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What is the different between the interest rates?

What kind of investing are you planning on doing? Fix and flip? Own and rent out?

Houses are usually easier to turn over if you are just looking to flip.

I like multi-family better to own and operate. One reason is that when you have a vacancy in an apartment, you only lose a percentage of your income, whereas in a SFH if your tenant moves, it's all gone.

In my little real estate dictionary, assign is defined, "To transfer property, or an interest in property."

Is your goal just to buy and sell homes?

The biggest problem I see is that people don't know how to properly evaluate deals. They learn some super-duper buying strategy (no money down or whatever) and rush out and buy a home or two and then promptly go bancrupt because they didn't estimate the expenses correctly or the home didn't sell as fast as they thought it would.

As for a selling tip:
When you show a home to a prospective buyer, don't just wander around and say "this is the kitchen" or "these are the stairs" or things like that. People aren't dumb. Talk about something else:
Here are a couple of ideas:
1) Talk about what could be done to decorate
2) What they buyers plans are for the home (kids, home business...)
3) If you know any history of the previous owners, tell it. Everybody loves stories.

You should consider:

1) Dollar-wise, how much work is it going to need to get it livable?

2) What exactly will it cost to bring the taxes current?

3) If you did the work (or had it done) what would the property be worth?

4) If you got a loan to bring the taxes current and do the repairs, could you rent it high enough (and consistently enough) to cover the mortgage and other expenses?

5) If you got the loan, brought the taxes current and did the repairs, would it be worth it to move in yourself?

6) If you got the loan, brought the taxes current and did the repairs, what could it sell for? Look at the other for sale homes in the area, call some local agents... How fast do homes in that area sell?

7) Think about what kind of investing you really want to do. Do you want to continue to rehab, do you want to own and operate apartments? How involved do you want to be? Or do you just want to put that money
somehow into real estate?

If you just want to invest it and forget about it, you should look into putting it into a reit. Or a reit mutual fund. Or that no-load reit index fund that Vanguard offers. If you've got school or other things to worry about, you might just want to put it somewhere safe, like those or even government I bonds (which are guaranteed to keep pace with inflation) until you're really ready to spend time doing real estate invesments.

As to avoid getting screwed over by someone else, just don't ever sign anything until you've read and understand it. That means ALL of the fine frint.

To avoid screwing yourself over, you need to make sure that your decision is based on real life numbers, not "I think it'll sell for x."

The risks of flipping homes basically boil down to this:
1) The house might take a long time to sell. You have to cover motgage while it sits on the market. That bites into your abiliy to make money.
2) The house needs more improvements that you thought. The house might have serious defects that needs to be fixed that you didn't forsee.
3) You "over-fix" the house. You spend too much money fixing things that don't really help the house sell better.
4) The house just isn't worth what you need, or what you think. You have to cover any agent fees and whatnot, too, and you can't just take one guys word for how much the property is worth.

When I read the post title, I couldn't help but remember something. Once while rehabbing my own house I got physically ill.

I bought a "fixer-upper" when I got married 3 years ago. Actually, "fixer-upper" is kind of a gentle term for the condition this house was in. The previous owner had died about a year before I bought it, and everything had just been left as it was. That meant a full refrigerator had been left with the electricity off the whole year. I don't remember smelling anything quite so nasty as that...

So yeah, I got sick doing a rehab.

I guess the long and short of it is that PPC can pay off if you know what you're doing.

I'm on Perry Marshall's mailing list and I found his free mini-course pretty good.
http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/

Also, a place called Google Adwords Made Easy(not an affiliate link) has a free ebook about adwords. Near the end of it, they sell a tool to help you run your adwords campains, but the rest of the book has some decent information.
Direct download link for the book:
http://www.googleadwordsmadeeasy.com/AWMadeEasy_signed.pdf

Whether it is fiscally responsible or not depends on your needs and goals.

Here are two things you may want to consider:

1) How will it affect rentability if you don't make any improvements?

2) Your plans for selling.
If you are planning on selling the property you should consider the return on investment of making an additional $99,000 ($3,000 x 33 units) investment in your property.

In a traditional marketplace, you figure the value of the property like this.

Property Value = NOI / Cap Rate

You can also figure the increase in value the same way

Property Value Increase = Increase in NOI / Cap Rate

I don't know what the average cap rate is in your area, so I'll just use 6% as an example.

Your increase in NOI = $100 a month per unit * 33 units * 12 months = $39,600

So the property value increase would be $39,000 / .06 (6% cap rate) = $660,000
Likewise, a 4% cap rate would be a $990,000 push in value and 8% would be $495,000.

Note: that's not a guarantee that you will sell it for that much more, it just means that if your property sells like others in your area have been selling, you should be able to get that much more.

Back to your return on investment. We'll use the 6% cap rate figure.

A $99,000 investment that makes a property sell for $660,000 more would be a 666% return on your investment. That's pretty good if you ask me.

Now, you just need to consider the possible religious significance of making an investment that pays 666%... ;)

Thanks, Wesley. I'm glad to be here.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, nor a CPA.

My understanding is like this:

Yes, the taxable loss can offset earned income, if you can be considered "active" in your investment. The IRS has several criteria for being "active", including stuff like if you are personally liable for the debt, do you make decisions reguarding operation, how many hours you spend managing, stuff that shows you really do have an active role in the investment. Active income (your regular income) can only be offset by active losses. Talk to your tax professional to make sure you meet the criteria.

If you don't meet the criteria, it's a "passive" loss, and can only be used to offset "passive" income, stuff like mutual fund and stock dividents.

And I have known people who were able to shelter 100% of their income through real estate investments.

For those interested, how the tax thing works is like this.

Let's say your regular taxable income is $100,000 this year. I don't know which tax bracket that really puts you in, but let's just call it 30% for our example. If you're in the 30% tax bracket, that means you have to pay $30,000 in taxes.

If you had this property, then even though you really had cash flow, due to depreciation you still have a loss for tax reasons in the eyes of the IRS.

In this example, you have a $-6,864.82 Taxable Loss

That means with this property, now your taxable income is
$93,135.18
and what you pay in taxes taxes is
$93,135.18 * .30 (30%) = $27,940.554

That's $2,059.446 lower total tax bill than you had without the property. If you've paid the $30,000 already through what you had removed from your paycheck, that means refund.