Real Estate blog

Archive for May, 2008

More and more young people are getting into real estate investing.

I was recently interviewed by Dave Dugdale who runs Rentvine.com, an online resource for landlords and rental applicants.

I’ve often stated that one of the most important factors in your success as a real estate investor is your ability to select, screen, and retain quality tenants. This is something that I think I’m pretty good at, which has helped me as an investor.

I was going to write an article about this not to long ago when, bam, I ran into a problem: tenants who stopped paying.

The tenants were a flaky young couple that I knew I might be taking a chance back when they signed the lease in May. But I decided to rent to them and mitigated my risk by signing a short lease (six months, with renewal contingent on timely payment), charged them first and last month’s rent upfront, plus one month’s rent as deposit. I won’t go through the boring details, but they ended up breaking the lease and abandoning the property while they owed me money. If you find yourself in a situation like this one here are some points to keep in mind.

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BusinessWeek recently ran an interesting article on Option ARM mortgages (also known as pick-a-payment, negative amortization mortgages, NegAms, deferred interest mortgages, and various other aliases).