We had a great day on Saturday October 11th at the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine Texas. Thank you to all of the real estate investors who came to spend the morning with us!
We have several events each year around the country to visit with real estate investors directly. Each fall we host an event in Dallas and each spring, we host an event in Memphis. We also travel once a year to Southern California and New York.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Real estate investing has been a very popular topic over the last few years. Real estate investors with rental properties have been in a good place during the last few years. The surge of homes in foreclosure meant that properties were ripe for the taking - and at record low prices. As the housing market recovers, however, the number of homes available is dwindling and some investors are choosing to leave the business...it just isn’t as easy anymore.
Millennials don’t have it as easy as we like to think. Recent college graduates deal with a slew of financial stresses thanks to the state of the U.S. economy and it appears that buying real estate is only one of those stresses. It feels nearly impossible to attend college without incurring some amount of student debt, and the job market, while improving, is still challenging. It’s hard to start a life and find success if you can’t find a job with that new degree. If you can't find a job, then you sure can't buy a first home much less invest in real estate.
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.
