Starting Real Estate

• Cashflow is a great financial learning game from Robert Kiyosaki.
• You learn more if you play with a group.
• Find a local group through meetup.com (search “Cashflow”).

I’m guessing most of you have already read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. In the book he talks about the Cashflow game he designed to help raise people’s Financial IQ’s. If you’ve never played this game, you definitely should.

The point of the game (outside of the financial learning) is to escape from the rat race. You have a job and get a regular pay, you get chances to make small deals and big deals. You can lose your job, buy doodads, give charity, have kids, and work creatively with other players to split or resell deals. Throughout the game, you keep a balance sheet, keeping track of your assets, liabilities, income, and expenses. The goal is to have your passive income greater than your expenses. Then you’re out of the rat race. These are valuable concepts that a person can apply to their life and their businesses, including real estate.

There are different ways to play the game, the easiest being the online or e-version. My little brother and I started playing this game when he was just ten, and even he picked up the concepts really quickly. However, the board version is even better because it teaches you to work as a team. Unlike other games, the game can be played with all the players helping each other out (at least that’s how we played it during my last meeting) and this creative cooperation (for example joint deals or deals for a percentage of the income or giving loans) are creative learning tools that you can’t get through the electronic version.

I didn’t know these guys were around, but a couple weeks back I attended a Cashflow workshop in Santa Clara. The man who runs them, actually helps host a biweekly meet-up and he’s not alone. There are over twenty five clubs in the Bay Area (CA). To find one, just search for “cashflow” on meetup.com.

Joining this club will help you network with like-minded people and build your business, financial, and real estate skills.

Without a doubt, we all love having our own home and enjoying it for as long as we want, however sometimes we are torn between two major options: renting a home and using the remaining money for design and other similar processes or actually owning a house. The bottom line is that we need a home and it is without a doubt a human necessity. We can discuss different areas and how expensive real estate is within those areas or we can discuss the advantages of each option. A small example – in Arizona if you are searching for a home you will find a variety of choices – you may encounter homes that have a waterfront or a golf view and so on. In such an area the homes will probably be rather expensive because of the numerous facilities and the nice weather.

You see, there are many things that may affect the price of real estate – not necessarily external factors such as recent increases in overall price or how crisis affects the market. I am discussing about typical advantages and disadvantages that affect the price – for example, a home in a quiet neighborhood with a medium-sized garden, lovely color, durable materials, interesting furnishings and other similar advantages, will naturally cost much more than one in placed in a rather cramped, noisy neighborhood but with the same advantages as the other home.

The location and neighborhood is one of the greatest factors affecting the home’s price. The features, weather, area, noise level, parks, scenery, and schools–especially schools–have a very serious affect on the home’s price. Whether a house is on a busy street or a quiet street. The look of neighborhood homes near it or the proximity to an airport (and airplanes flying overhead) as well. All these factors play a role in a home’s price.

The house itself also plays a role and one can be far above or below the average for a neighborhood, however the neighborhood itself is very dominant when it comes to price. Lately another factor plays in the pricing, with the downturn in the market, one can also take a look at the number of repossessed or foreclosed properties nearby and the amount of homes for sale. If everyone around is selling, prices drop.

As you can see, the neighborhood itself has a huge role to play in the pricing of a specific real estate property.

(Note: This article is the first of a series on buying real estate contributed by freelance author Sabina Munteanu. Contact her via RAC)

With over a year to it, I was way off on the Tarragon. A lot has happened since last year. RE markets are way down and it looks like they haven’t hit bottom just yet.

Anyone noticed the stock drop? Within a month it fell from the $8 range to the $1 range. Fell from the $10 range if you look over three months.

I have a feeling, even with all its problems, TARR is going to return, however it could just as easily keep falling. I thought it was done dropping at $4, but I was wrong. Everything went down.

There is definitely room to grow. It was just there, eight times over.

Would be great if it started making more money than it lost =D