Sep
28
How To Find Potential Cash Buyers in Minutes
Posted By: Ramon Rivas on September 28, 2010 at 3:58 pmHow To Find Potential Cash Buyers in Minutes
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Finding buyers is essential for a Real Estate business. It is equally as important as finding the deals. Recently, I’ve been asked by many people if Xima can be used to generate a list of buyers, so I decided to shoot a video explaining how to find potential cash buyers using Xima.
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Xima USA provides the best and most accurate foreclosure and pre-foreclosure information, data, and statistics available, making it a valuable resource to invest wisely Xima USA offers you everything you need to profit from foreclosure investing. It is your one stop destination to search for foreclosed homes, foreclosures Florida, properties with positive equity, short sale, pre-foreclosures or distressed homes. It creates comprehensive property comparison reports in a specific area, giving you a very powerful tool when making or negotiating an offer. XimaUSA is mainly geared towards real estate brokers and investors, and the main purpose is to identify the best investment properties. You are able to search for properties with 30%, 40%, or even 50% equity, and identify possible short sales. You can also identify distressed sellers and FSBOs, so you may easily get those hot listings.
All this information is collected from many different sources and presented to you in one place, in a very easy format. This will give you the ability to get MLS listings information, public records, mortgage, pre-foreclosure and foreclosure details, you can get comparables of active listings, closed sales and rentals. Best of all, you can customize and print reports, mailing lists and labels for easy mailings.
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Sep
13Buy The Most Expensive House In The Neighborhood?
Posted By: Ramon Rivas on September 13, 2010 at 11:01 amThink Long-Term
Assume you fall in love with the masterpiece home in a particular neighborhood. It has everything you could dream of: black bottom pool, marble, an incredible kitchen, top of the line windows, stunning brick work and so on. The sellers obviously put a lot of time, effort and money into the home. Accordingly, it stands out as the pearl on the block. Why wouldn’t you want to snap it up immediately?
Before you start signing documents, take a look at the sales prices of comparable homes, “comps”, in the neighborhood. If you compare the comp prices to the dream home, you should notice a pretty significant price difference. This difference should act as a metaphorical slap in the face or pouring of cold water over your head. The dream home is undoubtedly selling for a price range far beyond the comps. Warning lights should be going off at this point.
You are going to have a problem if you give into temptation and purchase the most expensive home on the block. In fact, you are going to have two problems.
The first problem is the appreciation of the value of the home. The appreciation on the best home in a neighborhood is always going to be dragged down by the structures around it. If you take a $900,000 home from a private community and put it on a block of $250,000 track homes, the $900,000 value is going to come down a lot because the neighborhood will not support it. When you eventually sell, buyers are going to look at the comps in the neighborhood and laugh at a $900,000 asking price.
The second problem is “hemming.” Since you own the most expensive house in the neighborhood, your appreciation potential is already limited. This becomes a bigger problem if you want to remodel or add on to the home. Taking such action would typically add to the value of a home. With the most expensive home, not only will it not add value, it may cut into your equity. Why? If you do a $50,000 remodel, you may see a $10,000 gain for your $50,000 cost. You just lost $40,000.
Dream or Nightmare
Unless you can accurately predict an increase in valuations for an entire neighborhood, you shouldn’t buy the most expensive home on the block. If you do, the dream home could quickly turn into a nightmare.
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This brings up the first thing to consider when comparing buying versus renting: the amount of time you’ll be there. Buying and later selling a home will usually cost about 10% or more of the value of the home. These costs mean that if the home only went up in value 10% or so in the year or two you lived there, you won’t be gaining anything (equity gain from principal pay-down is very little in the first years). You’ll often be better off renting if you’ll be in a town for less than a few years.
What about towns with faster rates of appreciation? Have you done some serious homework? If not, to assume appreciation will be more than the rate of inflation is just gambling. The sellers in the example above sold for the same price they bought the house for two years earlier – and this was in a decent and growing area. You can’t count on fast appreciation.
To Buy Or Rent – Cost Comparison
Looking at buying versus renting, you have to take into account that in many places it cost much more to buy. For example, in Miami a home can cost $200,000. The mortgage payment, taxes, insurance and maintenance will add up to about $1,600 per month, but you can rent the same size home for about $800.
What does that mean? Many real estate fanatics will say you’re at least buying something for your money, and renting is throwing your money away. Of course in this example more than $1,000 of your payment will be going towards interest alone, and that’s not buying you anything.
