How to Max Out Your Curb Appeal Before You List

Summer brings more than heat, it brings moving trucks, yard signs, and buyers cruising slowly past houses, deciding in seconds whether a place is worth seeing inside. You can have a beautifully updated kitchen and perfectly staged living room, but if the exterior looks tired or neglected, many buyers will never make it to the front door. Curb appeal doesn't just make your home look pretty but it sets expectations, affects perceived value, and can directly influence how quickly and strongly buyers are willing to make an offer.

That's why it pays to treat your front yard, façade, and entryway like the opening chapter of your home's story.

The first, non-negotiable step is cleanliness. A spotless exterior might not earn compliments, but a messy one will absolutely draw criticism. Realtor Amber Donnelly of CENTURY 21 Tahoe North reminds sellers that buyers often view the front of the house as a reflection of what's happening inside. Fallen branches, pine needles, leaf piles, and cobwebs around light fixtures all send the message that maintenance might be lacking. Before you hit the market, clear debris from beds and lawn, sweep the entry and driveway, power wash dirty surfaces if needed, and make sure gutters and downspouts aren't streaked or overflowing. The goal is for the house to look quietly well cared for, not like you rushed to tidy up an hour before the showing.

Once things are clean, pay attention to how "alive" the front of your home feels. A façade that's all brick, siding, or stone with no greenery can seem stark and uninviting, even if the architecture is beautiful. Interior designer Connie Vernich notes that adding organic elements softens hard lines and makes the entry feel more welcoming. Evergreen shrubs such as juniper or holly can provide year-round structure and frame the house, while seasonal or regionally appropriate flowers bring color and charm. Landscape designer Cate Singleton suggests viewing your front yard the way you'd view a room: it needs a mix of heights, textures, and focal points, not a few lonely plants scattered around.

Planters are an easy way to introduce that layered look without tearing up your yard. Landscape designer Lisa Mierop encourages homeowners not to obsess over perfect symmetry. Instead of placing two identical pots with identical plants on either side of the door, try grouping containers of different sizes filled with complementary but varied plants. Think tall grasses paired with trailing vines and blooms in a coordinated color palette. The slight asymmetry and variety feel intentional and modern, drawing the eye toward the entry.

If your budget can stretch beyond plants and clean-up, paint is one of the most powerful upgrades you can make. Designer Emily Barry of Rehabitat Interiors points out that a fresh exterior color can make an older home feel current almost instantly. She also warns against defaulting to bright white trim, which can sometimes date the overall look. Matching the trim to the body color or choosing a softer, related tone can create a more cohesive, elevated façade. Even if a full repaint isn't in the cards, freshening peeling trim, railings, and shutters will keep the house from reading as tired.

When a full exterior paint job isn't realistic, turn your attention to the front door. It's often the first thing buyers focus on when they approach the house, and a drab, scuffed door is a missed opportunity. Heather Goerzen of Havenly calls the front door "the eye candy of the space," and she's right: a well-chosen color instantly injects personality. Swapping a generic dark brown or faded black for a rich blue, deep green, or other inviting shade can completely transform the feel of the entry. Treat this like any other paint decision: test several colors, and check them at different times of day so you see how changing light affects the tone. The right color should complement your siding, roof, and landscaping rather than fight them.

Lighting is the final layer that can make your home stand out, especially in the evenings when many buyers drive through neighborhoods after work. One lonely fixture over the door doesn't do your house any favors. Designer Diane Schmunk recommends using uplights to wash the façade in soft light, which adds warmth and dimension and makes architectural details pop. You can also add sconces near the door or above the house numbers so visitors can easily find the address, line walkways with low path lights for safety and ambiance, and uplight key trees or larger shrubs to give the yard more depth after dark. The idea isn't to make your home the brightest on the block, but to create a gentle, inviting glow that says "well loved" instead of "afterthought."

When you put all of these elements together which include a clean, clutter-free exterior, thoughtfully placed greenery, strategic paint choices, an inviting front door, and layered lighting, you're doing more than making your home photogenic. You're telling buyers, from the sidewalk, that this is a property that has been cared for and is worth their time. In a busy summer market, that can be the difference between someone driving past and someone pulling over to schedule a showing.

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Louisiana’s Michoud Plant Joins the New Space Race with Starlab Deal

New Orleans East is taking a front-row seat in the next era of human spaceflight. Vivace, a Texas-based aerospace company with long ties to NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility, has been tapped to build the primary structure for Starlab. Starlab is a commercial space station backed by Voyager Space and Airbus that aims to be in orbit before the end of the decade.

The contract positions Michoud, already a historic hub for space hardware, at the center of a high-stakes competition to replace the International Space Station and capture a share of the growing commercial space market.

