Residential real estate investing is a business activity that has waxed and waned in popularity drastically over the past couple of years. Paradoxically, there always appear to be a lot of folks jumping on board with investments like stock, gold, and property when the economy’s going up and jumping OFF the wagon and pursuing other activities after the market’s slumping. In a means that is human nature, but it also means a lot of real estate investors are earning money on the table. 

By comprehending the dynamics of your own residential property investment marketplace, and acting in opposition to the rest of the market, you can often earn more money, so long as you also stick to the real estate investing fundamentals. Know how to protect your real estate investment right here.

Property investing, if you are buying residential or industrial property, is not a get-rich-quick scenario. Sure you can make some quick cash flipping homes if that’s your bag, but that is a full-time business action, not a passive, long-term investment. The term “investment” suggests that you’re dedicated to the action for the long haul. Often, that’s exactly what is needed to make money in real estate.

Thus, although the pundits are crying about the residential real estate market slump, and the speculators are wondering whether this is actually the base, let us return to the fundamentals of residential property investing, and learn how to make money investing in real estate in the long run, in good markets, in addition to bad.

A Return To The Basics of Residential Real Estate Investing

When real estate is going up, up, up, investing in real estate may seem simple. All boats rise with an increasing tide, and even if you’ve purchased a bargain with no equity and no cash flow, you may still make money if you’re in the right place at the right time.

However, it’s hard to time the market without a great deal of research and market awareness. A better strategy is to be sure you realize the four profit centers for residential property investing, and make sure your next residential real estate investment deal takes ALL of them into account. Click here and learn more about investing in Hamilton real estate.

Cash Flow – How much cash does the residential income property earn each month, after costs are paid? This sounds like it should be easy to calculate if you understand how much the lease income is and how much the mortgage payment is. However, once you factor in everything else that goes into care for a rental house – things like vacancy, expenses, repairs and maintenance, bookkeeping, advertising, legal fees, and so on, it starts to really accumulate. I love to use a factor of approximately 40 percent of the NOI to gauge my property expenditures. I use 50 percent of the NOI as my ballpark goal for debt services. That leaves 10 percent of the NOI as again to me. If the deal does not meet those parameters, I am cautious.

Appreciation – Having the property go up in value while you own it’s been the most lucrative part of owning real estate. However, since we have seen recently, the property may go DOWN in value, also. Leverage (your bank loan in this instance) is a double-edged sword. It may raise your rate of return should you buy in an appreciating area, but it can also boost your rate of loss as soon as your property goes down in value. For realistic, low-risk real estate investment, plan to maintain your residential real estate investment land for five or more decades. This ought to provide you the ability to weather the ups and downs in the market so you can view at a time when it makes sense, from a profit standpoint.

Debt Paydown – Each month when you make that mortgage payment to the lender, a very small part of it will reduce the remainder of your loan. Because of the way mortgages are structured, a generally amortizing loan has a tiny quantity of debt pay down in the beginning, but if you do manage to maintain the loan in place for quite a few years, you will notice that as you get nearer to the end of the loan period, more and more of your principle is used to retire the debt. Of course, this assumes that you have an amortizing loan at the first location. If you have an interest-only loan, your payments will be reduced, but you won’t gain from any loan cover down. I find that if you’re planning to maintain the property for 5-7 decades or not, it is sensible to check at an interest-only loan since the debt pay down you’d accrue during that time is nominal, and it can assist your cash flow to possess interest-only loan, as long as interest rate adjustments upward don’t increase your payments earlier than you’re anticipating and mess up your cash flow. If you plan to hold onto the property long duration, and/or you have a great interest rate, it makes sense to get an accruing loan that will eventually reduce the balance of your investment loan and allow it to go away. Ensure you run the numbers in your property investment strategy to determine whether it is reasonable for you to get a fixed-rate mortgage or an interest-only loan. In some cases, it may make sense to refinance your property to increase your cash flow or your own rate of return, rather than selling it.

Tax Write-Offs – To the right person, tax write-offs can be a large advantage of property investing. But they are not the panacea that they’re sometimes made out to be. People who are stuck with the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax), that have a good deal of properties but are not property professionals, or who are not actively involved in their real estate investments might discover that they are cut off from some of the greatest tax breaks offered by the IRS. Worse, investors who concentrate on short-term real estate deals like flips, rehabs, etc. have their earnings treated like EARNED INCOME. The short term capital gains tax rate they cover is just the same (large) they would pay if they earned the income in a W-2 job. After a lot of investors got burned in the 1980s by the Tax Reform Act, a lot of people decided it was a bad idea to invest in property solely for the tax breaks. If you meet the requirements, they can be a wonderful profit center, but generally speaking, you should consider them the frosting on the cake, not the cake itself.

Any residential property investing deal that stands up under the scrutiny of the fundamentals-oriented lens should keep your property portfolio and your pocketbook healthy, whether the real estate investment market moves up, down, or sideways. But if you can use the real estate market trends to give you a boost, that’s honest, too. The key isn’t to rely on anyone “plan” to try to offer you oversized gains. Be realistic with your expectations and stick to the fundamentals. Buy property you can afford and plan to remain invested for the long haul.