There are only three ways to minimize the length of vacancies.

1. Make sure that your rental units are desirable. I’m not talking about desirable from a fashion point of view. Plain vanilla rentals are very desirable as long as they fit the criteria for the area. What I mean by desirable is that the number of bedrooms/baths is what the average renter seeks in your community. If the most common rental in your community is a 3/2 with 1500 sqft and you are trying to rent a 1/1 with 600 sqft, you will have a harder time getting a renter as your unit does not represent what the most common customer wants. The other factor of desirability is the monthly rent. It needs to be in line with similar units to ensure a quick rental.
2. Start looking for a tenant early. If you have a lease expiring in 60 days, it might be the right time to start looking for your next tenant. You would of course verify that your current tenant doesn’t want to renew the lease before looking. (And if they do, it is a good time to get them to sign a lease for the next year.) By starting the process early, you have a good opportunity to have a renter lined up to move in right when the apartment becomes vacant. That is a good position to be in.
3. Build a rener’s hot list. This is an internal list that you create from every potential renter that calls. Your hot list will include their name, address, phone number and what kind of rental they are looking for. Every time you have a rental come up, you call the people on your hot list before investing in advertising. This process just might yield you a tenant with no advertising cost to you.

Craigslist is a great way to build your renter’s hot list all at no charge to you. Here is how you can do it.

Craigslist has a section called apts/housing. It is equivalent to the real estate for rent section of the newspaper. Whenever you have a rental become available - or about to become available - you can run an ad in Craigslist for your city at no charge. You can run this ad as often as you need to. In busier cities, you might post your ad (or a variation of it) every day. In less busy cities, once every few days is probably enough.

Your ad will describe the unit for rent and give contact information. This can be a phone number or it could even be a webpage where they could go and fill out a “preliminary” rental application - contact information, salary details, etc. By using a webpage, people can literally contact you 24 hours a day without your phone ever ringing. For best response, you should offer both methods. If you don’t want to take live phone calls, you can use a voice mail service to take a message so you can call them back at a later time - or you could even use that voice mail message to tell them to go to your webpage and fill out the contact form.

However you choose to collect the leads, you will have several potential renters to call back to rent your unit. You will also have a great start to a renter’s hot list. As you speak with each one, ask them questions and save the answers for later use. Good questions are neighborhoods they are interested in, price range, unit size, etc. You never know when someone might become one of your renters in the future.

If you have enough rental units, you can just keep running ads in craigslist to build up a large list of renters who are currently or will be looking for a new place to live in the future. Keep in touch with all your renters on a periodic basis and you will soon find that renting your units is no longer a problem.

And if you are smart, you collected their email addresses when you contacted them (or when they filled out your contact form) so that you can just mail out your rental hot list to the group every time a new unit becomes available.

How great would it be to have lots of renters calling you to rent every rental unit you have as soon as it becomes available?

This can be accomplished with Craigslist and a renter hot list.

To learn more ways to use Craigslist to build your real estate empire, you need a copy of Craigslist for Real Estate Investors.

The most powerful aspect of real estate clubs is the networking. But like all networking opportunities, caution and understanding is advised. Many experienced real estate investors will not be interested in networking with a beginner because they are busy with their already successful network group. They may be interested if you can show them a reason they should network with you. But just going up and saying “Hey I’m new. Can I bend your ear for a while?” is probably not a good approach to take with them. Getting the experienced folks to be part of your network is a challenge but really your best investment of time as it is they who can offer the most in terms of your education.

You can also network with people who are at a similar experience level as you. This type of networking is easy as you are all at the same level and there is the camaraderie of working together to solve equally challenging situations and issues.

There is a third group that would be delighted to network with you. These are the folks who want something from you. And it is here that you must exercise caution. There are any number of folks at these groups who will happily use you to further their own goals. It doesn’t mean that they are doing it with malicious intent but they may be doing it without your best interests in mind.

For instance, if you are a beginner you may run into someone who wants to dump a fixer upper house he just acquired - you know someone just wanting to do a flip. His goal is to unload the house. He sees you as someone who might buy it so he will make the pitch to you. He may not care if the deal is a good deal for you as he may think it is 100% your responsibility to figure that out yourself.

The deal may indeed be a good deal but only for someone who knows how to maneuver with that particular set of circumstances. For someone not adept at the particular situation, it could become a losing proposition. And that will of course create feelings if disgust and betrayal by the newbie buyer.

The best of this group of people will point out the challenges and be sure the potential buyer fully understands the situation and the risk. But some folks are just out to make deals just want to move the property and go on to the next deal. And they don’t care how many bodies get left behind.

This is a stupid short sighted view as burning people reduces your available pool of buyers over time. But there are people like this at the real estate club meetings. And they are happy to network with you and try to give you their latest great deal.