Suppose you can afford the $1600 per month, but instead you rent for $800 and put the other $800 into a decent safe investment that makes you 5%? In three years you’ll have over $30,000 in this account. If the home appreciated at 6% per year, it would be worth $231,000. The costs of initially buying it and then selling it would be around $13,800 (2% buying and 6% selling), leaving you with a gain of about 19,000 once we include your principal pay-down.
In other words, you would be at least $11,000 better off if you rented and banked the difference. Every market is different, of course, so you have to do the math. Compare the total costs of owning versus renting, and then make safe assumptions about the rate of appreciation for homes.
If you’ll definitely be in one place for a long time to come, it will almost always be better to buy than to rent. In the last example, buying becomes a better bet after about four or five years. Also consider that if you get a fixed rate mortgage, your payment will never change, a benefit landlords won’t offer you that on your rent payment.
To sum up, look at the time you’ll be there, the comparison of total monthly costs, whether rents are going up fast, and whether you have good reason to believe home prices will be going up fast. Then look also at all the personal factors. Do you want to be responsible for the maintenance, yard work and unpredictability of ownership problems?
To buy or to rent? In the end, you have to work this one out by yourself.
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Sep
10Buy Investment Property Without Seeing It
Posted By: Ramon Rivas on September 10, 2010 at 4:39 pmWhy would you buy investment property without seeing it? It’s a numbers game. Whether or not you see the property before you make an offer isn’t nearly as important as making sure the numbers make sense.
A man in California used to just send out offers on a hundred MLS listings at a time, offering 25% less than the asking price on each one. Occasionally a few sellers would accept his offers. He never had to look at the homes beforehand. Including an “inspection and approval” clause in the offer meant he could always back out of the deal later when he saw the house. Meanwhile, he efficiently found the truly motivated sellers.
This true story demonstrates that with a good clause or two in the contract, you don’t have to worry about making an offer before you see a property. It’s true when you buy investment property or your next home. When it isn’t everything the seller says it is, you can reject the deal with little or no loss. So why wouldn’t you want to look at the property?
Buy Investment Property By Numbers
The main reason you might skip looking at a property before making an offer is time. This is certainly true if the property is far away. If you don’t get a price that makes sense, why spend your time traveling to look at real estate investments? A price and terms that make sense – this is what is important. Of course you’ll probably want to look at the actual property eventually, but looking at the numbers is how you invest.
Investors value income property according to current cash flow (or should if they want safe and viable investments), so start by verifying income. Get the actual income figures for the past 12 months. Always consider the potential income if rents are raised, vending machines are added, etc., but base your offer on the current income.
Verify all expenses with investment properties. If any expenses listed by the seller seem unusually low, they most likely are. Just substitute your own best guess in place of any suspicious numbers.
After you determine the net operating income, apply the appropriate capitalization rate to arrive at the value. If you’re not sure how to do this, get help. However, you really should understand the principle of how to figure a cap rate. This is a numbers game you’re playing.
Calculate loan payments (talk to your banker), and see how much cash flow you’ll have. Then you can figure your cash-on-cash return based on how much of your own money you put into the deal. Just divide the cash flow by your investment.
When the numbers work, you can safely make an offer. Inspections will tell you if there are problems that will affect the cash flow. You can always renegotiate if there are such problems (assuming you made your approval of all inspections a contingency of the offer). Of course, you can even go take a look now that you are truly ready to buy that investment property.
Don’t Rely Excessively On Appraisals
An appraisal is a valuation of a property by an independent appraiser. The appraiser does an evaluation of the home, considers the home in comparison to others of comparable type and so on. Once completed, the appraiser then issues a written appraisal value of the home. Many homebuyers make the assumption the appraisal is the true value of the home both now and in the future. This can be a dangerous assumption.
First, appraisals are limited by something known as a moment in time. The appraisal done today, may not be entirely relevant a month or two later. If a property has been on the market for a few months, the appraisal may not reflect a slowing market. This, in turn, means the appraised value is actually higher than the current market will support. Homebuyers run into problems when this occurs because they put too much value on the appraisal. A seller will often list the home below the appraised amount and homebuyers will think they are getting a deal. In reality, they are not and may actually be paying more than a new appraisal would support. The older the appraisal, the less value you should put into it.
Most homebuyers assume an appraiser inspects the home for defects and discounts the value of the home accordingly. This is not really the case. An appraiser is not really doing a critical home inspection. In fact, the appraiser contract and/or report usually contains a long disclaimer whereby the appraiser covers his derriere by noting he assumes the property is in good condition and isn’t liable if it is not. Obviously, that should scare you. This, of course, is why you should insist on a home inspection for any property you make an offer on.
An appraisal is a solid part of the equation when considering a home purchase. It is not, however, the piece de resistance when valuing the property.
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