Wednesday, September 14, 2011

A candidate

My brother-in-law and I have identified a couple possibilities.  One is a house in an Omaha suburb called La Vista.  It's a bread-and-butter 3 bed 2 bath house that is a foreclosure property.  Other homes in the area sell for about $110k to $130k and it's listed for $80k.

I think we can get it for less, but what I'm realizing is that the most difficult part of the offer phase is figuring out what will need to be repaired or rehabbed and how much that will cost.  Not only do foreclosure properties generally need repair/rehab, but the way that I have been taught to invest is to do all repairs or rehab up front to minimize tenant issues during the first several years.

Friday, September 2, 2011

The Why

Exploring ways to increase readership of this blog, I joined StumbleUpon today (this is also one of the icons in the "Share" box to the right).  If you've never checked out StumbleUpon, it is essentially a website recommendation service.  I checked a few boxes for my interests and entered the site.

It automatically took me to a video posted on a website named Ted.com.  The video started and it is a short talk given by a gentleman named Simon Sinek.  Now, I don't know anything about Ted or Simon Sinek, but listening to this talk was like a smack in the head.  It is titled "How Great Leaders Inspire Action" and describes among other things something called The Golden Circle, which is represented graphically below: