Real Estate Anyone?

[Kaizen]

For all of the RE people out there:

What aspect of real estate are you in?
How's your local market or area of interest's market affecting your situation?
What strategies are you implementing to adapt or take advantage of the current market conditions?

I'm with an REI group in the SF Bay Area. We're mainly focusing on the acquisition of bank owned properties in bulk. Our exit strategy depends on the type of deal available.

[ozspyder]

Hey Ignoramus,

I was an architect for about 11 years having worked in local and international architecture. Then gave it all away to help my Mum & Dad in the family real estate business, working on our own franchise of a very large international RE group.

I haven't kept up with the US real estate market lately. But speaking from an Australian perspective, the market here was running hot for too long. The cycles of economy were not being followed for artificial political reasons and periods of high growth and lending. Since the 2000 Olympics in Sydney many factors have come into play and the market was propped up by over buoyant offshore investment, then taxes and government grants skewed the natural cycle here.

There was a shockingly high growth rate in market values from about 2001-2004, then the last 2 years have been pretty hard going. The market has recovered somewhat slowly and now being the summer season it is starting to get busy again.

Strategy-wise we concentrated on keeping afloat (too many staff and their families to worry about putting them off), rather than making staff redundant. And we decided to spend MORE :O on marketing, advertising and pormotion of the office. Being one of the strongest local agencies we had to maintain our high profile.

Consequently we ended up with more referral business (the best kind ), and thus held on to our stock for a bit longer than the market average.

We also brought about a new way to market our property prices and have been drawing in more buyer enquiry and thus redirecting them to what little stock we have on our books.

In terms of getting in new stock to sell. We've asked all staff to go through all their previous valuations and contact all of them to see if their situation has changed or if they have sold and moved on etc. Picked up a little bit of business that way. And as all in the industry know. The more sucessful you are the easier it is for business to 'fall into your lap'. So a bit of extra hard work (over the 7 day a week business ) and theoretically speaking you should reap your rewards 9-12 months down the track.

Our office deals mainly with private home owners , and selling their single dwellings. We also have a fair bit of duplexes, and townhouses in our area but not too many units/ apartments. Lately we've had a few commercial properties for sale , subdivisions of land, and more aged care developments.

Cheers and good luck with your business strategies. From the little I know of the US market, it seems the banks do own a fair bit of property there, and sell them off as asset portfolios to overseas and investment funds.

Daniel