Enumerated below are some of the best tips that you can implement when you are looking for the lowest mortgage rates for your requirements.

Compare The Rates In The Market

It is imperative that you do not finalize the deal with the very first lender that you meet in the course of your search for a mortgage. You have to make sure to make an application with several mortgage lenders so that you can be in a position to compare the different rates that they are offering you first. Additionally, they would also be charging you different fees. This discrepancy needs to be analyzed and calculated in accordance with your requirements. On an average, it is recommended that you get a quote from at least three or four mortgage lenders so that you can be witness to a fair spectrum of the charges that you would have to pay as well as the mortgage rate that you would have to bear. There are many instances where potential home buyers voluntary avoid getting multiple estimates from several lenders as it might seem that it could potentially lower the credit score, however, this is a gross misconception. You would be well within your rights to research the market and the rates that are going to be offered to you without it being detrimental to your credit score.

Maximize Your Credit Scores

Perhaps one of the most crucial determinants when it comes to your mortgage rate is your credit score. Your credit score is indirectly proportional to the interest rate that you will be levied on your mortgage loan. For this reason, it is what is that you maximize your credit score. You would have to be certain to stretch your credit score up to the highest level. You can compute your credit scores through various portals online. There are several ways to amend your credit scores if they are not up to the mark. First of all, it is recommended that you pay off any credit card balances that might not have been charged yet. The available credit that you would have left is commonly known as credit utilization ratio. On an average, the utilisation ratio constitutes for a significant percentage of your FICO score. In simple words, the more of it that you have the lesser your credit score would be. Hence, it is always advised that you pay of your debts as soon as possible so that you can maximize your credit score and get a lower rate of mortgage on your upcoming loan.

Pay Your Balances Off

It is also recommended that you get all your balances paid off. If in case you have a collection account on your credit, you would have to remove that at first. To do so, you could either counter the negative account with the Credit Bureau or you could get the collection accounts removed from the report as an agreement between the collection agency and yourself.

If you have been on the lookout for the lowest mortgage rates in the BC area, you can solicit the services of Super Rates.

If your windows have started deteriorating, their seal has become weak, and your utility bills have grown, it’s time to replace your windows. As your windows age, you begin experiencing a cut in the energy efficiency of your home, as well as dust starts sneaking into your home.

Replacing windows can be a large undertaking and such decisions are not made overnight. You need to choose between the different window styles, consider options like glass coatings, as well as find the right window manufacturer and a reputable installer. This means a lot of careful planning and consideration goes into the process of window replacement. Most of the homeowners find this process overwhelming and ultimately they end up making some common mistakes. However, considering the cost involved and the crucial role windows play, it’s imperative to avoid these mistakes. So, to help you make the process as pleasant as possible, we’ve listed 4 common mistakes to avoid when replacing your home’s windows.

1. Not Considering Other Options for Replacement Windows

Most of the homeowners find it convenient to replace their windows with the exact same type or style that they already have. When you purchase exactly the same windows, you miss the opportunity of finding a better and more durable substitute for your home. There are plenteous designs, material, and styles of windows available on the market today. By simply changing the style and material, you may experience better energy efficiency and give a great new look to your home. For instance, you may replace your Double-Hung window with Casement window to get more energy efficiency.

2. Making a Selection Based Solely On Price

You don’t go about replacing your windows every year. Such an investment is made only once or twice in your lifetime which means you should not compromise with the quality. Remember, you get what you pay! Obviously, you need to find windows that fit your budget but this doesn’t mean that your final decision is based on price only. If you’re looking for affordable options, vinyl windows can be right for you. However, if you want windows that require little maintenance, fiberglass can be a perfect choice. You spend once on energy-efficient, beautiful, and durable windows and they give you benefits for years to come.

3. Neglecting Energy Efficiency

These days, most of the homeowners want to reduce their utility bills. As such, they look for energy-efficient windows that not only save energy cost but also protect the interior of the home from harmful sun rays. It’s seen that homeowners who made a hasty decision or purchase windows by simply looking at the price tag regret later. When you choose windows that are not energy-efficient, most of the heat escapes your home through these windows. But if you invest in energy-efficient windows, you will see a reduction in your energy bills.

