All Forum Posts by: Don Konipol

I know real estate brokers hate to hear this, but my experience in 30 years of real estate investing bears this out. Utilizing one agent on an exclusive basis to find deals results in being presented with any good deals he has and all mediocre deals every other agent has. Utilizing several good agents results in being presented with any good deals all those agents have. Unless an agent has a specialized expertise in a certain area or in a certain property type, the typical property search consists of running an MLS search using certain parameters, emailing you a copy of the results, and asking you to pick which ones your interested in. All of which you can do yourself in less time with half the hassle.

The problem with using one realtor exclusively is that you would probably miss the hot deal that gets sold before it gets on MLS

I had been looking for a site this well run and this informative and valuable for a long time. I was lucky to stumble across it a week ago. You have done a fantastic job with this site. I have been sucessful in two different real estate investing careers over the last 30 years and still find new info here every day! thanks

How much time has passed since you made the phone calls? If you called on the weekend it would not be unusual not to get a call back until Monday or Tuesday. What did you say in the message you left? That being said, many hard money lenders either have little or no capital to lend or are out of business. Real estate investing has always been a numbers game. If you made calls on 2 properties and are already discouraged, than I don't believe you have anywhere near the persistence necessary to be sucessful. Don't mean to be discouraging but here are the statistics as told by "The Millioniare Investor". The average sucessful real estate investor looks at 30 properties to find 10 that appear to be deals. Of these 10 only 3 are worth making offers on. Of these 3 only 1 is purchased. Left unsaid is that to look at 30 deals probably takes 100 calls/emails on properties 70 of which are not worth the time to look at. I think you need to determine if you have the persistence neccessary for this endeaver.

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The Case Shiller index has shown major CA cities to have price increases the last 2 months. Many analysts believe this is due to a lack of inventory. With inventory slated to substantially increase the next 6 months due to increasing foreclosure rate, the system could take 12 months or more to shake out excess inventory. This would lead to a resumption of price declines in the market.

interesting tidbit. i have no way to verify this information but here it is because it supposedly has been researched. if you took the trump families fortune in 1964 (earned by fred trump in middle income apartment bldgs in Queens and Brooklyn NY) and invested it in the average REIT, the family worth would be greater than the Donalds! in other words, trump is all hype, passive investments would have done as well for the family fortune as Donalds Trump's investing prowess has. However, the haircut and ego would probably be the same.

With the aftermath of the subprime mortgage meltdown, appraisals in some parts of the country have gotten unrealistically low. In houston, appraisors for Bank of America are working on the basis that the 25-30% nationwide decline in SFR prices applies to the Houston area as well, although prices in Houston have declined very little if at all. As a prime example, I purchased my current residence in 2007 for $515,000. We spent $275,000 on updating and renovating, not quite a gut renovation but extremely extensive. In the last 2 months we received 2 unsolicted offers in the $800 -$850K range, although our home is not on the market and we have no intention of selling. I did however wish to refi, so I applied for a refi loan with B of A, who also holds our current mortgage. The first appraisal performed appraised our house at $592K, with our extensive improvements ($275K) valued at prox $25K price increase. If not for the two unsolicited offers, I might think that I had made the worst real estate investment ever. However the bank was unable to close our refi within 90 days due to their incredible volume, so the house needed to be reappraised. this time the appraisal came in at $530K, with 2 or the comps being from a very less desirable development 4 miles away although our community consists of 400 + homes with plenty of resales. the appraisor's excuse for using comps from a completely different area was that most of the houses in our development are traditional while ours is modern so it would not be comparable. apparently the fact that buildable lots in our development sell for $300k and lots in the comparable development sell for under $100K required only a minor $25K adjustment! But here's the clincher. B of A told me I can protest the appraisal and submit my own comps. that would delay closing approximately three months and they could not guarantee to hold the rate agreed (4 7/8 interest). Or i could pay 1/4 point more origination, and close the loan this week.! this is a perfect example of why i moved to doing only commercial investment deals

You can keep your money in the bank or long term bonds and a reocurrance of high inflation can render your investments worthless. The investing climate is always dangerous, there are no guarantees. However, there are always ways to mitigate risk. For example, this late in my investing career I purchase for all cash only. Early in my career I used extremely high leverage as I had little to lose. Money is made and lost in all economic environments. We just take our best educated guess and go from there. As John Maynard Keynes said "In the long run we're all dead anyway".

Due to the refi boom of 2006-2008, many vagabond salespeople, i.e. salespeople who sell whatever happens to be hot in whatever market happens to be hot entered the field of mortgage brokerage. Many of these are doing mortgage brokerage part time now, along with selling such other services as credit repair, annuities, gas and oil well participations and weight loss products. A full time mortgage broker working for a larger mortgage banking operation would probably provide more professional service.