So by all means network with everyone you can but do it with eyes open. If a deal is so hot that you as a beginner don’t have time to do your due diligence, it is better to skip the deal and wait for one that you can feel pretty comfortable with.

The other main aspect of the real estate investor meetings is the talks that are given. These talks are portrayed as education and in many cases they do offer good information. But many of them are also conducted with the purpose of selling something. It could be an investing course, software, financial packages or anything else related to real estate.

So if you hear a talk moving from fact to something that gets your juices flowing be prepared for some sort of sales pitch at the end of the talk.

And there is nothing wrong with a sales pitch. It is how you learn about products and services that are out there. Just be aware that anyone who gives a talk and pitches a back of the room sale is presenting details in a way designed to get you to the back of the room and buy their real estate course or finance service, etc.

When you know it is a sales pitch, you can listen with a more critical ear, look at the examples with a more critical eye and ask yourself what details were glossed over to make a situation look easier than it really was.

That way if you do decide to make in investment in the sales offering, you are doing it from a rational analysis rather than from an emotional knee jerk decision to grab it at the special price being offered for that night only.

As you can see, there are pros and cons of attending and networking at real estate investment clubs but but good far outweighs the bad. Just go into the meetings with your eyes and ears open and tread with caution until you get to know the folks.

Listings of local clubs:

• http://reiclub.com/real-estate-clubs.php
• http://creonline.com/real-estate-clubs/

While the years of easy money made lots of people - including savvy real estate investors who unloaded their speculative holdings at the right time - that world has been changed remarkably.

First there were tightening credit standards - requiring things like proof of income and proper debt to income ratios. They there were the bank and finance company bailouts. Now there is the $700 billion bailout plan.

After that who knows?

There is already rumbling about bailouts of states and industries.

Needless to say, all this financial contraction and new debt obligations on the U.S. taxpayer are dramatically changing the financial landscape. Hopefully for the better. (But probably not since it is likely the same bunch of legislators will just keep getting elected again and again. But that’s another story.)

For those who started investing in the early 21st century, this monumental tranformation that is occuring is devastating. But for old timers, the folks who had to work in the old financial system where a 10% down mortgage was a great rarity, you are going to be coming back to all the techniques that you used in the distant past.

I’m sure as new finance rules start coming out and money gets a bit looser, there will be many traditional and some new ways to operate in the financial markets to buy and sell real estate as an investment. But until that happens, you will have to get fairly creative to make many deals happen unless you are sitting on a great cash flow or a big pile of cash.

Options you will need to be considering include:

Seller financing - You need to explore why the seller is moving, how much equity they have in the house and if any sort of deal can be arranged where the seller can carry back either a partial or complete mortgage on the property.

Lease-Options You might find lease options to be more popular right now too. Many sellers have already moved to a new house and are eating two mortgages in a market where that problem could last for many more months or even longer. Contact such an owner at the right time and you may find them very amenable to a lease-option situation on very favorable terms.

Partners - Do you have friends or business associates who trust your skills enough to partner with you on various properties? If you do, you might have a nice pool of money and credit standing to move forward on many deals that you couldn’t do before.

REO - More and more properties are going back to the banks. They don’t want them on their books. If the bank is financially strong enough to give a loan on an REO and if you make an interesting enough proposal on the house, they may be favorably inclined to give  you a mortgage on favorable terms. After all, the last thing they want on their books is an empty house that is potentially deteriorating or attracting vagrants.

Retirement Plans - Assuming your retirment plan is of the type to allow real estate investments - and assuming that it still has value after this huge stock market collapse - you can get it restructured so that you can use it as a source of funding. You have your retirement account give you a loan on the property and you repay the retirement account the principal and interest just like you would do to a bank.

There are many other creative alternatives when money is tight. One of the best places to learn more is to go to your local library and find some of the older real estate investing books - books written in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of them are filled with creative ideas that could be dusted off and applied in this time.

Real estate is still local however. While the pundits are preaching the huge declines in real estate in the U.S., they are talking an average across the whole country. That means that many areas have had even bigger declines in value than the average. And it also means that many areas have had smaller declines or even appreciation.

You wouldn’t know it from listening to the national news. But if you follow your local market (as you should) you know what is happening there. For instance, as of August, 2008, real estate prices in my zip code increased by 5% according to the local real estate association that tracks such things.

Of course, even in this rising market in my zip code, there are still bargain houses due to people being in bad financial straits or needing to move because of a job transfer. And the market is much slower in terms of how long it takes to make a sale than before - which also has an impact on the market. This gives you more negotiation ability - provided you find someone who needs to move rather than who wants to move.

Think about it - someone in a good local real estate market in terms of price appreciation can just wait to get their price in a slow sales market if they do not need to move.

But for someone who needs to move in a slow sales market, they will at some point become much more flexible about the price they are willing to accept because they need to get out.

