I recently read a great quote from Noel Whittaker (Australian financial columnist). It struck me as particularly relevant for those who are unsure of where or how to make their next important financial move.

“Life is full of uncertainties. Future investment earnings and interest and inflation rates are not known to anybody. However, I can guarantee you one thing.. those who put an investment program in place will have a lot more money when they come to retire than those who never get around to it”

Apart from working, investing is the only method of generating long term financial independence. From a personal point of view, I’ve made more money from my investments than I have from the various salaries and dividends I’ve drawn over the past 15 years.

There was a lot of irrational behavior on display in Florida during the boom years. This irrationality forced prices too high and placed unwarranted trust in developers promising they would build luxury resorts that potential renters would flock to.

That property boom has bust, and the prices for certain properties in wealthy locations are completely irrational in the other direction – i.e. they being sold at too large a discount. While the instinct to wait for the macro economy to recover and “normality” to return before investing is understandable, it could turn out to be a counterproductive strategy if your aim is to create wealth for the future.

There are still quite a few areas within Florida where high rental yields are available and the potential for capital appreciation is huge.

For example, I’m going to be a sizable chunk of this week speaking to clients about the twenty odd units we’ve available Flora Ridge. These three bed properties are tenanted, generate 9% net yields and used to cost more than $350,000 per unit. They are now available for between $114,500 and $115,500. I’m pretty confident these can be sold with a minimum of fuss in 3-4 years time for at least double that. In the meantime you’ll be taking home more than $10,000 per year net of all costs.

You’ll be hard pushed to find something better than that.

Kind Regards

Colin Murphy

Torcana.com

Tags: distressed property, distressed property developers, Florida Foreclosure services, House price statistics

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 8:02 am and is filed under USA Property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.