Q: Our 25-year-old daughter has just landed her first job in New York. Her pay is dismal, but she has about $80,000 for a down payment on a condominium or cooperative apartment in Brooklyn. My husband and I want to help her out, but we don’t think co-signing a mortgage is a good idea. Can we be her mortgage company and loan her the mortgage money at market rate? I fear she won’t qualify for a loan, as she earns only $32,000 annually.

Susan K.

Monterey

If real estate finance is the art of the possible, what’s possible right now for home buyers and sellers worried about rising mortgage rates, Wall Street bond market jitters and soft home prices?

Plenty. Although certain aspects of today’s post-boom marketplace may look scary on any given day, most of the traditional problem-solving tools of real estate finance are still at your disposal, whether you’re a buyer or a seller.

Interest rates of 6.75 percent and higher needn’t be deal breakers or impediments to selling or buying. Just talk to veteran mortgage or real estate professionals who’ve worked through periods of double-digit and high single-digit interest rates in the 1980s and early ’90s and you’ll get some valuable perspective.

West Portal, one of San Francisco’s smallest and most neighborly neighborhoods, is about to get much bigger. And Arden Wood, one of the city’s finest remaining examples of an urban forest, is about to get smaller.

The Christian Science Nursing Home has reached a nearly $18 million deal with a developer to build on its 12-acre Arden Wood site, which includes 4.6 acres of urban forest.

That lovely chandelier hanging over your dining room table could also wind up hanging over your closing.

In a real estate transaction, chandeliers are generally considered “fixtures,” a category that covers anything attached to a building, such as the plumbing. They are included in the sale of a house. Anything that isn’t affixed, such as furniture and draperies, is “chattel,” or personal property, and doesn’t convey. The difference between the two is a common point of confusion in a sale.

“It really is a peculiar area of the law, and you want to be careful as a buyer or a seller,” said Barrett Kime, a lawyer in Washington, D.C.