Some times real estate investing can get a tad bit mundane.  We like to keep our team motivated and happy since that is the atmosphere where they are going to provide the best customer service in the industry!  So, when our teams wanted to have some fun in the month of October, we came up with a contest where all our main offices decorated their lobbies in honor of the Breast Cancer Awareness month.  It is fun for us and keeps us up beat and motivated while also supporting a great cause.  So there is a lot of pink going on in the office corridors!

There’s some crazy tech out there. For real estate investors, the ever-increasing pool of technological advances poses opportunities to increase efficiency and save time and money. Whether you’re looking for a nifty gadget or smartphone productivity tools, there’s plenty out there!

One of the great things about all these tech advances is that it does not matter if you are an entrepreneur and looking for business style apps or a small investor needing smaller more individual style apps, there are some great ones out there.  

Here are a few apps that we like and I would LOVE IT if you shared some of your favorites in the comments below!  Let us know what you think of the list.

Everyone has something to say about the real estate market. That’s no surprise, considering local real estate markets vary and can’t really be used to gauge or predict the overall national market.  Watch the national news for five days in a row and you are likely to get five different stories on the real estate market with five different "revelations".  

You’ll hear a lot of conflicting information from plenty of people, and many of them are considered credible in their field and others just claim the mantle of credibility.  So how do you know which headlines to trust?  How do you know when the source of information is real or when, say a magazine, is carrying the water for their advertisers.  It can be very confusing to know where good advice can be found in today's real estate space.

Real estate investing, at least investing successfully, has always been about finding good opportunities and understanding what is driving that opportunity.  We always hear about investors who land the big deal and take home an enormous payday.  Sometimes those scenarios are luck and others they are a mix of luck and skill.  

Some investors have ongoing concerns regarding the real estate market, particularly when it comes to a relatively weak demand for homes. There’s some news to be celebrated right now, however. The number of lenders that have initiated real estate foreclosures has fallen to the lowest level it’s been in almost 8 years.

As many of you know, if you want to use traditional financing when purchasing a property from any of the Memphis Invest companies, a pre-approval with one of a dozen different lenders is required.  Why is that a requirement?  As you can see with the infographic below, a pre-approval letter not only gives you a ton of credibility, but it also gives you peace of mind.