I FOUND A 9.5% PROPERTY....

[Sam Hoesch]

A little about me, I have graduated in the Spring, and have been paying off my 115K of student loans while living at home. Through this I have been learning from bigger pockets, listen money matters, and many other sources about how to become financially stable. As some of you may know, it is very difficult to learn about all these ways of investing and making money when you are not physically able to invest... anyways I digress. 

So I was perusing Zillow last night after reading an article, here on bigger pockets, about a 2% property. The guy bought a property for $45,000 and is renting it for $900. I live in the midwest (more specifically Holland, MI) and decided to do some research on Zillow. I was looking at homes that were for rent and then trying to look through the tax history to determine their percentage on rent. That's when I found it......

37 E 19th ST, Holland MI 49423. Its a small 3 bd 1 bath. It was sold for $11,000 in 2011 and has a rent Zestimate of $1,050 now (also on the site for $1,050 rent)! IT'S A 9.5% PROPERTY! Of course I realize this is 7 years later, and they probably did some work to it but I have seen at least one or two other home, similar to this, that were sold between 10-20k. This amazes me that someone could pretty much pay off the mortgage in one year of rent. Heck, maybe you can't even get a mortgage for that amount. 

Our area was hit pretty hard in 2008-2011 but has been appreciating at about 20% a year over the last 4 years but man... this makes me want to see everything burn again so that I could get a deal like this.... and also put some money away for opportunities like this in the future. Problem is I have done enough research in stocks to know it's not beneficial to save money for the market to downturn because you lose out on all the growth before it downturns. I am curious whether this is also true for real estate or if it would make sense for me to save 5-10k in case something came up?