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Associate Editor Toddi Gutner spoke with Veteran analyst Michael Youngblood about his upbeat view on real estate market and his surprising prediction that the greatest price appreciation will be coming in so-called bubble markets.

Despite all the fear that single-family home prices will decline, Youngblood thinks residential real estate is a lot stronger than most people suspect. He bases this assessment on a new economic model he created that forecasts housing prices in 379 metropolitan statistical areas.

Area real estate agents are divided over the answer.

Some say it could be worth spending $5,000 to $10,000, perhaps more, on upgrades, especially as the market begins to slow and more upscale homes are built in the Valley.

Says Agent Ruta: ”It’s no longer: Stick a sign in the front yard and sit back and wait for the offers to come in. You have to get the house ‘dealer-prepped.”’

Many properties are rented on a month-to-month basis. That simply means that either the landlord or the tenant may terminate the rental usually with a month’s notice. However, other times real estate is rented on a lease basis. A lease has a defined time period for which (he property is rented, typically a year or more. When you buy a property that has leases on it, the leases run with the land. That means that they don’t end simply because there’s a change of title. Therefore, it’s important to determine if the leases will enhance or restrict your ability to raise rents, to remodel units, or to otherwise change the financial and physical structure of the building. For example, you may find a building in which the rents are very low. You want to buy it, raise rents, and sell for a profit. However, the ten­ants are all on long-term leases. These leases do not call for rent increases. Thus, if you buy the building you’ll be stuck with those low-paying tenants until the leases expire. For this reason, the price may remain low. However, a creative investor may buy low and then offer the existing tenants a bonus to move out, after which he or she rerents to higher-paying tenants. Checking out the leases is vitally impor­tant when buying rental real estate. Sometimes it can be the road to riches