Operations

Your operations define your long-term success in real estate investing. Fine-tune your process with: Asset Management | Asset Protection | Deal Analysis | Fundamentals | Growth | Lead Generation | Risk Management

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Operations

Your operations define your long-term success in real estate investing. Fine-tune your process with: Asset Management | Asset Protection | Deal Analysis | Fundamentals | Growth | Lead Generation | Risk Management

Back To: All Topics 

Labor Shortage Ahead

Labor Shortage Ahead

A surge in retirees (people turning 65) will slow the growth of workers in the United States. In 2000, 2 million people turned 65; 3.5 million did in 2016; and 4 million will in 2021. Even with a higher-than-usual rate of retiree-aged people working, U.S. economic growth will almost certainly ...
Noteworthy Markets

Noteworthy Markets

Many real estate investors are looking to expand into new markets as backyard deals become scarcer and thinner based on demand for product, reduced HUD foreclosures and property values recovering from the mortgage meltdown. While new investors struggle to find local deals, seasoned and savvy investors are moving into new ...
Grass grow up from dollars

Capital Ideas: Where to Find the Funding for Your Deals

We’re talking about something pretty cool in this blog post: how to find the best capital for your real estate flips and real estate rentals. (This is taken from Episode 24 of my YouTube series, “Real Estate Deal Talk.”) One of the best ways I’ve been able to do that, ...
championship medals

Are You Going for the Gold, or Were You Not Even Invited?

| Kevin Guz | Article | Fundamentals
As I write this, the summer Olympic Games are going on in Rio. And as I watch the competition, I can’t help correlating the Games to my life as a real estate investor in Dallas, Texas. At the Olympics, we see the top athletes from around the world competing at ...
Slow and Steady Growth

Slow and Steady Growth

Centrally located in the Sunshine State, Orlando has always been a popular destination—not just for tourists, but for relocating families and investors, as well. The weather and job growth witnessed decades of slow, steady growth in population and real estate values. This healthy growth turned into rampant speculation during the ...
Rising from the Ashes

Rising from the Ashes

I’m thinking of a city with the busiest international border crossing in North America. Where downtown apartment vacancy rates are below 5 percent and continuously dropping. A city neighbored by suburbs with some of the safest rated living standards in the United States, where entry home prices are in the ...
Bubbling with Profit Potential

Bubbling with Profit Potential

Where are many reasons to invest in Kansas City, Missouri—one of our clients’ favorite markets. Well-known for its contributions to the musical styles of blues and jazz, the city is also noted for its Kansas City-style barbecue.  And with over 200 fountains, it has been dubbed the “City of Fountains.” ...
Red-Hot, But Is It Sustainable?

Red-Hot, But Is It Sustainable?

We have all seen market cycles—the peaks, the dips, the flat lines. So what makes a real estate market stand out? Time. How long does it dip? How long does it climb? Does it follow other market trends? Why or why not? The answers to all of these are questions speak ...
Going Up

Going Up

The single-family house business in the Tampa area has investors scrambling for scraps for house purchasing opportunities. The multiple listing service (MLS) and mortgage foreclosures are where most investors begin their search. Multiple bids on various opportunities put sellers in the position to sound the bell for highest and best ...
IRA Investing Hot Spots

IRA Investing Hot Spots

The convergence of two important trends—the improving U.S. real estate market and growing interest in self-directed retirement savings plans—presents an opportunity for people saving for their post-working years. Self-directed IRAs give you the freedom to invest in a wider range of assets, including real estate. The following data from clients ...
Oceanfront Paradise

Oceanfront Paradise

San Diego is a coastal town with more than 140 sunny days, low humidity and very few mosquitos. Ocean-access properties always seem to weather the storms and are the first to come out of a recession. The rent prices have increased 13.6 percent between the 3rd quarter of 2014 and ...
Texas-Sized Demand

Texas-Sized Demand

Another sign—if you need it—that the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area is a prime target for real estate investors is this: DFW has only around two months of resale housing inventory available for sale. This is truly a seller’s (and smart investor’s) market. DFW housing is being squeezed by three unrelenting ...
What If?

What If?

