Congress Gives Home Buyers a Unique Opportunity

If $7500 would help you buy a home, the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, passed by Congress at the end of July, is definitely something you should investigate.

If you:

a) Haven’t owned a principal residence in the past 3 years

b) Don’t have an adjusted gross income of more than $75,000 ($150,000 if you file a joint return).

c) Buy a home costing more $75,000 or more before July 1, 2009.

you will probably qualify for the maximum tax credit of $7500 –which is in essence an interest-free loan from the government. (you do have to pay it back – but over 15 years, at about $500 per year for the full credit)

As with all government programs, the devil can be in the details, so be sure to visit Congress’s website at http://www.jct.gov/ and look for the publication JCX-63-08 on the home page.

There are several other tax breaks and options for homeowners and first-time buyers you can find out about in Publication 530 at http://www.irs.gov/.

Interactive Mapping ?

So what, you may ask, is interactive mapping???

It's actually a nifty new service offered by Google, which we have just added to our website. To see how it works, just go to www.WaterfrontPropertiesOfMaine.com, click on one of the waterfront property categories (coastal, islands, lakes, rivers. etc.) and voila! -- there is the "Interactive Map Locator" for that category.

This feature allows us, when adding a new listing, to automatically position a marker for the property on the map of the state of Maine.

It allows you to see where properties are located in the state and, when you click on any marker, a window pops up giving you a "thumbnail" photo and brief description of the property. Then, if it looks interesting to you, you can click on this window, which will take you to the full listing with several photos of the property, a location map, a topo map, local town information, body of water information -- and in some cases -- a "virtual tour" of the property.

As I recall, it was IBM that coined the term "Information Age" in the early 1970's, and it seems that since then we have been getting more information, on more things, and more rapidly, every year...alot of it over the internet

Which, if you don't let it submerge you, is OK.

I believe this is what visitors to our website want -- as complete and accurate information about waterfront real estate as they can get before they take the time to go visit it -- which is why we keep working to improve our website.

We are pretty happy with this new mapping feature, because this is one is one of the most frequent questions we get: where, exactly, in Maine is the property located ?

Now, you can know...

LAKE & POND PROPERTIES

Interactive Locator Map
(please wait for the interactive map to load)