Silicon Valley Real Estate Investor

For a good analysis of the recent real estate market in Silicon Valley, make sure to check out Mary Pope-Handy’s recent blog post. She provides a good side-by-side view of listings vs pending sales, for the last 18 months, for all the major cities in the area.
It is very interesting to see them all together, [...]

Living here in Silicon Valley, we often have a perpetual sense of optimism. Being on the leading edge of technology, we follow beginnings of technology rather than their declines, and everything new is the Next Big Thing; we also tend to move on to latest products without always having a good understanding of how these technologies are maturing and being adopted by the population at large. For this reason , his visit to the California Realtor ® Expo 2009 in the San Jose Convention Center was a nice eye-opener to all the wonderful things going on with how the real estate industry is leveraging and applying maturing technology for its own purposes.

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.

Everywhere we turn these days, the newspaper headlines and the TV talking heads keep telling us that this is a great time to buy real estate — that there’s a firesale going on and anyone who can get in now will have it good for years to come. But as we know, real estate markets are local, and while it may pay to be bold and even contrarian, you still have to know what you’re doing.

So what does it all mean if you’re trying to get started as a real estate investor, and particularly as a real estate investor in Silicon Valley? In the upcoming inaugural series of articles, we’ll cover what it means to be a real estate investor, with a special look at the challenges and opportunities inherent in investing in Silicon Valley.

This blog is intended to help real estate investors succeed in their efforts to buy, sell, and profit from real estate. Unlike many other blogs, this blog is written by investors for other investors. We provide timely news, education, and tips, covering residential real estate investment subjects and investment property topics such as short sales, [...]