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.
This was the second weekend we went hunting. It’s been a fascinating experience so far, and what I’ve found tells me the housing recovery is not too far off, despite all the dire talk to the contrary. The investment implications are many and varied.
Being bullish on housing is a contrarian view. In a recent national survey, 37% of homeowners say they think buying a house is a “risky investment.” And 86% think prices will either stay flat or fall.
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 “
While homes prices continue to be on the decline, rent prices are actually on the rise and showed a 3 percent increase from January 2011 to January 2012, as opposed to home values, which dropped 4.6 percent during that same period, according to a recent Zillow Real Estate Market Report.
One of the most exciting things about being a real estate investor is knowing what markets will produce the greatest long-term returns – especially while in the middle of a challenging housing market.![flags_globe[1]](https://www.noradarealestate.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/flags_globe1-250x250.jpg)
For many individuals, the single largest “investment” of their lives will usually be their home, as opposed to investing stock, bonds, mutual funds or certificates of deposits (CD’s). This is because purchasing real estate is less risky than investing in the stock market and can be more rewarding than changing CD interest rates.
“The bursting of the global housing bubble is only halfway through,” 
