It’s a cold, hard fact of life. The suffering of one often comes simultaneously at the profit of another. So it is with rent increases, which you should be talking to your clients about, from an income property investing perspective, of course. As Jason Hartman has been saying, the real estate industry is passing through historic times right now: prices driven down by massive foreclosure numbers, low interest rates, low down payments (which is in the process of being corrected by financial and government systems).

Need evidence that the mortgage industry was taking crazy pills back in 2006? Consider that the average down payment required to purchase a single family residence was 4%. If you had a heartbeat and good credit, some lenders were standing by prepared to loan 100% of the purchase price on the basis of your name, address, and social security number. We all know how that turned out. A good many of those people who thought their American Dream ship had come in are now counting down the days until they are evicted from their house via foreclosure.

If you’re looking for the best real estate investing education in the world, you have two options. The first involves spending a lot of money on a high-dollar seminar from a real estate “guru” that serves mainly as a precursor to an even higher-dollar seminar, which makes you wonder why even bother with the first one? The answer is, of course, that those types of companies are in the seminar business. Not the real estate business. The second option, and one we hope you’ll take advantage of, is the next Meet the Masters of Income Property Investing hosted by Jason Hartman and Platinum Properties Investor Network.

An incontrovertible bit of wisdom surfaced at last weekend’s Masters of Income Property Investing live educational event, delivered succinctly and without great fanfare from the lips of Platinum Properties Investor Network’s own Jason Hartman. There’s really no polite way to phrase it, so let’s just say it outright:

“The best thing an environmentalist can do is not reproduce.”

Employment is one of the fundamental factors of economic growth that represent the most frequently used yardstick for measuring recoveries. In discussion of employment, there are two distinctly different categories of unemployment that must be understood. The first is the ‘narrow’ definition that compares the people who are unemployed and looking for work against the total labor force who is employed or looking. The alternative or ‘broad’ definition includes discouraged workers who have stopped looking for work and incorporates the number of people who are working part time, but would like to be employed full time.

Austin experienced a moderate value contraction after the financial collapse, but is now regressing back toward its long-term trend of modest single digit appreciation. The economic fundamentals of Austin continue to be strong as it moves into 2011. Currently, approximately 37% of listings in Austin are from foreclosures.

Oil prices have been going through a period of very significant volatility over the last few years. In the months preceding the financial crisis, global demand for energy was perceived to be on a permanent upward trajectory. This drove a large degree of speculation on oil prices by investment fund managers. The resultant run-up in oil prices1 generated large profits for established oil companies, which drew a high degree of political pressure from the government.