month, and we sold for 93% of asking, which I think is about as good as you're going to get in this market. I attribute it almost entirely to our agent, who hustled and worked hard to market our home and negotiate with our buyer. So, if your agent isn't hustling and you're disappointed with her performance, you should consider looking for a new agent. There are so many realtors out there right now looking for work that there is no excuse for anything less than 100%. This is a tough time to be a seller, and you're paying your agent a lot of $$, so she should be working hard to sell your home! We tried to sell our condo in 2008 and were unsuccessful, in large part due to the inactivity on the part of our former agent (who had been recommended to me by an acquaintance). We knew that when we went back on the market this year, we needed to find an agent who would be much more aggressive in marketing our home. I found this agent by reviewing reports of recently sold homes (a local realtor posts these for free on her website; perhaps you can find something similar in your area). I determined that a particular office was doing the majority of sales in my town, and then through a bit more online research I found out who the top seller was in that office. I put two and two together and figured out that the agent must be doing most of the work that his office is doing in my area. I did ask our current agent about flyers. He doesn't use them (and gave his reasons why), and I decided to trust him on that and not worry about them. However, when we toured homes in the town we'll be moving to, almost every home had a brochure or flyer. So, if that is what is expected in your area, your agent should be providing those. There is NO REASON for you to have to print them up on your own---this is what she gets her commission for---to market your home! Every agent that I've talked to still posts in the newspaper as a matter of course, even though they all admit that it doesn't really drive many sales their way these days. But again, if that is what is done in your area, then your agent should be doing it. The two main factors that sell houses right now are proper pricing and excellent marketing. If you are priced at the top of the range, then your agent needs to make up for it with her marketing, convincing potential buyers and their agents why they should take a look and consider making an offer. It sounds like you're at a double disadvantage, and the way to remedy that is probably to fire the agent. Good luck!

First, sliders aren’t very secure, so almost any French door is going to be more secure. Years ago we replaced sliders w/ Anlin French doors in the DR. They use a multi-point locking system that is way more secure than the sliders. Ours are outswing, too, b/c if they were in-swing they’d be too close to chairs on that side w/ someone sitting on the chair. We got operating sidelights so we could have air flow w/ doors closed. I didn’t want a screen door for ease of entry/exit & looks w/ V-grooved glass. The sidelights are screened.