DETROIT.. invest or not to invest?

 I recently answered a post from an out of Michigan investor in regards to Detroit.

I myself am still on the fence about entering into the city limits. But I thought this topic will be a very good blog and have pasted my answer from my post below.

Share your thoughts, knowledge and opinions.

"It's going to take some time to make Detroit turn around. Since surrounding areas dropped so much in the past few years, many people moved out of the city limits into neighboring cities like Warren, Roseville, Hazel Park, Ferndale, Oak Park, Southfield and so on.

These areas used to be more expensive than Detroit but once they weren't 1000's of people did a northward shift.

In fact people already in the surrounding areas even did a northward shift. It was quite a feat to see happening. It started back in 2008 and I was one of them that did it as well.

The owner of Quicken Loans has been buying up buildings in Downtown Detroit where things are still nice in some areas, but the neighborhoods are so bad and no one wants to live there. The ones that do really don't have a choice or anywhere else to go.

One of the biggest problems in Detroit is many of the residents don't take care of their own property. Whether it be because of financial issues or they just don't care I'm not sure of. But one drive through the neighborhoods and you would understand.

So the problem that an investor has is finding a tenant that will take care of the property after rehabbing it and preventing looters from trashing it during and after a rehab.

If people aren't willing to help the neighborhoods themselves, Investors will have a hard time as well trying to bring up the neighborhoods.

It will take some big team effort to bring the city back I think. Many people still have pride for Detroit and are trying to bring it back. But again... the citizens and residents in Detroit neighborhoods need to pull together as well or it just won't come back to where it should be.

Unfortunately even before the downfall Detroit had some pretty bad neighborhoods. So it's not like this was an all of a sudden thing. Neighborhoods have been abandoned, trashed, and burned down since the riots. To this day those neighborhoods have never been cleaned up.

In conclusion, the issues with Detroit were forth coming and will need a lot of people to come together to fix the problem and bring people back to the city.

If this happens, it will definitely be a place to profit from.

But don't expect any quick happenings. I personally still see the northward shift out of Detroit into the northern cities. In fact a couple of my tenants did the same exact thing.

One works for the city directly and had never lived outside of the city. Apparently things are ran different in the city including Utilities. His wife and him are awesome clients but they have no intentions of ever going back. They plan on staying in my house and eventually want to buy it.

So how can we as investors or the City officials of Detroit convince people that Detroit will change for the better?? This is the $1,000,000 question."