So - rising or falling market - what does this challenging situation mean to you as a real estate investor?

It means that you don’t want to just grab something because it seems to be a bargain. Before  you jump, you want to be sure you fully understand your local market, the direction prices are going and your exit strategy for the price.

As an example, it is not a good deal to get a 20% discount on the listing price of a house you intend to keep short term (1-3 years) if the market is still trending down. But if you can get the same house at 40% below its current retail value, it could be a great deal.

Know your market. Take time to investigate each deal against your strategy for that property. And move forward with confidence in your analysis.

Do not react out of panic or visions of dollar signs dancing before your eyes. Do not jump on a deal that seems good. Be sure that it is good.

• Equipment auctions
• Seized property auctions
• Foreclosure auctions
• Estate auctions
• General merchandise auctions
• Etc…

But one that I have never seen is a rental auction.

And that is in a way strange.

Auctions attract a lot of people and out of the ordinary auctions can attract a lot of press attention - which of course means more people showing up at the auction.

The idea behind a rental auction is that the property owner is having an auction to get a renter in his property at the highest bid price achieved at that auction.

Here are the interesting points of a rental auction:

1. The market is  determining the rental price of the property.
2. You as the owner can stipulate the the winning bidder must be approved for the rental contract in the standard manner - background and credit checks - so that the owner is not saddled with a bad contract.
3. You can use this as a great lead generation system for your other rental properties. By collecting registration information - required to bid - you will have a list of people who have identified themselves as wanting a new place to rent. If you have multiple units available, you have a hot list of prospects to contact about your other units.
4. A rental auction would generate a lot of local publicity. You would need to send a press release to the local newspaper and radio stations in advance of the auction date to inform them. They would all talk about it because it is something new and thus newsworthy.
5. It can be the quickest way to get your property rented in a slow rental market because people will always come out in droves if they think they can get a bargain.
6. You can set a lower limit on the amount that you will accept (a reserve price) so you do not give away the rental. This lower limit can be higher than the opening bid. In fact it is quite common for an auctioneer to start the bidding process low to generate a frenzy of bidding. (Of course the auctioneer will explain this this is a reserve price bid to cover his legal obligation to not give the rental to the highest bidder if the reserve price is not met.)

As you can see, a rental auction can offer you a variety of great benefits. And the more units you have coming onto the market, the more valuable it is. Imagine getting dozens of leads to follow up on for your other units at no additional cost - and in fact having your local newspaper and radio stations help you get those people in your pipeline at no cost to you.

So next time  you are facing challenges getting renters, you may want to look into doing the very first rental auction in your community.

Note: Depending on state laws, this auction may need to be handled by a license auctioneer. So be sure to check your state laws before conducting your first rental auction. And expect to invest some time in educating the auctioneer.

A typical business card is boring. It has a graphic - usually the company logo - and the name, title and contact details for the person listed on the card on one side. And the other side is blank. A small number of cards might have a company slogan on the front of the card also.

Boring…

There is nothing memorable or actionable about this card.

Imagine going to a real estate convention for a weekend and coming home with a bunch of cards all designed like this. You sort through them Monday night and find that you have eight appraisers, 12 lenders, 3 home inspectors and several other cards offering various other services that a real estate investor utilizes.

But they are just impersonal cards. Unless you happen to remember one person specifically or make a note on the back of the card, they all just jumble together in your mind and rolodex.

And everyone who you gave a card to has the same problem.

It is just one card amongst many that were collected during the convention.

Now, a convention is just one example of where you use business cards. They are obviously used in many more situations. And there is nothing wrong with a traditionally designed business card except it conveys no useful information other than your company name and your contact details.

Now admittedly that information can be quite important. Let’s face it. A business card without any contact information on it is pretty useless.

But a business card can be so much more. It can be a mini sales letter.

Just like business trainers teach about the elevator speech - a quick and to the point memorized speech you give people who ask what you or your company does - you need to treat your business card the same way.

As a minimum, you want to have a concise statement of what you are all about on the front of your business card. Just a little slogan that distills the core of your business. At the risk of being cliche, “we buy houses - any location - any condition - for cash” or a variation of that is a powerful slogan for the front of your business card provided that it is the correct distillation of what you do as a real estate investor.

Better still is to make use of that wasteland that is the back of your business card. It will cost a bit more to do two sided printing of your business cards but think of all that you can do with it.

• You can elaborate on what your business is about with some powerful, focused bullet points.
• You can give a testimonial from a satisfied client.
• You can advertise a free report they can get by going to your website (where you can capture their name, email and any other details you are interested in as the “price” for getting the report.)
• You can use a graphic that clearly depicts the core of your business (on the idea that a picture represents 1000 words.)
• You can put a coupon on the back offering a free service that you could offer to get your foot in the door.

