Buying real estate these days seems pretty straight forward.  You have many options and places to find and source deals.  The truth is, that is only a small piece of the real estate puzzle.  In order to get paid on your screaming purchase, you have to find a buyer.  In my experience, there are a lot of great real estate brokers out there working hard every day, and for every great one, there’s 10 bad right behind them.  Have you ever had a deal getting ready to close and then for some odd reason, the mortgage broker is trying to get extensions for this and that and all that crap….I’ve had this happen to me so many times, that I finally did something about it, and you should too.  You cannot rely on someone’s mortgage broker to get your deals done.  For me, I have found that by working with brokers who do their own underwriting, I can get a lot more deals closed.  Here’s why.  Freddie and Fannie have guidelines for lenders to use for them to fund deals.  Problem is, most banks put lots of overlays restricting good candidates.  So what you get is a funnel effect.  It all looks good at first but starts to get tight at the end.  With brokers who do their own underwriting, your getting Freddie and Fannies guidelines and a lot less red tape, which is why I get deals done.  I encourage you to find great real estate mortgage brokers and then have all potential offers have to run through him even if they already have financing.  Chances are, their deal will blow up and it’s nice to already have plan B in the works.

Here’s my formula for a good deal:

 Retail Price -20 to 30k Profit – 10% of Retail Price for soft cost i.e. realtor fee, closing cost, cost of money, utilities – rehab = Offer Price

So with numbers:  100k- 25k Profit- 10k soft cost – 7k Rehab = 58k Offer Price

This is a good rule to follow when buying REO deals.  If you buy and REO deal with a good amount of profit and for some reason things go bad, you have wiggle room.  Skinny deals only get skinnier.  Don’t do a Skinny deal.

So now you scan active REO listing in that neighborhood you scouted out.  Your looking for prices close to your offer price that are just coming on the market, or you look for homes that are REO’s but have been on market 90 days plus that you can make low-ball offers.

When you find a deal that is close, you call the listing agent directly and tell them you want to buy that home and you do not have a realtor and he can have both sides of the transaction.  By doing this, you just gave that realtor a big incentive to work with your offer.

Real Estate can be a lot of fun and can reward you handsomely.  If you would rather use an even quicker method to finding deals, join my VIP Buyers list at http://www.realestatelistingschandler.com

Phoenix, AZ has not been getting any love for our residential single family home markets.  Competition has been fierce with multitudes of single family investors shrinking up speads.  What most investors are not aware of, is how cash flow is abundant and almost everywhere in Phoenix with Multi-Family opportunities.  You can take a 4-plex that you can probably acquire for $15-$20k per door and rent it out for $400-$650.  You are making almost $1,200 dollars of profit per quad per month.  In Multi-Family, it even gets better.  Let’s say you have that one bad tenant that ups and leaves.  With your single family home, you just lost 100{c35051b4442fafb55b74468ce151e373ddcc3f5b6c0bbc4cc62a5de9551ee3ef} of your income.  With a quad, you are down 1/4 of your income.  In fact, if you lost two tenants you could still probably break even.  My point, is that with Multi-Family investing you can cash flow and have less risk because you are dealing with scales of economy.  If you want to get on my VIP Buyers list for duplex’s up to 120 unit apartments, then go to http://www.homebuyersarizona.com  For opting in, I will give you some really good info that will help you as you are investing.