Saturday, December 11, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
This has been a frustrating week.
It's only Tuesday and already so much has happened; there's a lot to be upset about. So for inspiration I turn to the words of a great thought leader from a different time... Yoda:
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
But for something more entertaining:
Saturday, September 11, 2010
A Review of My Realtor, Ed Greable
In the housing frenzy of the mid-2000s everyone and their brother got into real estate. I was in a bar where the bar tender was moonlighting as a mortgage broker and signing loans for people while serving them drinks. It was bad. Today the market has cooled considerably but there are still a lot of amateurs out there. It's hard to find someone in this field that is a true professional, that has the right contacts, and who actually brings value to your transaction.
As a recent transplant to Massachusetts, in December of 2009 I started looking for a realtor to buy a home in the Somerville / Medford area. I interviewed a lot of realtors in the area and each of them felt "salesy" and slimy or inexperienced. And then I met Ed. He was very cool and calm, not aggressive, he listened and seemed to understand what I was looking for. He asked all of the right questions. When I told him I thought I would like to work with him, he didn't require an exclusivity contract like so many realtors do. He felt his results would speak for themselves and we had a gentlemen's agreement.
Ed immediately started showing me properties that met my criteria. He never tried to push me into a deal but he was also very straight-forward about telling me how quickly (or slowly) he thought a particular property would sell for. He was very accurate with how much over or under asking price he thought a property would sell for. After a couple of months of looking for just the right place, we found it. Ed brought me to this property the day it hit the market. We were the first to make an offer in a pretty competitive space. Ed negotiated the deal throughout and managed to save me many thousands of dollars and did so in a professional manner where the seller felt like they were getting a fair deal and I felt like I was saving money.
Further evidence of Ed's commitment to his client, me, was the fact that he actually made less money on the commission of this particular property than he could have made on others, but he knew this was the right property for me.
As we got into the Escrow process, Ed's experience and professionalism continued to lend themselves to a great transaction; he suggested a great inspector, he got me in touch with a fantastic mortgage broker, he introduced me to the FHA 203k Program (a federally-insured rehabilitation loan program that I wouldn't have otherwise known about), he introduced me to a very experienced real estate attorney (who ended up saving me quite a bit of money in the Purchase & Sale agreement wording) and the many other people that required to make for a positive real estate transaction.
This is where you get the most value from a great Realtor; finding the right home is important, structuring the best offer is important... but having the contacts to make the whole purchase process and subsequent ownership a smooth ride, that is what matters the most. This is an area where Ed excels.
I will definitely work with Ed again in the future and I recommend him to all of my friends. He's a nice man and he's your best ally in a complicated and rapidly changing real estate market.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Multi-Family Real Estate Project - Evaluating Properties
I've had an interest in Real Estate investing for a while now. I'm not talking about "flipping" properties, what interests me is buying and holding cash-producing rental properties. This is an age-old, tried-and-true strategy. This technique has been making people money for centuries and it's just as good today as it ever was, even in this unsure economy. There are a few things that attracted me to this method of investing:
- The investment is in "real" property that is tangible and can be improved with physical labor
- As long as a person isn't a slumlord, this can be a type of responsible investing
- The tools for evaluating and acquiring a good deal are well-established
Each one of the items that I've listed has a counter-point, of course. At the end of the day, what a person invests in is a personal preference and, like anything, it will appeal to some people and not to others. For example, the prospect of replacing an old hot water heater or hanging storm doors is fun and interesting to me. I grew up around carpenters and something like this is a nice break from my daily hours spent in an office under fluorescent lighting. To others, nothing could be closer to torture.
The second bullet-point that I listed is also something that's very important to me. That is, ethical investing. I know that there are some funds out there that specifically focus on Socially Responsible companies and I think that's great. However, by owning and responsibly managing incoming producing real estate a person can have a direct, positive impact on a neighborhood while also earning a profit. In some ways this ties back to my first bullet-point, there are tangible aspects of real estate that stocks and funds don't have.
Hands down, the most appealing thing to me about investing in income-producing real estate is the fact that simple formulas can be applied to weed out the good deals from the bad. I've created a spreadsheet for evaluating properties and I've attached it to this post. I'll explain it in detail below. None of the formulas used in my spreadsheet are my own invention, they've all been around for a long time. As long as a person can separate themselves from the emotional attachment that often comes with selecting and purchasing property, the numbers are easy to live by.
One thing that the spreadsheet doesn't take into account is the appearance of a home and the desirability of the neighborhood. These are two items that you need to evaluate for yourself. Appearance is important, but it's usually easy to figure out what to do here; make the home look like the other homes on the block. In terms of desirability, be honest with yourself, see what people are getting for rents on Craigslist and make sure you feel safe in that neighborhood.
When evaluating properties to invest in it is likely that you will go through dozens, if not hundreds, before finding something that meets your specific criteria. There's nothing wrong with that, it takes work to find the right property. By putting this effort in up-front, you'll avoid a lot of pain (and financial loss) later.
On to the spreadsheet:
- This is designed to work with one to four unit dwellings, not designed for larger buildings (i.e. commercial lending).
