I've spoken many times on my radio show about how fear is used to move us. Well, recently I spotted a great example. Just last week I wrote about how a mortgage “expert” was predicting a “death spiral” in the housing market. That was last week. This week, the National Association of Realtors is saying that the housing market in 2012 will be the strongest in five years. February was actually a 9.2 percent increase in home sales from last year.
For most people those two things wouldn't compute, especially since the “expert” I quoted last week was predicting a 6 percent reduction in housing prices in 2012. This just all goes to show you something I've said for a long time: don't believe the doom and gloom.
A growing number of real estate investors are using a self-directed IRA to finance their property purchases nowadays. That’s because a self-directed IRA can provide them with the opportunity to buy real estate and earn rental income without paying early distribution fees.
As we continue to go through Morgan Stanley's “Housing 2.0: The New Rental Paradigm” we're more confident that 2012 will be a big year for real estate investors. For one, the financial services company boldly concludes, “…gross rents are historically attractive relative to current distressed prices. Adding to this attractiveness is the fact that multifamily data shows rents continuing to rise.”