Consider Minneapolis, Minn. You could’ve bought, out of foreclosure, a three-bedroom, two-bath house of 1,356 square feet on a quarter acre lot for about $29,000. It needed a lot of work, but houses in the neighborhood recently sold for $75,000.
Your mortgage would be under $100 per month and about the same in taxes. You could’ve got $1,000 in rent. Even if you had to put $40,000 in the house, your gross yield (cap rate) would’ve been 17.4% on the property.
This is one example sleuthed by my friend Gary Gibson. “The house had mold damage and needed a lot of work,” he wrote. “Beautiful yard, however.”
Investors are buying homes at a more rapid pace than ever before, and this time their investments actually make sense. Most are buying homes below replacement cost, or at prices that allow for a reasonable rental return.
The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both published articles in the past six weeks stating that the housing market has reached a bottom. But hold on for just a minute… It seems that not everyone believes it.
There are many complicated ways to analyze the market conditions in your local area, enough to confuse and boggle the novice investor’s mind. However, you can keep things simple by using our “MAD” method. This means paying attention to three important factors and noting whether they’re going up or down:
One crisp fall Sunday afternoon under bright blue skies, my wife and I visited five homes up for sale. We remembered them by their street names: Big Acre, Blue Silo, Pontiac, Prairie Rose and Lamont. The lineup has a poetic ring to it, but the real music is the potential rates of return from owning them and renting them out.
