It was standing room only with many first-time visitors at Real Estate Investment Firm’s most recent educational meeting. Scott Linson, President and CEO of American Home Team, Inc., gave us an informative presentation about how to evaluate a property in today’s market by determing ARV.
His useful and timely advice stems from 10 years experience in marketing/online advertising, 6 years as a licensed agent(currently with Keller Williams in Lynnwood, WA), 5 years in appraising and evaluating properties, and 5 years working with real estate investors. In addition, his previous work in the IT field (having worked with IBM and Hewlett-Packard) makes his knowledge invaluable to us, which is why we’re pleased to work with him. In his career, Scott has seen lots of investors’ mistakes, so remember, it’s crucial to become educated about real estate. Scott has developed his business around investors, which is what we do at Real Estate Investment Firm–working with our clients to help them succeed by providing them with the tools and education to invest in real estate.
When evaluating a property to decide if you want to buy it, you need to recognize a good deal when you see it; basically, as Scott explained, you need to know when to “pull the trigger”, because a good deal today in real estate is gone tomorrow. Finding those good deals can be a challenge, but Scott reminded us that the MLS is one of the most under-rated tools for investors. In fact, according to Gary Keller’s “Millionaire Real Estate Investor” book, although 42% of deals made by millionaire investors were made by networking, actually 32% of their deals were through MLS or real estate agents. Only 10% of deals were from newspaper ads/marketing/etc.
Scott was able to make an investor $300K from a 2004-built home located in Mercer Island, which they found on the MLS–list price as $699K and tax-assessed at $840K, and Scott’s investor was able to purchase it for $675K. When they ran the numbers and evaluated the property, they found its market value was $975K. The MLS has a wide range of properties–bank-owned, probates, estate sales, landlords, Seattle Housing Authority, as well. In fact, the Seattle Housing Authority has some amazing deals on their properties listed on the MLS.
Another excellent source of properties available is found over at REIF’s website, and the link is http://www.reif-wa.com. Just sign up and we’ll create a user account for you so that you can have access to details on 874 distressed properties at the time of this writing, across 7 different counties in Washington state. From the comfort of your own home, you can log in, analyze properties, and even place offers.
We’re going to continue to post some of Scott’s real estate investment advice, so stay tuned! Be sure to add our blog, http://www.distressedrealestate.org, to your list of favorites so you can keep coming back for more!
