Silicon Valley Real Estate Investor

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.

In the previous post, we introduced the question of How To Get Started As A Real Estate Investor In Silicon Valley. In the next few posts, we’ll start by looking at the basics of real estate investing and what it looks like to most investors.

Chances are, if you’re transacting in properties (as opposed to, let’s say, dealing in financial instruments secured by real estate), then almost all of what you’re doing can be distilled into the following four basics steps:

1. Buy
2. Hold
3. Sell
4. Repeat