InvestorLoft Real Estate Investing Blog

Allen Klosowski (K2 Photo Studio), Josh Mishell (Flying Dog Brewery), Erika Napoletano (InvestorLoft.com), Janie Gianotsos (Food Bank), Josh Clauss (Tuggl.com), and Rich Chirco (Food Bank) - photo by Scott Lawan

Some people ask: what can you really say in 140 characters? The answer might surprise you.

At InvestorLoft, we prefer to ask what we feel is a better question:

What can you DO with 140 characters?

InvestorLoft has been actively involved in the Twitter online community since November of 2008 (you can follow our feed and join the conversation here). It’s here that we connect with other real estate industry professionals, real estate investors and members of our local Denver community and beyond.  Being a Denver-based business, there’s no lack of enthusiasm we have for this city we call home and we’re always looking for a way to give back.

Last night, InvestorLoft was proud to be a part of the largest live gathering of Twitter users in Denver to-date by participating in the monthly Denver Tweetup. A live gathering of “virtual people,” the event saw over 300 local business owners, entrepreneurs and other users of Twitter come out to socialize in full force. Last night was special, however: the event was working to raise funds for the Food Bank of the Rockies. Flying Dog Brewery generously donated the refreshments for the event while another local Denver business, Tuggl.com, worked with the Food Bank to arrange the donations. Eventgoers generously donated $1261.50, which translated to 5046 meals that the Food Bank of the Rockies can now provide to Coloradans in need.

And it was all done through Twitter. The people who attended last night’s event are to be thanked, alongside all of the event volunteers, Flying Dog Brewery and Tuggl.com. If it weren’t for the power of Twitter and social media, InvestorLoft and our co-organizers wouldn’t have been able to get this event organized — we were given 5046 great reasons to keep using Twitter last night! Our Director of Communications, Erika Napoletano, has been an integral part of the planning process for the Denver Tweetup events since their inception in December 2008. From that first monthly event until August’s, they’ve seen attendance steadily increase from 30 guests to last night’s 300. That is the power of Twitter.

If you’re a real estate industry professional using Twitter, ask yourself: what can I DO with 140 characters? As we said, the answer might surprise you. Sometimes it’s not all about your business.

Sometimes it’s about the community in which you DO business.

Watch CBS 4 Denver’s coverage of the event HERE!

We thank @mistymontano and @CBS4Denver for covering the event on the 10pm news last night as well as Kendra Wiig (@polyhazard) for her great write-up on Examiner.com. We’re delighted to have partnered with the Food Bank of the Rockies and glad for the generous donations from our attendees. Additional thanks to Tuggl.com and Josh Clauss for coordinating the charitable aspect, Flying Dog Brewery for their generous donation of libations, venue and marketing support by Josh Mishell, and Allen Klosowski for working with our Director of Communications month after month to consistently create great events for the Denver Twitter community.

Receive buyer leads from InvestorLoft in your market

Realtors – you’ve worked hard and long to be a local expert in your market. You know sales trends, great neighborhoods, ones to avoid and the ins and outs of making offers on short sales. Wouldn’t it be great if you could share that knowledge and expertise with InvestorLoft’s investor buyers?

You can!

If you are a Realtor who meets the following criteria, you are eligible to be a Local Market Expert for InvestorLoft and receive leads from unrepresented buyer members shopping in your area!

Criteria our experienced Success Team Members must meet to join our Lead Network:

• Must have at least three (3) years experience as a real estate professional
• Must have handled a minimum of five (5) investor transactions
• Must have a clean ethical professional record with no ethics complaints against your professional licensure.

Benefits of Success Team Membership:

• More Leads, Less Legwork: receive leads from buyers who do not have representation in your market. Our buyers look to you to guide them through a real estate investment purchase as an expert in your local market.
• Month-to-Month Contracts: start receiving buyer leads for as little as $9 per month (market pricing varies depending on number of listings and local population, one-time setup fee applies)
• Design Your Own Territory: reserve one or several counties in your local market – pay the setup fee only once!

