All Forum Posts by: Tom A.

Are you thinking of Palmer Woods? It's north of 7 Mile, Palmer Park is south of 7 Mile. Palmer Woods has homes like these. Outstanding neighborhood. IMO the finest neighborhood in Detroit.

There are a lot of apartment buildings in Palmer Park so it's possible that's where it is. Palmer Park is on the historic register, used to be the gay enclave until crime got bad. There's some serious renovation going on now so it seems to have some upward momentum.

http://detroit.curbed.com/archives/2013/08/the-slowbutsteady-revival-of-palmer-park-continues.php

http://www.modeldmedia.com/devnews/palmerparkapartmentrehabdetroit011512.aspx

http://detroit.curbed.com/archives/2013/10/epic-architours-palmer-parks-apartment-district.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Park_Apartment_Building_Historic_District

There are other neighborhoods aside from the more well-known ones near downtown and midtown that are doing OK-ish. Good investment opportunities exist both in the city and the suburbs. So do bad opportunities.

It is really hard to give an overall reply to your request for "what there thoughts are for Detroit. Vacancies, job growth, education, public grants or assistants to help propel economic prosperity. Things like that." with out writing a lengthy dissertation.

If you're seriously considering investing in this area I think you need to do a lot of the general high-level research yourself, and then supplement it with more narrow, specific questions that we locals will be happy to answer. There are ample resources online to get you started.

The new institutional investors may be able to distort a local market for a period of time as they buy up available inventory, rent them out, or sell them, but they're really dwarfed by the mom and pops and other investors.

The Bloomberg article states as many as 200,000 properties have been acquired in the past two years. Sounds like a lot, but compare it to the total number of rentals out there.

There are 115 million households in the US. The home ownership rate is 65.2%, so the rental rate is 34.8%. That means 40,020,000 households rent. The 200,000 is just 0.5% of the total pool of rentals. Mom and pops, and other larger investors who've owned apartment buildings all along still own the other 99.5%.

The city we're building in has several potential garage size restrictions. The one that hits us is that the garage can't be more than 10% of the total lot area. This is an infill project on a 40' city lot. If the lot were larger the garage could be larger. There's also a limit on total lot coverage percentage (30% - 35% depending on lot size) and on absolute garage size, but the most restrictive prevails.

The next Metro Detroit meetup will be Wednesday, February 12 at Champps in Troy starting at around 6:30 p.m. and going until the last investor leaves. You don't need to be there right at 6:30, if you can't make it until 9:00 or 10:00 I'm sure we will still be there.

This is a casual, non-structured meetup aimed at helping local investors meet other local investors. No formal pitches or anything, just friends and future friends hanging out. Co-host @Aaron Yates should be in town that day which is fortunate due to his new travel schedule.

People with any level of real estate investing experience or inexperience are welcome. You don't have to be a BP member so feel free to bring buddies, partners and spouses.

I'm looking forward to the meetup on the 12th. There's a facebook event page for the meetup with all the details at:

https://www.facebook.com/events/254422531391137/

January's meetup was more lightly attended with about a dozen people (the snow?, Friday?, Livonia?) but others have had 25 - 35 people show up.

Feel free to click "Join" if you're planning on attending. It'll help us all to connect with each other. Particularly if you meet someone but can't quite remember their name or how to get in touch with them.

Also, if you "like" my FB RE investing page at https://www.facebook.com/WeLoveTheHouse it'll be easier to make sure you get a direct invite to the event page for the next one, or you can send me a message if you want to be on an email direct invite list.

Hope to see you there!

Nice job @Scott Hershberger on the flip, and on the write-up with lessons learned.

My perspective is that it's too late to be "getting into" Corktown. 5, 10 or even 20 years too late. Houses in Corktown are going for $100K - $250K, when they come up which isn't very often. It's not a very big area. Prices have been strong and supply has been low for years.

You may be able to find a good deal in Corktown, the same way you can find a good deal in Royal Oak or Troy, by beating the bushes and getting a bit lucky, but Corktown isn't a neighborhood that is just starting to get some traction, making the turn around, getting discovered by gays, hipsters and creatives. It's already there, or more correctly, it was there and now it's getting too pricy.

I don't know anything about these specific guys, but my theory for many gurus is that it's easier to find people to buy their course than it is to find and buy really low-priced houses to flip in the right neighborhoods. Those who are doing both have found a way to systematize their real estate investing so that they have time to do the guru circuit as well.

I think the urban farming thing is rather over-hyped. While there are some great projects underway, most are very small scale - just a few city lots at a time.

I've worked with one on the East Side and in addition to growign vegetables in the summer, they have a hoop house for year-round cool-weather produce, a lot with fruit trees, a lot with chickens and goats and they purchased the old, abandoned corner store and turned it into a community center with a library, computers and meeting area. That's all great and I support their efforts, but it only involves maybe 8-10 lots total. I just don't see it as scalable.

The Haantz Farms project is much larger but they are growing timber. That to me is really more a way to tie up the land for a long time, speculating on future development, than an agricultural business.

While I think the community gardens can be great for a neighborhood, and a few people are making money growing niche agricultural products, I don't see urban farming as something that will employ large numbers of people or consume a large proportion of Detroit's vacant land.

I have to reject the premise of the question because it asks if "Detroit" will turn around in 5 years. What is "Detroit"?

If you know the city then you know it's the size of Boston, San Francisco and Manhattan combined. It's not one monolithic neighborhood and it never has been.

Some areas clearly have momentum. There are areas where rentals are hard to find, waiting lists abound and landlords with desired properties have increased rents from $1100/mo. to $1500/mo. in one year.

There are other areas that are bad and getting worse. And then there is the urban prarie, the land that was occupied by many of the 2 million people who lived in the city in the 50's, that's now vacant and fallow.

There's not just one story of Detroit, or one future trajectory. Like many cities, Detroit real estate is neighborhood by neighborhood.

We can discuss the city's overall finances, or mass transit, or the local economy and refer to "Detroit" as one entity, but when looking at a "potential turnaround" you better specify the neighborhood or even the cross streets.