All Forum Posts by: James Orr

Thanks @Dale Myers. You may want to check out the classes and networking with the Northern Colorado Real Estate Investors Group (NCREIG) on meetup.

And @Ana Hyler... there are some great Realtors in Fort Collins, but some have specialties so, you may want to find one that specializes in the type of investing you want to do.

@Adam M.... There are some landlords that are lone wolves and will be seeking out a property manager themselves, my experience has been that most landlords that are going to be considering hiring a property manager are going to seek out a referral from other landlords or their real estate agent/broker.

When looking at acquiring landlord clients to manage properties for them, you may want to consider marketing to find on-going sources of business either in addition or instead of going directly to find the landlords directly yourself. In that case, maybe finding brokers that work with investors and don't offer property management themselves would be something to consider.

While there are exceptions, the majority of Buyers I've been in houses with in town in Fort Collins prefer gas fireplaces to wood fireplaces. That changes slightly if you're up in the foothills or north toward Laporte where it becomes a little more common to have wood burning fireplaces. So, for marketability, I'd say gas. I'd probably also say gas for safety.

From a value perspective, and maybe there's an appraiser on here that will correct me if I am wrong, but I don't see much difference in rental value between either.

Updating bathrooms might give you a slight edge getting it rented, and might bump rent a very, very small amount.

@Tonya Truelove we meet at the Fort Collins Board of Realtors now so we can do full teaching presentations for each class. Please do RSVP on the meetup site for the group because sometimes we have handouts and only print enough for the RSVPs.

Join the Northern Colorado Real Estate Investor Group for our meeting on understanding appreciation and how it affects your real estate investing.

Here's the class description from Meetup:

“Isn’t Nomad just speculating on properties appreciating?” I hear that question all the time and the answer is: no. It is true that even a modest appreciation assumption in our modeling of Nomad makes the Nomad model look amazing, but this class goes beyond that and walks you through a variety of appreciation related topics. We discuss what appreciation has been historically both quantitatively and qualitatively. Is it likely to continue and at what pace? Plus, we show what Nomad looks like if we have no appreciation in either home price or rent and much more.

Class is free to attend, but please RSVP at NCREIG.com

Join the Northern Colorado Real Estate Investor Group for our market stats meeting covering Fort Collins, Loveland, Greeley and Windsor.

Here's the class description from Meetup: Once every six months we pause and go over the state of our real estate market in detail. We look at a variety of charts and metrics to see what our real estate market has done historically over a long period of time, what it has done recently and what we think it may be doing in the future. We cover a variety of charts including sales price, sales price per square foot, days on market, discount (or premium) from list price, appreciation and, one of my personal favorites, months of inventory (also known as absorption rate). You’ll know more about our local market than a lot of local real estate agents after attending this class (and we tend to see quite a few real estate agents attend too for this reason).

Class is free to attend, but please RSVP at NCREIG.com

@Holly Baum... thanks... the NCREIG group used to meet Wednesdays and Thursdays... but in 2017... it is moving to Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Hope to see you all there.

You can also check out the Northern Colorado Real Estate Investor Group meetup which is primarily classes focused on buy and hold and some networking after class.

@Ralph R. It is true Fort Collins prices have increased significantly. It depends on what your goal is though as to whether or not it "pencils out". It is challenging to get cash on cash returns above 5%, the overall return on investment is still well over 20% looking at the top 10% of deals. I had posted this chart showing cash on cash return to another post recently, but it shows that there are definitely some deals that still get you *some* cash on cash return.

@Adam Christopher Zaleski wrote, "Fort Collins is booming right now and real estate is very expensive."

Yes, the Fort Collins market is very hot right now and our Cash on Cash Return On Investment is not the best out there, but you can still find deals where the overall return with cash flow, a reasonable 3% appreciation (not the crazy 8-10% per year we've been seeing), debt paydown and tax benefits should make you at least slightly cash flow positive with an overall return (not cash on cash) pushing 25%.

My two favorite strategies in Northern Colorado right now based partially on availability and ROI are Nomad and Lease Options.

Here's a chart showing some properties that are available and about 6 months of previous sales estimating cash on cash return on investment (just the cash flow part of the return) in Fort Collins for 3 bedroom homes. There are some data points in the 0-5% cash on cash return range with a couple outliers (that might be funky), but a large mass of the data is just not good cash flowing deals.

Hope that helps.