Tucson Real Estate Resources

Despite conventional wisdom about when investors should buy, most investors are running spooked from our current market. With stocks at fire sale prices and falling house prices in most markets, you may be wondering, should I hold tight and not take any risks in this uncertain market, or should I jump in and "buy low"?

The good news is that if you choose to employ a long term strategy with real estate investing, then any market can be good for buying. It's impossible to know when a market will bottom out, and how far it will ultimately drop. But, if you use net operating income as your primary criteria for buying, then a house that will support itself supports itself, regardless of whether the price goes down in the months after your purchase.

A net operating income analysis ensures

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If you've been watching the news lately you might have heard some of the breaking headlines about our current real estate and finance markets. Actually, it's kind of hard to miss. I know, because I don't usually watch the news and I am having a hard time avoiding all the gloom and doom. So, what does it mean to us as real estate investors now that money is tightening up for both our buyers and us as investors to buy houses?

Well, it opens up an amazing opportunity for those that are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work raising private money.

Private money, unlike institutional money, is

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While most people associate goal setting with New Year's, I am going to share with you some tools for converting the goals that you set into metrics that you can measure and work toward achieving daily in your real estate investing business.

I realize that the chances of your goals exactly matching the example I am going to be using is small at best, but it is my hope that the concept of how to calculate out your own numbers will be clear enough so that you will actually do it.

So, in this example, I am going to assume that you want to purchase $600,000 worth of real estate in one year and that the median home price in your market is $150,000. If each house is $150,000 you can determine how many houses you need to purchase in the year to achieve your goal. In this case $600,000 divided by $150,000 per house means you need to buy 4 houses in a year.

4 houses in a year means that you need to purchase 1 house every 3 months. I calculated that by taking 12 months and dividing it by 4 houses.

That means that you need to find and close on one $150,000 house every 3 months... which is a very reasonable part-time real estate investor goal.

So, let's take a look at

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Here's another Tucson property that was submitted by a user that we will use as a teaching tool for our Tucson, Arizona Real Estate Resources real estate investors. The property address, in case you want to look into it in more detail is: 3948 East Frankfort Strav, Tucson, AZ 85706.

Since this 4 bedroom, 2.00 bathroom property has an asking price of $44,900, let's take a look at what various offers would mean in terms of price per bedroom. Then you can select the offer price you would like to run further analysis on using the Offer Generator.

As you can see from the table above, if you know that rents in Tucson can support a certain price per bedroom, you can use the information provided above as a starting point for making your offer. Click on the Price Paid above to start your own analysis on this property using our Offer Generator investing tool.

Are you new to real estate investing and a bit confused by all of the different strategies you've heard of for making money in real estate? Maybe you've heard of such a thing as a bird dog, and are wondering what retrievers have to do with real estate. Worry not - Jassen covers the basics of real estate wholesaling, including bird dogging in his audio CD: Wholesaling Volume 1: Getting Started With Wholesaling. Check out this great way to get involved in your local Tucson market today.

Keep on investing Tucson,

James

Working with tens of thousands of real estate investors, I get more than my fair share of e-mails giving me some very basic information about a property and asking me if it is a deal. The challenge I often have is that people do not give me nearly enough information to even comment on whether it is or is not a deal.

For example, let's look at the latest e-mail I received. The investor who e-mailed me said that he is looking at a package of townhouses that are bank owned. He tells me that the previous owner is being investigated for fraud. There are 5-10 of these townhouses in the package and they are asking $45,000 each for them, but they are short sales. They are currently rented for $700 each. The investor asks:
should I pursue these? The investor has not shared anything more about the deal with me including the area of the country, what other similar properties are selling for, or anything about their ability to get financing or buy them for cash.

First of all, I don't know anything about

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If you take the time to do an in person walk through with your new tenants when they move into one of your houses, you can get some additional mileage out of this time by giving your tenants some basic instructions on taking care of the property. Included in your lease should be a list of tenant responsibilities. In our leases, this always includes the task of changing the furnace/air filter monthly. However, many tenants have a hard time doing this which ends up costing us in service, cleaning and repairs.

While you cannot be there every month with your tenant to ensure compliance with this provision in their lease, you can

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I just finished uploading the free real estate course download this week for people that start and finish a Learn To Be Rich™ game this week.

This week's free real estate investing course download is Volume #3 of our Real Estate Mentoring Calls series where I discuss Deal Analysis Basics.

Just start and complete a game between October 27, 2008 and November 2, 2008 to download this course for free.

Or, if you prefer to just pay for the course, you can use the add to cart button below to order it on audio CD.

Until my next post,

James

Here's another Tucson property that was submitted by a user that we will use as a teaching tool for our Tucson, Arizona Real Estate Resources real estate investors. The property address, in case you want to look into it in more detail is: 3819 South Lundy, Tucson, AZ 85714.

Let's look at this 1 bedroom, 1.00 bathroom property located at 3819 South Lundy that has an asking price of $39,900.

As you can see from the table above, if you know what a typical Tucson property sells for on a price per square foot basis, you can quickly use the information provided above as a starting point for making your offer. Click on the Price Paid above to start your own analysis on this property using our Offer Generator investing tool.

I also have additional information that Jassen recorded on audio CD on Selecting the Best Real Estate Deals. On the audio CD recording and members only password protected website Jassen covers determining Fair Market Value, how to find comparable sales, an overview of the 3 offers I typically make as well as some other additional information. If you're new to investing in Tucson then you may be interested in checking that out as well as the other free articles and resources on the Tucson, Arizona Real Estate Resources website.

Until next time,

James