1) you don’t spend 100W cash to buy a rental house. You borrow 25W to buy a 30W house with only 5W as down.

2) You repeat 1) to buy 3 or 4 such 30W house to have a total market position of 100W, with only 15W own money, rest is completely leveraged (borrowed).

Your ROI will not be immediate. ROI will come over a long time, probably 8 years or longer. ROI comes in three forms, A) increased rental income and B)increased equity in the property due to long term mortgage pay down. These effect will not be appearent for the short term. Therefore RE is not a short term business. Lastly C) capital gain made possible due to long term inflation, again, like A and B, C is not a short term pay-out.

I will flip during the next cycle. I will stick to my 3 year rule: Buy flipping properties only during the first 3 years of a cycle. Sell these properties by only holding 12 months. When everybody is getting excited, i.e., when I hear that some people in the real estate industries are organizing flipping teams to second tier cities, I will start to liquidate all flipping properties. Sound easy? It’s simply that easy. By that time, I hope more of my current holdings will turn into income machines so I just let them coast along.

The real reasons for price appreciation are multi-fold:
1) Increase in population.
2) Increase in income.
3) Decrease in land/house supply.
4) Favored depot for new immigrants.

1) is true, but that increase in population is only shown larger because the base to calculate that percentage is small. Total RTP population is less than one county around DC region. That’s why it shows high increase rate, but that’s superficial. To say more directly, if you consider absolute number of job increases, Raleigh is not even on the radar screen of hot spots. For the last 5 years, DC is undeniably the king in job creation, even higher than Silicon Valley. Most of the price appreciation is thus justified.

WEXFORD, Pa. — It’s the deal of a lifetime.Bob and Ricki Husick of Pittsburgh are offering anyone who buys their home a full refund when they die.

The Husicks have been trying to sell their suburban home for almost a year, but have failed to do so in the current shaky market.

Some area homeowners have lowered prices, offered free trips and tried a variety of other gimmicks, but the Husicks came up with their own unique incentive.

The couple have no heirs and built the house in 1993. They want $399,900 for the four-bedroom, 3 1/2-bath home, which is located about 20 miles north of Pittsburgh.

The chief executives of a major home builder and the country’s leading mortgage lender offered bleak assessments Monday of their industries and the economy, saying falling home prices would force more homeowners into foreclosure.

Housing prices in California could fall 10% to 15% in the next 18 months, said CEO Jeffrey Mezger of Los Angeles-based KB Home, who appeared on a panel at a Milken Institute conference about California’s economic prospects.

The other members of the panel agreed that prices would fall, a trend that one panelist — Angelo Mozilo, chief executive of home-loan giant Countrywide Financial Corp. — said would drive foreclosures to record levels for the entire mortgage industry.