Wealth Acceleration Strategies for Real Estate Investors
We will all agree that real estate is the best way to build wealth. Using real estate helps by using one key method that almost every other investing strategy does not offer. That being Leverage or borrowing against your property to control something more valuable than the amount of money invested. I can hear you yelling; “What about trading stocks on margin?” Yes, you are right that with a trading account you can trade limitedly on margin or only putting a fraction of money up for the stock. But that is very limited compared with real estate.
I have done a 100% LTV mortgage on an investment property before. Now since the Sub-prime melt down you will not be able to do that for a while. But still, people routinely buy property with less than 20% of the purchase price down.
Assume you are going to buy a single family house to rent out for 5 years and then sell my house. So you buy a $400,000 single family house purchased using a 80/15/5 conventional mortgage. What does that mean? 80% LTV first mortgage, 15% LTV second mortgage and 5% down payment. You bring $20,000 plus closing costs to the escrow company when you buy my house. So for $20,000 you control a $400,000 piece of property. Your monthly payments on your mortgages are $2,100 including your taxes and insurance. You receive $1,800 rent on the house. And it is vacant for 1 month out of every 12 months because of finding new tenants. Now this is a very conventional deal but very realistic in our current market.
Let’s take a look at the numbers:
| Monthly | Annually | Total | |
| Costs | $2,100 | $25,200 | $126,000 |
| Income | $1,800 | $19,800 | $99,000 |
| Net | ($300) | ($5,400) | ($27,000) |
So looking at the numbers this way it does not look like a very good investment. Paying someone to live in your property $27,000 for 5 years. Remember this does not take into account any repairs or tax implications these are just the raw numbers. But let’s look at it a different way. We are going to assume for the sake of argument that the property appreciation is 10% annually using round numbers. This a absolutely achievable in the Seattle market but will vary depending upon area. Here is really what you are controlling:
Purchase Price: => $400,000
Future Value 60 Months 10%annually: => $644,204
Total Equity Growth: => $244,204
Total % => 61% total growth
So your investment of $20,000 plus your additional expenses of $27,000 of holding cost will bring you an additional $197,204 over that same 5 years. How many of you would spend $47,000 to make $244,204 bringing you a rough profit of around $190,000. That is really the true path to wealth in real estate investing. The use of leverage is really what makes this happen for you. If you were to just invest the same $10,000 at a 10% annual interest you would only make $6,105 instead of the more than $190,000. So using the leverage only found in the real estate make you very wealthy when used over time.
Now most of you know that I am a big proponent of creative real estate investing and may think that there is something hypocritical about talking about going and getting a loan and investing for the long term. Remember. This is tactics that I use to make money to invest long term for growth. So this is very true of all real estate. So please take the time to develop a strategy to use the best of both worlds.
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