What does the index rise mean for real estate?

This week marked the release of the latest S&P/Case Shiller Price Index Report. For the first time in 20 years, there was an overall 0.5% increase in the index, possibly indicating that the real estate market on a whole is seeing signs of recovery.

“This is much more important than an up day on the stock market. It may mean that we may have changed direction,” Robert Shiller, a co-developer of the Case Shiller index told Reuters Television.

It is “a pretty significant indicator that we might be at or near a bottom,” said index co-developer economist Karl Case of the self named index.

Many of InvestorLoft’s active markets are listed in the recent report. Here’s a rundown of key metropolitan areas that our member may find of interest:

While the vast majority of what we hear these days about real estate in the news is “doom and gloom,” there’s definitely an upside that few are talking about. We’ve entered an era where America is on sale – we haven’t seen such a favorable buyer’s market in years. Property prices in many areas are below market rate, rents in those areas are above market rate, and non-traditional financing is become more and more prevalent and the options for investors to access quality rental/investment property are abundant. So tell me – why isn’t the majority of the media talking about the sunny side to the foreclosure across the street?

Fear.

Fear sells. Fear motivates. Fear is what we thrive on.

The most powerful thing we can do is tap into that fear that everyone’s trying to instill in us and glean powerful information from it.

If a city is experiencing a higher than normal foreclosure rate and population statistics are remaining constant – wouldn’t that mean that there’s a steady demand for rental property from displaced homeowners?

If inventory is plentiful and driving prices down yet vacancy rates in the area remain low and constant - wouldn’t that indicate an opportunity to access prime rental property at reasonable prices with a steady flow of at-market rent rates and tenant supply?

If credit is tight and traditional loans are harder to come by – wouldn’t that lend a look at less traditional financing methods like self-directed IRAs? The power to become a cash buyer is within your reach if you know where to look.

There’s a silver lining to every gloomy cloud in the sky and the real estate market is no different. Our CEO, Wally Charnoff, was recently interviewed by Jonathan Burton at MarketWatch about this exact subject. Have a look at the video and see what Jonathan and Wally found to chat about.

Here is the second part to How to Get Your Listings Noticed – Part 1 – more strategies to assist the real estate investor with setting their properties apart from the crowd and encourage a quicker sale.

3. Use Creative Financing: One of the best ways to offer the home improvements after the sale mentioned in #2 is through an FHA 203K Rehab loan or a USDA Rural Housing Rehab loan. Buyer can finance anywhere from $5,000 to $35,000 on top of the loan amount to pay for improvements. For energy improvement-type repairs, FHA offers an Energy Efficiency program for these repairs too. A good loan officer who knows the ins-and-outs of these programs can help you strategize listing offers that will appeal to buyers.

4. Sell the Payment – Not the Price: Again, your loan officer can be invaluable to you here. Buyers get intimidated by prices of homes. $150,000 sounds like a whole lot of money, whereas $1200 a month can seem much more manageable. Check out the temporary or permanent rate buy-down options available to you. “Seller will reduce your first year’s payment to only $1050 a month AND pay all your closing costs too!”

In your “call for more details” disclaimer – direct them to your loan officer with the questions and REQUIRE that the financing be done by him/her to get the special deal. As soon as you say “pay all your closing costs” and you allow ANY loan officer to do the loan – figure the costs will probably double or triple. If they want the special deal, they can use your loan officer (again, builders do this all the time) and you can retain control of the transaction.

Do These 4 Strategies Work?

It depends on what you mean by “Do they work?” If you try these strategies and the home doesn’t sell right away, does that mean the strategy failed? Not necessarily. Yes, it would be nice if the free bottle of wine or the offer to throw in a new fence was able to close the deal from the get-go, but that is not what the strategy is intended to do.

