Quote:
Originally Posted by rekid
there are tons of opportunities to choose from. i could only recommend what I would do but flipping houses looks good.
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Hey all... for my very first post I couldn't help but to jump in with so many recommending real estate.
PLEASE DON'T!
Now is NOT the time. How would I know? I have flipped about 50 houses. When it was good, it was good. Now that it's bad, it's TERRIBLE! I got totally out of it about 6 months ago after flipping my last deal which was a house on the Gulf of Mexico... last summer it appraised for $1.78M. I had it under contract for about $1.1M and sold it to a guy for $30k more than my contract. But by the time he actually bought it, it had two more appraisals, each one dropping like a rock. He still bought it. I only got $10k of my profits, the rest was held in a note that the buyer never paid. He never even paid his bank note and the house recently went straight into foreclosure. I had a lot of time, expertise, and a little bit of marketing money in that deal. I can tell you about how overall I lost about $50k last year in real estate, but do you really want to hear it?
Or I can tell you about some other members of the local real estate investors association I co-founded (Panhandle Investors) one of which made over a million dollars during the bubble boom, and then lost ALL OF IT AND THEN SOME in the crash.
Flipping houses is reasonably safe actually... as long as you don't actually buy the house. Just flip the contract. However, these days it's very hard to a) find a good deal, because it seems everyone refinanced while prices were high, and they just can't sell at a discount unless you do a short sale (and that's not an easy undertaking) and b) hard to sell your deal even if you can manage to find one, because retail buyers (end users) can hardly get financed these days with very tight loan restrictions in place and cash investors nowadays want lower loan to value deals than they did a few years ago so that they can rent for positive cash flow.
It's been a perfect storm for real estate doldrums and I honestly can say that I doubt it will be any better for at least 5 years, if then. And I do not think we've found the bottom yet. National inventories are running at 10 months.. more than since about 1980.
Do what I did and find something better! Real estate just ain't it (not in most of the USA anyway).
I hear South America is hot for real estate now though.
So much for an introduction huh? lol