With the market favoring selling so thoroughly, you might consider selling one or more of your investment properties. After all, it seems like a prime opportunity! But before you prepare that listing, wait. There are compelling reasons to hold your properties for the long haul – even when conditions make selling an attractive prospect.

Out of all the ways to invest in real estate, buy and hold is the one that we champion as the best way to invest at any skill level. But why? After all, there are so many different strategies available when it comes to real estate investment. Even within a buy and hold model, there are different types of properties to invest in and sub-strategies to consider: like turnkey real estate.

Recent studies from CNBC and Housingwire lament the returns on real estate flips. For three quarters, returns have been dropping, largely due to increased competition with buy-and-hold investors in the search for properties priced under market value.

As markets nationwide experience rising prices, such deals are harder to come by and the need for traditional financing has caused many flippers to purchase properties at full market value, which has hurt their returns.

Chandler Reports, the local real estate information aggregating company, released their monthly tally last week which included 1st quarter totals for all things related to real estate in Memphis and the surrounding areas.  Memphis Invest is interested in many of the numbers including total sales, days on market, average sales price and number of transactions as each of these data points is very important to the over-all health of a market.  But we are also extremely interested in the over-all sales numbers for the area and for the 8th quarter in a row, MemphisInvest.com was the leader in local company home sales.

So I wrote an article about the phenomenon going on with real estate owned by banks.  With an increase in the number of bank foreclosures in Memphis and the country and 2011 expected to have more foreclosures than any year on record, banks are being inundated with the need to sell property at discount pricing.  Unfortunately, they are choosing instead to...