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Selling Your Own Home In A Tough Real Estate Market - Five Tips
If you are in a tough real estate market and are looking to sell your home quickly, you might want to consider doing a For Sale By Owner. My wife and I recently bought a new house and after trying unsuccessfully to sell our existing house through a real estate agent for several months decided to try For Sale by Owner. We found a buyer within four days and closed on the house three weeks later. However, through our experience we discovered a few things. Here are a few tips if you are considering a FSBO in a less than ideal real estate market. 1. Consider paying to have your home placed in the MLS. There are several companies out there that will do this for a few hundred dollars. With sales down, real estate agents are desperate to earn a commission. By putting the house in the MLS you are agreeing that if an agent brings a buyer to you that you will pay the agent their part of the commission (you still save the listing agents commission). If you can sell the house on your own with no agent then you won’t have to pay an agent. However, in a tough market you want as many possible eyes on your property as possible. 2. Get the word out to as many places as possible about your house. One of the best places to do this is on the internet. There are dozens of free websites that will allow you to post your house for free. Consider starting with craigslist since it has so much traffic and then spread out to the other sites on the net. It will probably take you an entire evening to get the house posted on all the sites and you will want to keep a spreadsheet with your usernames and passwords so that you can go back later and remove the listing once the house sells. 3. Design a professional looking flyer and put out for sale by owner signs and a flyer box. If you aren’t the artistic type and don’t know that much about designing things like flyers consider a site like vflyer which will give you templates for designing a flyer. Take some good pictures of the house with your digital camera and put them on the flyer. If you use Vflyer or a program like it you can probably use the same template to post the house to craigslist and ebay (if you decide to pay for a listing). 4. Be creative. When we put our house on the market we ordered an eight foot full color printed banner to put on our fence. Our house backed to a major street and we were able to get some major exposure from the banner. I have heard of people offering free vacations, big screen tvs, cash bonus’ to the listing agent and even a free car. I have also heard of people giving away a cool prize at their open house. These things can help get your house noticed which is the first step to getting it sold. 5. Make sure that your price is competitive. Consider using the money that you are saving on real estate commissions to cut the price of your house so that it is more competitive. In tough markets it is going to be very important that your house isn’t priced too high or people will find another option. In our area there were a ton of houses on the market and most of the houses that were selling were 5% or more undervalued. If that is what it takes you might need to swallow hard and cut the price of your house. Of course all of these things are just suggestions. Still, when things get tough and you need to sell your house these could be an option for you. They worked for us.Jeff McRitchie is the director of marketing for MyBinding.com and lives in Hillsboro, Oregon. He writes extensively on topics related to Binding Machines, Binding Supplies, Report Covers, Binders, Index Tabs, Laminators, Laminating Pouches, Roll Film, Shredders, and Paper Handling Equipment.
Source: www.ArticlePros.com

How You Can Use Rehab, Refinance and Cash Out as Long-Term Wealth Building Real Estate Investing
Today we are discussing a somewhat advanced strategy for you to use after you have been in the creative real estate investing business for a while. I call this Rehab, Refinance, and Cash Out . This strategy can lead to true long term wealth and financial independence. This works very well in a buyers market like Memphis where prices have been quite flat for some time. You need to use this to augment your wholesaling for immediate income and retailing for bigger short term profits. Rehab, Refinance and Cash Out is a long term wealth building strategy and will be something you will be glad you did as it is a long term buy and hold strategy, and those are the strategies that lead to true wealth accumulation and financial independence. Let me explain how this works. You find a good middle to low end 3 bedroom home that you are able to buy from an out of state owner or other motivated seller that needs a little work and you buy at 60% of after repaired value. You buy the house using a hard money lender like http://www.pleaseclose.com/memphistrading and do your fix up and have a property management firm manage the property and put a renter in the house. The hard money lender will typically loan you up to 65% of the after repaired value to purchase the house which you use to buy the house and then repair it. Now that the home is repaired you obtain an investor friendly mortgage and cash out by refinancing at 80-90% of after repaired retail value and you should be doing this with properties where this strategy gives you back at least $10,000 at the refinance that you can use in your business any way you need. Do not use this money to live on, use it solely to grow your real estate business. Once you have done this strategy on 10 homes you should be able to keep finding better and better deals because you can close quickly as you have cash in hand to make things happen. More cash equals better deals and more opportunities. By the time you repeat this strategy 20 times you should have at least $200,000 cash plus about $200,000 equity and 20 homes giving you at least $2000 per month positive cash flow whether you decide to work this month or not since you have a property management company handling things for you. With average annual rent increases, within five years that $2,000 a month should grow to $4,000 a month. In 30 years you should have $2 to 3 million plus in paid off real estate. It s a good solid long term strategy to add to your immediate selling from wholesaling, retailing and lease options that the extra $200,000 in cash will help grow tremendously. The rent minus the management fees and all loan and other costs must leave you with positive cash flow or this strategy should be avoided. If you cannot cash out on the property I don t recommend holding it long term as you want to be able to use your best mortgages to cash out. You can purchase using http://www.pleaseclose.com/memphistrading if your Equifax credit score is above 550(which is bad credit) or you have a co-borrower who has an Equifax score over 550. A good investor friendly mortgage company will give you good rates if you are at 660 middle score or above and the very best rates if your middle score is 720 or above. Your first 10 investor mortgages in your name and 10 in your spouses name are the easiest to qualify and get the best deals. After those you really need a good investor mortgage company to work with. Take the time to find the real investor friendly mortgage companies that can help you get loans for 100 properties and not just the first ten and let them have the easy ones and the tougher ones. I do recommend having more than one good lender available though, but stick to the ones that specialize in investor loans. Find out from other investors who the most investor friendly mortgage companies are to use to refinance the repaired home. I do not advocate becoming a landlord as I do not believe this is a valuable usage of your time and energy. I highly recommend asking around and finding a good property management company that will charge you 10% or less to start out with and gradually lower that % as you add more and more properties. I feel this is an advanced strategy as you won t see any cash in your pocket from this strategy for 4-6 months after you find the deal which is a long time to work and not see any pay. If you are wholesaling and making consistent money each month then it shouldn t matter. This strategy will magnify the profits you make in your investing business in ways you might not have imagined. This strategy is a natural progression from wholesaling as you are already helping others find these kinds of deals, now you will be able to get the cash out typical of probably 2 wholesale deals, just paid slower, and at the same time building a nice future nest egg.David offers a free E-course on quick start strategies for getting started in real estate investing that is delivered free via email and tele-clinic at: http://www.FreeRealEstateInvestingCourses.com
Source: www.ArticlePros.com