Today we are going to take a look at a common tactic often employed in real estate.  It’s called the art of the low ball.  You low-ball the numbers and see if they don’t work out in your favor after all.

We are talking about low-balling the asking price with a counter-offer that’s so ridiculously far from the asking price that it would feel insulting.

For example, you can simply offer a substantially lower bid, say a whole one-fifth lower than the asking price, or even  more if you’re feeling really lucky.  Now such low offers are almost never accepted, but the operand word is “almost,” not “never.”  Like much else in business, it’s a numbers game, so you simply keep doing it until you win: you can bid on thirty different lots of property, but that one successful bid will pay for the other twenty-nine which your low numbers made you to lose out on.

The key in all this is to keep trying and not give up.  You will basically be treated as if you’re trying to sell people pencils – door-to-door.  And so it will be taxing on your nerves, as the rejections pile up.  But it doesn’t matter, as long as you understand the feast-or-famine nature of this approach.

But how low should you go?  It all depends on your situation.  You’re low-balling people, but you’d still want to appear half-way respectable.  So keep your figures within the realm of reality.  One helpful old rule of thumb to live, and quote, by states that if you’re not personally embarrassed, you haven’t gone low enough.

Yes, there’s a very poker-like aspect to this business.  But then again, that’s always the case when any negotiations are involved.  It constitutes a great part of what makes the property market so interesting to work in.  So low-ball your “disposable” real estate transactions and low-ball your way to real estate investment success!

Over the last couple of years in Calgary, more and more people had decided to inject some of their savings into the real estate market. Especially after the dot.com bust in the early part of the millennium. Including myself and many others were getting tired of the continuous fluctuations of the stock market. It was extremely stressful to wake up everyday and hoping that nothing bad is going to happen in the stock market and not being able to control my investments differently than buy or sell. As history has already provided many examples to us about how a company could disappear overnight and completely wipe out your investments, yet I have never seen a house disappear from the face of the earth so suddenly. If it did by some unfortunate event, usually an insurance provider has reimbursed the owner.

comes from directly applying the power of leverage. It doesn’t matter what kind of business we are talking about. If you want to be successful, you will need to find a way of multiplying your knowledge, power and time. If you choose to invest in stocks, you will get your returns one on one. Meaning that if you invest $1,000 and that particular stock goes up in value by 10% your ROI will be $100. When you put your dollars into a piece of real estate, the banks will usually require 25% of your own money and they will put up the remaining 75% of the purchase price for you. The beautiful part of this arrangement is that if the purchased real estate increases by 36% like it did in 2006 than your ROI will be 4 x 36%. Now that‘s the true power of leverage.

Real estate values most definitely won’t be increasing by 36% forever. However even if we make a very conservative assumption of prices to only increase by 6% annually than you are still anticipating a 24% ROI. In many of my client’s opinion it sure beats any of the G.I.C. investments available today.

Right, but I am not cut out to be a Landlord. What if the tenant doesn’t pay or damages the property? What if…? Excuses can be created in every situation in our lives just to rationalize why not to do something. Sometimes to move ahead in life, we need to get a little more comfortable with being uncomfortable when we decide to get involved with new ideas. However, if you prefer not to deal with tenants you can completely circumvent that challenge. Once again, if we examine some of the other evidences that successful people have left behind we can easily find the solution to this problem. You not only need to leverage

Piece of mind – is the first thought that comes into my mind when I think about real estate as an investment vehicle. Security, predictable future and leveraged growth are the number one reasons why many choose to invest in real estate. According to Andrew Carnegie “Over 90% of all millionaires become so through owning real estate”. Now that’s a powerful statement. Let it sink in for a minute. Even if you are somewhat skeptical about the future of Calgary’s real estate market we cannot pass by such an important statement and not to acknowledge it as part of a major footprint of success.

Real estate values go up for many reasons. The number one cause of increasing real estate prices is the scarcity of supply or where the demand of the influx of people to a geographical area will outperform the supply. The good news for us in Alberta is that our provincial government has done such a great job of creating an economical atmosphere for business that there will be new business opening up and moving to this province for many more years to come. Not to mention the billions of dollars of projects already in the books that requires a constant feed of new employees from outside of Alberta.

