http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress Actual real estate investing and development projects, including methods, lessons learned and profits! Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:39:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I haven't posted since July 2008. Put a lot of time into this blog both in the posts and in trying to get the word out, but just haven't found much of an audience interested in the ins & outs of commercial real estate investing. I may start posting again ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/10/17/continue/ If the first real estate project taught me one thing - it was to be prepared. You have to be ready to pull the trigger immediately when you come across a good deal. That means having everything in place so you are ready to go. See one of my previous ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/07/12/getting-prepared-financial-model/ The Offer  We received our first offer. Finally! The person found out about our property through one of our metropolitan area newspaper advertisements. The property was originally listed for $2.375 million. The offer came in at $2.1 million. This was an 11.6% discount from list. What would you do? http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/06/27/negotiating-the-offer/ We were nearing completion on the property and still hadn’t received an offer. This had us worried. The monthly carrying costs were approaching $11,000 per month! This was the highest priced lake home ever done on speculation on this lake. It was time to re-evaluate the asking price of $2.375 ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/06/20/real-estate-pricing-model/ If you remember from a previous post, we were marketing the property ourselves. We wanted the sales team at the development to represent the property. However, they wouldn't budge from the 6% sales commission. On a multi-million property, this was a significant amount of money. In addition, they didn't really ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/06/11/real-estate-commissions/ Here's some shots of the project in the final completion stages:  Finished Dock Fireplace at Upper Deck http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/06/08/wrapping-up-construction-first-development/ Marketing Plan  If you remember from a previous post, we had decided to not have the development's agents represent our property because of their unwillingness to negotiate on the 6% commission. We were going to sell the property ourselves. We developed our own marketing plan that consisted of: Produce color renderings and ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/06/05/real-estate-marketing-plan-results/ Construction Completion  The typical construction project starts off slow, goes like crazy for awhile and then slows back down to a crawl as you are trying to get the project done. Finishing the last 10% of a project is tougher than doing the middle 30%. You are dealing with all the ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/05/31/managing-construction-completion/  This post is about negotiation tricks and tactics. Successful real estate development and investing requires you to be a good negotiator. Understanding the common negotiating tactics that may be used by you or on you is essential to becoming skilled at negotiation. Whether or not you choose to use these ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/05/16/negotiation-tactics-and-tricks/ As discussed in a previous post, the development we were building in has its own dedicated sales team. It made sense to have them represent us for a number of reasons: They ran both a national and regional advertising campaign They typically showed all available properties to potential customers no matter how ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/05/14/marketing-plan-first-development/