Bronchick REI Seminar

Last Saturday my buddy Scott and I attended a one day REI seminar hosted by a local attorney and investor named Bill Bronchick. As a newbie to the REI investing world I found this seminar to be very helpful for some of the basics of getting started - it was entitled "Getting started in Real Estate investing" after all. There was a decent amount of meat in the seminar but, as I am hearing from several bloggers, the real meat is in their wares - what they are selling. I decided to buy 1 of the 2 products that Bill was promoting called "William Bronchick's Real Estate Library". It was a little pricey but I've been reading it for the last 4 days and have to say that it is full of a lot of well organized material that I will use in the next few months as I start to put together a short term cash flow system with distressed owners/properties. I am really excited about flipping properties as a dealer. I will keep you posted as to the progress that I have with flipping and going through Bill's 4 part course. The nice little bonus to this is that if I can flip one property in the next 2 months and net at least $7,000 then I will get the price of the product refunded to me. Bill is also on the board of the local CAREI club and I had attended one of their meetings about 2 months ago and got some great info on fix and flips. I'm not really interested in fixing anything right now except for my bottom line. Continued education is a great thing!

Investing in Idaho

I took a trip with my awesome girlfriend Sarah to Idaho in September of 2005 to visit some family and relax a bit. It turns out that Sarah's dad is an agent in the Boise area and we spoke for about an hour about REI in the Boise area and what the market was doing. According to the local papers the appreciation rate for Ada and Canyon counties is ranging between 8.5 - 12%. This seemed very appealing to me since the local appreciation rate is somewhat dismal in Denver. Currently, CNN Money is projecting the 2006 appreciation at 8.7% for the area in Idaho that I visited.
So I asked the dad (DB) to keep an eye out for good deals in the area. In late November a rehabber friend of his asked him to put a recently rehabbed property on the market - DB called me and offered it to me before it went on the market b/c he thought it was a great deal. It was a property with 2 houses on it - both were mostly rehabbed and were in very good condition. I had my brother who lives in the area check it out for me and he gave it a thumbs up. DB thought that I could easily get $1500/mo for both houses which would easily cover a zero down deal on the asking price of $180K. After researching rents a little myself I determined that I could get closer to $1250/mo which would result in a negative cash flow of $100/mo. Not great, but not terrible b/c I would be doing a buy and hold strategy for this property. So I put an offer on the property in mid-December and ran into some financing snafus b/c I wanted a payment around $1350. We cleared up the snafus and for about 3 weeks we have been waiting for the underwriters to get an appraisal. Why the delay in the appraisal??? Well, it turns out that this is one of the only properties in the area that has 2 houses on it and they are finding it really hard to find comparables. The best that they can do so far is $170K! This is really concerning me b/c if the bank doesn't think it is worth the asking price then maybe I should adopt the same thinking. That is were it stands currently. I should know something this week. At this point I am ready to take my earnest money back and walk away. Any comments are appreciated.

Update on Colo. Springs and New Builds

Ok. So I've not posted for many many weeks. I'm a slacker like that. Some updates on the recent REI activity. I was all set to put an offer on one of the Colo. Springs properties (3/2 condo) back in late November but someone beat me to the punch. The other properties just didn't seem to jive with the numbers or the neighborhoods. I checked on the new build market in El Paso and ABQ about 2 weeks ago. It wasn't a great effort - I just checked the agent's web site where I was told there would be new product after the first of the year. Well, there wasn't any new product for these particular builders/neighborhoods. I will check again in a few weeks but I am putting this on a back burner for now. I did some research on the RD Forums and on other REI/money web sites, it seems like the ABQ market may be becoming saturated with new homes and flipping may not be as easy as I would like it to be. El Paso still looks promising.