Carole VanSickle Ellis
Wildfire Devastation: How Tiny Houses Could Help
When multiple wildfires swept across California, burning hundreds of thousands of acres and destroying thousands of homes in the process, California’s housing crisis became immediately worse. While homeowners are still sorting through the wreckage and real estate investors are taking to the streets in hopes of helping homeowners who wish ...
3 Tough Truths About Real Estate Asset Protection
Ask any real estate investor what asset class is the safest for their capital investments, and the odds are pretty good that you’re going to hear the same answer time and again: Real estate, of course! Unfortunately, even the most dedicated and diligent real estate investors tend to make a ...
3 Actions to Start Self-Directing Your Retirement
“Most financial advisors will tell you that you simply cannot have a better lifestyle in retirement than you did while you were working full time. Most financial advisors are wrong.” So began Edwin Kelly, CEO of Specialized IRA Services, in his 60-minute training session at the 2017 Think Realty National ...
Tools for Property Management Mean Profit Growth
“We are an instant society,” Linda Liberatore, founder and president of SecurePayOne, started out in her presentation on saving hundreds of dollars each month by making simple adjustments to your property management strategies. “Did you ever see [the way people act] when they do not have internet?” she continued; “They ...
The Importance of Transparency in Passive Investing
When it comes to transparency in real estate, it seems like everyone boasts how they offer it, but few people are able to fully deliver on their promises. After all, just as chefs have their “secret sauces” and search engines have their “proprietary algorithms,” real estate investors who provide investment ...
Future of REI: Google Designing a Private Utopia
If you could own a home inside a metropolis boasting floating parks, perfect weather, and the option to work from home every day with the simple touch of a button, would you? Google thinks you probably would and, furthermore, that you would be a happier, healthier person as a result ...
Top 5 Most Expensive States for Property Taxes
According to WalletHub’s “2017 Property Taxes by State Report,” the average American household spends more than $2,000 on property taxes each year. Perhaps of even greater interest to real estate investors, nearly $12 billion of those property taxes go unpaid each year according to the same study. Interestingly enough, the ...
Bitcoin Appears in More Real Estate Closings
Cryptocurrency has been slow to take hold in real estate, making an appearance mainly when a seller hopes to garner media attention for a listing rather than as a serious form of payment. However, the controversial currency bitcoin, which is now accepted in many retail locations and restaurants in the ...
3 Reasons to Invest in Residential Assisted Living
“The silver tsunami is unstoppable,” Gene Guarino, CEO of the Residential Assisted Living Academy, is fond of saying. He follows that with some pretty incredible numbers, including that there are 1.4 million people turning 85 every single year and 10,000 people turning 65 every single day. “They’re going to need ...
Should You Invest in Areas Hit by Natural Disasters?
In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, signs of the storm damage are everywhere. Not all those signs are related to property damage, though. While there are plenty of homes devastated by flood waters and mold, mildew, and other water-related damage, there are also a number of bandit signs on the ...
Crowdfunding for a Down Payment?
Although there are certainly plenty of programs out there designed to help homeowners avoid the dreaded 10% or 20% down payment, years of buyer surveys from the National Association of Realtors, lenders, and consumer advocates show that buyers still believe they will need a huge chunk of money in order ...
Pricey Seattle Market Also “Most Affordable”
When you think of Seattle, Washington, you probably do not immediately think “affordability” in terms of its housing. After all, a metro area with a median home price of $610,000 is not necessarily accessible to the average home buyer. However, when that average buyer is, more than likely, an IT ...
Amazon’s New HQ Could be the Key to Buying your Next Property Investment
When Amazon announced it would be accepting proposals from cities around the country wishing to host the internet behemoth’s second headquarters, savvy real estate investors took notice as things got pretty wild pretty fast. It seemed like every major metro area in the country tweeted, Facebooked, and even turned to ...
Is There Hope for Housing Affordability?
According to a recent report from ATTOM Data Solutions, one in every four housing markets in the United States are becoming less affordable all the time. ATTOM’s Q1 2017 U.S. Home Affordability Index indicates that nationally, consumers are finding they must spend just about a third of their income in ...
Thinking Big from the Very Start
Real estate investors buy their first property for many reasons. For most, it boils down to independence, self-reliance, and control of their future. While most investors start out relatively small with single-family wholesale deals, residential fix and flips, or buy-and-hold rentals that they manage themselves, some opt to go big ...
One-on-One with the Atlanta Housing Authority
Real estate investors often cringe at the words “local housing authority.” While the term has a long, storied, and often strongly negative connotation, most of that negativity is due to decades of miscommunication between real estate investors and these organizations which are, in truth, dedicated to providing affordable housing resources ...
Breathing Life into Communities
When Tammy Phelps looks at a possible future investment, she also looks back. The leader of Capital City Real Estate Investors Alliance (ccREIA) and multifamily investor recalled her own struggles when she evaluated and eventually purchased her first multiunit community in 2007 after a terrible accident left her unable to ...
I was so hungry for success,” Jordan Dooley started off as he began describing his first foray into real estate investing. “I remember when I realized that real estate investing was actually a possibility, that I could really do it. It lit a fire under me.” Dooley sounds like a ...
Market Spotlight: Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri (KCMO), has been shaping the region around it since its inception in a tattered document describing the area penned by a deserting French soldier and illegal fur trader. Étienne de Veniard was, as a result of his desertion and subsequent efforts to avoid authorities, the first European ...
When the 1940s Meets the Modern Rehab
When a housing market heats up and home values start heading northward, the first thing to go is “affordable housing.” While this might seem like nothing more or less than conventional wisdom, when a market loses its affordable housing sector it tends to lose its lifeblood, the first-time buyer, in ...
In this issue’s section of “Industry Voices,” one of our features is an open letter that a magazine contributor, Brian Wojcik of NAIL411.org, sent the secretary of housing and urban development (HUD), Ben Carson. Wojcik provided plenty of context for his letter in terms of legislation and policy revolving around ...
Real Estate, Not Rocket Science
Hall and Fuller believe that successful investing hinges on consistency. Part of that “clockwork” relies on all parties in a transaction being clear about a couple key definitions. Turnkey Rental: a real estate investment purchased rent-ready, often with a tenant already in place and paying rent. Cash-Flowing Property: a property that is ...
Really Big Deals: Getting In on the Farmland Phenomenon
Farmland: Any land used for farming. Rural: The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines rural areas as those that are nonmetropolitan and have “open countryside, rural towns (places with fewer than 2,500 people) and urban areas with populations ranging from 2,500 to 49,999.” Over the past decade, international investors have doubled ...
Think Realty’s Guidebook to Turnkey Rental Real Estate
Turnkey Property: A turnkey property has historically been defined as a piece of real estate that can be purchased as-is and immediately rented out. Turnkey has expanded in recent years to include anything that can be conducted from a distance (i.e. a turnkey fix and flip) but generally refers to rental ...
Is Your Market Too Hot to Handle?
Investing in a hot market can be exciting. Watching the values of your properties climb is absolutely intoxicating, and many investors spend a great deal of time and energy trying to identify the next hot market before their competitors in order to get in early and make a mint. However, ...
