My Home Improvement Live

Improvement Live As promised, federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled OMB’s dashboard application for monitoring federal IT projects this morning at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York City. We noted yesterday that the application would be one of the features of the newly redesigned USASpending.gov, which the White House re-launched last night.

Tags: administration sites, [...]

The Gannett Company, owner of the nation’s largest newspaper chain, will go through another round of layoffs soon, with an announcement possible in the next few days, executives said Tuesday.
The company’s United States and British newspaper divisions eliminated more than 10,000 jobs in 2007 and 2008, including about 2,000 layoffs last fall, Home Quotes [...]

In Palm Beach County, buyers who find fire-sale bargains at foreclosed-home auctions — picking up, say, $400,000 houses for $100,000 or less — are realizing they’re required in many cases to pay the same property taxes if the homes were still valued at $400,000.
Home Realty In Miami-Dade County, to the south, where 1 in 4 [...]

U.K. houses held their value for a second month in June as increased demand and a lack of supply supported residential prices, Hometrack Ltd. said. The average cost of a home in England and Wales was 155,600 pounds ($257,000), the London-based property researcher said in an e-mailed statement today. They stopped falling in May on [...]

Last night, NBC ran a cut-down version of the 2003 TV special that did more than any other piece of media “reporting” to turn Michael Jackson into a punchline and worse. Living with Michael Jackson is a documentary overseen by the British journalist Martin Bashir, who now co-anchors ABC’s Nightline. Home Quotes In 2003, however, [...]

For homeowners who have been thinking about reducing their carbon footprint by making their home just a little bit more environmentally friendly, but just can’t find the time to do it  Home Quotes; there’s a trendy new concierge service that can help.

Tags: american families, carbon footprint, concierge service, concierge services, efficiency, environmental conservation, little bit, [...]

Some Wichita brokers contend that steady home values are a new form of price appreciation with values falling on the coasts.Kansas was one of eight states recording home price appreciation in April, gaining 0.84 percent over April 2008, national real estate analyst First American CoreLogic reported.
“That’s consistent with what we’ve forecasted and consistent with the [...]

HGTV has announced the winner of their 2009 Green Home Sweepstakes in an episode that aired on their network on Sunday, June 29, 2009. The sweepstakes, which ran from April 17, 2009 through June 5, 2009, offered entrants the chance to win an environmentally-friendly home and a hybrid SUV vehicle, a prize worth $750,000. The [...]

Most mortgages available today require a 20 percent down payment — $70,000 based on the median price from the San Diego-based MDA DataQuick real estate information service. The median includes new and resale houses and condos. FHA, VA, other federal, city and state government programs can get you in the door for less down — [...]

There may be another culprit scuttling a U.S. housing recovery: low home appraisals. Flawed appraisals are derailing real estate sales and depressing values across the U.S., the National Association of Realtors said yesterday as it reported that existing home prices declined 17 percent in May from a year earlier.
Home Realty “It’s pointing to thousands of [...]