Silicon Valley Real Estate Investor

Qing Li provides an excellent overview of the local housing market on his blog Lively Estate.

As someone who appreciates, well-presented data, I especially liked the following graph he provided (click the graph for full size). For example, a snapshot of the inventory in Santa Clara County this Jan 2010 reveals that the total housing inventory has fallen by about two thirds since the same time last year.

RT @LandUseXperts: Retail Contractors Expect Business to Remain Slow in 2010. http://bit.ly/5Wxwjy #CRE #
RT @borrowing: HUD Changes to Mortgage Insurance Premiums…Not as Bad as You Might … http://bit.ly/8Dd7Vn #
RT @PicAndClickCash: Biggest Real Estate Deal in History Goes Belly-Up http://bit.ly/8Qz7GQ good explanation of the stuy town debacle #
RT @TimOwensby: “No man’s credit is ever as good [...]

Tim Owensby at the Investing Notes blog has put together a great list of top mistakes made by new real estate investors. This list makes for enjoyable reading because all of us have been there at some point or another.

Here is a brief summary of Tim’s top 10 list of no-no’s in reverse order …

Over at InvestingNotes, Jan deSalvo writes a pretty interesting article detailing some horror stories she’s personally experienced over decades of working with property managers.

The stories aren’t pretty but do contain some classic elements; lack of accounting for repair & maintenance costs, poor paperwork when it comes to maintaining leases; suddenly not being able to get in touch with the property manager for long periods at a time, comingling of personal and business funds, etc; the list goes on.

… Like free ice cream, that is, in the sense that you may not really want it, but you don’t want to miss out on it either?

The $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit certainly has its supporters as well as its skeptics. 
Supporters say it is encouraging home buyers in those cases where they really do want [...]

The Tax Foundation has taken data recently released by the Census Bureau, regarding property taxes (payments to all taxing jurisdictions) collected in the US in 2008 on owner-occupied housing, and published this data into a series of comparative charts. I think these charts do a great job at putting things into perspective. What is different about this survey is that it focuses on owner-occupied housing, whereas other Census Bureau compilations include property taxes paid by businesses.

I found a good article on cyberspace today giving tips for buying investment properties. If you are a real estate investor in Silicon Valley (or anywhere else for that matter), these are good tips to keep in mind, although I’m not sure I agree with all of them.

Previously, we broke down our investing activities into 4 broad phases:
1) Buy
2) Hold
3) Sell
4) Repeat

So far, we’ve been breaking down the first phase, on Buying Real Estate, into small chunks and discussing one piece at a time. In this post, we’ll talk about buying Subject To, which is more about a certain financing technique for buying properties.

What is a subject-to purchase?

What is a short sale? To keep it simple, we can define a short sales as a scenario where a lender agrees to accept less that what is owed on a mortgaged property in exchange for considering the debt satisfied. If a bank approves it, it is because for them it presents a better alternative than taking the house through the foreclosure process and selling it into the current open market. We’ll cover this topic in greater detail later on.

The main advantage to buying on a short sale, of course, is the ability to buy discounted property, without the constraint of what the current lien on the home is.

However, there are certain disadvantages, too …

The practice of buying bank-owned properties is getting a lot of attention because it represents such a big, and growing, supply of ready-for-sale housing.

When a borrower stops paying, one of the principal recourses a lender has is to take over the property against which the loan was secured, and sell that asset to try to recover its money. Foreclosure can be a long process, but at the end of it, if no other way is found of settling that debt, the ownership of the property will fall to the bank. Banks are good at lending money but not at managing properties, so generally the banks don’t want to hold on to the properties and will usually try to sell them quickly. Traditionally the holding and selling of real estate this is handled by the “Real Estate Owned” department of the bank, thus today’s “REO” for short hand …