Athens Real Estate Resources

Despite conventional wisdom about when investors should buy, most investors are running spooked from our current market. With stocks at fire sale prices and falling house prices in most markets, you may be wondering, should I hold tight and not take any risks in this uncertain market, or should I jump in and "buy low"?

The good news is that if you choose to employ a long term strategy with real estate investing, then any market can be good for buying. It's impossible to know when a market will bottom out, and how far it will ultimately drop. But, if you use net operating income as your primary criteria for buying, then a house that will support itself supports itself, regardless of whether the price goes down in the months after your purchase.

A net operating income analysis ensures

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If you've been watching the news lately you might have heard some of the breaking headlines about our current real estate and finance markets. Actually, it's kind of hard to miss. I know, because I don't usually watch the news and I am having a hard time avoiding all the gloom and doom. So, what does it mean to us as real estate investors now that money is tightening up for both our buyers and us as investors to buy houses?

Well, it opens up an amazing opportunity for those that are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work raising private money.

Private money, unlike institutional money, is

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While most people associate goal setting with New Year's, I am going to share with you some tools for converting the goals that you set into metrics that you can measure and work toward achieving daily in your real estate investing business.

I realize that the chances of your goals exactly matching the example I am going to be using is small at best, but it is my hope that the concept of how to calculate out your own numbers will be clear enough so that you will actually do it.

So, in this example, I am going to assume that you want to purchase $600,000 worth of real estate in one year and that the median home price in your market is $150,000. If each house is $150,000 you can determine how many houses you need to purchase in the year to achieve your goal. In this case $600,000 divided by $150,000 per house means you need to buy 4 houses in a year.

4 houses in a year means that you need to purchase 1 house every 3 months. I calculated that by taking 12 months and dividing it by 4 houses.

That means that you need to find and close on one $150,000 house every 3 months... which is a very reasonable part-time real estate investor goal.

So, let's take a look at

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I want to share with you some information about a property in Athens located at 341 Arch St. This particular property is for sale and was submitted by one of our researchers, but I'll be using it as an example. If you want to run your own full investor analysis on this property, you can do that using our Offer Generator.

Let's look at this 2 bedroom, 1.00 bathroom property located at 341 Arch St that has an asking price of $45,900.

As you can see from the table above, if you know what a typical Athens property sells for on a price per square foot basis, you can quickly use the information provided above as a starting point for making your offer. Click on the Price Paid above to start your own analysis on this property using our Offer Generator investing tool.

Does 341 Arch St look like a good deal to you? If not, have you used the Offer Generator to see what it would take to make it work? If you could get this property at the right price, how would you go about marketing it?

Until next time,

James

Working with tens of thousands of real estate investors, I get more than my fair share of e-mails giving me some very basic information about a property and asking me if it is a deal. The challenge I often have is that people do not give me nearly enough information to even comment on whether it is or is not a deal.

For example, let's look at the latest e-mail I received. The investor who e-mailed me said that he is looking at a package of townhouses that are bank owned. He tells me that the previous owner is being investigated for fraud. There are 5-10 of these townhouses in the package and they are asking $45,000 each for them, but they are short sales. They are currently rented for $700 each. The investor asks:
should I pursue these? The investor has not shared anything more about the deal with me including the area of the country, what other similar properties are selling for, or anything about their ability to get financing or buy them for cash.

First of all, I don't know anything about

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If you take the time to do an in person walk through with your new tenants when they move into one of your houses, you can get some additional mileage out of this time by giving your tenants some basic instructions on taking care of the property. Included in your lease should be a list of tenant responsibilities. In our leases, this always includes the task of changing the furnace/air filter monthly. However, many tenants have a hard time doing this which ends up costing us in service, cleaning and repairs.

While you cannot be there every month with your tenant to ensure compliance with this provision in their lease, you can

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I just finished uploading the free real estate course download this week for people that start and finish a Learn To Be Rich™ game this week.

This week's free real estate investing course download is Volume #3 of our Real Estate Mentoring Calls series where I discuss Deal Analysis Basics.

Just start and complete a game between October 27, 2008 and November 2, 2008 to download this course for free.

Or, if you prefer to just pay for the course, you can use the add to cart button below to order it on audio CD.

Until my next post,

James

Here's another Athens property that was submitted by a user that we will use as a teaching tool for our Athens, Georgia Real Estate Resources real estate investors. The property address, in case you want to look into it in more detail is: 260 Kennedy Cir, Athens, GA 30601.

In this particular example, let's take a look at what happens to the value of the property over a number of years from appreciation.

As you can see from the table above, if we assume an appreciation rate of 6.3% per year, then the property value eventually reaches $71,845 after 10 years.

Do you have potentially motivated sellers who have contacted you about their house in Athens? Do you know what you will say to them, and more importantly, what you need to say to them in order to discover those really great deals? Listen in on Jassen and Sasha to learn how to build rapport with the seller, how to phrase potentially sensitive questions, and many other critical aspects of talking to motivated sellers on the Audio CD: How to Talk To Motivated Sellers: Role Playing Volume #2.

Keep on investing Athens,

James