Sep
10
Buy 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.
Aug
24Danger – Negative Cash Flow Real Estate
Posted By: Ramon Rivas on August 24, 2010 at 12:52 pmThe high Foreclosure rates changed all that. Now more people are seeking good homes to rent, so the supply of available rentals becomes slim. Demand for rental homes has also been stimulated by a reduction in the number of available apartments.
But it’s not all good news for landlords.
Some eager investors bought investment homes near the top of the real estate price cycle. They paid high prices for the homes they are now offering for rent. Many are learning that the cost of mortgage payments, taxes, insurance and other normal costs are leaving them with negative cash flow. That means it is costing them more each month to own the property than they can collect in rent.
The investor’s negative cash flow can amount to as much as $500 or more. Each month the owner must take those hundreds of dollars out of his/her pocket to make up the short fall between rents collected and money paid out in loan payments and so forth. That’s called an alligator property, because it can eat you alive.
Negative cash flow can be avoided by making a larger down payment on the property. You then have a smaller mortgage loan with smaller monthly payments. If you have planned correctly your rental income should then cover all your costs and expenses of owning. The down side is that you have a large amount of cash locked into one property.
The wise investor always buys at a price that will allow him to prosper no matter what happens to real estate values.
Jul
22Real Estate Appraisal – Rental Properties
Posted By: Ramon Rivas on July 22, 2010 at 10:18 pmReal estate appraisal for rental properties isn’t the same as for single family homes. If you were looking at a 24-unit building, it would be difficult to find similar ones nearby that have recently sold. Therefore, a market analysis using comparable sales isn’t normally used.
It is also not ideal to use replacement costs either. How do you figure replacement cost if there is no land for sale nearby with proper zoning? This is used as a secondary method, though, and can tell you if maybe you should be building instead of buying.
Real Estate Appraisal Using Capitalization
Start with the gross income. Subtract all expenses, but not including loan payments. If a building’s gross income is $82,000 per year, and the expenses $30,000, you have a net before debt-service of $52,000. Now apply the capitalization rate to this figure.
If the common capitalization rate is .10, for example (ask a real estate agent), divide the income of $52,000 by .10, and you get $520,000. This is the value of the building. If the usual rate is .08, meaning investors in the area expect an 8% return, the value would be $650,000.
Easy Real Estate Appraisal?
Net income before debt-service, divided by the “cap rate:” It really is a simple formula. The tough part getting accurate income figures. Is the seller showing you ALL the normal expenses, and not exagerating income? If he stopped repairs for a year, and is showing “projected” rents, the income figure could be $15,000 too high. This would mean the building is worth $187,000 less (.08 cap rate) than your appraisal shows.
Another thing smart investors do when buying, is to separate out income from vending machines and laundry machines. If these provide $6,000 of the income, that would add $75,000 to the appraised value (.08 cap rate). Do the appraisal without this income included, then add back the replacement cost of the machines (probably much less than $75,000).
Be careful when using any real estate appraisal method. No formula is perfect, and all are only as good as the figures you plug into them. Used wisely, though, real estate appraisal using capitalization rates is one of the most accurate methods.
Jul
14Property Investment Abroad — Beware of Guaranteed Rents
Posted By: Ramon Rivas on July 14, 2010 at 11:23 pmUK buy-to-let investors are being tempted by offers of guaranteed rents on property deals around the world, but how good are these deals in real terms and will there be any rental demand once the guaranteed period ends?
Worldwide opportunities
Investors are looking beyond the overcrowded UK market for untapped property hotspots in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and out to the Far East.
Deciding on the best foreign markets to invest in is a case of weighing up the potential for growth and rental income against the risks and costs.
For example prices of residential homes in Beijing rose by 20% in 2005 (according to the Beijing Municipal Construction Committee), however there are many issues regarding the transfer of funds out of China, a 5% tax on rental income and the possibility that the Chinese government could claim the land back.
Latvia on the other hand presents a lower risk to foreign investors, with membership of the EU and the ability to borrow up to 90% of the value of the property making it a more appealing choice.
