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Hi, I'm Linda craft and I own Linda Craft
& Team, Realtors in Raleigh, North Carolina
and Raleigh is in the Triangle and for those
of you that don't know what the triangle is, it's Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Durham, Cary,
some of those great places you've heard about moving to and living because it's
always ranked in the top ten if not the top one or two, so great area.
And so constantly, people are
saying "Linda, how's the real estate market?"
I've sold houses for 26 years. I've sold
over 5,000 homes so, obviously, I get that question a lot
and the thing that I always come back to is,
you know, all you hear on television is how bad the real estate market is
and the reality is it's not so bad. There's
some great opportunities.
Right now, we have around 15,000 homes for
sale which is down a little bit from what it was a year or so ago
and we're selling around 1,600 a month which,
you know, if you're a seller in this market that's a lot of competition
and you can see why perhaps they think the
market's not so good because they're definitely in a beauty contest and a pricing war,
ya know, they have to be a good value.
At the same time if you're one of those
sellers that took out equity lines and you paid off cars and, you know, bought beach
houses and paid off credit cards and all those things
and now you want to sell, well yeah, it's
not so good but I think we've gotten such blinders on right now, you know, the media
they just keep talking about how bad the market is
and it's all we can see and what we're
really focused on is appreciation.
Yes, there's not any appreciation right
now, you know, the market is flat and in some areas it's depreciating and other price brackets
and micro markets, you're actually seeing a little bit of an increase
but we've got these blinders on and we are
so focused on appreciation that we're missing all the other opportunities out there.
You know, in 2001, which was my last down
market and I think just about everybody's, we had just come out of Y2K where the Research
Triangle Park had a lot of people and then when the world didn't come to an end at
the end of Y2K well you know what happened they started laying off people
and we had a lot of houses for sale and then
9/11 hit and of course we just, ya know, had our ten year anniversary of that horrible
disaster. The market was tough and 2001, as bad as it was, my husband and I we built a home
and we could get contractors and building
materials. People were doing deals and we built this beautiful home that we would have
never had at any other time so there was opportunity for us
and we were able to get a mortgage with low
interest rate and build equity so it was a great thing for us and there's so much opportunity,
in fact just kind of thinking back in history, in 1996 the interest rates were at eight percent
which meant if went out and you spent a 100,000
dollars for a home, your payment was 750 dollars
when in 2001, the interest, the stock market
fell right, and interest rates fell, they were at six and a half and we thought my gosh
that's great and so at six and a half your payment was 630 dollars on a 100,000 dollar property.
Today, 2011, ten years later the interest
rate is at four percent and if you purchased a home for a 100,000 dollars your payment
would be 470 dollars.
And with the low interest rates and the amazing
affordability of housing right now the rental rates are just skyrocketing
and so you can take that 100,000 dollar home
probably rent it for somewhere between 950 and a 1,000 and have instant positive cash flow.
You're not getting that in the stock market.
You're not making anything, in fact, everybody's losing money right now in the stock market
and you can move that money from an IRA and you can invest it into real estate and have
instant cash flow
but we have a tendency to just look at appreciation.
Appreciation has always been the bonus for the long term investment.
There's so many opportunities and my fear
is that people are gonna get so focused along with the media about depreciation and everything
they're not getting that they're going to miss this amazing opportunity in life to
buy investment property and to really start building wealth
and I can tell you our phone is ringing for
people that are buying investment property. We had a call last week from someone
in England whose got a marketing group, a group of people come in and buy into this market,
and, ya know, if you're gonna buy something
with a low interest rate and have a hundred percent gain every month, oh my gosh, ya know,
what a shame to miss out on that opportunity.
We're also seeing people pool their friends
together and creating their little sea and do something creative by buying a big track
of land that they can hunt and fish and have a good time on on the weekend. Sell of the
timber and make some money along the way and their holding that investment for a better time.
so housing, building, land cost, everything
right now is so affordable that my greatest fear is people are gonna miss out on this
just amazing time.
2001 was a down market. It was tough for a
lot of people and yet so many people built wealth the next few years afterwards and I really
hope that my clients and my friends will just sit down and talk to me. Talk to someone.
look at some numbers and to see if maybe it's time to do some investing in real estate
and not be so afraid of it. The richest people
in the world own real estate and I am so happy that, you know, I purchased a lot over the
years and, you know, they haven't always gone up in value but over time they've really gone up in value
and just recently the investment properties
that we own that aren't paid for, we've been refinancing all of them at a four percent
rate for an investor term, four percent and a fifteen year and I mean I'm getting myself set for life
and I like to see others to be able to do
that too. So, thank you for listening so much. I'm Linda Craft for Linda Craft & Team, Realtors.
LindaCraft.com is my website and it just has a ton of information on it so I hope you'll
visit and if there's anything at all I can do for you please reach out. We'd love to help.