I'm a new investor, planning to move from New York to South Carolina to have access to the real estate markets of the Carolinas and Georgia.

Hi Joe,You need to pay special attention to the landlord laws of the area you are buying in.New York for instance has rent control in some areas whereas Georgia does not.Different parts of the country are subject to Earthquakes,fires,floods,Tornadoes,etc.Saturation of the product you will be buying for that area and the amount of foreclosures or short sales in that area for multifamily can bring the average rents down affecting your occupancy and ability to meet debt service.Also do not COUNT on those equity funds UNTIL you have been approved.I have seen this before where a buyer has say 100,000 cash but then they think they can pull out another 100,000 from equity in properties they own.The appraisal comes back lower than they thought and they get only 60,000.Now the 40,000 has to be borrowed from someone else or you do a seller second if the first lender allows it.The key is to have the money liquid to perform when you find the right deal.

As a pest control branch manager that works in a region including FL and GA, it is pretty important to know more about the activity.

Rural GA was hit harder on the mortgage defaults so I doubt, even 10 years later, that I'm a true 80% loan to value.

Hi BP Members,I might have a potential property lead in the Atlanta, GA area.

application fees to merit my time.Will, did you go to Georgia Tech?

www.rentalsoftware.com is one of the best I have seen for the money.I paid a one time fee of 97.00 bucks and you are sent the copy on a cd.I have been using it for about 3 years now.This is important because other companies charge a monthly fee or only have online access to reports.This bilks you out of tons of money over time.The guy that owns the rental software program is a CPA in Georgia and he answers his phone if you have questions about it.You can do your own excel stuff but I like this program for it's ease of use and makes a nice .pdf report from the excel program.I looked at a bunch of programs before settling on this one.

I would like to get into it full-time but don't have the resources to do it on my own yet.Currently I have one SFR in the Savannah, GA area that is rented for 1150/mo that I manage myself.

I can offer $10M for a little house, but that doesn't mean FMV is $10M just because I made the offer.So, while I'm not a lawyer, as a listing agent, I'd be happy to go to court to defend a decision not to present a higher offer to the bank if I believed it had a lower chance of closing -- and therefore was a worse choice for my seller.For what it's worth, my broker (who partners with the law firm who literally writes the GA contracts), is in complete agreement with everything I've written above.

Hey everyone, I am a longtime lurker, and finally decided to join and voice my two cents. Name is Will, and I look forward to learning a lot and sharing what I have. I won't go too much into detail what I do, I like...