Offer To Purchase Real Estate: Fill & Download for Free

I started at 19, forty years ago, when my wife and I bought our first townhouse. It cost around $48K if I recall. We lived in it for seven months and sold it for a $7K net profit.We moved and built a house. We sold that and built another house. In the mean time, we had invested in five acres on a major Austin highway, but way out of town. (We held that property a little over thirty years before we decided to sell it. By then, the town had grown out to where our land was. The property was worth approximately sixty-eight times what we had paid for it).We sold the house that we were living in, had raised our children in, and loved dearly. It was the perfect house for us, but we sold it, took the profits, put the minimum down on another home to live in, and started buying investment properties.Before long we were buying commercial properties to add to our rent houses. Then we started selling off our residential units to acquire more commercial properties.Now we pretty much just invest in commercial units. We bought a small shopping center in San Antonio, about 75 miles away, a few months ago. That was our most recent purchase.We are currently trying to buy out the last remaining tenant’s lease on one of the other properties that we own. That should cost us somewhere between $270K to $400K, I hope. Once that is accomplished, and that tenant has moved, we can begin construction on a fifty-million-dollar 253-unit luxury apartment community with 5,000’ of high-end retail.It all started with a thousand-dollar down payment… forty years ago.---------Update: I ended up offering my last remaining tenant (a public company) $750,000 just to move out of the space they were in. They refused. It looks like I'm stuck with them for another six and a half years. I was really hoping to build that larger project in their space. I may end up just building above them and around them. It won't be as beautiful a building as I had hoped, but it also will feel alright to not have to pay them $750K just to move out. We used a standard Texas Commercial lease instead of my regular lease contracts and now I'm regretting that decision. Things can change so fast when you are working with real estate deals, but it's all good. They will end up paying me a little under another million dollars in rent during that time and the property will likely double in value during the next six years.

I'll modify the question a bit to: What is a better investment: stocks or real estate?..and the answer, as anyone who has taken a first year corporate finance class will tell you is: it depends.It depends on your financial goals (how much, how fast)Your appetite for riskHow much time do you want to spend managing your investments.For example, by real estate investment, do you mean:Buying and holding land for yearsBuying rental propertyBuying distressed properties and renovating them for resell or rent (Donald Trump did that successfully)All three of those can be very time and capital intensive, with a higher barrier to entry than stocks.If you're buying land and plan to hold it for 20 years, then you'll need cash. Just to hold off losses from inflation you'll need to gain about 2% in value per year, with really no guarantees that you will see a payoff. You might get lucky if prices skyrocket, or someone really wants the land. Then again, you could find out later that the area was rezoned while you weren't looking, or someone dumped toxic waste on the site while you were away and you have pay for the clean up.Buying rental property is a path many choose, but as a former landlord it's not all it's cracked up to be. In short, you either buy a home outright or get a loan for a property and rent it out, hoping that the rental income can cover the mortgage, insurance, repairs, etc. Everyone overestimates the rental income and underestimates repairs and other costs. Lots of articles on Quora cover the ins and outs of this. I believe the consensus was that the real average rate of return is about 5% annually. Keep in mind the data below is gross income:Renovating properties carries its own ranks, whether you are selling (flipping) or renting. This takes time and skill to do right. You have to be able to judge the market really well and hold down expenses for the repairs/renovations, transaction costs, etc. Some of the overinflated numbers you hear of people bragging about flipping houses doesn't include all the labor costs that the investor did themselves. It's literally a full time job. The average reported gross returns are about 30%. Net returns (what's left after all the labor, materials, fees, commissions, etc are paid) are much smaller, likely single digits. I've seen lots of people go bankrupt doing this.So what about stocks?In your example, you mentioned dividend stocks which is a different investment strategy than trading stocks. Companies that pay a dividend are usually big, well established firms that don't have a lot of growth like GE, Microsoft, Wal Mart, etc. So if you bought 10,000 shares of a company that paid a $1 annual dividend, you would get a check every quarter for 1/4 that amount.But not all dividend stocks are equal. A stock offering a $1 annual dividend selling for $20 a share is a much different return than a company with a share price of $50. The actual return rate on your money is called a dividend yield:And since stocks are traded on an open market, you have to be careful as the underlying price of the stock can change as well. This in turn, impacts the yield.It pays to do a bit of homework here, but as you can see you can get pretty good returns with a little bit of homework.For my money, I prefer stocks and bonds to grow wealth. You can enter or exit your investments in a few minutes for about $10 (real estate takes weeks, and sometimes months), no one calls me at 2am because a furnace went out, I don't have to spend my weekends evicting a tenant or making repairs, and I get paid like clockwork.Any good investor will diversify their portfolio and that includes some real estate. In my case, that the house I live in which is as much real estate as I want to own.All types of investment carry some risks, so do your homework (5 Big Dividend Investing Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them), and follow a few basic rules (The 8 Rules of Dividend Investing). People often spend more time researching and negotiating the purchase of a car, but will buy a stock they know nothing about in 10 minutes. Never rush into an investment. If you take the same time and effort to learn dividend investing and understanding what you are buying as you would if you were investing in real estate, I think you’ll be much better off.Hope this was helpful. If you’re looking for more answers like this one on Investing and Wealth, follow me on Quora.

I have invested in real estate with no out of pocket expense several ways and numerous times.I took over the payments on mortgages with no money down. I have done that on a $42,000 property, a $180,000 property, a $650,000 property, and a $3,000,000 property... and probably some other properties too.I was approached by an investor that did not really know how to maximize his return on his investment, but he knew that I could help him. I was offered 50% ownership in a property if I would help him find something profitable to invest in. I found a small shopping center. I formed an LLC for us. I control the bank account, the bills, and the LLC. I put zero down, he paid for the LLC and the property completely, and I own half. It makes him about 10% annually... and I make the same.I started working on an opportunity six weeks ago. I put a deal together this week to purchase a mortgage from a bank on a property. I offered investors 7% APR, and after three weeks the opportunities to invest filled up. As of two nights ago the deal is fully funded. I did pay to start an LLC, but I put zero down on the property. I control the property and have over $7,000,000 in equity on that deal for myself.I am not sharing this information to boast, but rather to enlighten you and let you know that YES, it is absolutely possible to purchase real estate with no money. It can take a lot of effort, a lot of negotiating, an understanding of the local real estate market, an awareness of circumstances, a willingness to take calculated risk, and a little good fortune to find the right opportunities.I do not know global real estate, but in North America it is possible run across opportunities like these. I would imagine that it is possible to an extent in other countries as well.Start by networking. Let potential sellers know that you are interested in their properties. Help them visualize a way that they can retire and still have a guaranteed monthly income by owner financing the mortgage on their properties.