Are you ready to start making money? Foreclosures are being declared as real estate’s newest profit opportunity. There are stacks of how-to books hitting the bookshelves daily and real estate experts holding seminars around the country offering investment advice on how to get rich quickly from homeowners and lenders desperate to unload properties.

Just like other forms of investing, profitably buying and selling real estate takes research, knowledge, experience and time. Often, safe, trouble-free wealth-building opportunities turn out to be like most things that sound too good to be true. If it were so easy to make money, everybody would be getting rich off of foreclosures. And remember, every deal that comes with a huge profit potential has high risk associated with it.

Read More at BixLex.com

In a perfect world, prices would be set by supply and demand, and investments would cost around about the net present value of their future cashflows.

Stop laughing. Just look in any economics textbook.

Of course when you get to managing your own finances in the real world, you need to pay as much attention to politics as you do to dollars and cents.

This is a political market. Always has been. You have to play the refs, not just the game.

And the latest message is that housing is a privileged asset that will benefit from any number of political breaks and cover to make sure it does OK.

This, as already observed here, is hugely bullish for homebuilders.

Read More at Wall Street Journal

The last two years of declining home sales and prices have been a strain on anyone connected to real estate.

Discouraging monthly and quarterly statistics compared with previous years have found industry professionals, buyers, sellers and homeowners all searching for signs that a recovery is on the way.

And then something happened: The first half of the year finished with monthly upticks in the number of new and existing homes sold and median prices.

Is it a sign the market is on the mend or could the second half of the year see a return to falling sales and prices?

Read More at Jacksonville.com

Property yields rental returns and capital appreciation. It is a sound investment avenue. Here’s some tips for real estate investors.

A significant amount of investments in property is by investors. An investor is an early entrant in a project, especially at the launch stage, and exits equally fast, as opposed to the end user who enters at the fag end of the project and stays on until he occupies the premises.

In the absence of any single window offering generic advice on investments in real estate and providing the overall picture, speculation happens.

There has been no organised manner for advising investors and they have banked on gut instinct. There are only limited sources of information available for the investor. These are far from comprehensive…………….

Read more at The Economic Times

Good real estate news seems hard to come by these days, as industry analysts wax on about subprime mortgage losses, the credit crunch and foreclosures on the rise. But on Long Island, there have been glimmers of hope in the first half of 2008.

According to the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, an agency that tracks reported home sales and closing price data (excluding data on bank short sales and for-sale-by-owners), there are at least a half dozen local communities showing signs of “beating the bust” in 2008.

While the number of home sales dropped in these three Nassau and three Suffolk villages and hamlets, their average sale prices (a tabulation of all closing prices divided by the overall number of sales in a specific time period) rose - in two cases, by more than 10 percent.

“Real estate is inherently local,” says Rachel Drew, research analyst for Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “Some places remain desirable no matter how the economy is doing.”

But even though some of these houses sold for 10 to 15 percent less than their original asking prices, the sales still show the strength of the market in certain communities, says Seth Pitlake, sales associate for Prudential Douglas Elliman Realty in Merrick. “If the home is not priced right for today’s market, you’re going to sit until you are within the range of the comparables in the neighborhood,” he says.

Read More at Newsday

Home prices continue to tumble, and some economists expect the pain may not end until 2010.

The latest S&P Case-Shiller data, released Tuesday, showed home prices in the 10 largest U.S. cities plunged 16.9% in May from a year earlier. None of the cities saw price gains.

The debate continues to rage about when home prices will bottom. It seems like the stock market won’t be set for a sustained recovery until investors get comfortable with this issue.

Read More at The Street

It’s a safari unlike any you’ve seen before– it’s in your neighborhoods. More than 40 people took a bus tour of foreclosed homes around the Tri-Cities Saturday.

“We’ve got a lot of eager buyers on that bus!” said mortgage planner Dana Mundy, who helped organize and guide the tour.

Some of the tourists were looking to buy and sell homes, others were looking to rent houses out. All were there to take advantage of the mortgage crisis.

“It kind of opened my mind to the idea of investment property,” said Korey Vankampen, who went along for the tour. “Just the way people can do that and make a pretty good income off of buying property for a really good price, and then renting it out or fixing it up and reselling it.”

Another “foreclosure tourist,” Julie Molvik, agreed that buying foreclosed real estate is a creative way to turn a profit.

“We were looking for something that we could invest in, or maybe something we could fix up and maybe something we could rent out or resell, flip.”……………

Read more at Kimatv.com

Opportunists look at the stumbling real estate market and see bargains and the potential upside.

June Schroeder sees a minefield.

Real estate should be part of most investors’ portfolios, says the co-owner of Liberty Financial Group Inc., an Elm Grove, Wis., financial consulting firm, echoing the view of other advisers. And it’s tempting to wade in when prices seem to be at or near a bottom.

But in real estate, bargains often aren’t what they seem. Many rueful investors who leveraged easy mortgages five years ago to buy investment condos and houses are now finding that leverage works both ways. The fundamentals of reaping a return on real estate were obscured by the now-popped bubble, leaving some over-optimistic investors to now learn the basics while they pick up the pieces………

Read more at SanLuisObispo.com

With the housing market such a mess, we hit up neat-freak real-estate guru Jeff Lewis of Flipping Out (Tuesdays at 10 pm/ET, Bravo) for his top tips on how to sell your home without, well, flipping out.
1. “Pricing is everything. [List] your home 5 percent below the most recent comparable sale.”

2. “Always make your house available for showings and open houses. Don’t give a buyer a reason to buy the house next door.”

3. “Keep your house clean and orderly while on the market. Keep your yard and lawn maintained and manicured.”……….

Read More at TV Guide

Some people are benefiting from current tough economic times.

Tennessee ranks as one of the top 15 states when it comes to foreclosed homes.

But one group of people is riding the wave of foreclosures quite well.

Flipping foreclosed homes for profit has become a hot trend nationwide.

A recent article in Forbes magazine ranked Nashville as the third best place in the nation to get a good foreclosure deal.

Chris Choate buys homes and buildings taken back by banks when people cannot pay the mortgage.

He gave up an accounting career to do it full time.

“I bought a house about six months out of college that was a foreclosure,” he said. “I fixed it up and sold it. I made more money cleaning up that first little house than I did working a whole year as a CPA.”………..

Read More at News Channel 5