A person can make money with houses (and mobile homes) many ways, here are ten of them:
1. Buy low and sell high simply by using negotiating skills and market savvy. Bear in mind that every listing is acquired from an owner who is willing to sell at a price where he or she receives less than full market value, even knowing that the house is going to be sold for more money. Negotiation is a very highly paid skill.
In the race between the tortoise and the hare, if the hares are wheeler-dealers, managers are the turtles. Over the years I’ve noticed that the high-flyers of yesterday never seem to get to the finish line. Bill Zeckendorf and Bill Levitt were two of the giants who went broke after making billions of dollars. Why? There’s a simple reason for this; those who buy and sell make a lot of money while they’re doing it, but they have four adversaries that rob them of success.
I get a lot of questions from people who are trapped in houses that they bought only to re-sell for a profit. Now the market has stalled and they can’t afford to hang on to their property. What do they do? They list with a real estate agent (as if he or she had some magic potent that would suddenly produce buyers) and sit around hoping for the best. That’s about the same thing that their agent is doing too.
Continue reading “In a Buyer’s Market, Sellers Will Have to Learn How to Sell”
Continue reading “Finding Lenders With Overloaded Houses Which You Can Buy at Discount”
Continue reading “How Can People Buy if They Can’t Afford to Rent”
Last time we were trying to solve the riddle of being able to buy houses at today’s prices and rents that would be feasible as long term rental investments that would generate current positive cash flow. I think trading in one house for another is the solution, but it’s almost impossible to find two people who can make a straight property swap.
With the buy-sell market going through all sorts of gyrations because of the sub-prime melt-down, there seem to be very few choices left for real estate entrepreneurs who have been making a living buying, fixing, and selling houses. They can buy them and sell them by holding "paper", but this has severe income tax consequences. When property is bought for the purpose of resale, any installment payments are considered to be cash, and tax is due.
Continue reading “Maintaining Income When Buyers Can’t Get Loans”
For some reason or other, people act as if the banks should have the last say about what they buy, how much they pay, how much they pay down, and how much insurance they cover on a house. Oh, I know that the reason people let lenders run all over them is because they think that’s the only way they can buy a house; but this simply isn’t true. It’s one of those urban myths that give people an excuse not to buy houses. It’s what I call a failure of the imagination.
Continue reading “Maintaining Income When Buyers Can’t Get Loans Continued”
I keep hearing about how hard it is to sell houses today, or to even get people to come out and look at them. The vast majority of these complaints come from completely passive people with no selling experience or skills who either don’t list their properties and try to sell them without paying a real estate commission; hoping that a sign and a few cheap ads will get their house sold; or from those who list the house with a Broker and sit back to await results. Real estate can be a very lucrative business for passive investors and owners during a boom, but it takes imagination and a lot of energy to make money when sales slow. Certainly, you can buy houses for a lot less money and with creative financing, but unless you can sell that same house, you’re going to run out of money and credit pretty fast. You’ve also got to find a way to produce qualified buyers who can pay back your investment and produce a profit for you.
I still cold canvassed my neighborhoods, but instead of trying to buy houses, I tried to find owners who wanted to move up or down, or into another area. I’d work out some kind of trade in arrangement with them to get one of my listings sold. When each listed house sold, this produced another buyer in need of a house, so I’d take the sellers in tow and begin showing them other houses I had listed. This worked very well only because I was careful to list houses right on the market that would finance and sell easily with little fix up required.
