Real Estate Contract: 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.

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Invest for the long haul. Don’t flip. Every flipper I have ever met with exception of a few contractors that had tremendous renovation resources and did it on the side, have ultimately declared bankruptcy.Always invest at a minimum of a 15% cap rate. If you can’t find that in an acceptable neighborhood or community, look in another community. If the market is too high everywhere, wait for a correction and invest when the time is right.Only buy what you can manage well. If you can’t mange it well, don’t buy it. Don’t trust a property manager.Make sure you buy properties and renovate them to attract great tenants.Get great at doing “real” numbers - not the numbers the realtors give you.Develop a stable of private investors that can move fast with you. Never Never Never Never miss a single payment to them. Never risk their capital. Always have your own money in the deal after theirs.Know what you can do and what you can’t do. Find someone who complements you and is exceptional at what you’re not good at and hire them or make them your partner or some hybrid of the two.When prices get stupid wacky high - sell. Stupid wacky high is usually about a 5% cap rate. Move to cash and don’t invest a penny until the market corrects - it always does. Don’t carry financing for the crazy buyer that buys at those cap rates.Live below your means. Have a reserve.Pay very close attention to incentives. If you are not getting the behavior you hope for, check the incentives.The only “standard” contracts I use are my standard contracts. My standards are usually very different than standard standard contracts.I’ve been investing in and financing real estate for 35 years. This is what has worked for me.