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.

Continue reading “Pyramiding Equities Tax Free”

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.

Continue reading “Prospecting For Buyers”

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.

Continue reading “Prospecting For Buyers Continued”

Even in a local real estate market, there are vast differences between what houses are doing in different market sectors within the same market. Where I live, sales of houses that cost more than $300,000 have slowed considerably; and houses that cost more than $450,000 have stopped dead. I know because we got caught with an upscale fixer-upper and after 6 months of trying to sell it, accepted an offer $45,000 below appraised value. Why? Because we got all of our money back and could buy something else.

Continue reading “Opportunities Abound in Every Market”

For most of the last eight years, when interest rates were higher, I was able to buy houses subject to the mortgage or with seller financing all day long.  There were weeks when I would do 2, 3, 4 deals a week or more.  Life was good.

Continue reading “Time To Change Your Course Again – Where The Opportunities Are”

Over the past few months lenders have been conducting heavily advertised auctions of hundreds of foreclosed houses where opening bids have been about a third to a half of the value prior to the recent down-draft. Not everybody who has spent the time and money to obtain lists of these houses and to do due diligence has made out very well. Some of the properties were over-valued. Some were in poor condition, having been vacant for a long time. Some were in declining areas. Some were of poor quality. That’s not the worst of it:

Continue reading “Beware of Buying Too Soon in this Market”