Thursday, July 2, 2015

Top 50 Landlording Rules


1. It takes a special kind of courage to pour your money into investments in an economically depressed area. Most people, including me, aren’t that brave. So if you live in a part of the country where people aren’t doing that well, you’ll probably find better properties elsewhere. On the other hand, there are special risks involved in real estate investments far from your home.
2. If you decide to look for investments elsewhere, your first problem is finding the right area. Your second task is to learn the area well enough to make a smart buying decision. Finally, you have to pick the right property or properties for you. You only have so much money to spend, and you want to maximize your return on investment. Of course, the worst possibility is that you could lose all your money, or more (which would mean filing bankruptcy).
3. There seem to be two ways to do long-distance real estate investing. The first way, which I don’t recommend, is by talking to a salesman marketing investments in what he says are a hot area. It’s possible that some of these are good deals. I guarantee that many of them are terrible. In any case, it makes a lot more sense to be methodical; pick your area first, your city next, your property last.
4. There are also a couple of different ways to pick your area, and as usual, the harder way will give better results. The easy way is to find a newspaper story: “Hottest Real Estate Markets in America.” The problem with these areas is that they are usually at the halfway point, at least, of their growth trend. They may be near the peak of their growth trend; the next few years will bring a stable real estate market at best, or a declining market at worst. Read the rest of this entry »

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