An investment property can come in all shapes, sizes and values. As a real estate investor, it’s within your power to change the property value of your investments. There are many ways to measure value — and some that you think are helping may actually be hurting.

Real estate investing is all about knowing how to make the right improvements to raise the value of your investment property.  Often times investors either make the wrong improvements or they hire the wrong team that spends too many dollars on the areas of a property that actually hurt the value.  

Well, we are halfway through the year and we are looking at a cup that is ready to over-flow not only for our company and our team, but for every real estate investing client we work for.  And...make no mistake about it, we WORK FOR over 800 clients around the country every day!

As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you’ve been letting property maintenance slide, you might be throwing money away. Property management isn’t something that real estate investors really like to deal with — but it’s a necessary element to any investment.

In the years following 2006, urban living was on the rise. People were flocking to the big city, whether attracted by jobs or the bustle of metropolitan life. 2006 saw a massive spike in suburban populations and a low in urban areas, only to hit a spike in the opposite direction a few years later. 

As much as we all want our real estate investments to go smoothly all the time, reality is full of setbacks, missteps, pitfalls and even disasters. Real estate investors won’t experience success all the time. In seasons of troublesome tenants, complications and the losing of bidding wars, even profitable investments might seem like they’re not worth the headache.

A good property manager can be enormously beneficial for your real estate investments. He can keep you from becoming overwhelmed with taking on too many responsibilities when you’re looking for passive income in your investments or if investing isn’t your full-time job.  She plays a vital role for investors buying real estate as a method for diversifying their over-all portfolio. Many invest in real estate for passive reasons and they really have no desire to be an actual hands-on "landlord."

The classic debate returns. The “rent vs. buy” issue has been around for ages, but the answer is never as clear as one would think. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t distinct pros and cons to both renting and homeownership. In fact, many of these points transcend location, from the hottest metropolitan areas to more modest suburbs.