One of the myths that I learned about real estate is your property doesn’t increase its value according to your investment. What does that mean?

For example, you stay in a house for 4 years. Now it’s worth $180,000 and you want to sell it. You would like sell at higher price by increasing your home’s value. You take out $20,000 to do home improvements and try to sell your house at $250,000. You sell higher because you think that your home improvements have increased the home’s value tremendously. However, at the time you only get offers at $190,000 from the market. You feel strange and don’t know what has happened.

Yes, theoretically home improvements should increase your home’s value. However, in reality, it is not 100% sure that it will hit your expectation or even pay back what it has cost you. This is because not all home improvements are created equally. Again, home improvements are considered as some kind of investment which has some risks.

In this article, I would like to show you some of the tools which available in the internet that can help you in real estate investment. They are making your real estate investment easy and simple and most of them are free! 

As a real estate investor, we always need to go out and search for the good deal available in the market or do some research that will help us to make a better decision. This is a very high energy and time consuming task. However, internet is gaining popularity and more and more people research, sell and buy their property online. Because of this, there are many companies design and provide some great online tools or services in their web site. This really gives a lot of convenience to the end users like us. 

So today, I would like to gather and put all the tools in one article here. So this can be one of your real estate references in future. Please don’t forget to bookmark this page!

Without further ado, let’s get started!

Search Your Property

Due to the popularity of internet and high demands, some real estate sites appear as a trend in the internet. This site can let you buy and sell your property online. Some of them even can help you by pass those local real estate agents and help you save some money in the process of property buying and selling properties.

Bidsell.com – This is a real estate market place. Their motto is “Owners list them – Buyers bid on them”. You can search the deal available on the site and bid on those you think is good deal. Besides that you also can sell your property here and get the highest selling price through bidding.

Zillow.com – This is a real estate property search engine where you can search property on sale easily. You just key in the city & state or ZIP code and you can get the properties information and show the data in a map and list. The new feature of Zillow is “Make Me Move” where you can buy a property that not really on sale by offering the owner a good price and make them sell the property to you.

Trulia.com – This is a competitor to Zillow and is another option for you to search your first deal. Just like Zillow, you key the relevant information such as price range, property type and other requirement, Trulia will search the properties accordingly One of the features that I would like to recommend you is Trulia.com’s Heat Maps which offer a visual view of local home price trends. Besides that you also can subscribe to the RSS of your searching and keep updated with the new information easily.

Redfin.com – this is another great tool for you to look for a property deal. Buying with redfin is very easy. You can give a tour to the houses with redfin or on your own. Draft an offer online and Redfin will handle all the procedure after that such as negotiation and closing. This really can save you a lot of time. However, at this moment, redfin only provides service to certain area only such as Boston and L.A.

Property’s Value Estimation Tools

If you ever see and find a good property before, you will wish to know the value of the property. You can ask your real estate agent, appraisals or bankers to find out this information. This is another very time consuming task. However, today, the story is different. There are some free tools on the internet can do this job for you. You will know the value without making any calls and the best thing is - you can just sit in front of the computer.

Real Estate ABC Value – This is a property value search engine. They claim that real estate ABC can give you the power to search on a subject property, compare recent comps and compare to city averages. Overall this tool is not bad as it comes with the comparison feature.

Yahoo Home Values tool – Another great tool from Yahoo. I have nothing to say about these tools but let you try this yourself.

Eppraisal – Eppraisal provides home valuation service along with information about homes recently sold in your neighborhood. Eppraisal even provides more with mobile and professional services. You can get home valuation information through your mobile phone or request some experts to do the valuation for you.

Rentometer – I think this really a great tool. This tool can help you to check the rental market of your area. After you key in your rental address and relevant information, the system will analyze your area and listed several rental properties around your area on the Google Map. From here you can compare the rental market accordingly.

 

Update:

This site was recommended by Grey. This is really a great tool. Thank you Grey!

Housefront.com – Another site like Eppraisal where you can get the property valuation through your mobile phone. Housefront will help you to keep all your search history so that you can refer back from your computer what property you have searched when you go out for deal hunting. Overall this is a great tool.

Looking for an agent

Real Estate agent is one of the important team members in your investment team. They can help you by providing professional information and also experience which can save you a lot of research time. So I introduce 2 sites for you to find a good and reputable real estate agent by looking at their testimonials and recent business activities.

HomeThinking.com – This is a pretty straight forward site that provides services to help home owners choose the most remarkable real estate agent. They measure the performance of agents by monitoring the real estate transaction they made, for how much and how long on leverage. Besides that you also can read the customers reviews on particular agent to know their reputation.

Incredibleagents.com – As its name indicated, this site can help you to find an incredible agent for your investment. In this site, you will read a lot of information about agent’s profiles and the reviews from old customers. Personally, I think you can read a lot of great reviews over agents here.