4. Opting the DIY Installation

A big mistake is choosing the DIY route for installing your new windows. Some homeowners believe that self-installation could be a cost saver when in reality it’s a blunder. This is because you neither have the right tools nor the required skills that are necessary for perfect installation of windows. You have spent huge bucks for purchasing beautiful new windows but poor installation will result in expensive repairs and loss of energy in months to come. You don’t know how to properly seal the windows which means heat and air conditioning will escape and enter your home. Moreover, if installed incorrectly, you’ll also end up voiding all warranties on the windows. Therefore, tasks like this should be performed by professional window installers only.

A piano is one of the most expensive and antique possession. However, this fragile music instrument is also awkwardly-shaped and weighs around 1000 pounds. This makes it difficult to move, handle and protect from potential damage. When shifting to a new home, people are worried about how to safely move their beloved piano. This is because the instrument has an intricate design and even a slight bump on the road, a single drop, can damage it.

It is important to safely relocate the piano to a new place because if anything breaks or damages, replacing the parts of the piano and fixing is very expensive. For this reason, people are advised to avoid DIY for moving a piano, unless they have experience and know how to deal with it. It is best to hire a professional piano moving service to save your energy, time and money. The professional piano movers will provide you with insurance for the job and will guarantee perfect service. However, before you hire the piano movers, it’s better to keep certain things in mind to ensure you’re hiring the right people for the job.

Lifting and moving a piano needs plenty of manpower and special equipment. Therefore, piano owners rely on professional services. While looking for a piano mover, always find someone with experience to execute their job professionally. For a safe move, always be clear with the way they deal and read their website for details carefully, including the terms and conditions of the company. It is highly recommended to hire a piano mover who would give an insurance cover. This is to ensure that the moving company would take care of all the costs if the piano is stolen, scratched or damaged in any ways during moving.

The piano moving company you hire must provide door to door delivery. It is the responsibility of the movers to pick up and deliver the instrument directly to your destination. In the case of moving piano overseas, it is important to know every detail related to the ship transportation. The details include airtight packing of the piano, import duties, and other regulations.

Proper prepping is crucial to ensure that your piano would reach the destination in proper shape. Wrapping the piano in the right way is the key to safely move it without scratches and other damages. For proper wrapping; first, close the piano and wrap up the whole instrument with a thick soft blanket. Next, to ensure that it stays in place, secure the blankets with tapes. It is important to note that the tapes should not be in direct contact with the surface of the piano as it might blot its surface.

Don’t wait for the last time to call a professional for help because a piano mover should get some time to look at the dimensions of the piano and the destination place. This will help them in deciding the types of equipment and the workforce required according to your needs. They have to consider many things like narrow staircases, doorways, various levels of the building that needs to be navigated to make sure that no damage comes to your piano.

Pianos are not only fragile, heavy, and expensive; they also have great sentimental value. For all these reasons and many more, hiring an experienced and professional piano mover for moving any type of piano is the best option.

CHANDIGARH: A group of youth from Chandigarh have got together to organise the unorganised sector of property leasing and connecting it to the digital world and making it a customer friendly process. This startup is designed to cater leasing solutions to all the sectors of the industry i.e. commercial, residential, warehouses and industrial – one-stop shop for all your leasing problems. It caters to both landlord and tenants, besides also giving assistance in rented accommodation. Every property listed has its genuine pictures and no property is listed without the pictures.

The core team of the startup also includes Founder & Chairman Manmeet Singh, 38, Neha Duggal, 30, from the hospitality background, and Sakshi Bagga, 25 from management background, both co-founders of the startup. etolet.in was launched on Friday at INNOV8 Co-Working Space in Industrial Area Phase I.
Giving the information, Manmeet Singh, said, “I am a landlord myself and well aware of all the problems faced by landlords and tenants these days in leasing their properties. After facing all the challenges we decided to launch a solution for leasing properties.”
He said, “Locality view is our outstanding feature which showcases the entire locality including parking area to have a better view of the surroundings. We have special feature that let you save your favorite property on SMS. It sends you the required details and you can access it without the internet.”
“We also provide assistance for every transaction which is made between landlord and tenant is through etolet.in where we also process properties that fall under low foot fall markets. We are online but are physically present for Executing Agreements and handing over the possessions to tenants”, added Mr. Singh. The startup etolet.in promises to give full assistance to landlords at their door step and online assistance to tenants.

Union home ministry has tasked Living Tired  Custodian of Enemy Property (CEP) of India to prepare a complete status list of enemy properties following which the Centre plans to act and take possession of all such properties.

