Category Archives: Real Estate

Learning Your Local Area Characteristics Thru Real Estate Research

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As part of my new interest in real estate, I’ve been driving around and learning interesting new tools to use on the internet to help me in my research.

As much as I enjoy the internet and the time-saving aspect of the real estate investing online sites like zillow and trulia, I’ve discovered a new joy (so far anyway) in researching the surrounding city and town areas.  It’s amazing the history that you can discover of about a place if you drive around and go to the library.

Often times, if the town/city is quaint, you’ll discover a lot about the history just by looking at the pictures within the library since most try to tie the history to the present.  For instance, once I was in a library where the city was a central hub of a canal system.  After the canal system went into disuse, the old boats just sat and decayed (many were destroyed by neglect).  What was especially interesting was a picture I saw in the canal town’s library that showed a family with kids living on one of those old canal boats.  The clothes lines and young kids playing on the deck of the boat was very surprising.  I don’t know how long that family lived on the old canal barge, but seeing the family in the old black and while photo was amazing on multiple levels.  First, that after the canal system was closed, that people did what they had to do to get by, and secondly that the boat in the picture survived and is used for canal rides today.

While it’s possible for a city to change it’s population consistency, I was amazed at how many of the cities to retain their roots both in work opportunities and practices.  The canal city I mentioned above was a working class city, and although tourism is an important part of the current economy, many of the people living there are still from a working class kind of background with plenty of renters, at least in the downtown portion.  In fact, I’ve never seen so many old rental units (duplexes mainly) in a city before.

After driving around for about a half an hour in the quaint canal town, I decided to pass on considering purchasing a few of the duplexes that were for sale.  While those duplexes might be filled up now, once the housing market changes, that properties might be difficult to fill up.

Bests,

MR

Real Estate – First Missed Opportunity

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I found a duplex that I wanted to buy, but my inexperience caused me to miss this diamond in the rough!

The duplex that I wanted and pursued was what appeared to be the perfect starter rental property for an individual that wanted the “cash flow” from such an real estate investment.  It was small and appeared to be easy to fix.  Newer, but not so new that it would be expensive.  In a city that while on the small side, still had few duplexes available for renters.  And the last benefit was that it didn’t have central air, instead it had two air conditioner units in the front with the holes neatly cut into the wall of each unit.  Each unit has two bedrooms and 1 bathroom, nice and simple.

Yes, it’s not sexy, but it’s also not a total dog either.  It would have been perfect starter and learning home to own for me!

So what happened?

  1. I went on vacation for a week shortly after the house went up for sale.
  2. I didn’t contact the real estate agent, instead I opted to try to establish a relationship with a bank so I could get pre-approved.  Surprisingly, even though I have no debt and a credit score over 800, I’m having problems getting responses from the bank that I contacted for the pre-approval.
  3. I didn’t jump on this deal.  After driving down to check it out, and realizing it was a great piece of property, I second guessed my opinion.  Instead I looked for reasons that it might not be a good deal.  Even though I was dragging my feet, I couldn’t really come up with a reason not to buy the property.

I’m sure if I were more experienced, I would have been able to move with speed.  Too bad, it looked like a great start property…

Sad miss,

MR

Checking Out Local Property As An Investment

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Right now, I’m sitting in a small local bank, waiting to speak to a loan officer?

I need to start making the proper connections, so I thought I’d get pre-approved for a mortgage as a first step by making a connection for my property purchasing plan.  Since I’m not entirely sure what I’m going (I’m still reading up on the process), I thought it would be best to test the waters with a small local bank just to get my feet wet.

I just recently drove through an area that I’m thinking of making a purchase and I thought I would describe it.

It’s a small (less than 4,000 total population) town that based around an resource mining company.  I’m sure most of the population is employed by the few local companies that are mining the earth for their manufactured product.  Driving around, I noticed a high amount of rental properties scattered throughout the small manufacturing town.

Even with a lot of rental properties, I didn’t notice too many “for rent” signs in the town.  I’m thinking that there could be a lot of renters in the area.  Driving around the area I’m thinking of buying, they people all seem like they are nice, happy looking people.

Although the neighborhood I’m looking at seems decent, I did notice that the neighbor across the street has a sign on his garage that says “Drunk Drive”, and there are a lot of plastic chairs and a big fire pit in the yard…  That might mean that perhaps they do more partying that I would like, but who knows.  Most likely, I’ll do a couple of weekend drive-bys to see how bad it really is.

Debt Free… Now What? Real Estate

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I’ve been Debt Free since the beginning of February 2010!

I became Debt-Free in the article called “I Am Debt Free, My Mortgage Countdown #1 – Equilibrium“.  In the article, I revealed the technique I used to become Debt Free in 10 years and how I felt. It was truly an exciting moment in my life. But now life has stagnated from a financial perspective, I feel kind of lost without the instant feedback in my monthly debt levels.

Oh sure, I’m investing in a 401k and my regular brokerage account, but the accumulation of money is slow going and not as exciting as paying down my debt monthly.  Yes, I’m accumulating money, but at the same time, I find that I’m almost bored by the process since the cashflow from my earned income is so low.

So I’m considering going back into debt to increase my cashflow. It’s not consumer debt though, it’ll be debt used to buy assets to speed up my progress on becoming wealthy.  I hope to use debt for the two opportunities below:

  1. Own real estate
  2. Start and invest in small businesses.

Colonial Home

Some may find it odd that I’ve never had credit card debt that lasted more than a month and I paid my cars and house off early, but now I’m contemplating going into debt to buy real estate.  You might think that I’m even a bit off-kilter, and perhaps I am?  But I still want to try to own real estate, for the following reasons:

  • Find out what it’s like
  • Help renters in a positive way
  • Try to make some money off of it
  • Diversify my assets, but having both investments and real estate
  • Increase my wealth
  • Develop verbal people skills to become more proficient in the process.

So over the next few months or years, I’m going to look and call around trying to find a great deal on properties that I won’t lose on.

We’ll see…

Don