Selling a San Mateo County home? Sellers need to be aware, with real estate prices continuing to tread along the bottom, it's a tough time to sell.

It's even more important not to make some of these dumb mistakes when trying to sell your San Mateo County home.

These are just a few of the mistakes you could make when selling a San Mateo County home. If you'd like more home selling tips, we have those for you at this site under the "Home Selling Tips" category.

As always, if you have questions, please don't hesitate to contact us or post them using our comment form.

Home Buyers Find Bidding Wars Again

Home buyers nationwide are being caught by surprise as the spring selling season swings into high gear. Bidding wars are back!

Many buyers are finding themselves competing for the same house. Unlike the bidding wars of the past, these recent bidding wars are the result of a shortage of inventory.

Sellers, meanwhile, are not seeing huge price increases or hefty profits, like some did during the boom years when prices were going through the roof. Competitive bidding in this current enviornment is being caused by tight inventories. More evidence that housing demand is starting to pick up again after a six-year slump.

According to a Wall Street Journal quarterly survey, the inventory of homes listed for sale declined sharply in all 28 markets they track. At the height of the housing crisis in 2008, there was an 11.1 months' supply of home for sale. In March, there was a 6.3 months' supply. Real estate agents normally consider a market to be balanced when there is a six month supply of homes for sale.

An index recently reported by the National Association of Realtors measuring the number of contracts signed to purchase previously owned homes rose in March to its highest level in nearly two years, up 12.8% from a year ago, and 4.1% from February.

Market inventory varies in different parts of the country, but the general consensus nationwide is, the number of houses for sale is edging down.

Inventories seem to be declinging for several reasons. Some sellers have taken their homes off the market to wait for prices to increase and market conditions to improve. Investors, meanwhile, have been outmaneuvering consumers for the best properties, often making cash offers that are quickly accepted by anxious sellers.

Improvements are obviously investments in your home, and most homeowners have a list of things they'd like to do to their home to make it their dream home. Things like: gutting the kitchen, reconfiguring the bathroom or repainting the entire outside of the home.

Some economists say inventory levels are artificially low because Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the nation's largest banks have been slow to list hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes they own. Lenders slowed down the foreclosures after record-keeping abuses came to light 18 months ago.

If those same banks and lenders step up their efforts to unload their properties, inventories could quickly rise, putting pressure on prices again.

Even with bidding wars popping up again, pushing prices higher in some areas, many homes are still selling for prices much lower than they were a few years ago. Meanwhile, rents are rising at a time when mortgage levels have fallen to or near record lows. Many renters are finding rates so low they can now afford a house that was out of their price range just a year or two ago.

Housing markets face another danger. More than 11 million homeowners owe more than their home is worth, causing the trade-up market to completely stall. When homeowners can't sell their home, let along come up with the down payment for their next home, move up buying tends to dry up.

Mortgage lending standards remain very tough. Many "deals" fall apart because homes won't appraise for the price buyers have agreed to pay, and sellers are not willing to come down even more than they already have.

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Mortgage Rates Remain Near Record Lows

Mortgage rates have dipped to near record lows again, keeping home buying and refinancing very affordable.

Last week, mortgage buyer Freddit Mac reported the rate on the 30-year fixed rate loan had dropped to 3.88%, down from 3.9% a week ago. The rate hit 3.87% back in February, the lowest long term mortgage rate in history.

The average on the 15-year fixed rate mortgage dipped to 3.12%, down from 3.13% the previous week. The national average hit an all-time low of 3.11% just two weeks ago. Average rates do not include extra fees, aka points, which most borrowers have to pay in order to get the lowest rates. One point equals 1 percent of the loan amount.

So far, record low mortgage rates have done very little to boost home sales. Analysts suspect that a record warm winter may have something to do with that, as many sales that would have normally taken place during the spring buying season, actually took place in January and February.

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Spring Cleaning For Your Finances

With Spring in full force most everywhere now, and tax season once again behind us, now is a good time to do some "spring cleaning for your finances" to help you eliminate some of the paper clutter, and get better organized.

Here are some tips on Spring Cleaning for Your Finances and your office record keeping…

We welcome your comments and suggestions below.

San Mateo County home prices rose for the first time in 10 months, according to the S&P/Case Shiller composite index released recently, an encouraging sign the battered housing sector is starting to stabilize.