A top government source said there are 9547 enemy properties, having estimated worth of more than Rs. 1.1 lakh crore, scattered in important cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bhopal, Hyderabad and Lucknow etc.

“There are court cases pending against 1215 properties. Most of the other properties are under illegal possession and occupation at prime locations in key cities, and can be used to serve government needs that are falling short of space in premium locations.”

Enemy properties are those abandoned properties which the government took over when their owners chose to leave India and move to Pakistan and China after Partition and the 1965 and 1971 wars.

“It is better if the government takes possession of all such enemy properties before they also get mired in court cases that linger on for years,”said the source.

Recently, the government has taken possession of 31 such properties and decided to give their possession to the central reserve police force (CRPF) and border security force (BSF) that facing space crunch for their offices.

The Government of India had created the office of CEP under the Enemy Property Act, 1968 soon after the 1965 war to tackle the growing list of abandoned buildings and their encroachment.

The new move comes after the government failed to pass an amendment in law governing enemy property.

The amended act says once the custodian’s office becomes responsible for a property, it shall continue to remain enemy property even if the original owner ceases to the country’s foe. Besides, the law of succession will not apply to enemy property and cannot be transferred as well.

The bill failed to pass in the Rajya Sabha because of protests by the opposition parties following which an ordinance was promulgated to keep the amendment in force.

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MUMBAI: Mark Zuckerberg-owned Media Focus  social networking behemoth Facebook is the latest social media titan to join the race for the media rights of BCCI’s biggest property, the Indian Premier League. Twitter has already evinced interest in IPL’s digital rights.

BCCI sources confirmed to ET that Facebook has picked up the IPL tender and is most likely to bid for the digital rights of the league. A Facebook spokesperson, however, said: “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation.”
Earlier this year, Facebook had streamed Premier Futsal on its video platform Facebook Live. In August, it streamed Wayne Rooney’s testimonial match between Manchester United and Everton. It also allowed fans to chat with other fans, send wishes to Wayne, and learn how to donate to his foundation. In the summers, Facebook streamed nine USA Basketball exhibition games live.

“We’re focused on helping our partners experiment with a variety of Live content types — from ‘behind the scenes’ access to first-person athlete Q&As to live games. We have seen great results when we have streamed games live — and continue to be interested in testing the viability of this content on Facebook,” the spokesperson added. “We will continue to work with our partners to find the best ways to connect their content to the world’s largest community of sports fans.”
Interestingly, Facebook has been seeing a jump in conversations during IPL year-on-year. During IPL 2016, Facebook said that the league drove the highest level of conversation it has measured for any IPL season — 360 million posts, comments, and likes.

Facebook pages of the IPL and eight teams totalled over 140 million video views during the season. Also, during the 50-day tournament, the IPL’s Facebook page added over two million new fans touching 18.3 million subscribers.
Facebook will join the likes of Amazon, Twitter, Reliance Jio, Times Internet and broadcasters like Star India and Sony Pictures Networks India (SPN). ET was first to report that Twitter has also joined the race, hinting at a very competitive bidding for the digital rights.

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It’s a Monday afternoon, My Amend and property tycoon Cecil Chao and his daughter, Gigi, are poring over architectural plans in their 49th-floor headquarters in Hong Kong’s Central Plaza, their backs to sweeping views of Victoria Harbour. The chairman and vice chairman of Cheuk Nang Holdings are busy with an array of big residential and commercial projects in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Malaysia.

Their professional relationship belies a lot of history. Generating headlines worldwide, Cecil offered $65 million four years ago to any man who could woo his daughter into marriage, though she was already married to a female partner. Some 10,000 men responded. Headlines flared again in early 2014 when he doubled the offer and Gigi countered with a public letter to Cecil asking for acceptance and respect.

Looking back, Cecil, 80, explains that he made the offer to give his daughter male options, believing that she had struggled to find acceptable boyfriends. After Gigi, 37, spurned the idea, he accepted her decision. “It’s her life,” he concedes. “She decides about her private life.”

For her part, Gigi, a practicing Christian, clearly loves and respects her father, believing that his inten- actions stemmed from love, not malice. “It’s been tragic and comic,” she says, “to have something so private in the open and to become a laughing stock of dinner conversations.” She says the saga helped her develop “humility, patience and character” and increased her capacity to forgive.

Still, she is weary of discussing the subject, which even now generates unwanted emails. “I’m tired of the random notices from men trying to seduce me,” she says. “It has become an engine of online fraud, with impersonators of me or my father going after these men for ‘emergency money’ while stranded abroad, or in some ‘lucrative’ deal.”