These four strategies can only help you get the home noticed by potential buyers. They cannot sell the home for you. Nobody is going to buy the home because you give them a bottle of wine or free tickets to a hot concert. But it’s possible that someone who likes wine or concerts will become interested in buying your home – and they maybe wouldn’t have ever considered your home unless you had offered the giveaway.

If you try using these strategies, the measure of its success or failure is: Did more people notice the home? If your open house was better attended because you offered free pony rides for the kids – then that was a success. Just because the home didn’t sell doesn’t make it less of a success.

Why Do People Buy?

Someone will buy your home when they believe your home offers them the best value for their money, based on their individual needs. You cannot dictate what their needs are – that is beyond your control. The only things you can control as a seller is making sure your home’s offering is competitive with other offerings in your area AND reaching out to as many potential buyers as possible.

Again, the more potential buyers you can get to consider your home, the better your chances are. And then it will be up to the buyer to determine if your home meets their needs. Your pricing and the condition of your home will play a big role in their decision, but they wouldn’t ever have that decision to make if they had never considered your home in the first place.

Get them to consider it – that’s the ONLY way to have a shot at selling them your home.

Glenn Leach is a mortgage loan officer in Puyallup, Washington. You can read more articles and ideas at www.credittothewise.com.

The content in this blog is not affiliated with nor is it endorsed by InvestorLoft.com and contributors receive no compensation for submitted articles. All articles submitted to InvestorLoft are subject to editorial review. Please seek the advice of qualified real estate, tax and financial professionals before investing in any project or opportunity. InvestorLoft does not provide tax or legal advice and any and all content herein is provided for informational and educational purposes only.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on strategies for getting your investment property listings and other home listings noticed – check back on Thursday of this week for Part 2.

Many investors acquired their non-owner homes using yesterday’s rules with a focus towards shorter-term lending solutions. Perhaps you’re one of them. You planned on keeping the home for a few years and then selling it for a profit, right? And you were attracted to low introductory rate ARMs because they helped with cash flow until the home went up in value and you made the big profit on the other side. Remember that plan?

And then the rules changed…

Those shorter-term loans that you were so sure you’d be out of by now are starting to convert to long-term problems. Your ARM interest rates are skyrocketing or you can’t refinance into today’s great interest rates because you have too many properties. You realize you need to sell some of your investment properties before they put you in an awkward position. But selling for a reasonable price while competing against bank-owned foreclosures and short sales isn’t easy in today’s market.

I’d like to offer you some ideas for getting your investment properties sold as quickly as possible AND for the best price possible.

To start, it is important for you to know that whether real estate markets are good for sellers – with buyers everywhere – or real estate markets are unfavorable for sellers (like right now), there is one constant that you can count on:

The more potential buyers you can get to notice your listing, the greater your chances are of selling it sooner AND at a better price.

All selling strategies need to be filtered through that undeniable truth. If the strategy will help get the home noticed by more potential buyers, it is a good strategy. If it limits the number of potential buyers who might be interested in checking things out, it is a bad strategy.

Following are two strategies (to be followed by an additional two in Part 2 of tios blog) to help get your investment property noticed:

1. Listing Gimmicks and Give-Aways: At the time of this writing, real estate values are declining in many parts of the country, loan programs have become restricted preventing many potential buyers from obtaining the necessary financing to buy, and many buyers are afraid of the uncertainty presented by a shaky economy – so sellers are having to resort to unusual measures to get their listings noticed.

Freebies and incentives are increasing – in value and in creativity. “Buy this home and we’ll throw in a new Porsche!” “Free yard maintenance for a year!” “Tour our home and get a free bottle of fine wine!” These are just a few of the listing gimmicks you can find out there.

2. Home Improvements AFTER the Sale: Would the home sell better if it had a new roof? How about new floor coverings? New appliances and granite countertops? If so, then go ahead and offer the home for sale that way. Builders do this all the time – and so can you. If you have a favorite contractor, have him/her put together some bids for various improvements, use photos of the new appliances, leave carpet samples or countertop pieces out. “Price includes new…” Laws vary from state to state on how to pay for the repairs – but there is usually a way to work it out within the deal.

