Foreclosures and REO’s are bringing many investors out of the woodwork - and some of the new investors who are novices are making many mistakes in selecting and purchasing of undervalued residential real estate.
RealtyTimes published an article that discusses a situation where a novice investor purchased a property and outsourced property management to a property manager. The property had lots of defects and improving the property to get it ready for rental proved expensive for this investor. The investor was blaming the property manager for the expenses.
Before becoming a Do-It-Yourself or absentee landlord, the 3 tips that investors should follow for success are:
1. Understand the market you are purchasing your investment property.
2. Be clear of your end goal and write it down
3. Calculate the costs of owning the investment property
These key rules will help you make good decisions when you are purchasing investment property.
BusinessWeek editor Chris Palmeri got his first residential rental property in March and faced the usual challenges of property management. Many real estate investors, especially the ones who own properties far away from where they live - do the smart thing and hire a property manager so that they sleep well at night.
Chris, a new do-it-yourself landlord, was anxious to rent his property quickly, and skipped tenant screening. Once landlords are burnt by a tenant, they never skip tenant screening! Read 5 tips for tenant screening in today’s market to make sure that you do not make this error. Luckily, he has managed to rent his property to new tenants. The best part is that he is looking to acquire another property.
According to Builder magazine the real estate markets that have been hit the hardest will take the most time to recover. They did a study of all the real estate markets in USA to determine which ones are the weakest. The real estate markets that appear on this list have had the most job losses, increasing foreclosures and falling home prices.
The real estate markets were ranked based on population trends and job growth, perennial drivers of housing demand. Builder magazine also examined the rate of home price declines. The other factors considered by the magazine included the rate of building permits, which they consider to be the single best ongoing indicator of builder confidence in a market. They combined all these factors to rank the markets with a score.
I
had a listing that had some neighbors that were nice neighbors, but
their yard
was somewhat of an eyesore. It really wasn't as much the
yard as it was the
house. It also needed some touch up and my seller was willing to help
out.
You
see, in today's world my seller and I figured the reason for not
painting the
house and doing the up keep on the yard was because of the lack of
money. But,
it turns out that they just didn't see a reason too.
This
is where we went from being helpful to (apparently) offensive.
My seller
offered to pay to have his yard professionally cleaned up, landscaped,
and to
have the side of the house that faced him painted at no cost to the
owners next
door. But, I guess they didn't see it as a way to help him sell his
house, but
rather as an insult to how they kept their yard and house.
Now,
we had an angry neighbor who wanted to do what ever they could to make
the yard
as ugly as possible. Kids toys everywhere, lawn equipment
left out, yard debris
piled next to the fence, but the one that really said it all was while
trying
to show the home having their kid come out and pee on the fence.
I think we have a
problem. I said and we need to figure out what to do about
it. We went and talked to the neighbor and explained it
wasn't the seller that
was upset with the yard, they had lived next door to each other for 5
years and
he thought he was a great neighbor, but the feedback was saying
otherwise.
They sat down, hammered
out
their differences, and the yard got cleaned up, the
house painted and my client got his home sold. This could
have gone on for
forever, it could have gone to court. But instead, two level headed
people sat
down and discussed what the real issue was and worked out a compromise
over a
mis-understanding.
What
do you do when you offend someone? Do you walk away and ignore the
situation,
or be upfront and say your sorry? Or do you work something
out so they can
understand your side of the story? Lucky my seller did the latter and
it worked
out great for him, but it certainly could have been a lot worse! What
would you
have done in this situation?
Todd Clark - Broker / Sales Coach
Palazzo Realty Group
Phone: (503)524-9494
Fax: (503)622-8739
Tigard Oregon
Homes for Sale,
Tigard OR homes for sale, homes for sale in zip code, 97223,97224,
Tigard Oregon Realtor,
Tigard OR Realtor, Tigard Oregon MLS Search, Tigard OR MLS
Search, 1st time home buying expert, short sale expert, avoiding
foreclosure in Tigard, helping families home, LivingBeaverton,
Townhomes for sale, home for sale, house for sale, Bull Mountain North,
Bull Mountain South, King City, Mountainview,
Greenburg, Summer Lake Neighborhood, Summerfield
neighborhood, Tigard neighborhood, Walnut Grove Neighborhood. Tigard
Oregon Real Estate, Tigard OR real estate, Todd Clark,
(503)524-9494, WWW.LivingTigard.com, www.IFoundYourNewHome.com,
www.SavingyouFromForeclosure.com
You have your Active Rain blog climbing the SERPS, then you start your Active Blog, outside Active Rain blog and then maybe you then send your posts to Facebook or you have a wordpress blog. Some of you then will take your posts that you have written and copy and paste them into your website. You are doing great, then suddenly- you read some blog or some comment in the blogosphere that you are posting Duplicate content and you may get the Google slap, ending up in the dreaded Google sand box.
