The Geography of Real Estate Investing

The old adage about real estate investing remains as true today as it ever was. In real estate, identifying and tracking investment metrics in geographic markets is critical to understanding whether you are investing a strong and improving market or a troubled declining market. While prospecting for good geographical areas, it is essential that you follow a winning strategy; do thorough research and properly analyze the underlying trends in the market.

Identifying Trends

In general, markets create good investment opportunities when they have increasing demand and provide a good relative value. There are several ways to measure demand. For example, you can look at the number of home sales in an area in the current year compared to the previous years. Keep in mind that listings and sales are indications of market activity, but not necessarily demand.

Services like Zillow provide access to home value trends and other goo indicators. You can also review the average sale prices of apartments and houses in a particular area and compare them with the previous years. This will allow you to calculate the increase or the decrease in the average prices.

Are more tenants coming into the area? If so, then it could be profitable to buy an apartment building there. Are more people putting up sale signs on their homes? Why are they trying to leave the place? Finding out the answers to such questions can prove very useful in making the right decision.

Measuring Accessibility and Potential

Many investors prefer suburbs due to their proximity to the center of the city. The real estate prospector should identify whether the suburb is affordable and how much demand there is within the market. If you are looking for short-term investments (e.g., buy, refurbish, sell), first evaluate whether builders are available on your timeline and how long you reasonably expect to list the property prior to closing a sale.

It goes without saying that one should look out for land that is fairly valued. It should be a desirable location, accessible by public transport such as buses and roads and there should also be considerable investment by the government/public sector.

Job Growth

Locations attractive to the working families, students and the elderly are often very lucrative. If there are a number of students and industrial organizations in the area, this could provide strong long-term demand. You can access employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When there are a good number of students and employees, there will naturally be greater demand for rental properties as well as new houses and commercial complexes.

However, a sudden drop in jobs in a particular area can also be exploited by buying properties at very low prices and holding onto them until they appreciate back to normal prices. A savvy investor with a good eye for opportunity and the ability to plan for the long-term exit can generate a strong ROI in such a market.

A Final Word

Many successful real estate investors are geographic specialists. Others are product specialist and go for niche prospecting, such as looking for areas that are ideal for offices, industry, retail, residence and so on. Once you have zeroed in on your specialty, you can develop a depth of knowledge about the specialty, providing you an “unfair advantage” and ensuring maximum returns on your investment.

Where Do You Find Clients as a New Real Estate Agent?

The real estate agent needs to learn to put him/herself out there. The methods listed in the section above should all be playing a major role in making one known. There is no magic formula for finding new customers. Real estate agents need to be open to the idea of experimenting. For a month you might want to focus on passing business cards and brochures, and the next month you might be able to pay for online advertising. The advertising options along with the combinations are endless. You never know who you will reach. Everyone you come in contact with is a potential customer. As you keep this mentality, you will notice an increase in real estate clients. The idea makes sense; the more people you reach out to, the more people that can become clients. Where do you find clients that are trying to sell my house?

With that in mind, here are a few places where you can generate leads and find clients as a new real estate agent:

Find Areas with Heavy Real Estate Traffic: This method can be considered the simplest and most convenient. Once you find an area with heavy real estate traffic, both from buyers and sellers, you need to focus on that area. This would be the perfect area to try one of the offline methods mentioned above. You may start by going home to home offering your services, leaving brochures, etc. These areas will give your real estate career the jump start it needs.

Using Social Media: You can find customers by advertising via a blog. These are modern and effective tools commonly used by many companies to advertise products. Through this, you can also advertise your services. Many people today come in contact with products and services online, which is why it’s important to have a prominent online presence. Having your own blog and being able to link back to it from other real estate websites will increase both traffic to your website and the number of clients.

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Forums: Forums may be the most difficult of the real estate marketing techniques mentioned here. However, they can be extremely effective. Spend some time looking for real estate related forums. This will guarantee an audience that may be interested in your services. Once you have found a forum that suits your needs, create an account and begin writing your experiences with real estate. Be prepared to answer questions and keep an active presence in the forum. You want to gain people’s trust- only then will they become a client. In the beginning, this might seem like a waste of time, which is why it’s such a difficult marketing technique. However, as you push through and endure, there will be a reward for the time invested. We buy ugly houses Cutler Bay

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