Real Estate Investing Advice & Information

Threats of economic recession throughout the world have gravely affected many industries, especially the nation’s real estate business. Homeowners have been troubled to getting loans in refinancing their property. But sometimes due to much more rigid measures banks and other lending companies take to avert bankruptcy or further losses, loans are hard to come by. Hence, foreclosures have been the priority means of escaping a delinquent loan. But then again, you could still prevent loss of your property by going through short sales. If worse comes to the worst scenario possible, the bank rejects your offer for such deal. What can you do now?

Assuming that you have fully accomplished the requirements for the short sale package, you then wait for the approval of the bank. The bank’s consent goes through several processes. The broker price opinion (BPO) or loss mitigation would be performed by a third party. The negotiator puts your short sale package forward and then the bank rejects it. The first thing you might opt for is to go through a public sale. On the other hand, you could still be faced with better options.

First of all, discuss modifications of the deal with your prospective buyer. Ask him if he could bend to make a higher counter offer. If again he too says no, look for another buyer. This time make sure that the new potential buyer could give your demand of price. At least a portion higher than the previous one’s offer would make a lot of difference. The bank would not commence the short sale procedure if you could not find a better buyer. In addition, if six months or more have passed since the last BPO, a new settlement is necessary. continue reading…

When you wish to buy a house, you might consider going to real estate auctions. Most people nowadays are using this to acquire a house. It might be helpful to refrain from auctions until you familiarize yourself with the process. Following are some disadvantages that you should be aware of before you proceed.

1. Auctions require a high binder. Most auctions require high and non-refundable binder, which usually amounts to at least ten percent. This could be a bit risky especially when you are a novice in the real estate business. Since it is non-refundable, you cannot allow any room for error. If you mess up the financing or overestimated your capacity to buy, you could lose the whole ten percent deposit, a considerable loss of money.

2. Because auctions are typically run over a short period, you will not be able to analyze the property and its potentials in the market thoroughly. The list of properties will be sent to you a week or two weeks before the auction date, giving you a limited time to study it. This way, it is easier to make mistakes in your choice.

3. Be careful on paying additional liens. There are instances where a second mortgage holder forecloses without liens as the first mortgage that went into default. Usually, the auction starts at the balance of the second mortgage. Now, if you buy the home, this may lead you to be automatically responsible to pay the liens of the first mortgage. Unless you do a quick title search on each real estate investment, you might be stuck with many unexpected debts, which could ruin your investment. continue reading…

Sick of paying for leads that lead to no sales or spending numerous hours prospecting through cold leads? Would you like some warm leads for free?

If you’ve been in the real estate business for at least a few years or have a decent-sized clientele list, then I would postpone your cold-call prospecting. It’s time to benefit from your best prospecting tool: your clientele. New homebuyers create a great reason to keep in touch with them. You can inquire about their satisfaction of their new home immediately after they move in as well as many anniversary dates into the future: 1st six months, 1st year, 2nd year and beyond. And provided your clients are satisfied with your level of service, they should know plenty of people that fit the ideal new-home-prospect mold. The credibility and familiarity of your clients is powerful and will help open the door to their contacts.

How can this lead to obtaining referrals?

You will start with a post-sale survey and a “Congratulations Gift”. All clients respect business professionals that are not afraid to hear good honest feedback and fix problems, and they certainly love gifts. You must choose a gift that you can obtain or make in bulk, so you don’t have to keep shopping for the item over-and-over, and is easy to deliver. That’s why I suggest desserts or candy gifts. Who doesn’t like sweets? Almost every one does. You just need to choose items that are of high quality and preferably are packaged in an attractive way.

You can either choose to make homemade gifts or order them online. If you decide to make homemade gifts then you should be at least adequate in the kitchen, have many of the necessary supplies and ingredients and then obtain some attractive tins or boxes in order to ship them. Yes, it will take more work to make the gifts yourself, but your clients will love you for it. Think about it. How many realtors go out of their way to send gifts, let alone make them themselves? Not too many, right? continue reading…

“Up to 90% of our normal behavior is based on habits.”

If you are like me, you have the same kind of problem and it’s this.

Knowing what you should do vs. actually doing it.

Take exercise for example, how many of us know we should exercise more and may even have some kind of exercise schedule, but, fail to follow that schedule? I am sure we can all relate to this.

So, when it comes to our commercial real estate business we can run into this problem as well. This problem will take two forms. I won’t spend much time on the first -laziness. A lazy owner, or in this case a lazy commercial real estate investor has a lot of issues that will keep them from achieving their actual potential. Point being if you sit around eating chips and watching TV, most of the day your business will suffer. So, I want to focus on something continue reading…

One of the best things about internet marketing is the fact that you can put all your lead generation on total autopilot so you can focus on turning your warm leads into paying clients who will buy homes with you. In this article I want to show you exactly how you can do this.

Secret #1:

You have to realize the power of good internet marketing for your real estate business. The problem with a lot of offline marketing strategies is that they are really expensive and they are not going all the time.

When you do a mail out to an area you will get a big surge in calls and sales, then it will all be over in no time flat. continue reading…