New Homes Sales Surge in July

Finally, some good news on the housing front.  It seems everything has been doom and gloom for so long.  Many investors have completely left the business, many more are struggling to stay alive.  The Washington Post just reported that new homes sales for the month of July increased 9.6% over sales in June.  This is key because foreclosures and bank owned properties have been leading sales, in most areas for quite some time.  Although that means many opportunities for buying great bargains at bargain basement prices, it does also drive values down.  So, if you are a buy and hold investor and you have 10 homes in your portfolio then you don’t want it to be compared, value wise, to all the short sales, REO’s and foreclosures. 

If you want to read the entire article you can check it out at: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/economy-watch/2009/08/new_home_sales_surge_nearly_10.html?hpid=topnews

The Top 5 Effective Marketing Techniques To Find Private Lenders To Fund Your Real Estate Deals

Marketing is always the key driver to running any business.  We always need to be thinking about how we can differentiate our strategies to get ahead and stay current.  A lot of my clients ask me all the time if there are any new methods to sourcing private money for real estate deals.  Sometimes there are new approaches and sometimes the old, proven methods still work best.  Below are the top 5 that I’ve seen the best results from when sourcing new private money sources:

1. Small Aggregate Lending Sites – These sites are put together and funded by other individuals who want to make a return on their money.  An example of this is Prosper.com.  This site will pool individuals’ money together and bet on you based on your profile to negotiate the interest rate, etc.  Their limit is $25K loans but these are great for funding renovation and/or holding costs when you buy a property subject to the existing loan, the seller finances the property on a first mortgage, or you want to renovate a rental that you have.  In today’s market another great strategy is making up the back payments on a foreclosure deal and taking it over subject to the existing financing. The great deal about these Prosper.com loans as they aren’t secured against the property.
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The Feds To Cut Interest Rates

Did you see that the Feds may cut interest rates?  This is going to flow down to your consumer loans, home equity lines, etc.  For anyone that has rental homes with adjustable financing, this is going to create a nice chunk of cashflow for you across all of your units for at least a short period of time. Hopefully your loans will lock the change for at least a 12 month period.  Optimization is the key.  Checkout the article here:

http://snipurl.com/8ayj4

Reply and let me know what you think about this…

Now is the time to promote your programs

Ok, not to point out the obvious to all you investors out there but now is the time to build and promote your private money programs for real estate.  The banks funds are locked in most cases and until there is some sort of approved bail out, there is less money circulating in the market.  But here is the greatest part of all… Read more