Can Your Kitchen Pass the Food Safety Test?

It's that time of the year again when we think of spring cleaning the Berkshires and getting our home ready for the season to come.  Here in the Berkshires this time of year is known as the mud season and everything around us is an earthy brown.  Then the brown blooms into a kaleidoscope of pastels [...]

Credit crunch?  Can't borrow?  For those who are overleveraged or have bad credit then it possibly is true.  However, for the great majority of Berkshire and Bennington County buyers, credit is readily available particularly at small and midsize local and regional banks where mortgage lending continues to be a mainstay of their business [...]

Home sales decreased only 3.6 percent in December 2008 over December 2007 compared to a decrease of 20.5% from November 2008 to November 2007 indicating that the "slippery bottom" described in previous reports is alive and well.  While one month of improvement does not signal the end of the housing recession, it does indicate that despite [...]

Mortgage rates continue to drop, and some of the nation's largest banks are offering loans below 5 percent. Chase Bank advertised a 4.75 percent 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage, Wells Fargo's rate was 4.875 percent, and Bank of America was at 5 percent on their Web sites recently. The rates are for borrowers who have a 20 percent down payment [...]

Top 10 Museum Exhibits

1. Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective

The wall drawings of Sol LeWitt are art's equivalent of gifts that come with "some assembly required." LeWitt was a pioneer of Conceptual art. For him the idea behind a work was all important, the execution a secondary matter. So a LeWitt wall drawing was simply a set of [...]

Those of us fortunate enough to live in Williamstown are really rather reluctant to tell too many people about it because, well, we like it like this. Everyone knows how beautiful Martha's Vineyard and Block Island are, how swanky the Hamptons are, how upscale Newport is, and just how crowded and expensive they all are but well, again, we [...]

The recently unsuccessful vice presidential candidate added a memorable phrase to our repertoire but like her bid for office, the rallying cry for rampant oil exploration missed the [...]

The following is a summery of the new requirements, attached are links to the division of fire and safety's website where you can find additional information. Note: significant differences in regulations exist state by state. Be certain to be fully informed as to the regulations in the state in which your property transaction takes [...]

In the go go '90's mortgage brokers were writing an ever increasing percentage of loans, taking business away from the traditional lenders, the banks and S & L's. Many of us well remember the so called S & L crisis from the 70's when there were unfortunate abuses taking place that sank some major S & L's, principally in the west and [...]

Traditionally, buyers in the northeast are pretty scarce from the beginning of November until around mid February. Why? Weather, job cycles, holidays. Some years have seen exceptions such as the winter of '04-'05 and one or two winters during my 34 year career but those are rare. Much more common are the slow winter months when buyers, like [...]