There are of course many other ideas.

Just because the back of a business card is small and can’t fit too much information doesn’t make it useless.

That little space is really quite valuable and not using it is costing you business.

Do you doubt that small spaces are valuable? Just take a look at google. They built their entire business model on little three line ads. And they are worth billions.

So next time you get business cards made (like maybe right away) think long and hard how you can convert your blah business card to a powerful mini sales letter and grow your real estate business today.

When you are looking at buying a FSBO, you have a large amount of interaction with the seller. The seller will typically show you the house and will negotiate the contract directly with you. That gives you many opportunities to point out defects in the house that can be used in the negotiations to help you obtain either a better price or better terms.

When dealing with real estate agents, it is quite common for the seller and buyer to not meet until the closing - and even then many closings are done separately so the seller and buyer may never meet.

That lack of buyer/seller interaction takes away a lot of the negotiation power you have as a buyer.

The typical process is that you sit down with your real estate agent and write up a contract. Your real estate agent faxes is to the seller’s agent. The seller’s agent then goes over it with the seller (and hopefully understands what the clauses mean and makes an effort to sell the deal to the seller.)

With that many degrees of separation between you and the seller, you lose a lot of negotiation leverage. All you can do is put clauses in the contract and hope for the best. And if you negotiate after that, it is the same back and forth process.

There is a better way - provided your agent is up to the task.

It works like this.

When writing the purchase contract, you explain to your real estate agent every defect you saw and explain exactly how you arrived at the price and terms you put in the contract. Work with your agent until he or she totally understands every element of how you arrived at the deal you are presenting.

Next, insist that the contract be presented by your realtor to the seller’s agent and the seller at the same time - and in person.

This allows your agent to go over the same details that you would have covered in a FSBO deal. And it gets the seller to understand exactly how you arrived at your figures.

If you can get your agent to agree to this, it is much better than leaving the contract to blind luck. Lets face it. All it takes to destroy a deal is for the seller’s real estate agent to say something like “We have an offer but I don’t think it is very good.”

This method, when you can work it, pretty much removes the seller’s agent from the negotiation loop. And that puts you in a position of more power in the contract negotiation process.

For the most part, this decision is entirely up to the landlord.

But due to equal access and non-discrimination laws, there is a pet situation that could represent an issue to a landlord who refuses to rent to people with pets.

There are a small number of people with medically subscribed companion pets. A good example of this is a blind person with a seeing eye dog. You sometimes see such a person/pet pair in a department store or a mall even though they have big signs saying “no pets allowed.” (Generally if you look closer, they say that companion pets are allowed because they could be subject to lawsuits if they refused entry for this class of people.)

Each state has laws with regards to this condition - and many do not allow you to charge any extra. That means no additional monthly rent or no additional security deposit.

To understand the laws with regards to companion pets for your state, visit http://www.guidedog.org/pubedu/ADA/usalaw.htm. It gives the details and references specific code for each state.

While it is unlikely you will encounter a companion animal situation for your rentals due to the very small population that use companion animals, it is good to know what the regulations in your state are. So even if this situation doesn’t apply to you today, be sure to bookmark the above website or print out the section relevant to your state and keep it in a safe place for future reference in case you find yourself showing an apartment to someone with a companion animal.

There is a great source where you can get almost any recent real estate investing book at 50% or more off the retail price.

That place is amazon.com.

Every time you do a search, Amazon gives you the choice to buy the books that show up from them at their catalog price (which can be quite a discount from retail) or buy from a reseller. Here is an example to show you:

It is not available in every state and it is only available for married couples. It is not right for every situation but if you are in a tenancy by the entirety state and married, you should consider using this form of ownership on your deed when you purchase your private residence.

So what is tenancy by the entirety?

Tenancy by the entirety is similar to joint tenancy in that it offers rights of survivorship. In other words, if one spouse dies, the house is immediately owned by the other spouse without probate.

Where tenancy by the entirety differs - and where it gets its great value - is that both spouses must agree before the property becomes subject to one spouse’s creditors. That means that the actions of one spouse by himself or herself cannot do anything that would cause the house to be encumbered. Only jointly agreed to debts can cause an encumberance on the house.

So what is a practical example of how tenancy by the entirety can benefit you?

Lets assume that one spouse gets sued and gets a judgement against him or her. In this form of ownership the creditors can do nothing that would force the sale of the residence without the consent of the spouse.

There are several nuances to this powerful protection that are best discussed with your real estate attorney when conducting a transaction.

States allowing Tenancy bu the Entirety include:

Alaska
Arkansas
Delaware
District of Columbia
Florida
Hawaii
Illinois
Indiana
Kentucky
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Mississippi
Mississippi
Missouri
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Tennessee
Tennessee
Vermont
Virginia
Wyoming