Tune in Thursday for part 2 of this entry!

Special thanks to Glenn Leach, author of this post. Learn more about Glenn at www.credittothewise.com.

The content in this blog is not affiliated with nor is it endorsed by InvestorLoft.com and contributors receive no compensation for submitted articles. All articles submitted to InvestorLoft are subject to editorial review. Please seek the advice of qualified real estate, tax and financial professionals before investing in any project or opportunity. InvestorLoft does not provide tax or legal advice and any and all content herein is provided for informational and educational purposes only.

Where to look for the best real estate deals

Real estate investors – looking for the best markets for new deals? FORTUNE online just published a comprehensive pictorial tour of their “best markets” for retirement homes – and InvestorLoft is right in line with their estimations. There are subtantial values to be found in each of the named markets, earning each a place on this list of 12 key cities to consider for the retiree – AND the real estate investor in search of investment property for their portfolios.

The article names Miami, San Diego, Las Vegas, Tampa and Denver as the top markets for this article, citing lowered home prices, quality of living and local amenities for each.

In a separate article, they identify Phoenix as a key location for picking up a “deal in the desert.”

If you’d like to take a quick search through InvestorLoft’s available properties in each of the 6 markets listed in these two articles, just click on the links below and we’ll take you there in a jiffy:

Miami investment property

Tampa investment property

San Diego investment property

Las Vegas investment property

Denver investment property

Phoenix investment property

As a reminder, every property listed on InvestorLoft has been listed by a licensed real estate professional – no “fly by night” or under the table deals here. We make it simple to search for, identify and analyze investment property with just a few clicks of the mouse and firmly support the role of the real estate professional in every stage of the transaction.

First Time Home Buyer Savings Can Stack-Up with a Little Research

If you’re one of the few who hasn’t heard about the $8,000 first-time home buyer credit – listen up! That’s a fair share of dough for those who qualify, and this week’s blog will give you some tips on how to stretch your homebuying dollars even further. When looking for your first home, it’s hard to not think of that purchase as a significant investment. While InvestorLoft traditionally focuses on the needs of the investment buyer, we’re here to tell you that there are some handy tools (on both our site and others) that can help you make that $8,000 credit stretch even further.

So first-time home buyers: this list is for you!

Ways to Maximize Your First-Time Home Buyer Credit

1. Shop for Discounts – Everyone’s talking about the abundance of foreclosures on the market – so there MUST be deals to be had, right? Absolutely right. Using InvestorLoft’s PropScout search engine, you can actually search for properties by discount to market value and estimated equity! Not only that, but Forbes Real Estate frequently issues their Luxury Housing Index numbers weekly and MSNBC.com publishes up-to-date housing information (like cities with the highest foreclosure rates and info on the 10 priciest cities for owning a home). A little research lends to a keen eye for discounts!
   
2. Keep an eye on Craigslist! Real estate listings don’t just come in the classifieds of your local paper or online. While the risk runs high for potential scams, a trained eye will let you know if you’re looking at a potentially good deal. You can take the information from the listing you find and then research similar properties in the area or (preferably) just hand the info over to your chosen real estate professional and let them do the legwork for you. Think outside the MLS and let your Realtor help you!
   
3. Know Your Numbers - Sites like Bankrate.com are hugely useful for financial research. They’re a long-standing source of data for up-to-date mortgage rates AND the bank providing them. Pre-approval for a mortgage gives you eve more negotiating power when you need to act fast on a hot deal.
4. Set Up New Property Alerts – Searching every day for the home of your dreams can be cumbersome. On sites like InvestorLoft, you can save searches and have new results emailed when they post to the system! It’s kind of like a concierge for your home buying needs (but there’s no obligatory $20 tip required). Does the site you’re using to search email you targeted results or just random emails of new listings? Your time is valuable – make it count with targeted searching!
   
