There are many, many reasons for real estate investors to rely on a good property manager. It’s no secret that property management is a difficult job. Any owner who has taken on landlord responsibilities themselves can vouch for that!

The reason investors ought to seek a property manager (or property management company) go beyond simple convenience. Having a top-notch manager can be the single biggest factor in the success of your investments.  On the flip side of that statement...having a poor property manager can be the end of your successful investment.

RealtyTrac recently featured Tennessee in their latest newsletter and even published an article from Memphis Invest.  The newsletter is full of fantastic information and is linked at the bottom of the article.  In the meantime, here is our article with some fantastic updates on Memphis real estate.

Just like positive cash flow, the notion of a good ROI has long been the gold standard for real estate investing. ROI can come in the long term through appreciation (which is what most people who take on big property renovations are banking on), but also through the short-term (such as just buying an investment property and achieving positive cash flow).

There’s a lot of reading to be done. As we’ve done in the past, we’re bringing you a handful of recent, relevant articles for real estate investors and professionals to pursue this week in lieu of having to hunt down posts worth reading.

As always, we try to keep our selection diverse, covering a broad range of industry topics and recommending reading that investors will find useful and practical.

One would think that with the relatively sluggish recovery of the real estate market in many parts of the country, with both home buying and home building on the low side overall, home improvement would be similarly stunted.

And yet, that’s not the case — a study by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, property renovations are booming with nearly $300 billion in sales. It could be the highest spending this year since 2007. That’s good news!

When the housing crisis kicked up in 2007, foreclosures became a nationwide fear for American families. Between 2007 and this year, a whopping 5 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. Homeowners grew more and more fearful as neighbors disappeared and property values dropped off. Those foreclosed upon found themselves with ruined credit — making another home purchase impossible as they were turned down for even small loans and credit cards.

Of course, real estate investors took this chance to buy foreclosed properties and slowly, slowly breathe life back into the real estate market. But now, eight years later, where are we?

Sometimes it seems like people like to talk more about millennials than millennials like the talk about themselves. We see opinions such as an overly generalized “they’re all lazy and selfish” and naysayers who see the 18-34 demographic as a threat to the economy. After all, they’re not buying houses. They’re not getting jobs, so some conclude that they’re at fault for our economic woes. On the other end of the spectrum, writers celebrate the drive millennials have to make a mark on the world, both as entrepreneurs and visionaries, while recognizing how the economy has stifled their ability to gain a solid footing in the professional world.

No matter what you may think about millennials, they are the up-and-coming face of our workforce and they want and value things that are different than any generation before them. Real estate investors need to pay attention to how millennials impact the world — because they’re likely to be your number one customer.

Like its sister city Houston, all signs inDallas are pointing to a great year in real estate. While the Dallas-Fort Worth boom has attracted a little less attention than Houston’s, it’s no less significant. They both felt softer effects from the recession and, now that the economy is picking back up, are at the forefront of recovering markets.