Is it good to invest in property now?
Great question, my friend. Let’s talk about it, and I’ll let you come up with your own conclusion.
Here are my thoughts on it, though.
Related: Can You Make Money Flipping Houses in this Market?
Develop Your Own Strategy
Before I get into the meat-and-potatoes of this talk, I want to advise you to analyze the landscape, and make your own decision.
Everyone’s situation is a little different.
Besides, the “herd mentality” will get you slaughtered in real estate.
For example, let’s go back in time to about 2007, right before the real estate bubble burst here in the U.S.
Here in the metro Detroit area, people were signing up left-and-right for stated-income mortgages to acquire rental properties.
The problem, is that they didn’t understand that they were signing-up for adjustable rate mortgages; mortgages that were going to take a big leap in monthly payment amounts in just a few years.
Combine that with a sharp decline in property values, and you have a recipe for disaster.
In fact, I don’t know one person that bought a property that way back then that didn’t go into foreclosure.
I say all of that to say “Don’t just do what everyone else is doing.”
Get educated on real estate, and think for yourself.
Now I will get off of my soap box, and continue :-).
Be Smart
OK, I lied.
One more thing I wanted to encourage you to do, and that’s to be smart.
Be a smart investor.
It sounds harsh, but in real estate, the smart investors usually end up making money off of the mistakes and naivete of the herd.
Let’s revisit the “stated-loan investors” that I was just talking about in the previous section.
Guess what the smart investors were doing back then?
They were getting hard money loans or private money, and using that money to rehab properties to sell to the herd!
So let’s talk about what’s going on in the real estate market today (December 2013).
Note: I will be talking about national trends. You want to make sure you investigate these numbers in the areas that you want to invest in, as each market has their own trends to consider.
Next: The Impact of Median Sales Prices and Interest Rates on the Market, and More…