Probate property was the only way we could afford to get into real estate
By Jimmy J.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
The real estate market has definitely fallen off dramatically in the last 18 months. My wife and I had planned on buying properties, fixing them up, and then reselling, in order to afford children. Luckily, she works for a real estate company and we saw the writing on the wall before we were stuck with two mortgages we couldn’t afford.
About two months ago, she started noticing that the real estate contracts coming into her office were beginning to increase, so we started to look around. She asked advice from an old school agent we both trust because we couldn’t find any properties that we could afford. He immediately directed us to look for probate properties. Probate property is usually owned by a bank and/or several family members after someone dies. The current owners rarely plan to live there and are the most motivated sellers of real estate. We found several probate properties in the first few weeks of looking that were in our price range. The probate sellers were as motivated as the agent had promised and we were amazed at how quickly we became real estate investors.
So if you’re interested in “flipping” real estate, do yourself a favor and check into probate property. It’s the best way we have seen to get going in the business.