USA investment companies – advise?

We have bought a number of properties from Top Rental Returns USA and have visited Atlanta twice now. During both visits we toured potential houses (all foreclosures) with Bronwyn and Micheal who are Australians and are based in Atlanta and chose houses that we were happy with. We then waited to see if the bank accepted their offer and the HUD closing statement clearly shows the accepted foreclosure price and their commission.

They managed the renovations (and received no kickbacks from the builders) and have also employed an American to manage the properties. Tenants were all found within a month.

We purchased two other properties in Florida (unfortunately both are townhouses) and have nothing but issues with the property managers (their care factor there is zero!). From our experience it is absolutely vital that you visit, get a feel for the area as each street can change, let alone each suburb and feel comfortable that the house you are buying is well priced (read bargain) and will attract good tenants. We paid between $40 and $56k for our properties in Atlanta and then between $8 and $13k for the renovations. The returns range from $950-$1100 month.

The rent we receive for our Florida properties is half that and the HOAs increased by $60 a month on one place, so we are hoping, fingers crossed for greater capital gains. We also found that the real estate agents in Florida were all too happy to deceive you and couldn't be trusted. The sellers and buyers agents seemed to collude, even though the buyers agent was meant to be working with your best interests in mind!

In florida you might also want to connect with http://cfri.net/  They may be able to help you out of a bad situation and allow you to check out potential partners.

I'd be interested to know what LVR's and rates LoansUSA are getting for their clients.

I was also wondering Nigel how the banks agree to you assigning the mortgages to the new investors? I was quite surprised to see that was your offer,  as even in 05/06/07 when everything was a lot more relaxed they still didnt like to do that.

Completely agree with this post. A lot of the activity mentioned above is just a scandal waiting to break, its totally rife in markets such as Detroit, Buffalo etc. People are buying because the rents are so high compared and the sellers use the zillow estimate to back up totally spurious prices.

Please dont use Zillow as a method of getting a current valuation it can be two or three times the actual value, its useful to find previous sale prices, pictures, home sq ft etc, but thats about it.

Each County has a property appraiser where you can check the previous sales of any house, its normally simple to use and almost always free.

A lot of these people are building up levels of mystique around the property industry that isnt necessary, there are lots of online wholesalers in the US in these markets people can try Econohomes as a starting point.

HI, Ive no experience at all of Kansas City. Quite a few people on here seem to rate it though.

This is exactly what happened in upstate New York a few years ago and is exactly what is going to happen in a lot of cases this time around. Where there are huge prospective gross rental returns there is generally a good reason and they rarely translate into strong net rental returns.

There used to be a group in Upstate New York which was an association of investors who were active there, mostly US residents, the guy who ran it put out a report where he detailed his returns and then transalted them into an hourly rate, based on the amout of work he had done on maintaining his portfolio. The guy made money, but the returns were not spectacular and the hourly rate was ordinary. I'll dig it up and post it if i can find it as it is a very interesting document.

To APerry,

I have invested in upstate NY and have found the people that i partner with are honest and true to there word, they can back up all there properties.

I believe that there was a number of years ago a few bad apples running arround fleecing left and right, however 1% of investments in any city can prove to be not good investments do you then not deal with the honest ones.

I have a partner who works out of denver property man for over 30 years knows all about the US market thats his business advising investors on were to put there money.

There are certain parts of upstate NY that never boomed or busted and have good ROI, you need like in any city to work with a team that knows there business and has the infrastructure in place.

Jeff