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This is the continuation of sage real estate investment advice from Scott Linson at Real Estate Investment Firm’s latest educational meeting for our investors.  This time, let’s talk about how to evaluate investment properties.  It’s important to find the right value of the property you’re interested in.  Several factors should be included in this.

• Determine Your Project Budget–remember, do not overbuild the area, because if you have a property that you want to improve in order to increase its market value, you must be careful not to spend too much on upgrades, or else you’ll end up losing money. 
• Know the Immediate Market (what prices does the property’s immediate market support?)
• Foreclosure Auctions

When you start getting emotional, you have a higher chance of losing money.  After all, as an investor, your job is not to make the house perfect, but to just bring it up to a higher level of quality, and get out. 

As far as your project budget, be mindful of two things.

1. What increases your property’s market value.
2. What increases your property’s market appeal.

Obviously, you’d like to increase the home’s value if you’re interested in flipping it.  Once the repairs are complete, the home’s worth is now called “ARV”, which is “After-Repair Value”.  The whole point of flipping is to buy at the fair market value (FMV), and sell at the ARV, because it’s the difference between the two that makes you money.  However, you still must have a balance between your property’s market value (what it’s worth) and its market appeal (how much it appeals to people)–although it’s true that improving the home’s “wow” factor won’t increase its market value, it can actually make the property sell faster.  Just keep in mind the old maxim, “Buy low and sell high”, which still applies today. 

The market will eventually pay you whatever the home is worth.  Up to the first two weeks that the home is listed, you’ll have the most attention from agents and potential home buyers.  Of course, you want to make money, but if your list price is too high, nobody will come–if your list price is lower and you wait a bit longer, you might eventually end up with a bidding war later on.  Keep in mind that you don’t have to sell your property just because it’s listed–it’s only a marketing agreement.  Don’t chase the market, because when you lower the list price of your home, people will wonder what’s wrong with the property.  As far as buying a property, remind yourself that $20K in the bank is still worth more than $30K that you might be able to get from the property you’re buying. 

It’s important for investors to understand the factors that tell us the home’s value.  They are as follows…

• Tax Assessments (from the government)
• Appraisals (from professional appraisers)
• Competitive Market Analyses (”CMA’s”, from real estate agents)

Tax assessments are created by the government.  They are usually about 20% below market value for the suburbs, and 40% for cities like Seattle.  To arrive at the tax assessment, the assessors evaluate the home based on mass appraisal technique (2 years’ of sales data for that area), areas (over 65 areas in King County alone), frequency, weaknesses, and disputes.  There’s actually a 50% “win” rate on property owners’ disputes, but it’s a 6-12 month process.  However, when you buy below the tax-assessed value, you just need to show proof of this to the government, and they will immediately change the tax-assessed value to what you actually paid.  Of course, if you’re able to buy a home for the tax-assessed value or even below (which would be lower than the market value), that’s going to make you some money–the only caveat is that as a result of the market’s “softening” (translation–the market’s still going down), the difference between the asking price and the tax-assessed value is getting closer, which means you might end up making less.  Allegedly, the market will improve in 2010, so there may be some properties in your portfolio, or that you’re considering buying, that you may want to hold until then, just so that they can appreciate in value.  However, don’t bank only on potential appreciation of a property–that’s speculation, and it’s not actually investing. 

In general, Scott recommends October/November/December as the best time to buy property, because you can fix it up and then sell it in March.  Keep your eye out for snowflakes–buy those auction properties when it’s snowing, because that’s when nobody else is bidding on them.  Also, you can call the bank that owns the foreclosed property on December 1st, make them an offer, and you have a very good chance of successfully buying form them.  Scott doesn’t recommend buying property in the summer if you want a quick flip, because you may end up holding it for a longer period of time, from 9-10 months.   

Remember that now is an incredible opportunity to buy, if you know what you’re doing.  You have to know what you want to do, and how you’re going to do it, so you need to educate yourself.  With that in mind, go sign up on our website at http://www.reif-wa.com, where you can view foreclosure properties to be sold at auction, short sale properties, MLS properties, etc.  Using our website, you can view the tax value vs. the list price, and you can also set filters so that you’ll only see details of properties that match your interests.  More importantly, you can analyze the deal for yourself, without any other investors seeing your details.  If you feel like you need some assistance, click “Contact Rep”, and just let us know what type of analysis you’d like for the property you’re interested in.

Here at REIF, we love what we do, and that’s helping you invest in real estate!  Stay tuned for our next blog entry, where we’ll discuss how appraisals work.

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