In the first two articles in this series we noted that Florida Governor Crist had suggested buying Florida real estate as an investment at the current low prices and showed a couple of different ways an individual could act on the Governors suggestion.

When banks are bragging that they will pay 1.7 per cent interest on a certificate of deposit, the governor may well be right in suggesting an investment that actually benefits from low real estate prices and can pay returns well into the double digits.

Of course when the landscape is littered with wreckage of the real estate investors of three years ago, the first thing to look for is not the greatest return on your investment dollars, but the return of the dollars. What did the investors who are in foreclosure now do wrong? And how do I avoid doing what they did?

The simple answer is they bought with the expectation they could sell for a profit quickly. Once they bought a house, it had to go up in value so they could sell it to another newbie investor. This is no better than betting on the stock market, buying with the hope of selling for more later.
Pretty hard to imagine this was what the Governor had in mind for the state of Florida retirement plan.

The better approach is to buy something that will pay you weekly, monthly, quarterly (or some other period of time) whether the market goes up or down. And the best approach is to buy it so cheaply that the amount you are paid is eight percent, ten percent, or more after all expenses.

Unlike the newbie investors buying houses, hoping they will go up in price over night, this form of investing requires effort, money, discipline and patience.

Basically there are two skill sets needed at this stage. You must buy cheaply and know that it really is cheap (more later) and it must be capable of making people commit themselves to pay you money on a regular basis for the use of the house you bought: You are going to have to be a landlord either in person or by proxy.

Really cheaply means that you must combine the purchase price with expectation of continuing expenses. There are a number of approaches to evaluating “really cheaply.” Some are expensive, and you may need to use some of them if this is your first time in real estate investing. Other, however, are free and amazingly effective.

To find a house that you can buy really cheaply, I suggest that you first use two free web sites. Realtor.com and Zillow.com. If you have a friend with a real estate license, she or he can do it better, but the free version is pretty nifty.

In Realtor.com search the area where you would like to buy. Look for three bedroom homes with two baths that are offered for sale at least 20 per cent below the average sale price for that type of house in that area. Easy way to estimate value is ask a Realtor.

But you can Do It Yourself (DIY) by looking in Public Records with the Clerk of Court or checking houses in that subdivision in the property assessor’s web site. Look for recent sales prices, not tax value.

Now look each house up in Zillow.com. Get the Zestimate of value for the house and compare that to the price the seller is asking on Realtor.com. Secret: You are looking for houses for sale by MOTIVATED sellers. People who start out offering to sell for less than the recent sale prices are the people you want to buy from.

You need to know that Zillow.com will be wrong. You are using it here only to help you identify houses. More checking to follow before putting any money at risk.

You should now have a list of houses, with the address, the price the seller is asking and what Zillow.com thinks it is worth. You need one more number to finish this part of your research. Go to RentORama.com, put in the address of the house and the number of bedrooms and you will receive an average rent for a house of that size in that neighborhood.

Multiply the monthly rent by ten and divide that number by the price the seller is asking for the house. Rent $700, price of house $60,000. Gives you $7,000/$60,000=11.6%.

Make a list of all the houses where this percentage is more than 10 per cent and meet me in the next article in this series for what I think will be a surprise.

Author Bio: George Beardsley has written extensively about finance and business as a financial reporter for the Chicago Tribune and an editor for publishing firm Dow-Jones, Irwin and is now a landlord in Florida and is offering the FREE REPORT “Landlord in a Box” at At http://www.easy-rental-income.com.

Category: Real Estate
Keywords: beat cd rates, earn income with rentals, deep discount houses, rent, property management, Florida,