Individual sellers can learn a great deal from mass-market homebuilders.

Take curb appeal, for example. There's a good reason builders skip every other lot when putting up model homes. Or leave out lawn-gobbling driveways. Or build models uphill from the street, never downhill. All these tricks of the trade are designed to make their homes loom as large as possible.

But while you can't rip out your driveway or make the house next door disappear, there are steps you can take to make a good first impression. If you don't try at least a few, you may not get a second chance to wow buyers with the inside of your palace. In other words, all the emphasis on interior home staging -- prepping a home's interior for maximum appeal -- could be for naught if you ignore the exterior. You have only a few key moments to spark someone's drive-up interest, so it pays to put your best facade forward.

Not many buyers will make up their minds from the curb alone. But many have found the outside of a house so unappealing that they didn't bother to go inside.

Fortunately, you can beef up your home's exterior for less than $500 and a weekend's worth of time. Power washing a stained walk or driveway is labor-intensive, but not that expensive. Ditto for trimming the shrubs, mulching the garden and planting colorful flowers.

If you have the time and money to go all out -- say, by replacing discolored siding, replacing worn-out windows or adding shutters -- you should be able to recoup most of your out-of-pocket cost.

According to the latest "Cost vs. Value Report" from Remodeling trade magazine, the projects offering the greatest return on investment involve what could be called "curbscaping." Seven of the 10 top-ranked projects are siding, window or door replacement jobs, with cost-value ratios above the average 71.6 percent.

"The high value of replacements is due partly to their relatively low costs," editor Sal Alfano said, commenting that most "immediately improve curb appeal."

But, again, you don't have to go to that much trouble to make your home's exterior more inviting. All it takes is a critical eye toward detail and the desire to create attractive finishing touches that stand out from the street.

For starters, take a step back. Walk across the street and look at your place the way first-time visitors will see it. Give it a wide view, searching for positive features that can be highlighted and negative elements that can be hidden or even eliminated.

If it will help, take a photograph of your house to use as a basis for the improvements you want to make. Since color can affect your perception of problem areas, stick to black and white film, which shows the greatest contrast -- or the lack thereof.

The most obvious exterior improvement is a fresh coat of paint. Nothing creates impact more than color. Since different people have different tastes, keep it neutral, with earth tones as the main hue and stronger shades to accent the windows and doors. Keep in mind that two or three colors are enough to make a statement.

If painting the entire exterior isn't an option, consider painting at least the doors, shutters or window frames to give your place a little pop. If your front door is made of wood that has been painted, consider stripping off the paint and staining the wood, which is much more inviting.

Your front door should be visible from the street. If it isn't, add an arbor or other landscape element to point visitors in the right direction.

Potential purchasers are just as likely to show up after dark as in the daytime, so replace your front-door light fixture with a brighter, shiny one. Also think about laying down landscape lighting. And remember to keep the lights burning in the evening. You never know when a buyer might be on the prowl.

If you have a front porch or stoop, clean or replace any furniture out there and add new, colorful throw pillows. The idea is to give visitors a place to stop and enjoy the front door.

For a little extra spark, add a polished door knocker. Replacing an old, tarnished lockset and accenting the doorway with decorative pots or planters also are good ways to add vitality.

If you have a garage, especially one that faces the street, treat those doors the same way. If they are in bad shape, replace them. In some houses, garage doors take up half the front or more, so they contribute -- or subtract -- from curb appeal like any other element.

Remember to keep the doors closed at all times so visitors will feel the impact. You want people to see your smile, not be able to peer into your mouth.

Don't neglect the walk and driveway. They need to be clean and free of cracks. Put the kids' toys, the hose and other gardening tools out of sight.

Fresh grass or sod is another cost-effective way to dress up your property. Seeding, of course, is the least expensive way to go, but it takes time for the seed to germinate. Sod is faster but far more costly, especially if you have to hire someone to do the work. But it might be best for curing those bald spots in the lawn.

Either way, make sure you start the process long before the house goes on the market. The last thing you want visitors to see is a bunch of stakes and ropes that cordon off freshly planted areas and signs that warn folks to "Keep Off the Grass."

