All Forum Posts by: Jason Woods

The first thing is to do as much research on the property as you can, location, size, transaction history, tax record, assessed value, ownership information, any lien on the property etc. You can do most of the research online now, http://www.zipinsight.com offers all these information, there are also other online resources as well.

Here in Seattle I've seen market is clearly slowing down, somewhat flat and maybe a bit of dip, however I don't see a crash coming any time soon, economy is doing well, job market is tight, and for Seattle there has been net in flow of people, so I just don't see real estate market crashing. However it's unlikely we will have double digits appreciation either, as we have seen in the past few years here.

I actually thought about crashing and even the urge to sell before crash, then I realize I'll have to pay 8% in transaction cost and capital gains, market will have to crash at least 10% AND I'll have to time the market right to make it worthwhile. I don't have confidence that I could predicate either of these two events, so I decided to sit tight and stick it through.

I live in the Seattle area, where I have a couple of SFH rental properties which I bought a few years back, now they all have significant appreciation due to the red hot Seattle market, now I'm trying to figure out the best strategy forward.

I don't want to sell because of the significant tax hit; doing 1031 exchange is also problematic since I don't find anything attractive in the Seattle market today; the cap rate on the rental is about 3%, pretty miserable. After years of rapid growth, the Seattle market is also clearly slowing down (although I don't think we will have a crash, probably flat or slow growth for the next few years). 

Any ideas and suggestions? Thanks in advance!

Buddy

Congratulations!! The remodeled house looks awesome.

Where can you find the complete mortgage and lien information on the property? I've been using www.zipinsight.com and it offers pretty good records on properties in US, but it could get expensive pulling multiple lien reports.