Hope everyone had a very Happy Holiday season and a great New Years!

Just ran across this article while reading Google News today and thought I’d share it with you.

In a nutshell here are the highlights of the article:

• Resolve to Get Your Finances in Order and Buy Something
• Resolve to View Your Home as a Product
• Refinance a Home

What’s holding you back?  It’s a new year and a great time to evaluate where you’re at with your real estate business.  Seek out advice from people doing it well and take action…those are the keys to success in any endeavor.

Source: http://www.nuwireinvestor.com/articles/real-estate-investment-resolutions-for-the-new-year-60324.aspx

Are you considering putting your house up for sale, but not sure where to start?

Afraid it will take too long to sell, or that you won’t get the price you want?

Think about “staging” your home, or in other words, setting the scene for the buyer to develop serious interest in your property.

To be really effective, you need to look at both the outside and the inside of your home.

Here are 2 tips to get you started with the inside of your home:

1. De-clutter. This is one of the most important things you can do.

2. Make your home look like a model. You want to de-personalize as much as possible so potential buyers can imagine themselves and their own belongings occupying the space in your house. That means minimizing – putting away everything you don’t need or use. Clear off kitchen counters, stash all those appliances that are not commonly used or that look amazing, and put miscellaneous small clutter in a few attractive baskets or boxes.

And the biggest tip of all? Imagine yourself as a potential buyer looking at your property for the very first time. What impressions are you getting? Would YOU buy your house? What would you like to see changed before you put an offer on your house?

And don’t worry about spending several thousand dollars to get your house ready to sell, you’ll be putting yourself in a position to get it all back when your house sells. Proper staging helps you sell your house in a shorter time and at the price you want.

Staging is an important element that all real estate professionals know needs to happen when aiming for the best possible market value for your house.

Is the market moving towards recovery?

The SeattlePI posted this today and is worthy of a read.  They also reference another major industry related magazine in the write up.

Here’s a brief excerpt from their update:

“Increases in housing prices across the nation have created rising expectations that the U.S real estate market has risen out of its low point and is on its way toward recovery.  Low inventory, interest rates, and low prices have been driving significant numbers of sales for the past year, but now we are seeing price increases in almost all of the major metropolitan areas nationwide.”

Source: http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlewaterfronthomes/2012/08/06/real-estate-recovery-major-indices-show-housing-market-past-bottom/

Read an interesting article on the topic today and thought we’d share it with the class:

“For investors, “home” is no longer a four-letter word.

The real-estate sector, for the first time in years, is serving as a beacon of relative strength in an otherwise weak economy. Standard & Poor’s on Tuesday reported that home prices in its S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city index rose 0.9% in May from the prior month, after adjusting for seasonal trends, and have risen 2.6% since bottoming in January.

Some of the world’s smartest investors, including Warren Buffett, are taking notice, placing big bets on a continued recovery in the housing market. Other kinds of real-estate investments—including real-estate investment trusts that own shopping malls, apartment buildings and hospitals—also have been among the best performers this year.”

Read the full article here from the wsj.com:

http://stream.wsj.com/story/markets/SS-2-5/SS-2-41479/

WATCH: Is Real Estate Still A Good Investment? From Maria Bartiromo

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/27/marlo-thomas-mondays-with-marlo-is-real-estate-a-good-investment_n_1710285.html

Always a good question to ask.  Take a minute to listen in to Maria Bartiromo’s take on the subject.

Have a great rest of the day!

While we’ve known it was true, we were surprised as anyone to see the mainstream media get it right. After years of depreciation, homes are simply a more stable, highly undervalued asset than gold or stocks. We’ve seen scores of students make fortunes off of homes, and now Fortune magazine agrees.

Fortune cited Mike Castleman, founder and CEO of Metrostudy, a company that has spent three decades tracking real-time data on the inventory of new homes in America. His thoughts?

“I’m a dirt-road economist who sees what’s happening on the ground, and in 35 years I’ve never seen a shortage of new construction like the one I’m seeing today. The talking heads who are down on real estate will hate to hear this, but America needs to build a lot more houses. And in most markets the price of new homes is fixin’ to rise, not fall.”
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Now that the history lesson is over, let’s get to the part that investors really care about – where are we now, and how can you make money from this? If you look strictly at the 18 year pattern, the next peak will happen sometime in the mid 2020′s – so we still have a few years. Rather than focusing on the date, though, I encourage investors to look at the fundamentals. If you dive deeper into the fundamentals you will notice that the market has for the most part leveled out. In most real estate markets across the country home prices aren’t really increasing, but the huge drops seem to be a thing of the past. If you look at affordability indexes you’ll notice how buying a home actually makes sense now – which was not the case a few years back. In fact, in many real estate markets it is actually cheaper to buy a home now than it is to rent. Interest rates are at all time lows, and mortgages are as attractive as they have ever been.”

Source: http://www.nuwireinvestor.com/articles/the-real-estate-cycle-where-are-we-now-59319.aspx

A recent study by DataQuick and Inman News shows that SW Florida is the spot international home buyers like the most. We’ve been over why this market is hot before, but it seems like the rest of the world now knows about it as well. This is great news as new money in the market means a bigger piece for all of us.

Top 10 markets for international home buyers according to the study:

Lakeland-Winterhaven, Florida
Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Florida
Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, Florida
North Point-Bradenton-Sarasota, Florida
Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, Florida
Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, Arizona
New York County, New York (e.g. Manhattan)
Honolulu, Hawaii
Tampa-St. Petersberg-Clearwater, Florida
Las Vegas-Paradise, Nevada

Read the rest of this entry »

Hope you all are having a great spring!  The market is still hot and there are tons of opportunities out there.

Here’s a few more resources we wanted to share with you.

Three blogs that will give you the inside track:

1. http://blog.topagent.com/ - Excellent charts and info on the market in SW Florida

2. http://www.realestateoptimist.com/ – it may not be the prettiest blog out there, but David Welch does a great job of posting up to date stats and analyzing the market

3. http://www.realtyinorlando.com/blog.php – Great blog with all sorts of insights on both the Orlando real estate market as well as info on the community

Remember, if you have any internet tools you find useful, forward them to resha@millionairementorgroup.com and we’ll include them in an upcoming post.

In a recent article at nuwireinvestor.com they covered how Florida, while one of the hardest hit recently, is now rebounding nicely.

“The real estate market is coming back around after years of getting hammered, and the markets leading this recovery are the very ones that were damaged most by the collapse. Florida was one of the hardest hit states when the real estate market tanked, but now things are looking much better in the sunshine state.”

Source: http://www.nuwireinvestor.com/articles/best-florida-real-estate-markets-for-2012-59234.aspx

One of our favorite markets is in Orlando, Florida which they covered as one of the top spots making a strong comeback:

“The real beauty of the Orlando real estate market, is that thanks to Walt Disney World – and all the various other theme parks – the area is the #1 tourist destination in the United States. For investors, that means – assuming you buy a property in a decent location – there are two potential tenant streams (vacationers and long term renters). Here are some more market facts for Orlando:

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