- Make a copy for each property you look at, name it by the address.
- Fill in the appropriate fields:
- Property address
- Type
- Details (note things that are important to you like off-street parking and things that need work)
- List price (asking price)
- Purchase price (what you're willing to offer, play with this number... be sure to add in repair work here if you're financing repairs - more on 203K loans in a later post)
- Change the percentage in the "Down Payment" formula to reflect what you'll be putting down
- Under Operating expenses, find estimates that make sense. Fill in "taxes" for each property (this is in the MLS listing)
- Complete the "potential revenue" section, indicating the number of units and anticipated rents for each. Use Craigslist to figure out rents, don't trust what's in the MLS listing unless you've seen actual leases from the owner's tenants, if occupied.
- Fill out your interest rate
The rest is calculated for you. The spreadsheet includes notes in the "Important Calculations" section about what you should be looking for. You can tweak the "Acceptable Cap Rate" value to see what the calculated "Value of the Property" will come out to. Look at the calculated "Cap Rate" to see where that pans out. One of the most important items to the average investor is going to be the cash flow. This is listed as "Approximate Monthly Cash Flow" in the "Cash Flow Calculations" section. This MUST BE a positive number when all is said and done. If it's not, the property is losing money each month and it's not a good investment.
Real Estate investing isn't for everyone but if it's something that you're interested in, these are good rules to live by. If you play it by the numbers you can make a good income in this type of investing and you can make a positive impact on the world around you. You can provide a quality home for people to live in at a reasonable price and you can physically see and improve your investment. You can even live in your investment and share it with tenants.
I will be publishing a few more posts on this topic as I go through this process myself. In my next post I will write about investing in income-producing properties by using an FHA 203K loan and my experiences with that.
Friday, September 25, 2009
The Beginnings of Fall in New England
And this is one of the many things I love about living in New England. While it's still over a 100 degrees in many places out west (unfortunately I have to go to Arizona next week for work where it will be 106!), the seasons are changing here in the North East and it's a beautiful time.
When I get back home from my work trip I plan on making my annual early-October drive through Western Massachusetts, up into Vermont, and having some delicious barbecue at one of these paradoxical outdoor southern-style pork rib barbecue places that I've seen here in New England. It looks like something from the deep south, with the order window built into the side of an old school bus and 50 gallon drums cut in half to serve as grills. A little later in October I'll drive up to Maine and get a pumpkin for Halloween.
This is one of the most beautiful times of year in New England and makes me happy to be here.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
New Forms of Electronic Communication
Email today is often used as a sort of slow-motion chat without any public persistence. People will send brief notes back and forth to each other and then after the problem is solved, the solution reached, the email is either deleted or filed away and only the two people involved in that conversation know the answer. Sometimes that's good but in collaborative environments this is often valuable information for other people, too. Copying these other people into email conversations just to keep them informed results in too much noise and overflowing inboxes. Chat tools, on the other hand, are too temporal and are also very disruptive.
I think the answer to this lies in the type of communication seen on Twitter and now being adopted by Facebook and other social media sites. This is the use of the broadcasted "status", or "tweet". For anyone who's not aware of what this means, a user types a short blurb about what they are doing, a question they may have, an idea they want feedback on, etc and it is broadcasted to their followers. The result is a "timeline" for each user of their tweets that can be subscribed to by people who are interested in what this person has to say. All of this information is stored in a publicly-accessible location (on the web) and it can be searched. Specific tweets can be directed at certain people (using the @USER convention) and subjects can be applied using hash tags (#TOPIC).
I think a system like this could be adopted very effectively for collaborative or corporate use with the addition of "context". So a user would identify the audience for their tweet, like "my team", "project X team", "department", "enterprise", etc. Users could apply filters to feeds to see what is immediately relevant to them, search for historical information, or read departmental notices when they have time. Of course, this would not replace email entirely; email is still important for formalized communication between two people or for sending information outside of an enterprise although much of that could eventually be done away with and replaced with a good content management system with publishing and workflow features.
It will be interesting to see where the future takes electronic communication. I know that Google is working something called "Wave". More information can be found here: http://wave.google.com/ It seems to work in a similar way as what I am describing although it's hard to know for sure since it's not released yet. Twitter and Facebook have all but replaced email for interpersonal communication for many people. Let's see if the corporate world follows.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Classic Chris Craft Boats
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So as it turns out those slips are part of the Mystic Wellington Yacht Club. Apparently they have public launch spaces but I am going to do a little research and find out what's involved in joining and renting a slip space. I've always wanted to own a boat. In particular, ever since seeing "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" I've wanted one of those old wooden boats. There are probably a few different kinds but one particularly popular kind is Chris Craft. Chris Craft still makes new boats, out of fiberglass, but I'm looking for a classic 1950s or earlier wooden model. Something like this:
I really have no clue what all is involved in restoring, maintaining or using a boat like this but I do intend to find out. Once I get into the new place I'll go down to the marina to start to learn a bit more. I'll have to find out if there are any local restoration clubs as well. I don't know if a boat like this would have the cruising range to get to the cape but I think it would be awesome to be able to boat out to Provincetown. More to come on this....
