Real Estate Investing - The Marvel Of Home Depot And Lowes

Repairing a rental home (or your own home) use to require running down to the local hardware store or to the nearby building supply house. After several stops around town, you found everything you needed to solve your maintenance problem.

If you are a fixer upper or tenant landlord today, you now have the marvel of Home Depot and Lowe's!

Now we have one-stop shopping for virtually everything needed at one of these two stores.

But more than that efficient feature for saving time (and often cost), you can get instruction for repairs from either experienced employees and/or special classes of instruction. If you don't know how to perform the job, you will often find it easier than you imagined. I had never laid any tile, until I discovered that an experienced tile-layer-turned-Home Depot-employee showed me how easy it is. And I found I could get my tile cut free at the store to fit those difficult spots around the tub faucets.

And add to these attractive store features the ease of acquiring commercial and consumer credit, often with promotions of $299 or more purchases at 0% interest for 6 months or more.

I was in Phoenix many years ago when I visited my first Home Depot. It was love at first sight. I had always wanted good quality tools fit for the job at hand at discount prices, and what I saw was a dream come true. I walked that store in amazement as I saw row after row of ceiling-high supplies of every sort of tool and construction material imaginable. It was an awesome experience, and I have never lost that euphoria in walking into a Home Depot or Lowe's. I have become increasingly appreciative over the years at this luxury of shopping at these two stores. Shopping is time-saving, and I leave it to Home Depot and Lowe's to do the research on discovering which suppliers manufacture the best tools, equipment and supplies for the job at hand.

Even if you are a real estate investor who does NONE of your own labor, these stores are a great place to learn how a job should be done right.

But if you perform the repair work on your own properties, you can find the materials and instruction at Home Depot and Lowe's.

It seems Home Depot and Lowe's are gonna slug it out for the predominant position in the marketplace. In some areas, when one new store is opened, the other store buys the lot next door for its own new location. America loves these two competitive stores. Some individual stores do a million dollars of business a week. I find both stores are excellent sources for the best tools and materials I've ever found. And it's hard to beat their prices.

Home Depot and Lowe's fill a void for real estate investors with convenience, pricing, instruction and availability.

Phil Speer, Ph.D., started his real estate investing career 25 years ago. Without the availability of credit and using only a $10 bill, he purchased $1 million in properties in his first year, and had accumulated $10 million in properties by his fourth year. http://www.CashinHouses.com/ He was featured in a Wall St.Journal editorial as most successful investor in the Nothing Down Real Estate Movement, and was honored with a Caribbean cruise as top investor of the year. In his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, he has been a businessman and Human Resources Consultant for 30 years. He is an author, speaker and seminar director.

To learn how to profit in real estate investing, even without cash or credit, read his report at http://www.General-RealEstate.com/business/flipping.html/ Subscription is free to his Fix-up Ezine. He and other contributing authors provide free articles and resources on real estate investing at his online "Academy of Advanced Real Estate Investing Techniques" at http://www.AAREIT.com/

Also: David W. Higgins, David Bohnett and more.

Reality TV star and singer Heidi Montag has been hiding out by the beach this summer at a Malibu place she rented for $25,000 a month, according to the Multiple Listing Service. But she moved on in late August, and the gated contemporary is back on the market at $5.5 million.

A Long Beach couple struggling with mortgage payments find out their home's been auctioned off by Wells Fargo when the new owner's representative shows up on their doorstep.

Mike and Ellen Kahara knew times were tough. They'd run up about $30,000 in debt on their credit cards and had fallen about $8,000 behind on their mortgage payments.

The 1960s Buff & Hensman-designed Wong House has a pool, a walled garden and downtown and ocean views.

It seems as though actress Scarlett Johansson had no sooner sold her old place in the Hollywood Hills than she and her husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, closed on a house in Los Feliz for $2.9 million.

Completed a few years ago, a Normandy-style estate was built to look a century old.

Glen and Linda Keane felt guilty about tearing down the O'Melveny family home. After all, John O'Melveny was part of a group of Los Angeles businessmen who formed Lake Arrowhead Co. in the 1920s and oversaw the lake's development into a popular resort destination.

The mortgage giant quietly launches the HomePath program, which offers subprime-era terms for buyers: minimal down payments, no appraisals, no mortgage insurance and lower minimum credit scores.

If you're a buyer with little cash or a small-scale investor looking for a deal on a foreclosed house, a little-publicized national lending program could be just what you need this fall.

How some of our previously featured properties have fared in the sales market.

Buff & Hensman-designed beach house

Lenders lose an estimated $310 million annually in undervalued short-sale transactions, according to a study released in August.

Question: I am fed up with my homeowners association and successive boards for sabotaging owner requests for records and refusing to fix maintenance problems in common areas that directly affect individual units. I believe I have no other choice than to sue the association and the boards. What are the steps I have to take?

Keeping tenant out over concerns of illegal activities may be viewed as a 'constructive eviction.' Such moves as changing the locks to prevent access can bring significant penalties.

Question: I own a couple of houses that I rent out for extra income. Unfortunately, they are not in the best part of our town. I have a tenant living in one of them who may be dealing drugs or doing something else illegal because the police have arrested him several times. Every time he is arrested he makes bail and returns to the house in a day or so. Even though he pays the rent on time, I realize that I can't continue to allow him to live in my house. My plan is to change the locks the next time he is arrested, so he can't come back into the house. I know that I need to protect his property inside the house if I do this, but my plan is to move his belongings into a storage locker. I can't afford a lawyer to file an eviction case, so this is my only alternative. Will I be OK if I do this?

July's increase from June in the National Assn. of Realtors' gauge for previously owned residences follows two straight months of declines and a report that sales of such homes dived 27.2%.

An index of home purchase contracts for previously owned dwellings unexpectedly increased 5.2% in July over June, the National Assn. of Realtors said Thursday, a modest note of good news for the U.S. housing market.