Copyright 2006 National Real Estate Network LLC The comparable sales in a one-mile area around the property will be the ones you want to be looking at. This is a general rule. There are many areas where you have do comparable sales block-by-block, or street-by-street. A comparable sale would be a similar property that has sold in the last six months compared to the one you are buying. For example, if you were going to buy a 1000 square foot, 3 bedroom house, brick, with attached 2 car garage, and full and https://shakuryukou.com/ http://urzadzajzpasja.pl/basement, you would want to look for similar properties in that one mile radius or closer, in some cases. If you are looking at a house that differs in size, square footage, bedrooms you will need to make adjustment in pricing to have a comparable to the target property. For example if the target property has a 3 bedroom house with basement, and you are using a comparable 3 bedroom house with no basement, you might have put a downward adjustment factor of $10,000 to compensate for the missing basement in order to get a real value of the comparable sale. You need to look at the amount of time the house was on the market (the number of days it took to sell the house). You don’t want to be basing your buy on a house that was on the market for long periods of time. If you use comparable sales that all took 10 months to sell and you are looking to buy the house, fix it up and sell it in 3 months, you sure don’t want to use these houses as “comps” that took 10 months to sell. So we now know how to determine what the house we are looking at would sell for. I am going to suggest that if you are getting into this business to be a landlord that you treat your rental business as if it were the business of finding, fixing, and reselling. I say this because most landlords will be selling at some point in time. So don’t just look at buying houses based on cash flow, or tax benefits. You need to look at it from the point of view that if you were to get sick tomorrow could you resell the property at a profit. Let’s talk about profit, after all this is a business and that is what you are after. So what is the profit you want to make in this business? That’s right; profit is where you want to start! Let’s assume that I am looking at houses that sell in 3-month period for $60,000. Let’s say we are looking at a house that needs a new kitchen, paint and carpet. If all those repairs were done, the house would sell most likely for $60,000.00 in three months based on comparable sales. So another way to say this would be that the after repair value of the home would be $60,000.00. Some nonconforming lenders and HUD 203-k mortgages use what is called a “subject to appraisal” (which is another way of saying the after repair market price). So we have a minimum profit goal for this $60,000.00 after market value home of $12,000.00. So we now build the model to determine what the maximum $ we want to pay for the house we found are. You now have to start adding in your cost? The costs you need to add up are as follows: a. Your time – What is your time worth? How much time are you personally going to be spending on the buy, rehab and etc? Put a dollar figure to your time. b. How much is the rehab going to cost? I have seen a lot of people in this business that are very experienced. The majority of them will tell you that their rehabilitation cost will run 1 ½ more than they expected or estimated. It’s a must to build in cost over runs. If you are a new investor take your estimated cost and double them for figuring your rehab. c. What is cost of your holding time? You need to look at how long you think it will take you t