It was the first time home prices have gained since April 2011. That gain was itself an anomaly in a string of declines stretching back to May 2010.

San Mateo County Home Prices Likely to Remain Weak

Yale economics professor Robert Shiller, the co-creator of the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index, believes the San Mateo County housing market is likely to remain weak and may take a generation or more to rebound.

Shiller, the co-creator of the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index, told Reuters Insider a weak labor market, high gas prices and a general sense of unease among consumers was outweighing low mortgage rates and would likely keep a lid on home prices for the foreseeable future.

David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor's, cautioned that while there were some pieces of good news in the report, some areas saw home prices still continuing their decline.

The S&P/Case Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas gained 0.2 percent in February on a seasonally adjusted basis, matching economists' forecasts. Seven of the cities saw home prices drop on a seasonally adjusted basis, while home prices in two cities were unchanged. On an unadjusted basis, 16 of the areas slumped further.

Home prices in the 20 cities fell 3.5 percent year over year, moderating from the previous month's decline of 3.8 percent.

"Looking forward, we think homes sales will continue to trend upward, which ultimately will result in a slower rate of home value depreciation," said Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow. "But any housing recovery will be dependent on job growth. Continued progress in this area is essential to keeping the housing recovery, such as it is, on track."

San Mateo County home renovations, in general, now exceed the dollar value of expenditures on newly constructed single family homes.

This trend is not only in San Mateo County , according to federal estimates, but it is having a profound effect on real estate markets all across the country.

Housing Scenarios

Maybe you can say you fit one of these scenarios.

• You've been reluctant to sell because you don't think you can get what your house is worth…

• Buying a home seems out of reach because it's so difficult to qualify for a mortgage…

• You've decided it may be smarter to improve the house you already own and just stay put for a while…

The National Association of Home Builders' remodeling market index recently hit its highest level in five years, which only underscores this home remodeling trend.

Many San Mateo County home renovations companies are seeing a significant jump in interest in renovating, especially from owners who have been in their houses for years, have built up some savings and managed to get through the recession without falling behind on their mortgages.

San Mateo County Home Renovations No Longer About McMansions

San Mateo County home renovations are generally the projects where people are no longer thinking along the grand, McMansion show-off scale; they're smaller, more modest, less costly efforts than five to seven years ago, with more emphasis on finishing details and quality than square footage.

Many of the San Mateo County home renovations being made are not ones where the owner worries about immediate paybacks from their improvements. Most owners understand that the boom-time expectations of 100 percent immediate returns on their investment are gone.

Most people are happy with modest returns, which is right in line with what's happening overall in the San Mateo County real estate market: a slow, modest recovery, spurred by modest and realistic expectations about where we're headed and how fast we'll get there.

The San Mateo County housing market bottom is not going to be a date on the calendar. More likely, the market's bottom represents a series of events that set up the San Mateo County housing market for recovery.

What Has to Happen to the San Mateo County Housing Market First

According to Stan Humpries, chief economist at real estate website Zillow, "The market bottom is a multi-step affair. First, home sales have to bottom out, which they did in early 2009. Then, long-horizon buyers such as investors, 2nd home buyers, and retirees move into the market."

Even though the San Mateo County housing market has seen some decent sales activity this buying season, economists still predict home prices to decline a bit more on the whole, mostly because a big chunk of sales in coming months will be distressed properties.

Humphries points out that "A big part of it goes back to figuring out the 'bottom of the housing market' and the annoying little fact that no one can really predict when it will occur. For obvious reasons, consumers tend to not want to fork over thousands of dollars for something they know will decline in value, even if it's only in the near term."

Humphries goes on to say, "…for those who continue to wait out 'the bottom of the housing market,' lower prices aren't their biggest enemy, the specter of rising interest rates are.

With rates hovering at historic lows, there's really only one direction they can go and a higher interest rate can cost consumers a lot more over the long term than if they wait for home prices to drop a few thousand dollars more.

Don't Try to Time the San Mateo County Housing Market

Every time San Mateo County housing cycles and buyers try to wait for the bottom, they invariably miss it while thinking they can figure out where the bottom is, and a combination of rising home prices and higher interest rates add up to cost buyers a lot more than if they had taken advantage of prime buying times, which we seem to be in right now.

Humphries sees 2012 as an inflection point for the housing market, albeit on a super local level.