Financial Freedom One House At A Time
So, you’ve been telling everyone that you buy houses, and you’ve finally found someone who needs to sell their property quickly. After you inspect the house, you realize it needs work. But there could be a good profit if you fix it up and sell it. You get the seller to the kitchen table and structure the deal of the century. The seller accepts, and you close the deal….
We’re doing a property right now that has a propane furnace, so we went to see Ms. Sue over at Calhoun LP Gas. She got me taken care of and scheduled their guys to bring me a tank the following week, weather permitting. As we were doing the paperwork, Ms. Sue noticed I was reading everything and remarked that that was fine, but that it was just their…
One of the biggest mistakes I see beginning investors make is buying a property a long distance away from where they live. And trust me, I understand. It was a great deal. And you hadn’t seen anything that cheap around you. Ashley and I did the same thing when we bought a place for $8,000 45 minutes (one-way mind you) from where we lived. And that…
I wish you could hear the voice of the character I have inside my head. It’s that of a Scotsman. I’m not sure if it’s from a cartoon I watched as a kid or if it was one of Robin Williams’ alter egos. Either way, when something unsavory would happen to the Scotsman, his expletive of choice was “Ah shillelaghly!” And with what we just learned on a…
So you bought a house to flip, did a jam-up rehab on it, and already have it under contract with some buyers who love it. Things are going great. During the due diligence period, the buyers pay for a home inspector to go out and look the place over. Then it happens. Your agent calls and says, after the home inspection, your buyers have concerns. You’re wondering…
As we were doing the walk-through inspection of our most recent flip, we noted that there was a regular 200 amp breaker panel on one side of the house with a few open spaces in it. This was great because we needed those spaces to add a new air conditioning system. When we got to the other side of the house, however, we found a small fuse panel. It…
I was talking to one of my best friends, Houston Long, recently about something that had been going on at his office. Not only is Houston a top notch investor, but he’s also a fantastic agent at Maximum One Realty. At his office, they had a new hire that was going full throttle. By that I mean they were showing houses from early in the morning to late into the…
Ashley and I recently came across a listing with “possible short sale” in the title. If you don’t know, a short sale occurs when a bank agrees to accept less than what the borrower owes on their mortgage when the property sells. This listing was intriguing to us since we haven’t seen any short sales advertised in a long time. Personally, I think short sales have almost gone…
I’m often asked when talking to aspiring real estate investors what a “full timer’s” daily schedule consists of. So far my reply has not been that we push computer buttons for 10 minutes each day, in order to make a bazillion dollars a day while enjoying umbrella drinks on exotic beaches. I say that because that’s how infomercials portray us. My experience, however, has been… well let me tell…
Contract terminations Pete Fortunato has a wonderful way of defining contracts. He says a contract is a memorial of the meeting of the minds. Isn’t that poetic? For us real estate investors, our paper work tells the story of what happened when the buyer and the seller had a meeting of the minds and agreed to a deal. Sometimes I think we lose the simplicity…