Why real estate vs. the stock market? Unfortunately, many media outlets don’t understand the concept of the power of leverage when it comes to calculating actual ROI (return on investment). Every time I look at a news clip or read an article in the paper where they are comparing the performance of real estate prices to the stock market, I am ready to kick something to calm my frustration. The secret of many successful investors. your money, you will also need to leverage your time and knowledge by hiring the right professional to be on your team of success. Can you imagine Donald Trump taking phone calls at 2:00a.m. about a leaky toilet? Or personally collecting his rental cheques every month from his tenants? I didn’t think so. So, why do you think that you need to do it all alone? Why not do exactly what some of the major players in this investment business have already done? If it worked for them why wouldn’t it work for you?

It’s absolutely essential to hire the best professional experts on your team of advisors to propel your investments to the top and not to leave anything to a chance. Some of the professionals you should absolutely consider on having on your real estate team are Property Managers, Accountants, Contractors, Lawyers and knowledgeable REALTORS® who will not only advise you but allow you to stand on their shoulders and push you up to achieve your goals.

I truly believe that everyone can succeed at investing in real estate if one puts their mind to it. But it’s up to you to decide and take actions. You owe it to yourself to further explore the possibilities of investing in real estate. As you are probably aware, real estate is and has been a solid blue chip performer over the long term (after all they’re not making any more land!).

Joe Samson is currently a realtor For Calgary Real Estate and has been for the past 7 years. You can read more articles like this at his web site http://www.joesamson.com

As long as you own your own home, pay your mortgage and have fairly descent credit, it will actually be easy to get started in real estate investing. There is most likely a pretty good amount of equality in your house. Even if you have only owned your house for a short time, you have been paying it off and it is most likely has been increasing in value. Just take a look at the balance of your mortgage and subtract it from its current value. Of course you may need to include a second mortgage or and other liens that may be on your property, but you should still have equality to work with. This is your green light to move forward into investing.

Here three ways to use the equity in your home to raise the capital for real estate investing.

1. Refinancing Your Home – You can refinance your house, get a better interest rate and also get some cash out from a refinance mortgage. You can use the cash to purchase an investment property outright, or you should at least have least enough money for a down payment of a property. Be sure to check with your lender or mortgage broker for any of the rules about cash-out refinancing. Keep in mind, a cash-out refinance mortgage may have higher interest rates than other types of mortgages.

2. Using a Home Equity Loan – A home equity loan uses the equity in your home as collateral, this would be a second mortgage to the one you already have. The mortgage amount is based on a percentage of the equity in your house. You may be able to borrow up to 100% of your homes value, but if you are getting a home equity loan on a second property, you may not be able to borrow as much. This type of loan allows you the option to pay the loan back early without penalty, just a nice little bonus.

3. Open a Home Equity Line of Credit – A home equity line of credit has a credit limit similar to a credit card. This is not much different from a home equity loan, the amount that you can borrow is based on your credit score and the amount of equity in your home. You can transfer funds from your home equity line of credit, or even write checks directly from the account. Interest rates are generally lower than cash-out refinance mortgages, and there are tax advantages as well. Another advantage is that you are only paying interest and making payments on the amount you owe at the time, not the entire amount of the loan. In the future, you may also be able to renegotiate for a higher credit line when the equity in your house increases, especially if you have made improvements to your house.

Real Estate Investing is not only for the rich. The average homeowner can get started in real estate investing even if you don’t have a lot of money in the bank. You can use cash-out refinance mortgages, home equity loans, and home equity lines of credit to begin your journey as a real estate investor, and continue to build more investments into the future.

Get more Real Estate Investing Tips and free advice from www.ezlandlordforms.com. We offer Rental and Lease Agreements for landlords. We are the only online document system for landlords.

What is the difference between people who get rich and people who don’t? It is a very simple question that many people simply forget to ask. The first time you are truly confronted with this question, you will probably reach for an easy answer, such as, “Being born into a rich family” or “Getting lucky with the lotto” or even “Having a good career that pays a lot of money.” And you might indeed be considered lucky if any of those things had happened to you.

The bad news for those lucky people is that being in those circumstances is no guarantee of wealth. In fact, according to Robert Kiyosaki, author of the Rich Dad book series, it isn’t about how much money you bring in, but how much money you keep that determines how wealthy you are.

