My Favorite Strategies for Making Money in Real Estate Investing
by Jeanette Fisher
If you're like most real estate investment wannabes, you've taken seminars, read books, watched infomercials and DVDs, and have spent considerable amounts of money to learn about the ins and outs of the field. Well, if you're still struggling with how to get started, here are some of my favorite ways to make money in real estate, taken from personal experience.
The first has become popular with the advent of several television programs. It's popularly known as flipping, which just means buying, fixing up, and reselling a property for a profit. It sounds simple enough. Find a dog of a house, spend what can be a considerable amount of time and money to upgrade and repair it, and then recoup that investment, along with a sizable profit, when you resell the property.
However, I like to buy homes that are in need of the repairs and upgrades you see so often portrayed on television and sell them WITHOUT doing the repairs myself. It's not as crazy as it sounds. All it involves is buying a property by contract, structuring that contract so that you have the right to sell the underlying to a building contractor or other investor who will have the means to be able to subcontract out the work.
The process is sometimes called bird dogging, but I prefer to call it wholesaling. I don't make as much per transaction, but the turnaround time is much faster, and I don't have to deal with the 101 things that can and do go wrong, as you well know if you're a fan of the various television shows that follow the ups and downs of investors as they try to flip their homes.
Real estate investors have always looked for houses that have the potential to be fixed up and upgraded and then resold at a profit. That's partly because, depending upon how hot your local real estate may be, the potential profits can be in the five-digit range for each transaction.
There are dangers, of course, since I've never run across a single project that didn't have at least one hidden problem that threw a giant monkey wrench into the process, reducing our profit and lengthening the time we expected to finish. Therefore, it's important for you to know your market and how much things will cost to repair before you start working this popular process.
Lease options can also be a profitable way to get into a rundown house, bring it up to standard, and then either resell or rent it, depending upon your taste. This allows you to generally get into a house without the real estate agent's fees, which can be considerable. Once you've got the property up to standard, you can then sell the home on a lease option to someone else, which is generally good, because they'll have more incentive to keep it nice.
There are many other ways to make money in real estate, of course, but these are some of my very favorites. The main thing is to pick a strategy you're comfortable with and stick to it until you're an expert at it!
Free ebook: The Truth about Making Money Flipping Houses at Fixing and Flipping Houses.
Copyright © 2006 Jeanette J. Fisher
P.S. Join us in our "Sell this House Race."
If you're like most real estate investment wannabes, you've taken seminars, read books, watched infomercials and DVDs, and have spent considerable amounts of money to learn about the ins and outs of the field. Well, if you're still struggling with how to get started, here are some of my favorite ways to make money in real estate, taken from personal experience.
The first has become popular with the advent of several television programs. It's popularly known as flipping, which just means buying, fixing up, and reselling a property for a profit. It sounds simple enough. Find a dog of a house, spend what can be a considerable amount of time and money to upgrade and repair it, and then recoup that investment, along with a sizable profit, when you resell the property.
However, I like to buy homes that are in need of the repairs and upgrades you see so often portrayed on television and sell them WITHOUT doing the repairs myself. It's not as crazy as it sounds. All it involves is buying a property by contract, structuring that contract so that you have the right to sell the underlying to a building contractor or other investor who will have the means to be able to subcontract out the work.
The process is sometimes called bird dogging, but I prefer to call it wholesaling. I don't make as much per transaction, but the turnaround time is much faster, and I don't have to deal with the 101 things that can and do go wrong, as you well know if you're a fan of the various television shows that follow the ups and downs of investors as they try to flip their homes.
Real estate investors have always looked for houses that have the potential to be fixed up and upgraded and then resold at a profit. That's partly because, depending upon how hot your local real estate may be, the potential profits can be in the five-digit range for each transaction.
There are dangers, of course, since I've never run across a single project that didn't have at least one hidden problem that threw a giant monkey wrench into the process, reducing our profit and lengthening the time we expected to finish. Therefore, it's important for you to know your market and how much things will cost to repair before you start working this popular process.
Lease options can also be a profitable way to get into a rundown house, bring it up to standard, and then either resell or rent it, depending upon your taste. This allows you to generally get into a house without the real estate agent's fees, which can be considerable. Once you've got the property up to standard, you can then sell the home on a lease option to someone else, which is generally good, because they'll have more incentive to keep it nice.
There are many other ways to make money in real estate, of course, but these are some of my very favorites. The main thing is to pick a strategy you're comfortable with and stick to it until you're an expert at it!
Free ebook: The Truth about Making Money Flipping Houses at Fixing and Flipping Houses.
Copyright © 2006 Jeanette J. Fisher
P.S. Join us in our "Sell this House Race."
posted by Jeanette at Monday, July 31, 2006
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