Sorry for the delay to my response but just got back from holidays and playing a little catch up.

I haven’t written guest posts on other blogs but I’m planning on having my own Blog set up to discuss Real Estate Investing, how to create passive income and where to look for opportunities.

It should be up and running by June.

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I always like to “pay back” my guest posters by allowing them to “self-promote” a tad bit, and I’m sorry if you felt this was too much. That being said, I believe Michael’s advice to be sound and just, and as he said, he was mainly using his own experiences as examples (which is what I do a lot), so that is why I really enjoyed this guest post.

All the best, and thanks again!

@ Michael, thanks for your follow up. I think this information does ad quality to the post as a whole. Cheers!

Hi Erica,

I appreciate the response and feedback. My intention here was not to promote Real Estate investing as it was more to share my experience of looking at your existing relationships within your business to help generate additional sources of income.

Your right Real Estate is not an easy cash cow and there can be costly mistakes when your not following the right system. In Real Estate Investing it’s all about fundamentals and POSITIVE CASH FLOW (Rental Income – All Expenses = Positive CASH FLOW) the more positive cash flow your able to create the more secure your investment is going to be.

I agree you shouldn’t depend on equity appreciation to bail you out but it’s important to look at cash flow to provide you with a passive income stream. As long as your investing long term in growing markets your appreciation will eventually kick in but regardless; if your tenant is paying down the mortgage and providing you positive cash flow this should be a good investment even during a market down turn like we are seeing today.

These are things you should be looking for when I say growing markets:

1) Strong Job Growth within the City
– Look for announcements for new jobs or major projects.
– Areas of low unemployment

2) Cities with Strong Disposable Income
– Average disposable income growing faster then the State or Provincial Average
– When people have more money to spend they usually buy more things, which
drive retail sales, purchases of newer cars and people tend to upgrade their
homes.

3) Increased In-migration or
– Look for areas to which people are moving at a rate faster then State or
Provincial average.
– When you see more people moving in an area that tend to drive sales price and
also provides you with more tenants.

4) Critical Infrastructure Expansion
– Look for major transportation announcements and look at surrounding areas
that may show benefit from this infrastructure change.
– People measure where they live based on time so if you reduce peoples time to
get to work, they would consider moving to that specific area.

These are just a few of the things you should be looking for before investing in Real Estate but it is absolutely important that you do your home work before investing in any real estate venture.

Real Estate is not get rich quick and you should really consider this as a journey that will hold long term benefits. CASH FLOW is king and if the property does not cash flow don’t buy. In the US, you will see plenty of properties that will cash flow these days but please do your home work before investing as I mentioned you should only invest in markets that are growing. If they are not, then you need to wait or look somewhere else to invest.

I hope this clarifies just a few things you need to consider before investing in Real Estate but again my intention to my post is more about looking at opportunities within your business relationships.

Michael Ponte

I think you have to be careful about the types of guest posts you accept on your blog. This one feels overly self-promotional (“we need advertisers! join our mailing list!”) but doesn’t even touch the BASICS of how to determine whether a property cash flows or not. The author spends a lot of time talking about how awesome he is and not a lot of time explaining even simple metrics of real estate investing.

Be careful with this. It lowers the quality of your blog as a whole to post these types of posts.

To the guest post author: Some metrics would have dramatically improved this post. Real estate isn’t the easy cash cow you present it to be; there are lots of pitfalls and you can’t count on equity appreciation to bail you out. Some more facts, figures, and warnings would help balance this post.

-Erica

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As for the article — this was great, especially ‘Passive Income through Relationships’. I learned a lot from this, and look forward to using these points with my projects.

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