In order to be successful as a real estate investor you must have an aggressive finding or prospecting strategy. There is no way around this fact. If you are going to be buying deals you first have to be finding deals. The key to finding good deals is finding someone that is willing to sell their property for less than what it is worth – motivated sellers. People with beat up houses, vacant houses, condemned houses, foreclosed houses, etc. are typically the sellers that are going to be the most motivated.
The article below is good news for investors. These “squalid, dilapidated homes� are exactly what we are looking to buy. Now, we don’t want to run out and buy a hammered property just to buy a hammered property. We need to make sure we do our numbers and research the area so we don’t simply take on someone else’s trash. We need to have a strategy for making money; having said that, these are great properties to be looking at and evaluating.
These homes for sale stink
Never before have there been so many squalid, dilapidated homes on the market – and they’re helping to exaggerate already-plummeting home prices.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Mold, maggots and piles of festering trash – no wonder home prices are in freefall.
It’s not just the sub prime mortgage crisis that’s to blame for plummeting home prices. A flood of squalid properties on the market is helping to exaggerate the post-bubble price declines.
“Part of the reason home prices are declining is a fundamental deterioration in the housing stock,” said Glenn Kelman, CEO of the online, discount broker Redfin. “During the boom, nine out of 10 houses for sale in many markets were in prime condition. Now, for every 10 houses, at least three are dogs.”
Most of these mutts are foreclosed properties that have been permitted to fall into disrepair by lenders overwhelmed with thousands of vacant homes. If these houses sell at all, they’re going for bargain basement prices that are hurting home values throughout the neighborhood.
“I’ve never seen so many houses in this condition before,” said Ray Anderson of Buyer’s Advantage Real Estate in Auburn Calif., near Sacramento. “And I’ve been in the business 20 years. I’ve seen bank-owned properties in the past. They were never like this.”
Distressed properties usually sell for discounts of 10% to 40% below comparable, well-maintained homes, according to Tom Inserra, executive vice president for Zaio, an appraisal company that is creating a national database of home values.
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