While most father-daughter bonds would likely snap under such glaring pressure, the Chaos’s has not. In Octo- ber 2014, Cecil named Gigi, the oldest of his three children and a fellow architect, the heir to the company.

In the new Cheuk Nang headquarters—the company sold nearby Cheuk Nang Plaza last year for just over $100 million—father and daughter are in constant communication. Cecil, dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt with a gold iPhone in the front pocket, is positioned at the far end of his palatial office. There’s a trading terminal for his private investments as well as Chinese and European classical artwork and antiques, including his mother’s inlaid Italian marble table and six blue upholstered chairs Net Maddy.

Just outside, between Cecil’s secretary and the three-person design team, Gigi stands at a high desk wedged into an open space. Her black vest sports the insignia of Faith in Love, a foundation she started in 2008 to help economically struggling youth and elderly. Hanging on the wall are colourful contemporary prints as well as her appointment to the Hong Kong Air Cadet Corps. Books, binders, and stacks of documents are within easy reach while course notes for a law degree she’s pursuing are taped on the window, slightly obscuring the view.

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Global private My Latest News equity firm Blackstone Group Lp, the largest owner of office real estate in India, plans to list two separate real estate investment trusts (REITs) for its office assets with developer partners, said multiple people familiar with the development.

For its office parks in the National Capital Region (NCR), and west India (Mumbai and Pune), Blackstone will collaborate with Pune-based Panchshil Realty for a REIT with about 20-25 million so. ft of office space across cities.

The proposed REIT includes office parks and buildings, some of them jointly owned by Blackstone and Panchshil, such as Eon Free Zone and Panchshil IOCC Park in Pune, 247 Park and Express Towers in Mumbai. There are also assets Blackstone owns independently, such as the two office parks that it had bought out from IDFC Ltd in Pune and Noida, and the Oxygen SEZ in Noida.

Blackstone’s other REIT with Bengaluru-based Embassy Property Developments Pvt. Ltd will have a south India-focus. Valued at around Rs22,000 crore, this REIT will have a larger portfolio with more than 25 million sq.ft of office space. It is also at a more advanced stage, with Embassy having filed an application for approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) in October Soul Crazy.

“If all goes well, the Blackstone-Embassy REIT will first go for a listing sometime in mid-2017. The Blackstone-Panchshil one is likely to file a REIT application early next year and then list at the end of 2017 or in the beginning of 2018,” said one of the persons mentioned above who did not want to be named.

As per norms, both REITs can include under-construction office space of up to 20% in each of their portfolios.

Blackstone declined to comment.

REITs are listed entities that primarily invest in leased office and retail assets, allowing developers to raise funds by selling completed buildings to investors.

Since 2006, Blackstone has invested $2.7 billion in 19 transactions involving real estate projects and currently manages the largest portfolio of office parks in India. It owns 31 million sq. ft across 16 operating office parks (apart from an additional 8 million sq. ft under development). Besides office parks, Blackstone has also started buying out retail assets such as shopping malls and has made a few residential investments in recent years.

“The Blackstone-Embassy REIT is likely to enjoy the first-mover advantage and grab the attention of investors. What will be a determining factor for the following REITs, be it Blackstone’s second with Panchshil or for the other developer-investors, is the price the first REIT commands as that will set the overall tone for office REITs,” said another second person cited above, also on condition of anonymity.

India’s real estate sector has witnessed tough times in the past three years, particularly the residential segment where sales have been slow. Property prices have stagnated, leading to a liquidity crunch for many developers. However, even in this situation, commercial office space has emerged as a bright spot with steady momentum in leasing, investors buying office space at high valuations and good demand in large cities.

Other companies acquiring and consolidating their office assets and firming up plans for a REIT are RMZ Corp. and K. Raheja Corp.

India’s largest real estate developer, DLF Ltd, is in talks with investors such as Blackstone to sell a 40% stake in its rental assets arm to raise about $2 billion, Mint had reported on 31 August.

DLF is the second largest office space owner in the country, after Blackstone.

“Blackstone has steadily built a very worthy portfolio of investible, good grade office assets. These are properties that have a good mix of tenants, combined with healthy cash flows. For investors, REIT is all about stabilized yields that entail less risk,” said Shobhit Agarwal, managing director, capital markets and international director at property consultant JLL India.

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