The Successful Landlord Blog

In the past, when a person stopped making payments on their home, it generally took 3 months before they were foreclosed upon by the bank and evicted from the property.

These days, as any real estate agent will tell you, it could take the better part of a year for the process to come to a close. In the past I have made posts detailing some of the completely unprofessional behavior exhibited by the banks during the “short sale” process.

For the uninitiated, a “short sale” is when the bank agrees to discount the loan amount due on a property usually due to some financial hardship on the part of the borrower. Whereas, a foreclosure is when the bank takes possession of a property and evicts the previous owner with the intention of selling it at market price to re-coup its losses. Read the rest of this entry »

First off I’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year for 2009. May it be the economic turnaround year that we’re all looking out for.

So the other day as I was preparing the spreadsheet I use to track income and expenses for my rental properties in 2009. After finishing that task, I had a chance to look back at the spreadsheet for 2008 and noticed a few things.

• The constant expenses incurred by the properties (property tax & insurance) are lower than they were last year. This is a good thing since rents are ridiculously low due to the downward pressure exerted by a glut of housing units available for rent. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was about to start buying property some years ago I met a guy through a friend-of-a-friend who is an ex-landlord and is currently an attorney based in West Palm Beach, Florida. This guy used to own about 25 single-family units in Oklahoma City, OK back in the mid 1970s.

Apparently the reason he started buying all these properties was that back in 1973 our “good friends” at OPEC decided to basically stop supplying oil to the United States and other countries who supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War

Apparently, the ensuing oil crisis caused the United States and other western countries to seek other oil supplies as a way to blunt the effects of another potential shock to oil prices.  This included drilling domestically which made Oklahoma City a good place to be at the time.

A huge influx of people descended on Oklahoma City looking for well paying yet unskilled jobs in the oil industry. From what this guy said, there was such a shortage of housing that people were living in tents just to be close-by to these jobs.

As a result, the landlord business was the business to be in at that time. After 1980, oil prices declined for 6 years due to a glut of oil on the world market. Over-production and weakening demand were the main reasons for this situation. Read the rest of this entry »