Tag 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

Is Now The Time To Buy Real Estate?

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With interest rates are a ridiculously low rate, I have to wonder “Is this the time to buy real estate“?

Since interest rates are below 4.0% for both the 15 year and 30 year mortgage loans, I’ve started to unconsciously notice the houses and multi-family apartments for sale.  For the multi-family units, I’m mostly looking at duplexes, although I would definitely consider a triplex building if I could find one selling in my area at a decent price (actually, I didn’t see any triplexes selling at all in my area).  I might have to go out of my city to look for deals that are elsewhere, but still within a comfortable distance from where I live.

Colonial Home

Alternatively, I’m also tempted to scale up to a larger primary home with more land.  With the dip in interest rates, I could find a bigger home that would have a smaller monthly payment than the prior mortgage for the house where we currently live.

Actually, I’m considering both paths at the same time.  Why not look around for a new house to scale up to, and buy investment property to boot.  It’s a tempting way to go, but more than likely, I’ll choose one over the other.  I think if I had more income rolling in monthly, I would take the plunge and pursue both, but since that’s not the case, I’ll probably choose the investment property if I can find a decent deal.

While not all conditions are perfect, from a low interest rate perspective, it seems to be a pretty good time to consider making such investments.

I’ll keep everybody updated on what path I pursue.

MR