Some bloggers get so fearful that they may stop blogging on Active Rain. You will also hear people who don't like Active Rain using the duplicate content spin to attack Active Rain bloggers. Well, pay them no mind. Look the other way. Walk on by.
Duplicate content that gets the Google discipline is highly likely not going to be yours. Below you can find all of this information from Matt Cutts of Google- in his own words. So don't take my word for it. You can have it right from the horse's mouth. Matt Cutts talked about duplicate content at the latest SMX Seattle conference.
The kind of duplicate content that Google is concerned with is the spammers that go out and use software to duplicate thousands of sites and then try to manipulate the search engine spiders to pick up their sites in SERPS ( Search Engine Results Pages). This is what happened to Squidoo several years ago. I was very active on Squidoo and my lenses were climbing fast on SERPS when we all were at the mercy of some hackers that got into Squidoo and started spamming the search engines. Now Seth Godin is a pretty famous guy on the internet, the creator of Squidoo, yet even he could not stop the Google slap. There was one guy in South America that produced 1500 Squidoo lenses with some software that were all spam! Matt explains more of what Google looks at for spam in the video I posted below.
When you are writing on your Active Rain blog and then click on the post to your outside blog and then add the same post to your website or your wordpress blog- there is nothing wrong with that. You can even tell the search engines which blog is your 'authority' site. But that is beyond the scope of this post. Let's just say that you do post regularly as stated in the beginning of this paragraph. What Google algorithms will do is to choose one to two spots on the search result page for your content. They will just ignore the others.
So if you are following me; it does not hurt you to post duplicate content, you don't get punished for doing so and you get more chances of Google picking up one blog or another. It is like you have put out the same bait in different locations to attract the spiders to your bait. When the spiders arrive they may choose one bait over the other. Many people get the notion that they are being punished because Google only chooses one or two articles with the same content but that is not a punishment. It is just a matter of bringing back to the searcher the best possible variety of matches.
Matt also states that seldom is Google picking up article submissions to article marketers like Ezine articles because they know that is an article from your blog or website. It is still great to do article marketing for the link value.
The goal of Google is to get smarter and smarter. For instance if you change like 10% of the content in one post or just change your keywords around in another post of the same- Google is now smart enough to catch that little trick that many marketers used. Now they will look at that as duplicate content and count it still as one article.
Happy Blogging!
The next SEO TO THE TOP Webinar begins on January 13, 2010- get your space reserved today, limited spaces for the webinar. Start your new year off right with a great SEO boost to the top.
There are many topics and thousands of posts that have been written about How to Blog, Why to Blog, When to Blog, Where to Blog and What to Blog. And then you see a comment on someones post where the writer is complaining about others getting featured posts all the time. Obviously they aren't getting a post featured ...or even read......and they are wondering why?
We engage the reader with our ‘interesting' content and I can't be more straightforward than to say that if you want others to read your posts you have to MAKE it interesting.
Localism Posts: They have been always my favorite to write and I've written hundreds that have given the consumer an idea (and then some) about my local area happenings and so forth. One of my favorites was: Tsukiji Fish Market & Restaurant- Honolulu Hawaiiwhere my husband and I took clients to lunch.
Personal Posts: No one said that transparency in blogging meant to reveal the skeletons in your closet but it does mean to have a little transparency in your writing. Showing your personality through your writing is something we all share when ‘getting to know others'. The best way your peers and the consumer will ‘see' you is right there in your writing. "The Lovely Wifes" Blog.... is for members only blog but indeed a level of transparency that we all can relate to.
Market Reports: You can do a ‘boring' market report but make it eye appealing and attractive with a graph, pie charts and pictures of the area you're doing the report on. KNOW what you're talking about and give details that the consumer WILL UNDERSTAND. Renee Burrowstaught me how to do pie charts and I'm doing some wonderful ones with Hawaii pictures in the background to enhance them.
Off Topic:Sure, we want to create a discussion on whatever the topic for off topic (not real estate) like SEO, Windows 7,Positive Attitudes and so forth. Keeping it light and not judgmental is a great start. No one wants to read a closed minded post full of ‘only my opinion matters' type of thing. Again, we engage the reader without insulting everyone that is reading.
