You may have noticed that this blog was captured by someone who used it for an adsense revenue generating blog. Google played fair and returned it to me. The problem was that I listed this blog in some of my articles, one of which is Flipping Houses for Gold (viewed over 21,000 times on EzineArticles and posted on thousands of real estate websites).
In case you're wondering if you can still make money fixing and flipping houses with all the media coverage of the real estate bubble burst and the return to a buyer's market, I'll share some success stories and market trends.
Last week, we listed a property in Riverside California and sold it in one day for full price, which is $85,000 more than the purchase price.
Joe Luckino in Ohio continues to work full time fixing houses. Joe keeps most of his properties but he still flips some. You can read about his investment plan.
I see more investors like Joe getting serious about real estate as a long-term investment. Instead of house flipping, they're fixing and renting. Joe wants 100 rentals and he's well on his way with 56 houses.
Even though newspapers and TV news report that housing prices are dipping, they tend to confuse the facts. For instance, reports in our area says that the prices fell but what they really mean is that prices didn't go up as much as they did last year. According to Jamie Johnson with Keller Williams Realty, Riverside County didn't appreciate 30 percent in 2006 like it did in 2005. However, prices overall appreciated over 6 percent. Prices did not go down. In fact, southwest Riverside county saw significant gains.
Lou Barnes, mortgage broker and nationally syndicated columnist said "The best thing is to stick with the data, and evaluate commentators by what they say about it. Example: this week the National Association of Realtors announced that median home prices fell in July, headlines shrieking. Someone who really wanted to know what is going on would have to dig deep to find reality: a decline in median prices just means that more cheaper homes are selling than expensive ones; the median says nothing about the fate of an individual house or neighborhood, or city."
Facts:
* Declines in price are minor.
* Declines mainly in economically weak zones.
* 20 percent decline in new home construction.
* 50 percent nationwide increase in inventories of unsold homes.
* No sign of a downward price spiral in any market.
Decline in home mortgage refinance means less business for mortgage brokers. Two of our mortgage brokers are branching out into home sales. This means that investors will get more attention and quicker action from their loan officers.
What does this mean for people who want to get into real estate investing?
Learn as much as you can about the different strategies to make money in real estate. You can still make money flipping houses but you can also make money as a landlord.
In case you think you need a huge down payment to get started, below are pictures of the house we just finished. It was purchased for no money down, fixed, refinanced with $65,000 cash out, and just listed yesterday.
Copyright © 2006 Jeanette J. Fisher
