Minnesota Real Estate Investors Association, Inc.

Many Real Estate Investors start out rehabbing properties to resell for a profit. Many of these investors eventually migrate to wholesaling or become landlords, but some become experts and just keep on rehabbing. Most rehabbers build a system and once they have it fine tuned, don’t deviate from that system. If they build a system rehabbing rental properties for landlords or for first time home buyers, then that is what they always do, because it works for them.

However, a few rehabbers make the leap from rehabbing properties in low to middle income neighborhoods to rehabbing properties in upper middle class to affluent neighborhoods. But very few move beyond that and take the step to rehabbing extremely expensive houses. And even fewer are true visionaries.

A close friend of mine, which many of you already know, Robyn Thompson, the Queen of Rehabs started out rehabbing multi-families in firs time home buyer neighborhoods in Connecticut. She then took a huge leap in faith in herself and her abilities and now rehabs multi-million dollar mansions in Florida. That is something that I hear a lot of people say is too big of a rehab, and to those people I say, you are just not thinking big enough. 
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I was just talking with a close friend Robyn Thompson (The Queen of Rehabs) on a conference call last night with a bunch of students. And we got to talking about what kind of properties not to buy in today’s market and something she said made a lot of sense. She said she will not buy a small house right now.

While that makes sense, I had not put a lot of thought into it until last night. I have noticed a few things from buyers that told me that I should only be dealing with larger homes, but I hadn’t spent much time thinking about it. So I probed Robyn a little more about her philosophy towards buying larger homes and here is what we talked about.

First of all, because a lot of people are losing their jobs, they are starting small business and they are usually converting one of their bedrooms into a home office. And then I mention one other trend that I have been noticing. A lot of younger people that are losing their smaller homes to foreclosure and are being forced to move in with their parents or other relatives. And it doesn’t look like this is going to be a short term trend. I have talked to a lot of buyers recently that said that they are looking for a larger home because their sons, daughters and their spouses are moving in with them.

Also with the cost of elderly care and nursing homes, more and more people want to have their elderly parents live with them. There is yet another trend that Robyn Mentioned that I also agreed w
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Every real estate professional knows that the first impression a buy gets of a property is when they first drive up to the house. It is called “curb appeal” and if you don’t have it, you risk losing the buyers interest in the property before they even get out of their car. Most real estate professionals know the importance of curb appeal. Real estate investors will spend a lot of time and money creating a good curb appeal for the property before they ever put the for sale sign in the yard.

Buy what do you do in the winter to create the kind of curb appeal that will not turn buyers away before they even get out of their cars? This is a big challenge in the middle of the winter, but there are a few things to concentrate on and we will cover a few of them. I did however find one thing that a few people have done, even though they might not have their house up for sale, it gave me ideas on how to create that curb appeal that buyers like. Watch the following video and you can find many more examples just like this one from Youtube.com.