However, this is not to say that an investor can simply buy any property in Latvia and expect to make easy rental returns. Like any foreign market, the risks are generally higher than buying in the home market.
Incentive to buy
To help encourage potential landlords to overseas markets, a number of investment companies are offering guaranteed rents for anything up to 5 years. Rental guarantees, it is argued, provide a reliable safety net for riskier markets, however many experts warn they are merely a marketing tool and advise investors to look very closely at the deal being offered.
Key issues
One of the biggest issues with guaranteed rentals is a lack of demand for the property once the period has finished. Guarantees are often used to market properties that otherwise would not sell and many investors are shocked by the resulting drop in income.
In addition to this, it is often the case that investors end up footing the rental bill themselves, when developers inflate the price of the property to cover the guaranteed rent. This can provide a further shock when the investor tries to sell the property and realizes that it is not worth as much as they originally paid for it.
If you do opt for a guaranteed rental deal, make sure that it is properly underwritten by a bank. Otherwise you would be at risk of losing the guarantee if the developer were to go out of business.
Poor regulation means that it is also worth checking the small print for any hidden clauses that enable the developer to avoid paying the guaranteed rent and it is always a good idea to seek expert advice.
Real estate investing is a game. To play it well you must understand the four financial benefits of real estate and how to maximize them. Those benefits are:
1. Cash flow
2. Equity build up (the payoff of your loan)
3. Tax benefits
4. Potential appreciation
In this article we are going to look at benefit number one.
Benefit number one – Cash Flow (cash flow before tax).
Investing in real state is game of numbers. To play the game well you must understand how to manipulate the numbers to get the end results you want. The result being positive cash flow.
The formula to calculate the cash flow is listed below:
Gross Rental Income
Minus: Vacancy
Equals: Adjusted Gross Income
Minus: Operating Expenses
Equals: Net Operating Income
Minus: Debt Service Payments
Equals: Cash Flow Before Taxes
Here is an explanation of each of the factors in the formula above.
Gross rental income is the first number that you need. It includes all the rents and any other miscellaneous income from garage rents, laundry machines or vending machine. This number is that total income that we expect to get during the year.
Vacancy is a percentage of the gross rental income. It is based on that you won’t collect from of the rent that is expected because of bounced checks, evictions and vacant units during the year. This percentage will vary depending on the supply and demand for rental in your area. I commonly use a 5% vacancy factor when I don’t have any data to determine this. It is important to ALWAYS have a vacancy percentage. Many times the seller will tell you that they have had no vacancy. It is just not true because people’s lives change. They get divorced; lose their jobs and other changes. This causes them not to have the money to pay rent and creates vacancies.
Adjusted Gross Income is the actual money that you are going to receive.
Operating expense are all the costs that apply to the property each and every year other than the loan payments. It includes things like taxes, insurance, repairs, utilities that you pay and any other expenses.
Net Operating Income is that amount of money that the property produces after all operating expenses. This is the most important number because this is the number use to pay any loan payments. This is also the number that we use to determine the value of the property (more about this later).
Debt Service Payments is the amount of payments that you spend per year for any loan that you have on the property.
Cash Flow Before Tax is the amount of money that is left over after you have paid EVERYTHING. This is the amount of money that is you get to keep for your self.
Ok, now that I explained what all the numbers are, here are the keys to creating more cash flow. There is only basically two ways to do it. You have to get more income by increasing the rents and/or reducing vacancies losses or you need to reduce your operating expenses and /or your loan payments.
If you are buying, it obvious that by paying less for the property would mean that your loan should be less, therefore your loan payments should be less and should give you more cash flow.
It is extremely important that before you every buy any rental real estate that you look at the cash flow and you should run the numbers using three different scenarios. The best case where you rents are high and expenses are low, the worst-case scenario where the rents are low and the expenses are high and then a middle scenario. If the worst-case scenario still makes sense then the property should be a no-brainer and you should go ahead and buy.