Chances are you already have shrubs and trees, so you probably won't have to invest in these key design elements. But make sure they are trimmed and tidy. Remove dead leaves, branches and debris, and add fresh mulch to dress up planting beds.

If your place is going on the market in the growing season, adding flowers is a minimal investment with a maximum payout. Fences and gates are far more expensive, but they are an excellent way to frame your entire yard and set it apart from your neighbors.

Millions of borrowers will pay off their mortgages this year. But sending in that last payment is not the end of the line. It's the beginning of the end, perhaps, but not the end itself. So don't burn those mortgage papers just yet.

For starters, call your lender about a month after you've made the final payment to make sure that you have, indeed, satisfied your debt. You may not be as current as you think.

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes a long-ago payment never reached its destination, so you're actually a month behind. Or perhaps a late charge is still outstanding for a payment you forgot to make. Or maybe your escrow account is a little short and there's not enough money for the lender to pay your taxes and insurance one last time.

After your mortgage is paid in full, the lender or the company that services your loan on behalf of the lender will prepare a document known as a "satisfaction of mortgage," to be recorded at the county courthouse.

The satisfaction "piece," as lawyers like to call it, is much like the notice that automobile lenders stamp on the auto titles they return when car loans are paid off. The only difference is that while a lender's rubber-stamp statement is proof enough for most state governments that a car lien has been satisfied, a satisfaction of mortgage is a legal document that must be recorded to be valid and actually release the lien on a property.

Without that last step, title or escrow companies will be unable to verify that a mortgage has been paid off. And if they can't do that, they won't issue a clear title when the owner tries to sell the place, whether that's now or 10 years down the road.

Fortunately, the lien release process usually goes off without a hitch. But once in a while, a release isn't filed or recorded, and a buyer's lender refuses to close. This can hold up a sale for as long as it takes to clear the air, maybe months.

In some cases, the original lender is no longer in business. In others, ownership of a loan has been transferred, sometimes so often that the trail is difficult to trace.

With this in mind, when you call your lender to make sure you've met all your obligations, ask about the procedures regarding the satisfaction document. Most states require lenders to file the release on your behalf, but a few places still allow lenders to hand off this important step to their borrowers.

Either way, the cost usually ranges from $20 to $40, according to Aurora Marsh of Rekon Technologies, a Pasadena, Calif., company that provides lenders with software to electronically create and record lien releases and other documents.

In the do-it-yourself jurisdictions, borrowers sometimes are not told how to proceed, or they simply don't read or understand the instructions. And whether the release is thrown out with that day's mail or filed away for safekeeping, the lien is still there. The loan has been paid in full, but until the release is recorded, the lien is in place.

The process of sending the original release to the county, having it recorded and getting the satisfaction back for your records normally takes 30 days. But it can take up to 60 or even 90 days in jurisdictions that do not accept releases electronically and/or are not otherwise equipped to handle the job.

Marsh says more than 700 of the nation's approximately 3,600 recording districts accept releases electronically from authorized submitters, including title companies. If the process works properly, the submitter should receive electronic confirmation within three business days that the satisfaction has been accepted or rejected.

The most common problem with lien satisfactions is that they don't conform to the recording office's requirements. Perhaps the wording is wrong, the page size is incorrect or the format is not right. Or maybe insufficient fees were submitted with the release.

Another possibility is that the lender's name is incorrect. If the entity signing the release is not the same as the one that put the lien in place, it will be rejected, says Marsh. "Lenders often fail to use the phrase 'formerly known as' when they have acquired the original lender."

If the original lender has been taken over by another institution or has gone out of business, it may become necessary to hire an attorney to create an affidavit on your behalf attesting that the loan has been paid in full to present to a judge.

Or the escrow or title company can create and sign a release when the lender is unable to do so. In California, for example, if the escrow company does not hear back from the lender after 75 days, it is allowed to create a release on its own.

Often, though, the title company has enough internal capabilities to trace your loan's lineage, from one lender to another or one servicer to another. Usually, the history can be found right away, but sometimes it can take weeks or even months.