Vivace, founded in 2006 and headquartered in San Antonio, has operated at Michoud since 2012. From its New Orleans East manufacturing center, the company will lead development of Starlab's main aluminum structure, which the project's backers say will be one of the largest integrated pieces ever built for launch into low-Earth orbit.

Starlab is designed to host up to four people at a time that will include a mix of researchers and private space travelers, in orbit. In addition to scientific work in microgravity, the station is being pitched as a platform for in-space satellite manufacturing and as a logistics node for future deep-space missions.

The Starlab venture is led by Colorado-based Voyager Space and European aerospace giant Airbus, with additional partners including Mitsubishi Corp., MDA Space and Palantir Technologies. Strategic collaborators range from Hilton, which has been involved in early habitat design work, to Northrop Grumman and The Ohio State University.

Starlab CEO Marshall Smith framed Vivace's selection as a key milestone in proving the project's seriousness to NASA and other potential customers.

"Starlab is meticulously engineered to deliver scalability, reliability and mission-critical research to our partners," he said in a prepared statement, calling the Michoud manufacturing plan an important step toward turning the paper design into hardware.

For Michoud, the agreement extends a long lineage. The 829-acre facility, owned by NASA, has been a production site for everything from Saturn V rocket stages during the Apollo era to external fuel tanks for the Space Shuttle and core stages for the Space Launch System. Today it hosts NASA operations alongside roughly 20 aerospace and high-tech firms, with Vivace among the most established.

The Starlab work will rely not just on Vivace's floor space and workforce, but also on the technical ecosystem that has grown up around the site. The company said its U.S. government partners at Michoud will provide structural analysis support, specialized testing infrastructure and subject-matter expertise as the design is finalized and full-scale manufacturing begins.

"Leveraging Vivace's facilities in Louisiana, we are proud to contribute to this significant project supporting U.S. and allied leadership in human spaceflight," said Steve Cook, Vivace's chair.

State leaders were quick to tout the announcement as a win for Louisiana's advanced manufacturing ambitions. Gov. Jeff Landry praised the decision to use Michoud as a central element in Starlab's build, saying the partnership underscores the facility's value as a national asset and a driver of local economic activity.

The timing of the deal is no accident. NASA is preparing for life after the International Space Station, which has been continuously occupied since 2000 and is expected to retire in the 2030s. The agency has made clear it does not plan to own and operate the ISS's successor. Instead, in 2021 it launched an initiative to seed privately developed stations that NASA can use as one customer among many while it shifts its own focus toward missions to the moon and Mars.

That policy has sparked a modern space station race among commercial operators. Starlab is one of several competing projects vying for NASA support and future contracts. Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, and Sierra Space are co-developing a station concept called Orbital Reef. Axiom Space is pursuing its own design, beginning with modules that will initially attach to the ISS before separating into an independent outpost.

All of these companies are trying to prove that their concepts are technically sound, financially viable and capable of serving both government and commercial users. Securing a manufacturing base at Michoud allows Starlab's backers to point to a concrete industrial plan as they court NASA, international space agencies, universities and private firms interested in microgravity research or in-space production.

If schedules hold, the Starlab station could be operational as soon as 2028, providing an overlap period with the aging ISS and giving NASA and other partners time to transition their experiments and crews.

For New Orleans and Louisiana, the project's significance extends beyond aerospace bragging rights. It signals that Michoud's role is evolving along with the space industry itself. Coming from a site dominated by government-owned vehicles to a mixed environment where public and private missions are built side by side.

As Starlab's design is refined and aluminum frames begin to take shape on the factory floor, Michoud will again be sending large, complex structures skyward. This time, instead of supporting a single national space station, those structures could form part of a global, commercially driven network in orbit—one in which Louisiana's industrial base plays a quietly central role.

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Making a Mortgage Work in a High-Rate World

Mortgage rates have been elevated long enough that both buyers and homeowners are feeling boxed in. Many would-be buyers are sitting on the sidelines, hoping for a big drop that makes monthly payments more manageable. At the same time, a huge share of existing homeowners are locked into much cheaper loans they took out years ago, making the idea of refinancing into today's higher rates look irrational on paper.

That doesn't mean taking out a mortgage right now is automatically a mistake. It does mean you can't be casual about it. In this environment, you have to treat the rate you accept as something you've actively negotiated and planned for, not something that just happens to you.