1031 Exchange, named after Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code, allows a real estate investor to defer (postpone) tax liability when selling one property and buying another. This raises an important question: How much income tax will I owe if I sell this property but do not acquire a ...
Thwarting Break-Ins

Thwarting Break-Ins

When we look at claims information we see that many of the properties subject to break-ins, thefts and vandalism are usually vacant or going through renovations to prepare them for sale or the next tenant. I’m sure it’s truly disappointing to arrive to show a house that was finished only ...
Know Before You Go: A Loan Commitment Checklist

Know Before You Go: A Loan Commitment Checklist

While issues such as interest rates, principal loan amounts, underwriting requirements, etc., generally are included in a loan commitment, many issues are often not addressed until after the prospective borrower has signed the loan commitment, paid the nonrefundable loan commitment fee and funded, in advance, a deposit for expenses related ...
Defeating Defaults

Defeating Defaults

As a specialist in owner financing of residential properties and a teacher to students across the nation, I am often asked about the default rate. Nationally, in 2010, the default rate for subprime loans was about 10 percent, but those likely included options, adjustable-rate mortgages and other variable interest loans ...
5 Strategies For Building Wealth Through Note Buying

5 Strategies For Building Wealth Through Note Buying

"You can make a living brokering notes, but you get wealthy owning notes!” This statement from a pioneer real estate note investor provided one of those “lightbulb” moments for me. Determined to start owning notes, I left a 10-year “job” in the corporate note-buying world to start my own note ...
5 Must Know Fix-and-Flip Tips

5 Must Know Fix-and-Flip Tips

Whether this is your first flip or your 20th flip, there are strategies you can use to help make your business even more successful. Fixing-and-flipping homes can be profitable for real estate investors in a number of different cycles. An important thing to keep in mind when starting out is ...
set of tools in tool box on a wooden background

Five ‘Gotta-Have’ Tools for Real Estate Investors

| Engelo Rumora | Article | Operations
We all love lists, right? And today I’ve got an awesome one for you—five great tools that I know can help you in your real estate investing. Tool No. 1: Think Realty Starting with the obvious: The first one is Think Realty Magazine. You’ve got to subscribe to the Think ...
Office skyscraper

Trends in Real Estate: Urbanization, Changing Office Usage

Certain American cities are seeing prices rise; others are starting to cool. Some broader demographic trends have continued, though—urbanization is on the upswing, and urban office usage patterns are changing. Home Buyers Want Cities No less than Robert Shiller—a 2013 Nobel laureate in economics, professor of economics at Yale University ...
Closeup of a diverse group of people holding up pieces of a jigsaw puzzle

As a Real Estate Investor, Are You a Jack-of-All-Trades or Master-of-One?

As a real estate investor, should you be a jack-of-all-trades or a master-of-one? It’s a very important distinction because it will influence what kind of real estate investments you make. In exploring this subject, probably the best place to start is with something relatively familiar—the concept of diversified investments. You ...
Manager looking at his laptop in despair

Newbies, Don’t Let Sellers Take Advantage of You

I’ve got a gripe, and I think it’s important to share it so that some of the newbies out there don’t get unfairly taken advantage of. It’s driving me nuts that new investor—and even some seasoned, pro investors—are buying deals at terrible prices. I see it happening in Atlanta, where ...
learning about real estate investing

NAR Student Debt/Housing Survey Provides Insight for Investors

Imagine this familiar scenario that so many Millennials face: they spend four years in college working hard to attain the grades they’ll need to get profitable employment once their schooling is complete, but at the same time, they are amassing thousands upon thousands of dollars’ worth of student loan debt ...
Multiple exposure shot of a business group superimposed over a train track

‘Wantrepreneurs’ Have Ruined the Term ‘Entrepreneur’

| Engelo Rumora | Article | Operations
I have said it many times in my videos and social media posts: the word “entrepreneur” is dead. Or useless, anyway. All the “wantrepreneurs” out there have seen to that. Now you’re probably saying to yourself, how can the word “entrepreneur” be dead? Well, it’s dead because of so many ...
Arrows painted on asphalt. Young man standing hesitating to make a decision.

3 Characteristics That Define the ‘Active’ Investor

When talking about real estate investors, we generally put them into one of two categories: active investors or passive investors. In this post, we’re going to focus on the active, but first, let’s briefly touch on what is meant by “passive.” This could be a HomeVestors franchisee (as I am, ...