Posts Tagged ‘real estate investing’
Lifetime Home Survey UPDATED
Recycle your house into a Lifetime Home
Changes include:
- new products we’ve discovered and/or are now using
- replacing any mention of fluorescent with LED lighting
- multiple embedded hyperlinks to source material, additional information or manufacturers/vendors
There are numerous active links (anything underlined blue, all dot-coms as well as the green title of the document) to make the surveys convenient and save you time Googling. Click the underlined text and you’ll be taken to that web site. If you rest your mouse pointer over blue underlined words, you should see the web address to which you’ll be re-directed when you click those words. Email me and I’ll forward as raw PDF attachments if it’s not working.
Remember, because I’ve added and deleted since the original, the line items have changed. Please reference the version date at the top and specific line item if you have a question so we’re on the same page.
Click the following links to download the respective PDFs:
Our Resolution is a Revolution
Lifetime Home Survey
I was on a mission and took six months developing the Lifetime Home Survey (LTHS), which was born of a single negative comment following a post class, feedback form. Without ever knowing his name, I still picture the disgruntled attendee with arms crossed, an engineering type who frowned the entire presentation.
His comment? “Didn’t give specific measurements!” I purposely avoided getting technical to reduce the likelihood of audience slumber; but, after reading Mr. Unhappy Engineer’s feedback, I vowed, “Metrics you want, measurements thou shall get!”
Call me obsessive compulsive but, with Mr. Unhappy Engineer’s scowl burned into my mind, what began as a simple checklist grew (out of control?) into a whole house assessment. I referenced 17 documents and architect teammate Charles Hendricks proofread the final product, what we believe to be THE most comprehensive Universal Design home assessment resource currently available on the web.
Think Universally
Not your typical soap dish
(This is the fifth of an on-going series about real estate flipping. My introductory post covered the basics and the third described an investor’s proper mindset before planning improvements.)
Every investor aspires to lead the pack, to be ahead of where the market is going before the herd follows. Given present day dysfunction in the credit, commercial and housing markets, this is particularly important for real estate investors, both cash flow and flip. For example, many are exploring lease-purchases and subject-to structures to buy time, wait out problems (e.g. appraised value, credit markets, unqualified buyers/tenants) and hopefully boost profits, or stem losses. If you’re going to make money in real estate, you absolutely must research and plan ahead as the speculative gravy days are over.
With being ahead of the game in mind, here’s an idea for making your investment property shine from a marketing perspective, appeal to a wider buyer/tenant audience and be at the forefront of a burgeoning demographic, seniors aging in place, and a continually expanding one, the disabled. (One quick comment about the latter, many perceive “disabled” as only “physical limitations” but brain injuries suffered from an accident or among war wounds are one of the fastest growing hardships facing residents who must rely on timers and monitors to prevent accidents in the home.)
Know the Hood
Don't go overboard upgrading a flip
(This is the third of a multi-part series about real estate flipping. My introductory post covered the basics.)
A quick review, flip investors typically try to make at least 20 percent profit. Underestimating quiet costs and over-improving the property often chew big slices of the profit pie. Later I’ll delve deeper into specific types of improvements to consider, those with good bang for the buck, but here I devote to your initial mindset as you begin researching the neighborhood or immediate area (i.e. within one mile) around the subject property to gauge how much you should spend improving your flip. (An appraiser or real estate agent with a proven track record of understanding investment property can be valuable analyzing comparable home data and features before construction spending begins.)
You will eventually sell at market value, which will be influenced most by pure supply-and-demand conditions of the local market (affected by household income, employment) and the desirability of the location of the subject property (the flip home). But as you’re planning the improvements for your flip, you must know the neighborhood, specifically the individual homes and how the flip could benefit or suffer from either Progression or Regression. In other words, you don’t want to become the biggest/nicest house on the block, you don’t want to over-improve the flip. And it might not be such a bad thing to be the smallest/modest house on the block.
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