One place to start is understanding the big forces that are likely to move mortgage rates from here. The Federal Reserve's policy decisions, announced after Federal Open Market Committee meetings, shape expectations for borrowing costs across the economy. If inflation measures, especially core PCE, come in hotter than expected, markets tend to assume the Fed will keep rates higher for longer, which pushes mortgage rates up. Softer inflation data usually has the opposite effect. On top of that, policy choices like tariffs add another layer of uncertainty by affecting growth, prices and investor sentiment. None of this is under your control, but ignoring these signals while "waiting for the right moment" is just guesswork by another name. At a minimum, you should understand that rates could easily drift sideways or even rise from here instead of assuming a sharp, painless drop is right around the corner.

Because most forecasts only call for a modest move lower, you do not want to lean entirely on the hope of cheaper money later which is risky. If average 30-year rates slip from the low-7% range into the low-6s, that's helpful, but it doesn't magically make homes affordable in markets where prices keep climbing. And the same drop that encourages you to finally jump in will likely pull thousands of other buyers off the bench too, which can drive prices even higher. Waiting purely for a slightly better headline rate can backfire if the home you want becomes more expensive or faces heavier competition when you finally act.

That's why temporary rate buydowns have become so prominent in the current market. A buydown allows you (or a seller, or even a builder) to pay up front so that your rate is artificially lower for the first one, two or three years of the loan. In theory, this buys you time where you can you get a more comfortable payment now, and if rates ease in the meantime, you refinance into a permanent lower rate before the buydown expires. Used well, it's a bridge through a rough rate environment. Used blindly, it's a way to lull yourself into taking on a mortgage you can't really afford at the true note rate. The critical question is what happens in year four and beyond. If you would be in trouble when the buydown ends and you don't get the refinance you're hoping for, you're relying on speculation, not planning.

The current market does at least give buyers one advantage they haven't had for a while which is to leverage to negotiate. With fewer people lining up for each listing than during the pandemic frenzy, sellers and even lenders are more willing to work to make a deal happen. Instead of only pushing for a lower purchase price, it can be smarter to ask the seller to pay closing cost credits that you then use to buy down your interest rate. Over a 30-year term, a slightly lower rate can reduce your monthly payment far more than a modest price cut will. But again, there's nuance here. A seller-paid rate buydown is valuable only if it doesn't tempt you into stretching beyond a safe budget just because the payment looks temporarily smaller. Your focus should be on what you can still handle if market conditions don't cooperate.

Refinancing in today's environment also requires more scrutiny than it did when rates were dropping like a stone. If your current mortgage rate is already below 6%, refinancing purely to "get a better rate" when current averages are higher is almost certainly a losing trade. You'd be taking on new closing costs and resetting your loan term only to pay more interest, not less. That said, there are scenarios where a refinance can still be rational. If you're using it to consolidate high-interest debt and you have the discipline not to run those balances back up, or if you're able to remove private mortgage insurance or switch into a shorter term with a meaningfully lower total interest cost, it might be worth it. But those are targeted, specific goals—not vague hopes that "refi is always good."

If you are leaning toward refinancing for any reason, getting preapproved early and then watching the rate tape with your lender is a smarter approach than waking up one morning and deciding to refi because rates dipped a quarter point. Preapproval allows you to move quickly when there's a brief drop, instead of missing it while you're still filling out paperwork. Even then, you should only pull the trigger once you've added up the closing costs, run a realistic break-even analysis, and confirmed that the new payment still fits your broader financial plans.

In the end, high mortgage rates are inconvenient, not impossible. They force you to think in terms of trade-offs instead of wishful thinking. Tools like temporary buydowns, seller concessions, and selective refinancing can absolutely make the numbers work, but they can also mask long-term risk if you only focus on the first year's payment. The smarter play is to keep one eye on the macro picture, including Fed decisions, inflation, and tariffs. Keep both feet firmly planted in your own reality which includes your income, your savings, your debt and how long you actually expect to stay put.

If you come across a home that fits your life and your budget at a payment you can sustain even under less-than-perfect conditions, passing it up while you wait for the "perfect" rate can end up being more expensive than acting now. In a market like this, a solid, well-thought-out plan will beat wishful waiting almost every time.

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How to Lock In a Better Mortgage Rate When Borrowing Still Feels Expensive

Mortgage rates have finally eased from their recent peaks, with the average 30-year rate slipping to about 6.13%—the lowest level in three years. That's a genuine improvement, especially if you watched rates hover well above 7% not long ago. Still, for many buyers and homeowners, borrowing costs are nowhere near the ultra-low pandemic era, and when you combine today's rates with elevated home prices, the monthly payments can feel uncomfortably high.

The good news is that you're not stuck just hoping rates magically fall further. Even in a market where borrowing remains expensive, there are concrete steps you can take to improve the rate you're offered. Lenders are heading into a slower season for real estate, which means they're often competing harder for each customer. If you're willing to do some work up front, you can use that to your advantage.

