Loveland Real Estate Resources

Despite conventional wisdom about when investors should buy, most investors are running spooked from our current market. With stocks at fire sale prices and falling house prices in most markets, you may be wondering, should I hold tight and not take any risks in this uncertain market, or should I jump in and "buy low"?

The good news is that if you choose to employ a long term strategy with real estate investing, then any market can be good for buying. It's impossible to know when a market will bottom out, and how far it will ultimately drop. But, if you use net operating income as your primary criteria for buying, then a house that will support itself supports itself, regardless of whether the price goes down in the months after your purchase.

A net operating income analysis ensures

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If you've been watching the news lately you might have heard some of the breaking headlines about our current real estate and finance markets. Actually, it's kind of hard to miss. I know, because I don't usually watch the news and I am having a hard time avoiding all the gloom and doom. So, what does it mean to us as real estate investors now that money is tightening up for both our buyers and us as investors to buy houses?

Well, it opens up an amazing opportunity for those that are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work raising private money.

Private money, unlike institutional money, is

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While most people associate goal setting with New Year's, I am going to share with you some tools for converting the goals that you set into metrics that you can measure and work toward achieving daily in your real estate investing business.

I realize that the chances of your goals exactly matching the example I am going to be using is small at best, but it is my hope that the concept of how to calculate out your own numbers will be clear enough so that you will actually do it.

So, in this example, I am going to assume that you want to purchase $600,000 worth of real estate in one year and that the median home price in your market is $150,000. If each house is $150,000 you can determine how many houses you need to purchase in the year to achieve your goal. In this case $600,000 divided by $150,000 per house means you need to buy 4 houses in a year.

4 houses in a year means that you need to purchase 1 house every 3 months. I calculated that by taking 12 months and dividing it by 4 houses.

That means that you need to find and close on one $150,000 house every 3 months... which is a very reasonable part-time real estate investor goal.

So, let's take a look at

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I want to share with you some information about a property in Loveland located at 115 East 42nd St. This particular property is for sale and was submitted by one of our researchers, but I'll be using it as an example. If you want to run your own full investor analysis on this property, you can do that using our Offer Generator.

This 3/1.50 1,315 square foot property has an asking price of $108,000, but let's take a moment to do some calculations to see what our actual cost per bedroom would be based on various offer prices (both above asking price and below asking price).

As you can see from the table above, if you know that rents in Loveland can support a certain price per bedroom, you can use the information provided above as a starting point for making your offer. Click on the Price Paid above to start your own analysis on this property using our Offer Generator investing tool.

Have you considered adding online marketing to your overall campaign to buy and sell houses in Loveland, but are at a loss for how to start? Check out Buying Houses with Websites for some very useful information on everything from domain names and web hosting to writing good copy for your site to generating traffic (and leads) from your site.

Sincerely,

James

Working with tens of thousands of real estate investors, I get more than my fair share of e-mails giving me some very basic information about a property and asking me if it is a deal. The challenge I often have is that people do not give me nearly enough information to even comment on whether it is or is not a deal.

For example, let's look at the latest e-mail I received. The investor who e-mailed me said that he is looking at a package of townhouses that are bank owned. He tells me that the previous owner is being investigated for fraud. There are 5-10 of these townhouses in the package and they are asking $45,000 each for them, but they are short sales. They are currently rented for $700 each. The investor asks:
should I pursue these? The investor has not shared anything more about the deal with me including the area of the country, what other similar properties are selling for, or anything about their ability to get financing or buy them for cash.

First of all, I don't know anything about

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If you take the time to do an in person walk through with your new tenants when they move into one of your houses, you can get some additional mileage out of this time by giving your tenants some basic instructions on taking care of the property. Included in your lease should be a list of tenant responsibilities. In our leases, this always includes the task of changing the furnace/air filter monthly. However, many tenants have a hard time doing this which ends up costing us in service, cleaning and repairs.

While you cannot be there every month with your tenant to ensure compliance with this provision in their lease, you can

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I just finished uploading the free real estate course download this week for people that start and finish a Learn To Be Rich™ game this week.

This week's free real estate investing course download is Volume #3 of our Real Estate Mentoring Calls series where I discuss Deal Analysis Basics.

Just start and complete a game between October 27, 2008 and November 2, 2008 to download this course for free.

Or, if you prefer to just pay for the course, you can use the add to cart button below to order it on audio CD.

Until my next post,

James

We just had a researcher submit some very basic information about a house for sale in Loveland to us and I wanted to share that with you. From time to time, I'd like to take a property submitted to us by our users that is for sale and show you how changes in one (or more factors) can affect various aspects of your investing. This particular property submitted for Loveland, Colorado Real Estate Resources is located at 450 E 13th St, Loveland, CO 80537.

In the table below I show what happens to the value with a modest appreciation rate. Can you have years where this (or any other property for that matter) go down in value? Yes. Might it not go up by as much as we are estimating? Yes. Can it go up by more? Yes. Only time will tell what will happen.

As you can see from the table above, if we assume an appreciation rate of 6.5% per year, then the property value eventually reaches $215,683 after 10 years.

You may have noticed how seriously we take the skill of being able to analyze deals here at Loveland, Colorado Real Estate Resources. You simply should not be buying properties without thoroughly understanding how to analyze them. 450 E 13th St may or may not be a good deal, but do you know how to determine this for situations where you will be using hard money loans, or when you might be buying Subject To the existing financing? Check out Jassen's CD on 3 Ways to Analyze Deals for Real Estate Investors to fine tune your deal analysis skills.

Keep on investing Loveland,

James