Renting Out Your Property

Renting out your rental property is another challenge for a real estate investor. You have to know the marketing skills in order to rent out your property faster to the targeted customers. If you are looking for some communities that full of targeted customers, then the following sites can help you on this.

Apartments.com – In this site, you can be an advertiser to advertise your rental property to the world. First you sign up to become their advertiser and then select an ad package to expose your rental property to market.

HotPads.com – You can list your property on the market free in this site. Just type you address, City and select the state, then your property will be listed in this site. There is a free video provided by HotPads to help you on this.

RentMineOnline.com – This is a site that connects millions of owners and renters through a convenient online market place. If you go to their site, you will know that they are combining their network, members’ network and also Local rental companies’ network into a big trusted market place. If you want to rent out your property, this is a good place to get started.

TenantMarket.com – This is a search engine site that let you to search renters and landlords accordingly. The search engine is quite easy to use. Just key in the relevant information and the potential tenants will be showed on the screen. Besides that, there is a virtual assistance appears at the site to help you on how to use the their service

This is an article that I wrote and put in the “How to Invest Your Money” which is about achieve financial freedom by making more money. You can read other relevant articles over here.

Do you want to invest in real estate? However you have a problem - you don’t know how to get started? Then you must read this article - The 8 ways you can take to get started in real estate easily. All the steps I’m going to tell you here will help you to build a firmly base for you Real Estate Empire. The best thing is every steps are so easy that you can start taking action right away.

To build wealth in real estate, you don’t have to wait until you get cash or credit. Instead, you can start right now by taking some simple action to come up the money. Beside that you must also set a plan to train you up with the relevant know-how and information that will help you in real estate investment. All you have to do is take action today! This is the main point of this article – showing you the simple action that you can take today! 

Ok, without further ado, here are the steps in general:

1. Cut your Spending and increase your savings.
2. Shape up Your Credit.
3. Start a part time business.
4. Closely read the real estate news
5. Go out and look at the properties
6. Join a real estate investment club
7. Read books and attend seminars that about real estate
8. Set goal and commit to buy a property as soon as possible 

Cut Your Spending and Increase Your Savings

Every financial success is start from a very basic step – Manage your money. It is not about how much money you make that bring you to financial free. It is all about how you manage your money. So the first most simple step that I will recommend you is cultivate a new habit to spend your money wisely. Just make plan to cut down your expenses and increase your savings. This savings will be your modal to invest in real estate. You will be thankful that you have this habit today after 10 years. This is why saving is important to achieve financial freedom.

Shape Up Your Credit

Your credit or FICO score will directly affect your investment strategy and profits in real estate. This is because your credit will determine whether you can get a loan and the interest rate which is very important in your real estate investment. I wrote an article called Improve Your FICO score to achieve financial freedom faster. Inside there, I mentioned about how important is your FICO score, how it is being calculated and some of the steps that you can take to increase it. So I recommend you to read my article and follow the steps I provided to shape up your credit.

Start a Part Time Business

One of the main reason I write this article is I want you to stop thinking and take action if you want to invest in real estate. If you think that you don’t have the enough money to invest, then you can start a part time business to generate it. I recommend my 2 articles that talk about 20 Ideas to start a part time business and also reason to start a part time business. Of course, my first choice and favorite part time business is blogging. So stop thinking now, and do something that will generate excessive cash for your real estate investment.

Closely Read the Real Estate News

If you can follow the news of real estate news closely, you will get a good feel for the relative market trend. Besides that I also recommend you to read about the real estate classifieds and ads. Just open up a newspaper and you will find a lot of relevant information. I want you to do this because this is a best way for you to learn about the property price and rental level for certain areas. You will absorb the marketing tactics from others which is important for you to sell/rent your property out in future.

Go out and look at the properties

All of us know that practical experience is as important as theory. The best way to gain practical experience is calling your local real estate agent and go out to look at the properties. At this stage, you don’t really have to buy the property. You can also drive through and explore the property deals in some neighborhoods and communities. If you see any “sale” and “rent” sign board, you can call the owners and ask for the rate. This will let you feel the trends in property selling prices, apartment vacancy rates, and rent concessions on the market.

Join a real estate investment club

Your local real estate investment club will be a great resource for you to start your journey. There you can meet different kind of investors, from beginner to advanced investors. There are a few advantages you can get from real estate investment club. First, you can meet other investors and collect valuable contacts. All the contacts are targeted in real estate market! Second you can partner with others to find deal and invest. You can leverage on partnership to make money. Third, you can learn a lot of practical and theoretical know-how from others. Each member might exchange their own experience and this will save you a lot of time to do research yourself.