The first and most important strategy is to treat lenders like any other competitive business and actually shop them. Many borrowers still walk into the bank where they keep their checking account, accept the first quote, and never look back. That's a mistake. Different lenders price loans differently, and those differences can be significant—sometimes a quarter of a percent or more on the rate, plus big swings in fees. You should be requesting quotes from several types of providers: traditional banks, credit unions, online lenders, and, if you're open to it, working through a mortgage broker who can compare multiple wholesale offers at once. When you do, be methodical. Use the same basic assumptions each time—similar loan type, term, down payment, and closing timeframe—so you're actually comparing like with like. Then look beyond the headline rate. A "great" rate paired with thousands in extra fees, or a lender with a reputation for slow, painful underwriting, may end up costing you more in money, stress, or both.

Improving your own financial profile is just as critical as choosing the right lender. Mortgage pricing is fundamentally about risk, and your credit score is one of the main ways lenders measure it. The better your score, the cheaper your loan is likely to be—especially if you're using a conventional mortgage. Going from the mid-600s to the mid-700s can shave anywhere from a few tenths of a percent to a full percentage point off your rate, which can add up to tens of thousands of dollars in interest over the life of the loan. For government-backed programs like FHA or VA, credit scores matter somewhat less in the rate calculation, but they still influence your options and approval odds.

That means you should not walk into a mortgage application blind. Pull your full credit reports from all three major bureaus through AnnualCreditReport.com, check for errors, and dispute anything that's clearly wrong. Then focus on the basics: pay every bill on time, avoid opening new accounts unless absolutely necessary, and work on lowering your credit card balances so your utilization ratio stays low. If your score is under about 700, you may be leaving serious money on the table by applying too soon. A few months of disciplined cleanup can be worth far more than any promotional lender offer.

You should also be willing to question whether the standard 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is actually the right fit for your situation. It's the default product in the U.S. for a reason: predictable payments and long-term stability. But it isn't the only choice. Shorter-term loans, like a 15-year fixed mortgage, typically come with meaningfully lower interest rates. The trade-off is a much higher monthly payment, since you're paying the loan off in half the time. If your income is strong and you're more concerned about total interest cost than monthly cash-flow flexibility, this can be a powerful way to save money over the long run while enjoying a lower rate from day one.

Adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) offer another path, but this is where you need to be especially clear-eyed. ARMs usually start with a fixed teaser period—five, seven, or even ten years—at a rate lower than a comparable 30-year fixed loan. After that, the rate adjusts periodically based on a benchmark index and a margin. If you know you're likely to sell the home or refinance before that initial fixed period ends, the lower starting rate can be a real advantage. However, the risk is obvious: if rates are higher when your adjustment date arrives and you're still in the home, your payment can jump. ARMs are not inherently bad or irresponsible, but they demand an honest look at your timeline, your job stability, and your tolerance for uncertainty. Choosing one just to maximize your buying power in the short term, without a clear plan, can come back to bite you.

Buying mortgage points is another lever you can pull, but it's not automatically a smart deal just because it lowers the stated rate. Points are essentially prepaid interest: you pay an upfront fee—often around 1% of the loan amount per point—to reduce your interest rate by a small fraction. That lower rate then applies for the life of the loan. Whether this makes sense depends entirely on the math and your plans. You need to calculate a breakeven point: take the total cost of the points and divide it by the monthly savings from the lower payment. If you spend $2,000 on points and save $100 per month, you recoup your cost in 20 months. Live in the home longer than that and the savings can compound nicely. Leave earlier, or refinance too soon, and you may never fully earn back what you paid.

A rough rule of thumb is that points tend to make more sense if you're confident you'll stay in the home at least two or three years past the breakeven date, and if you don't expect rates to drop so sharply that you'll be refinancing right away. If the payback period stretches beyond three years, the benefit becomes more questionable, especially in an environment where future rate cuts are a real possibility. You're tying up cash up front on a bet that might not pay off if the broader market shifts.

Through all of this, the common thread is that you need to be thorough and intentional rather than passive. Treat getting a mortgage like any other major financial decision: gather information, compare options, and ask tough questions. Talk to more than one lender. Probe how rates and fees are structured. Work with a loan officer or broker who is willing to walk you through scenarios, not just push you toward the product that's easiest to sell. Be honest about how long you plan to stay in the home and how much risk you're truly comfortable with.

You may not be able to recreate the rock-bottom rates of the pandemic years, but you don't have to settle for whatever number appears in the first quote you see, either. By strengthening your credit, exploring different loan structures, running the numbers on points, and actually making lenders compete for your business, you can tilt the odds in your favor—and turn a merely "okay" rate environment into a deal that works for your budget and your long-term plans.

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