Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
If you want to grow a small nest egg into a million dollars in 10 years, real estate investing is an independent business that you need to seriously consider. What beginning investors often fail to understand is that real estate investing is about controlling properties rather than paying for properties. The less of your own money that you invest in each property, the more properties that you will control for no money down or small investments.
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If you think zero or low down deals are difficult to come by, you'd be correct. But that doesn't mean they are impossible to come up with. I know of one investor that arranged a deal to purchase a $66,000 house for zero down. Of course, the seller was desperate. The seller was out of state and didn't live in the house. He had repeat problems keeping a tenant in the house because he couldn't afford a professional management company. Because he lacked steady tenants, he had gotten behind on the property taxes and the house was no longer insured. All he wanted was to get out from under the house without losing it for the cost of back taxes. The seller agreed to carry a second mortgage of $36,000 for no interest and no payments for five years. Based on that, the buyer found a lender willing to issue a first mortgage for the balance of the purchase price. The seller was full owner of the property and walked away from the closing table with $30,000 in cash. The buyer owned a low mortgage property that he could easily pay to have managed professionally. He could pull a profit out of the house for five years before having to make payments to the seller.
As an investor, your primary goal is finding a way to deal with the seller's equity in the property. When you can leverage the seller's equity, you can typically find a lender that will payoff any outstanding mortgage on the property if the lender can be in first position with a spread of 30% or more between the money loaned and the fair market value. That's what makes short sales so difficult to close. The seller has no equity in the property.
Sellers always want to maximize their equity in a deal. However, the market is what determines how much equity they actually have at any given time. Some insist on holding out on a sale until they receive the high end of what they perceive to be their equity in the deal. Others are more anxious to sell and will trade part of their equity for cash today. You number one secret to putting deals together is learning what is motivating the seller.
If the seller wants cash now, you make a low ball offer that leaves plenty of meat on the bone for a new lender willing to put up money based on the loan being well below the market value of the property. If the seller wants the high end of the fair market value, it becomes a question of how long they are willing to wait for the money. As an investor, you can offer them premium dollar if they will owner finance and take the full value in installments over the next 20 years. If the property cash flows sufficiently, you can take over their existing financing and make a second mortgage payment to them that pays off their equity over multiple years.
Of course, the majority of sellers want to sell at full market value and receive the highest price at the closing table. As a no-cash or low-cash investor, these are not the sellers you should even be talking to. Your strategy is finding the 5 percent of the market that is either willing to sell at a discount or take their full equity over time.
Author bio: Brian Kline has been investing in real estate for more than 30 years and writing about real estate investing for seven years. He also draws upon 25 plus years of business experience including 12 years as a manager at Boeing Aircraft Company. Brian currently lives at Lake Cushman, Washington. A vacation destination, a few short miles from a national forest in the Olympic Mountains with the Pacific Ocean a couple of miles in the opposite direction.