5. Leverage Professional Assistance – You might be the king or queen of finding aything you want online, but odds are, you’re going to use a Realtor to buy your home. There are thousands of experienced professionals ready and waiting to help you do the legwork for your new home search. Search for property is all they do, each and every day – chances are that they know a few inside tips about the area in which you’re looking to buy and may even hear about listings before you can find them online. Find a real estate pro you trust and let them help with the heavy lifting!

Your Virtual Key to Real Estate Investment

We find so much powerful information across the web on a weekly basis that we wanted to take a moment and fill our readers in on the “coolest of the cool” in this week’s real estate and investment markets.

Back on April 3rd, we posted Real Estate: the Self-Directed Perspective and have found that this subject is really heating-up across the web. Here are two complimentary posts on the subject of “retiring with real estate” that our readers might also find useful:

Real Estate: Market Slowdown Offers Deals for Real Estate Investors – DailyPress.com. Real Estate is on sale and the market’s current slowdown is offering great deals for real estate investors in the Norfolk, VA region. InvestorLoft members can search Virginia for investment property!

Using IRAs to Buy Real Estate: Six Reasons to Tap Retirement Funds Now to Buy Rental Property - (Chris Pummer) MarketWatch.com. There’s a lively discussion going on over at MarketWatch on Chris Pummer’s series of articles on investing in real estate with your retirement funds. This let us know that we’re doing the right thing at InvestorLoft by helping educate our members and site visitors on the details of using their IRAs to purchase real estate. Have you seen our 7-part series on the Basics of Real Estate and Self-Directed IRAs?

Bellevue, Wash. and DENVER – (April 13, 2009) - Guidant Financial Group and InvestorLoft.com announced today that they will be joining efforts to create more awareness around real estate IRA investing through both companies’ websites. Combining Guidant’s award-winning expertise in alternative investment facilitation with InvestorLoft’s reach within the real estate investment community, both companies are excited at the expanded offerings.

“Many would-be investors contact us looking for investment opportunities,” says David Nilssen, co-founder of Guidant, a leading provider of self-directed IRA services and business-financing solutions. “By combining InvestorLoft’s resources with our self-directed IRA services, our companies create an opportunity for investors to identify, evaluate and purchase real estate investments.”

Guidant’s website includes audio and video about self-directed investing, a glossary of investment-related terms and a plethora of informative articles,” says Nilssen. “The inclusion of InvestorLoft content will help fill a gap in our curriculum.”

InvestorLoft is the first technology-driven real estate investment marketplace to effectively solve the challenges of identifying, analyzing and funding investment opportunities. Having experienced a similar gap in educational content and trusted resources for referral, InvestorLoft is enthusiastic about the resources that the relationship with Guidant offers their site members as well.

“With an estimated 70-90 percent of IRA holders unaware of their ability to purchase real estate through their IRA, there is a strong need to educate our members by providing solid educational tools, particularly information about innovative investing solutions as offered by Guidant,” says Walter Charnoff, co-founder and CEO of InvestorLoft. “We’re excited about the relationship with Guidant and look forward to leveraging their expertise on the utilization of retirement funds for purchasing real estate and other alternative investments.”

By teaming up, Guidant and InvestorLoft plan to help investors take a more active role in their future investments and get one step closer to achieving their investment goals.   

About Guidant Financial Group

Guidant Financial Group provides self-directed IRAs and business-funding solutions through IRAs and 401(k)s. Guidant’s services allow investors the freedom to make investments in real estate, franchises, businesses, tax liens and more by accessing their retirement accounts without penalty before retirement age. For more information on Self-Directed IRAs or Business Financing please visit www.guidantfinancial.com.

Contact: 

Marty Weishaar 
Guidant Financial Group^TM 
Phone: 888.472.4455 ext. 3248 
Facsimile: 888.418.0374 
marty.weishaar@guidantfinancial.com