Knowledgebase

All of Think Realty's extensive content archive is at your fingertips. Filter by media type and keyword to hone in on exactly what you need.

Knowledgebase

All of Think Realty's extensive content archive is at your fingertips. Filter by media type and keyword to hone in on exactly what you need.

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 ...
Lifebuoy in a stormy blue sea

Seriously Underwater Property Numbers Decline

ATTOM Data Solutions’ recently released Q2 2016 U.S. Home Equity and Underwater Report shows 6,666,622 seriously underwater properties. That number represents 11.9 percent of all U.S. properties with a mortgage as of the end of the second quarter 2016—down from 12.0 percent in the previous quarter and down from 13.3 ...
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 ...
Stop for the school bus

Home Values Higher in ZIP Codes With Good Schools

Homes in ZIP codes with at least one good elementary school have higher values and stronger home price appreciation over the long term than homes in ZIP codes without any good elementary schools, where homes lost more value during the housing downturn but have seen stronger appreciation during the housing ...
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, ...
Soccer player kick the ball at the penalty

Believe in Success—And it Will Come

This blog post is a little more philosophical than usual, but I really believe in this as a key to reaching success—whether that’s in your real estate investing, or in life in general. What I’m talking about is the “law of attraction,” which is, quite simply: what you think, you ...
Client signing a real estate contract in real estate agency

6 Ways to Grow Your Rental Business Without Breaking the Bank

| Dennis Spivey | Article | Operations
As the U.S. real estate market continues to recover from the financial crisis of the mid 2000s, there has been a noticeable flow of capital moving back into residential investment opportunities. From the fix-and-flip model to the long-term rental/hold strategy, we’ve seen a steady return to real estate as a ...
Piggy bank standing at front door with house interior in the background. Pig is pink in foreground and house is modern style.

Are Housing Prices Slowing?

Property is, in many areas, considered to now be about fully valued; interest rates can seemingly only go up; and the current low rates have been low for so long now that some observers fear a market top. Why are other observers less concerned? Low Interest Rates Fuel Exuberance Abroad ...