November 25, 2008: Real Estate Action

Back from North Carolina and heading to Columbus, OH. The real estate market may appear on CNBC and elsewhere in the media to be in a shambles, but the "underground" purchase of distressed real estate by investor pools is robust. For example, a Broker informed me that a team of investors flew in from California to northern Ohio over the past few days and are buying single family foreclosed or distressed homes in groups of a dozen. Although I believe that passive management from a distance (California to Ohio? Yikes.) of this sort is fatally flawed, readers of this blog need to know that this activity is occurring with regularity. Multi-family units are experiencing no shortage of investors either. An astute and handy father-son team is buying a 34-unit duplex community in a mild urban area that the bank had rehabbed over the past year after acquiring it back in foreclosure, at a great price. This property should perform very well for them, with a strong positive cash flow - just the antidote for stocks and bonds lost in space.

As mentioned in previous blogs, landlording is a superb investment if property is bought right and the investor is willing to get into the fray as an active property manager.