For instance, his father, the highly educated man to whom he refers in his books as his “poor dad,” always had a good salary. Yet, Kiyosaki said, at the end of every quarter, he was practically penniless.

The good news for you, is that becoming rich has less to do with external factors like your job or whether you were born a Rockefeller, which you can’t control, and more to do with internal factors which you can.

Whether you ever become rich or not is determined, in large part, by nothing more than how you think.

The man Kiyosaki dubbed his “rich dad” broke people down into four types and set them on a graph he called the Cash Flow Quadrant. On one side of the quadrant are the E’s and S’s, or the Employees and the Self-employed. On the other side are the B’s and I’s, or the Businesspeople and the Investors. According to Kiyosaki, each of those quadrants represents which sector a person’s money comes from. It also represents the way that person thinks.

Are you beginning to see? The people in the four quadrants are not there by chance–they are there because they experience life in fundamentally different ways.

“The four people in the four quadrants are four totally different people,” Kiyosaki says in his book “Cash Flow Quadrant.” “The four people found in the four different quadrants are different mentally as well as emotionally.”

What’s more, Kiyosaki says, it is that emotional difference that determines to which quadrant a person is drawn. And, he says, you can always tell which quadrant a person is coming from simply by listening to what they say. If you hear a person talking primarily about their benefits and job security, then that person is coming from Kiyosaki’s E or employee quadrant. He also goes on to say that it is perfectly all right to live your life in the E quadrant if security is indeed the most important thing to you. But, he adds, the E quadrant is the most difficult quadrant from which to become rich.

It sounds a little scary at first, but this is actually good news for you. It’s good news because it means that, if you want to get rich, all you have to do is start thinking more like the people who live in the I, or investors, quadrant.

One of the best things you can invest in is real estate. That is what Kiyosaki’s rich dad did, and it made him…well, rich. In order to think like a real estate investor, simply tell your money that you are through working for it. It is time for your money to get to work for you.

Alex Anderson Connects Investors With Appreciating Minnesota Real Estate Investment Property and South Florida Investment Properties

You can still make your purchase. The trick is, you just have to think about things a little bit differently.

If you have not seen the movie “Schindler’s List,” you probably should. Not only is it a great bit of social consciousness, its writers did a good enough job on Schindler’s character to give you a glimpse into his business know-how. The man wanted to build a factory because he knew it could make him a lot of money during the war. Thing was, he didn’t have the capital to build that factory.

But the Jewish community did.

He went to them and presented his idea about how, in return for their investment capital, they could take some of the goods produced and sell them on the black market. He talked to a lot of investors. He raised a lot of money.

You can do the same thing, and indeed a lot of people do. If you see a good deal on a building and you haven’t the spare millions lying around to purchase it, put together a cooperative to buy the property. Even if you receive only 10 percent of the property’s earnings, that will be a nice, tidy sum if it’s the right property.

That is why you shouldn’t content yourself with starting too small.

According to Ken McElroy, who authored Rich Dad’s “The ABC’s of Real Estate Investing,” there is nothing wrong with small bits of real estate. He simply says that there is no reason to relegate yourself to them out of fear that you don’t have the skills to go larger, because it doesn’t really require more skills. You wind up outsourcing a lot anyway.

What a larger chunk of real estate will do, however, is allow you to interest more investors, as they stand to make more money off the deal. A larger piece of real estate will also be very unlikely to slump into zero occupancy.

As McElroy says, if you rent out a single-family unit and that family moves out, you have an occupancy rate of zero, and the property becomes a liability until you can rent it again. If you own interest in a 50-family building and 10 families move out, you still have an occupancy rate of 80 percent. The property is still an asset. You’re still making money. And you know you stand to make more again when you get those 10 units refilled.

All of that doesn’t even begin to take into account the relative ease of getting a bank loan for the purpose of purchasing an investment property. The bank knows they can make money off that property if you default, regardless of your credit history.

Whatever you are trying to do in this life, you owe it to yourself to put aside your assumptions and find out how to work around potential barriers. Real estate investing is no exception. Just stick your nose in and start learning. There is a way for you to do it.

Alex Anderson Connects Investors With Appreciating Minnesota Real Estate Investment Property and South Florida Investment Properties