There probably isn’t any question asked of me more often then if now is a good time to buy real estate. It’s my opinion that everyone in the investment community knows that there are more distressed assets for sale now than in recent memory. And I am not talking about only distressed real estate assets. I’m talking about distressed assets in every asset class.
The question isn’t whether or not it’s a good time to buy real estate, because absolutely it is. The questions is, “what real estate should you buy and how should you buy it?”. Are you as an individual in a position to purchase that real estate yourself, or would you be better off to go in with other people?
There are some pro’s and con’s to going in with other people. First, you may or may not have control as you would have by yourself. But that might be good if you’re not an experienced expert in acquiring, improving and disposing of real estate assets. Aligning yourself with people who are experts might just be the best thing that you can do. Further, buying something by yourself may limit you as to the size of property you can buy. The smaller properties sell for less money, but because there are more people with not very much money to invest, there’s a lot of competition for these single family homes and one to four-unit apartment building properties.
Larger properties have less competition. Consequently, they sell at much more depressed prices because there are not as many people competing for them. Groups of people who pool their money have a much better chance at organizing themselves for acquiring better properties.
The second issue is that in many cases financing is not available to many property buyers. Therefore, more cash is required. If more cash is required, the only way that that could be accomplished is through teams of investors who cooperate together.
Every investor knows that there are distressed properties in the marketplace, but they might not know where to find them. Every professional real estate expert knows exactly where the best properties are, but they don’t always know where the investors are. Matching these two groups of people is the hard part.