Real Estate Industry Related: We all know that ActiveRain is a wonderful place to gain knowledge about everything real estate industry related. My favorite real estate writers are long time seasoned ActiveRain bloggersLenn Harley and Broker Bryantand you'll see some hard core real estate with engaging conversations for sure on their blogs.
Why do I read the blogs of these writers? They are creative, interesting, eye appealing and lo and behold ORIGINAL, honest, great information, entertaining..... and they allow the reader to walk beside them while they are talking ‘with' them. ....not AT them. They engage me.
As much as I love writing about marketing, I am very aware that effective marketing is impossible without sound business planning.
Good Business Planning
Some of the factors that contribute to good business planning are:
knowing your numbers;
knowing who your clients are;
know who can assist you and what they can do for you;
being aware of what you are doing;
having a schedule to dedicate 60% of your time towards building new business by prospecting for new clients;
being clear of your budget and time;
knowing your peak performance time; and finally - fully planning your year with adequate time off.
Numbers Are Everything
We have to know where we stand. How would we know where we are going unless we know where we are?
The numbers provide the objective data about everything we need to know about our business activities:
how many calls you have to make in order to connect with a good lead
how many leads you need in order to generate one client
how much money you make from each client
how much money you earn for each call you make...and for each hour you work
how many Internet hits you need to get one client
etc.
We have to know things like this...but unfortunately we often find...or make...ourselves too busy to track these numbers, let alone pay much attention to them.
Certainly many sales people have the motivation to undertake varied and demanding actions.
But far too often tracking and making sense of the numbers is not one of these actions.
Sure it's great to feel good about what we are doing...but what do your numbers tell you?
Yesterday the House of Representatives unanimously voted to extend the $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit to active military personnel, foreign service and intelligence officers. HR 3590 extends the existing tax credit to this group until November 30th, 2010. The bill now goes to the Senate, and is expected to pass with the same ease.
The bill was introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) because it was thought that military personel serving oversees this year did not have the same opportunity to take advantage of the tax credit. If the original qualifications are met, the extension applies to military personnel who spent at least 90 days of the current calendar year oversees. It also does not require borrowers to payback the tax credit if they are deployed after receiving it. The current tax credit requires borrowers payback the tax credit if they do not occupy the home within three years of receiving the tax credit.
No word yet on whether the $8,000 tax credit will be extended for all eligible borrowers.
Builder magazine has just updated its list for the Top Real Estate Markets in USA.
Since the list was published in early 2009, the economy seems to be staggering to recover the federal government $8000 tax credit along with real estate investors have been picking up real estate properties at discounts. Even though many economists are suggesting that the recession has ended, unemployment is running very high.
The magazine reports that right now no market is really healthy but some of the real estate markets are doing better than others. So the markets which are on the top of the list will do much better than others. This study and report is one of the most comprehensive available and covers the top 100 real estate markets in USA.
According to Builder's List, the top 5 real estate markets in USA are:
Vacancy rates have mushroomed to a 23 year high, close to 8%. As inventory of vacant residential rental properties is increasing, rents are dropping. Even then, savvy do-it-yourself landlords and property managers are still able to attract high quality tenants and keep their residential rental properties occupied.
Are you able to attract high quality tenants or is one of your tenants leaving soon? Here are steps to take to have high quality tenant line up to rent from you making your experience as a landlord or a property manager enjoyable and profitable.
1. Approach your property from the eyes of the tenant and make sure that it has curb appeal. A property that is very attractive from the curb will rent itself.
2. Create an ad targeting your prospective tenants. Landlords or Property Managers can determine the target tenant based on the location and size of the property. Depending upon the features of your residential rental property a target tenant could be a student, couple or a family. In the ad, highlight the features of the property that would attract the target tenant.
3. Advertise your property in Craigslist, the most popular rental property listing site. If you are a do-it-yourself landlord, contact your local rental property management company and pay for their service to find and do tenant screening. You can also advertise on various rental sites on the internet like rent.com, etc.
4. Respond to emails, phone calls from prospective tenants to keep their interest high in the property and highlight the features of the property in your response.
Until you get into the habit of looking at your residential rental property from the eyes of the target tenant, pin these 4 tips where they stay in front and follow them rigorously. Make attracting high quality tenants a high priority for you and you will have target tenants lining up to rent your property.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
Personal Posts: No one said that transparency in blogging meant to reveal the skeletons in your closet but it does mean to have a little transparency in your writing. Showing your personality through your writing is something we all share when ‘getting to know others'. The best way your peers and the consumer will ‘see' you is right there in your writing. 
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