Business and Finance

 by: Ron LeBlanc

For the real estate investor this has a different meaning than for the musician. John Lennon would be shouting also about this concept. What I am talking about in regard to real estate is the twist. It is a way of seeing something in a property that no one else has seen. Let me explain.

I frequently come across properties, and in fact I look for properties that have been on the market for a long time and have a big stack of realtor cards on the kitchen counter. What I do is put on a different set of glasses than all the previous visitors.

Previous visitors have included mostly people who want to occupy the house. They are looking for a home and they don’t see one. A few people are looking for something they can apply their specialty to – a painter looking for a house that just needs paint; a carpenter looking for a house that needs cabinets; you get the idea.

I’m by no means all seeing, but I am looking for anything that could make the house into a home. I try and see either what people were expecting when they first drove up, or what people would like to see when they drive up to the house I am now marketing.

For example, I had one house that had a sunken in sitting room with a curved drop-off going from the kitchen/dining area to it. I asked another realtor and several contractors what to do with it, and I got answers about how to round off, or make the transition smaller, or more decorative. Then it just popped into my head – raise the sunk in part and make one big room out of it!

That house suddenly had a large tiled dining area. It transformed from a barely adequate main floor with a room that was semi-useless, to a large dining area to entertain and impress. I saw what no one else had seen.

Another obvious twist for the real estate investor is to see a small house as a large house with a now-finished basement. If you have a good source of contracting services and can finish a basement for a reasonable cost, you enter a totally different market of buyers. Instead of potential home buyers looking for something under $200k, you now tap into people in the $250k range – a completely different set of buyers.

The real estate investor has to have several sets of glasses: the first has to be the set that the final buyer has. The majority of buyers want to drop their bags and plop down on the couch. They don’t want to do much work on a place – this is your target market and highest return. The second set of glasses is the contractor set. A successful investor has to know approximately how much it will cost to rehab a house. Bring a contractor with you ideally to get the best estimates.

The third set of glasses for the real estate investor is the buyer set. You will be most successful if you can see the profit in that older beat-up house as it is transformed into a home. The bottom line is we buy houses and sell homes. If you keep this in mind you will be a successful real estate investor. Don’t ever limit yourself in what you visualize when you look at a property. You may come up with that one twist that makes it a completely different property – then you can shout with joy at the profit. Twist and shout!

Copyright 2006 Ron LeBlanc