I was on Youtube today and I have found a great video that I would like to share with you guys.  So one may ask… how to make money in real estate today?  If the market is good, you can buy and hold with a tenant staying there.  If the market is bad, you can sell it to people who want properties with leases.  The gentleman featured in this video suggests focusing on your niche where you sell properties that have existing income, where it would attract buyers who don’t want to deal with finding tenants but want to make money from real estate to supplement their incomes.  Why is this good?  Furthermore, if you have a larger property, you can hire a property manager.  Thus, this is a good way to have an exit strategy also in your real estate endaevors.  Sounds like a plan, don’t you say so?  For more real estae investment strategies, please continue to check out UrbanPropertyInvestor.com.

Are you a first time homebuyer? Do you want to own your own house but are worried that you do not have enough money? Well, good news! The United States government is issuing something called a tax-rebate, whereby first-time homebuyers get an approximate $8,000 tax break when they buy their home. However, there are requisites that one must meet prior to qualifying for the rebate. First, one has to pay at least $8,000 in tax each year. This sounds like it’s just a break-even, right? Y0u pay $8,000, you get $8,000. Well, no. Usually, one would not get this tax-break, and either way, one would still have to pay the tax. Due to the recessing economy, the US government has decided to issue this rebate to encourage first-time homebuyers. How does this help the government, you might ask? Well, the economy is strongly built on the estate foundation. If there are more homebuyers, banks make more money, and when banks make more money, businesses get more loans, and when businesses get more loans, things are just cheaper and consumer confidence thrives. So, if you have yet to own your first home, be sure to hop on the rebate bandwagon before it’s too late. The rebate expires in December 2009!

Hope things are going well, everybody.  This is part one of our ongoing series: First Time Urban Property Investor.

For first-time owners, consider this. Instead of looking for a single-family home to live in, how about trying to look for a duplex, a triplex or even a four-plex? Typically they are around the same price as a home the same size in the area, but the pros of these properties is that you can rent it out to people, while potentially getting some sort of tax deduction for doing so. I would check with a professional with that, but typically you can depreciate a portion of the improvement value over 27.5 years, plus you can expense a portion of the maintenance costs if you lease out part of the building, thus giving you some tax break, while also benefiting from having somebody pay for your mortgage payments, going towards your first home.

So why not??? Though you have to deal with potentially troublesome tenants and maintain the property (the latter you should be doing for your own home anyway), you can always get hired help and still end up with money in your pocket to pay off some of your mortgage, resulting in a more affordable house. Live through it a few years and you could always decide you don’t want to be a landlord so you can move up to your dream single-family home. For more information, I recommend talking to your local real estate agent to take a look at the prices of multi-family properties and the most important, the cap rate, the ratio between rental income after expenses versus the property price. This ratio will help you determine whether the property will generate enough cash flow for you to not even worry about mortgage payments in general.