centennial investment properties: Centennial RE Trends: Purchasing Apartment Buildings
- 12/18/08 10:17 AM
Investing in Real Estate 4 – Small (2-4 units) Apartment BuildingThis blog will discuss a type of real estate investment, small apartment buildings, in the Centennial area.What this investment is: Purchase of duplex, triplex or quadplex to be rented to tenants, usually for 6-12 month terms. Usually what the rental home / condo landlords graduate to. In most markets they cost a little more than a rental home, but are much more likely to cash flow on the average month. Less cash flow risk; if one unit is empty you have other tenants that still help you with the mortgage payment (0 comments)
centennial investment properties: Centennial RE Trends: Purchasing a Rental Condo or Home
- 12/18/08 10:16 AM
Investing in Real Estate 3 – Rental Condo or Rental HomeThis blog will discuss a type of real estate investment, rental condos or rental homes, in the Centennial area.What this investment is: Purchase of a residential property to be rented out to tenants, usually on a 6-12 month lease term. This is how most new landlords get started. You can hire out all of the property management functions, but in many cases you will do many of them on your own. There are smaller down payment requirements than for larger rental buildings. The purchase process and financing process is very similar (0 comments)
centennial investment properties: Centennial RE Trends: Investor Assignments
- 12/18/08 10:15 AM
Investing in Real Estate 2 – AssignmentsThis blog will discuss a type of real estate investment, assignments, in the Centennial area.What this investment is: An investor who is interested in Assignments gets a property under contract for an attractive price then assigns the contract to another buyer, usually another investor. The first investor will be paid a fee for the work. If you don't have much equity to work with, and/or if your credit power is limited, assignments can be a way to get started in real estate investing. You will need to have a strong "sales" personality to succeed at (0 comments)
centennial investment properties: Centennial Real Estate Trends: Investor Loans
- 12/18/08 10:14 AM
Topic: Special considerations for Investor loans The talk around the water cooler these days is all about LOANS. Who can get them? At what price? What if I already have a few loans, do I still qualify? A year or two ago the question was at what price do I get a loan (those were the days!). Today it is "am I still in the game?" Here's the deal: if you have an owner occupied loan and 3 investor loans you cannot buy any more properties and get Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac financing, meaning you can't get a conventional 30-year (0 comments)
centennial investment properties: Centennial RE Trends: Importance of Sewer Scopes
- 12/18/08 10:13 AM
Topic: Investor Series: Why sewer scopes are important A LOT of agents don't advise their clients to get sewer scopes when they purchase a property. This is a major mistake. A broken sewer can cost between $3,000 - $10,000 dollars to repair and it only costs $99 ($99Rooter - others are more expensive) to have a tech put a camera down the sewer pipe and videotape the sewer all the way to the mainline. This will tell you and the-buyer what the condition of the sewer is. So let's see, we pay to have the furnace inspected but a new furnace will (0 comments)
centennial investment properties: Centennial RE Trends: Estimating Rents
- 12/18/08 10:12 AM
Topic: Investor Series: Estimating Rents A lot of clients ask me how to figure out what market rents are in a neighborhood. This is a critical input into the calculations an investor needs to make in order to determine what their return on investment will be on a rental property. So you don't want to screw this up! Unfortunately, this is one of the many figures new investors get wrong. One place people go to get rents is Rent-o-Meter. Rent-o-Meter is billed as an online resource to get accurate market rents. In my experience it is anything but! However, I have a (0 comments)
centennial investment properties: Centennial RE Trends: Roofs
- 12/18/08 06:43 AM
Topic: Investor Series: Things to look for when you look at roofs Have you ever driven through Aurora North looking for a rental property and taken a close look at the roofs? Here's what you'll see: a bunch of 1950's ranches in varying states of repair or disrepair, lawns that are often grassless, old handcrank windows and roofs in almost perfect condition! This surprised me at first and perplexed me for a long time. Why, in a neighborhood devastated by foreclosures with properties with massive deferred maintenance are the roofs in such condition? Really! Stand in the middle of a typical street (0 comments)
centennial investment properties: Centennial RE Trends: Foreclosures
- 12/18/08 06:42 AM
Topic: Investor Series: Things to keep in mind when seeing a foreclosed home As investors we face a number of very real and very scary challenges. Making sense of this market is no mean feat and one has to be very careful with his or her investment. However, we usually think about danger as financial. Unfortunately, on rare occasion it can be even worse than that. The majority of the homes investors are buying these days are vacant and once in a while people break in and live in these properties illegally. The last thing you want to do is walk in (0 comments)
centennial investment properties: Centennial RE Trends: Egress Windows
- 12/18/08 06:41 AM
Topic name: Investor Series: Understanding Egress Windows A lot of investors ask what an egress window is and when one is needed. Technically, it's a window for a room below grade that a municipality has deemed large enough to be safe for exit in case of emergency. While there are some variations, the window needs to be large enough that a firefighter with an oxygen bottle on their back could get in, then carry out an injured person in a fire. Most often, it's associated with a basement bedroom window, making it a legal bedroom. Basement bedrooms without egress windows are illegal. (0 comments)
centennial investment properties: Centennial RE Trends: Basement Kitchens
- 12/18/08 06:40 AM
Topics for Investors: Basement Kitchens You walk into a property you're looking to buy and rent and you walk down into the basement and voila! you find a full second kitchen. Great! You start calculating how much rent you could get if you could rent the downstairs separate from the upstairs and the cashflow is out of this world! But wait, there are a number of very real problems with this scenario. First of all, it's illegal unless the property is zoned for more than one tenant and the property has been converted to non-residential use. But there are even more practical (0 comments)