As an agent, do you enjoy banging your head against a brick wall? If so, then helping a client through the process of pricing their property so that it will sell, rather than sit on the market for years, is probably one of your great joys in life. These days, with a LOT of competition from foreclosures, it’s even more important to find a good selling price sooner rather than later. Some markets have more than a year’s worth of inventory and not nearly enough buyers to make a dent in it.

As a conservative strategy that normally generates returns far exceeding the stock market, income property investing is about as good as it gets, in our humble opinion. The basic play is to finance the purchase of rental properties with enough cash flow that the monthly rent paid by a tenant covers the mortgage payment and, in the best case scenario, leaves a little extra in your pocket too. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that this method of real estate investing is the only game in town because offering a rent to own contract to a tenant can be pretty good as well.

We’re all perfectly aware that mortgage companies caused the sub-prime meltdown all by themselves. They sent armies of loan officers out into their communities, located unqualified people who had no intention of owning a home, held them down and twisted their arms until they signed on the dotted line. As most readers will be able to detect, despite relentless rumors to the contrary, the preceding sequence of events has never been proven to have actually happened even once. Not to detract from the grievous mistakes, stupidity and outright criminal behavior on the part of America’s lending institutions, it should not escape out notice that there are two sides to a mortgage fraud.

You might say, what the heck does avoiding office nut cases have to do with selling income property? The harsh reality is that some people reading this blog work in an office with other actual human beings. Any time you have two human beings together, there’s a good chance at least one is a certifiable nut case. Add more people to the mix and the odds go up considerably. If you’re not prepared to identify and neutralize this wacko, your work life could become incredibly miserable. Here’s what to watch for:

As a professional, it’s sometimes hard to remember that selling a house is something most people do precious few times in their life, and they really don’t have much of a clue about how to “increase the curb appeal,” to borrow a phrase from HGTV. Here’s where you can step in and generate some of that all important good will from a client. Not only are you helping them get the best price they can from a house but you’re also ingratiating yourself so that if they decide to become an income property investor down the road – they’ll pick up the phone and call you.

Jason Hartman talks with Christy Crouch on The AIPIS Show. As a sales and life coach who has been in the real estate sales business for over nineteen years and has been selling an average of 100 homes per year for the last eight years, Christy will share some valuable insights. More at: http://aipis.org/category/podcast/. Christy [...]

The late night infomercials and real estate investing ads would have you believe that it’s an easy thing to get rich quick in real estate. Listening to them, one would think that at least a handful of millionaires are made every few seconds, especially once they’ve seen the wisdom in purchasing whatever high price seminar the “guru” is selling. If only it WERE so easy. One reality in this life is that a sure way to tell if the sales pitch is nothing more than a load of warmed over crap is a promise of amazing, immediate wealth at any point in the spiel.

Mr. Obama has been known to proudly declare that the recession ended in June 2009. Thank goodness for that because, if we didn’t know any better and judging by recent GDP numbers, we’d assume that the economic downturn was still going strong. The current administration (and we use that term loosely since it seems they aren’t actually administering to anything) has taken to pointing at an increase in the overall GDP of the nation as evidence that the bailout/stimulus program is working. The problem with all this proclaiming and back patting is the recession is not over, Americans still can’t find work and you’re looking at the wrong damn numbers anyway!

Whether rehabbing an older home to flip it or simply remodeling to make it fit for a tenant to move in, real estate investors better darn well know about the lead law from the EPA. With a fine starting at $37,500 per day, this is not one you want to mess around with: learn it, know it, obey it. By the way, like we said, that startling figure quoted goes up precipitously if the agency can prove you knew about the law and went ahead with the work anyway. Did we already say this is not one to mess around with. This is not one to mess around with!

The fact that many Americans refuse to face is that there is a distinct possibility that your Social Security retirement might simply disappear before you need it, or, if it’s still around, will be unrecognizable from the stalwart pension plan it was intended to be all those years ago. Right now, the Social Security program is operating at a deficit of more than $14 trillion dollars. That means that the money needed to make payments is not there and, the dirty little truth, is that no one has a very good plan for figuring out to fund the thing any time soon. For the time being, money comes from raiding other areas of the budget.