Read Books and Attend Seminars

Books and seminars are another great resources for you to learn something all the time. Now you can set a budget and a goal to read at least 1 real estate book per month. If you can afford, attend some great seminars as well. A seminar also is a great place for you to build relationship with other real estate investors. So set aside some spare time daily and read information about real estate. I can guarantee that you will improve a lot within 1 years of reading.

Set goal and commit to buy a property as soon as possible

Finally, the most basic step is setting a goal. Without a goal, you will not have any motivation to move on. Without a goal, you will go no way! So set a goal today. Maybe you set a goal to buy 1 rental apartment within 2 years of time. Or maybe you set a goal that you will have at least $10,000 of cash on hands after 1 year for real estate investment. All you have to do is set a goal and focus on it.

Conclusion

I have to say this again, you don’t have to wait until you have cash and credit to get started in real estate. There are a lot of simple steps that you can take today as you stepping stones in your real estate journey. So keep everything simple and take 1 simple step daily. After a long time, you will have a more establish financial and basic to jump start your real estate investment.
 

This is an article that I wrote and put in the “How to Invest Money” which is about achieve financial freedom by investing your money. You can read other relevant articles over here.

Last week, I wrote an article about real estate bubble and some tips to protect you from it. If you read the article you will find out that the first tip I give is Learn how to determine if there is real estate bubble in an area.

I did not provide much more information about this first tip in that article. I know it will be a long explanation on the theories and skills that needed for this tip. So I decided to write another article specially targeted on the topic on how to determine and keep track the real estate bubble in an area. 

Without further ado, below are the tips that I want to share with you:

1. Keep tracks the real estate news. Real estate news such as real estate sales, house prices, mortgages lending, foreclosure rate, homebuilders and housing stocks, REITs and other relevant global news are very important for real estate investors. All of this will let you know what really happens in the real estate market and hence know the trend of real estate. Local newspaper and internet will be the good sources for you on this.
   
2. Calculate the price to income ratio. This is the most basic calculation that many economic experts use to calculate the local affordability to own a house. If the ratio is too high, meaning that local people cannot afford a house and this is a phenomenon that real estate bubble might happen in that area. In this case, you must pay attention on that market before you put any money in it.
   
3. Build a investment team. Real estate agent is the man who always keeps in touch with the market. So he/she might provide some valuable insights into the market condition. Besides that, your accountants, bankers and financial planners might also be able to help you on this. This is why you need a team to assists you become a good investor.
   
4. Learn and use the following formulas. I collect the following formulas from Wikipedia. This is some of the formula that we can use to measure the housing market for an area.

PS: Expenses here are including the maintenance and also property taxes. This is a common metrics used to analyze other uses of the money tied up in a home.

 

PS: This formula is used to measure how much the buyer is paying for each dollar of received rent income. If you found that there is a rapid increase of home prices combined with a flat renting market, real estate bubble might happen in the area.

So far, there don’t have any accurate facts that real estate bubble is really happening. This is why there are always some arguments between financial experts about real estate bubble. Anyway, it is good for us to learn how to detect a market. This will be a skill that going to help us to make money and at the same time prevent us to loss any money in real estate bubble. Kill 2 birds with one stone.

Candlestick analysis? Is it an analysis on candle holder? Sorry, the candlestick that I’m talking about now is not the holder for candle but it is a technical analysis for trading.

What is candlestick Analysis?

The first time I came across the words “candlestick analysis” was the time I learn about Forex trading. This is a kind of famous technical Analysis that using a special charting, usually called candlestick charting, to predict the trend of the market.

Candlestick charting originate from Japan and the first candlestick charting appeared sometime after 1850. This system was developed by a rice trader in Japan, Homma. After some modification and refining, this old trading system was transformed to become today Candlestick Charting.

Many traders are using this technique to detect and predict the market trend. From my own experience, in most cases, the results are quite accurate. This is why I want to introduce this technical analysis to you and if possible, please spend some time to learn it. It definitely will be a weapon for you to achieve financial freedom. At least it can help you to make money from trading.

Where to learn Candlestick Analysis?

Now I think you are ready to learn what candlestick analysis about. I already did some research over the internet and found some sites that might help you on this.  

Stockcharts.com – This is the most completed and free simple course that I can find from the internet. In this site, you can learn about the history, formation of candlestick chart and some candlestick signal that you must learn to predict the market trend. This is quite a complete site.

 

 

TradingDay.com -  Under the candlestick tutorial, you can learn more about candlestick. Besides that you can also learn the daily and weekly candlestick play instruction. All details and explanations are there to make you clear with the chat and theory. 

Candlestickshop.com – This actually a page that contain the glossary for candlestick. The page is simple and I think this can be your quick reference site.

 

 

 
Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques, by Steve Nison – I learn the candlestick through this book. Actually this book was given by my mentor. Inside there the explanation is detail and come with a lot of example. So far I found that this is a good book or candlestick dictionary that you can keep for your trading.