If your lender was a now-defunct bank or savings institution, you might be able to find your loan's current owner on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. website (www.fdic.gov), which maintains a list of all failed banks and the investors that acquired their assets.

If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, can builders and developers land homebuyers via the same route?

That may be something of a stretch, but food-related amenities are fast becoming a way to make today's new home communities stand out from the competition.

For example, a few years ago, developers would have asked authorities to chase away any food truck that set up shop near their community centers. And if a homeowner turned his backyard into a farm, the community association probably would have objected.

Now, mobile dining and urban agriculture are the rage, and forward-thinking developers are welcoming vendors and gardeners as part of their amenity packages. Call these new edible community features "gastronomic extras."

Mobile kitchens are helping to energize many downtown markets at lunchtime, and they can do the same at master planned communities, according to panelists who shared their best ideas on what it will take to succeed at a recent Urban Land Institute (ULI) conference.

Mobile vending used to be the sole purview of ice cream trucks and food and vegetable wagons. But now, a wide variety of gourmet and ethnic meals are being served from vans and even pickup trucks.

These meals-on-wheels are welcome not only at lunchtime but also in the late afternoon -- say, just after school -- or any other regularly scheduled time, such as during sporting events.

"Creative retail is a wonderful thing," said Theresa Frankiewicz, vice president of community development at Crown Community Development of Naperville, Ill.

Just as hot as mobile dining is urban farming. In fact, agriculture is supplanting golf courses as today's must-have amenity, said Randal Jackson, president of The Planning Center/DC&E, a consulting firm headquartered in Santa Ana, Calif.

One good thing about gardening is that developers don't have to devote big acreage to it, which is important with today's downsized projects. Whereas golf courses can easily gobble up a couple of hundred acres, community garden plots may require as little as an acre.

Some builders are offering storage sheds, arbors, greenhouses and even vegetable beds as options. One well-stocked backyard garden can produce enough produce to feed the entire block, according to one ULI panelist.

Following the same food-based theme, Adam McAbee of John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Irvine, Calif., recently noticed a couple of attention-grabbing features that are intended to stick in visitors' minds long after they've left the premises.

One, in a San Diego market with a predominantly Asian buyer profile, was a wok kitchen, offered as an "extended prep" area off the main kitchen. Another was a sales office that looked decidedly like a French countryside cafe, where prospects could linger and sip coffee.

Creating a social infrastructure has long been as important to developers as streets and sewers. But nowadays, that means going beyond intranet systems and clubs, especially if the property is large enough to support retail and commercial components.

Anything that gives a project a sense of place and encourages social interaction will create value, the ULI panelists stressed. It could be a trout stream, such as the one running through a Salt Lake City project, or a riverside park, such as the one below a spaghetti freeway in Houston.

One of the best tools for bringing people together is restaurants, according to developers. "You buy a couch once every 10 years, but you eat three times a day," said Jonathan Brinsden of Midway Development, the developer of the CityCentre mixed-use property built on an old mall site in Houston.

Other people magnets are athletic clubs and hotels, if the properties are large enough to support them.

"Athletic facilities are part of our daily lives now," Brinsden said. "And public spaces are so ingrained in our DNA that they are the most valuable acres in our project."

Todd Meyer of the SWA Group, a worldwide planning, urban design and landscape architecture firm, agreed.

"People like to get out and enjoy open spaces," he said. "They are great gathering spots anybody can walk to at any time. But they can't be sterile or boring. People need to have things to do, so create the kind of venue where people like to mix with each other."

But the project doesn't have to be big to be bountiful. Take Taxi, a 20-acre live-work-play property being built on the site of an old taxi garage just outside downtown Denver.

As relatively small as it is -- six buildings with 25,000 square feet of commercial and residential space -- about 400 people work for more than 80 different companies at Taxi. Occasional seating and dining areas can be found along the halls, which are called streets.

The two-story, low-rise project is a place where the younger generation can escape the high-rise culture and express themselves, said longtime Denver developer Morton "Mickey" Zeppelin.

"It's sort of like not having to make your bed in the morning when mom isn't home," he said.