Good Morning! Karen and Steven here...

After a relaxing and refreshing weekend, we are ready to hit the ground running with real estate investing again this week...

Friday afternoon we dropped off a packet of info at a house in pre-foreclosure. The house is in Brentwood, which is a highly desirable area just south of Nashville. Some of the homes were built in the 60s and 70s, but trendy Brentwood is also filled with multi-million dollar mansions that have sprung up in the past 5 years.

The house we are interested in was built in '71. From our online research, it appears that it was paid for and the owner sold it to a relative, who then took out a loan against it for $150,000. Now she is in preforeclosure. The actual value of the home is in the $250k range, so there is potential for a good deal. We are going to continue to follow up with her. This will be our first venture into the world of short sales.

We also went to a house outside Franklin, another trendy Middle Tennessee hot spot, to look at a house a bird dog told us about. He knows the owner. I spoke with her several times on the phone before we looked at the house. She does not want us to go inside because it is jammed with clutter and boxes. She has not lived in the house for 3 years. Anyway, we pulled up in front of the house and at first I exclaimed, "This can't be it...this is someone having a yard sale!" because she has one of these open carports (four poles and a metal roof) and it was full of clothes and junk. But it was, indeed, the house. From the outside it looks good. House was built in 52 but she remodeled, put on siding and a red roof. The deal breaker on this deal could be her father, who is convinced the house is worth $200,000 when in reality it is closer to $140,000. We probably will not offer more than $85,000, esp. if she does not let us in.

In many ways she is an ideal candidate to sell to an investor because she has been through some hard times and does not want to go back into the house and clear it out to show it through a realtor.

Steven and I were excited to read about David's goals and the amount of houses he will be purchasing in 2007. Shortly after joining our local REIA group, we went to a meeting in which favorable comments were made about people purchasing 60 houses in five years. So that is basically 1 per month. Not to diss what they are doing, but I thought, "That reeeeally doesn't seem like much to me! I'd like to do more." So it is wonderful to be coached and mentored by someone who has greater goals and is achieving them, and can teach us how to do the same.