Wednesday, 27 August 2008

Create Your Real Estate Empire with these Three Basic Ideas

By Tommy Alphin


Creative real estate investing can put money in your pocket. It can also be a lot of fun. Historically home values have always increased even through other rough housing markets. Investing in real estate in the current market is a terrific idea. If you wish to start investing in real estate think about using a three prong approach.

Real estate investing is a long term strategy. Yes you can make short term profits, and you should. You use those profits to fuel your longer term strategies. I can not tell you how many people have called me up and wanted to get started investing right away. I ask them to come and see me so we can go over their plan so I can figure out how to best help them. No they just want to start looking at cheap houses. I cannot help that person unless of course it was a n experienced investor.

There are several approaches to investing in houses, and one of the main ones is buying and holding for the long term. They rent them out to well qualified tenants. Those renters pay down the landlords mortgage every month year after year.

Long term rental properties are a good way to provide a stream of income in later years. A professional agent can be a power boost to your investment career. Their knowledge of subdivisions, homes and values can help you buy great homes that will appreciate as your renters pay off your mortgage. Owning several of these free and clear when you retire is a no brainer in my book.

Don't have any funds to buy rentals then consider re-habbing a home. This is a well used investment approach. I actually became an agent to get the capital to do this type of investing. Finding and fixing properties to flip to a retail buyer is a solid money earner if you do your due diligence.

Flipping is just buying a house on one side and then flipping it over to a buyer on the other side. All that dough in the middle is your hard work. Repairing a run down home and selling it is one way to get more money to invest. If the numbers worked out you could always pull out some of the money with a refinance and turn it into a rental property.

When you don't have money up front you can use this third investing approach. You buy from a motivated seller and wholesale the property to another investor or retail buyer. When they close you pull out you fee for the deal. This gives you some cash to do another deal without pulling from your family funds.

With this approach your not really in the deal and have no risk, other than losing your fee, if the deal falls through. It is a great technique to build up your investing capital so you can use one of the other techniques. There are many investors who simply do wholesale.

If you think long term and short term and use these three approaches you can do quite well for yourself. Your equity and holdings should grow steadily over the long term. Be steady and consistent and you will win with these investment techniques when others do not.

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