Seperating the Pros from the Amateurs in Real Estate...

This current real estate market can all be summed up with this statement from one of the great real estate investors of all time, Sam Zell.

"First you Have the Investors, Then You have the Imitators and Then you Have the Idiots".

Sam tells you like it is and he expects his employees to do the same. They don't kiss butt like some other TV hound hogs wanting to tell the world how great real estate is to always buy and that it always goes up in price. In fact... most people don't even know who Sam Zell is and that includes a lot of real estate agents. Check this interview out and what one of the current employees told the HR director for Sam's company --> …

Changes in Las Vegas Real Estate

I first earned my Nevada real estate license and became official in July of 2001. Just to give you a recap of what happened that year, the United States was in a recession. The stock market had taken a big hit with the Dot.com bust in 2000. My dreams of retiring by 32 went down the tubes as I watched my stock charts sink like the Titanic with the hope that it was something only temporary and that some lifeboats would magically appear and rescue them from the Abysss.

Yep... I lost a lot of money following stock picks from the so called experts in the name of Money Magazine, Smart Money, AOL forums (remember those?) etc... I learned from that experience and learned from one of Peter Lynch's books that if you are reading…

Mountains Edge Bank Owned Home

Hmmmmm.... Normally I do not highlight the great Foreclosure deals going on in Las Vegas openly and reserve this for only clients but this Mountains Edge Home I came across today makes me want to break my rules just to show you what is available in this great community located in Southwest Las Vegas.

It's not uncommon to hear the horror stories of Las Vegas Foreclosures that are trashed, stripped, beat up or just plain out dirty and while there are some Las Vegas Bank owned homes that fall in that category, there are some great Las Vegas foreclosures that do not. You just never know unless you get out there and look -- something that I've been doing with a long list of interested Las Vegas buyers that see the opportunity…

Sellers want to sell, buyers want to buy and real estate agents get the honor of dealing with overworked asset managers for the banks. Even in a perfect scenario that is a win-win situation for everybody, it could all be a waste of time for everybody involved.

This post on Active Rain by a Real Estate Broker  who gets paid by the New York Times to write for About.com highlights the problem in this post ----> Bank of America would rather let the home go into foreclosure.

Obviously, short sales are becoming the norm in areas that are being hit hard with real estate values that have dropped significantly and banks are certainly becoming more receptive in approving these hardship situations if you follow their procedures. Banks are currently slammed with a…

It really was no secret for anybody that understands the very nature of supply and demand that real estate speculators caused the artificial appreciation rates that Las Vegas saw in 2004 with 52% appreciation rates. The fall out this year has not been very pretty and the media certainly is not helping out but as seen from the article above, the media also helped fuel the very problem of real estate speculation to begin with.

From doing some research and looking at Bank repos in Las Vegas for the past several months and tracking the numbers, I came across a bank repo in Las Vegas (The Ridges in Summerlin) that was listed for $5,780,000. I was telling somebody else about it since the community location is absolutely phenomenal and when I went to pull it up…

It's not too hard to pick up something from the media and hear doomsday news about the real estate industry. Generally, the media picks up a story from a heavily speculated real estate market such as Arizona, Florida or Las Vegas real estate and pinpoints a story of a homeowner that paid too much money for their real estate in 2005. Now the prices have gone down  resulting in the homeowner losing valuable equity and their great investment in real estate not being such a great investment for the short term.

These same real estate markets all seem to have something in common - an increase in prices due to speculation by real estate investors that were fueled by sensationalized stories in the media - much like a heavy gust of wind can make a fire turn into…

How nice it is to have a full blown home search on our Las Vegas real estate website with everything that a potential home buyer needs to help narrow down all of the selections! It makes our job so much easier and it's also less confusing for the buyers.... if used properly.

The latest couple we took out to search for Las Vegas real estate for sale actually used it to it's full potential. The beautiful benefit of this is that before we even went out to view the homes in Summerlin and Red Rock Country Club for sale in person, the couple had extensively searched all of the real estate for sale that met their criteria, used our mapping, and dramatically reduced the number of Summerlin homes available for sale that they were interested in viewing in person. Read Full Post