Building wealth trough real estate takes just a little determination, dedication and education. One very important aspect of real estate investing that you should educate yourself on is how to evaluate or appraise a property’s value. This is very important to understand since your profit is made when you buy the property and only realized when you sell it. Determining a property’s value is a tricky field and you must have sound real estate tricks up your sleeve to pull it off successfully.

For brokers Most real estate agents can calculate a reasonably accurate price based on “comps,” short for a comparative (or competitive) market analysis. You can create your own “comps” based on information from your local property tax office and perusal of Internet and newspaper sale ads, but this strategy probably will not give you as accurate a picture as actual recent neighborhood sales in your price and size range.

Right now we are looking at a buyers market. There are a lot of homes on the market that just aren’t moving. The sales pace of homes has come down quite a bit since the boom and are now just over 6 million homes per year and is tracking to be be below that in the next quarter.
It also looks as though that the median home price is also going to drop this year as well, something that hasn’t happen in the 40 years they’ve been keeping the stats.
It also doesn’t help that mortgage prices are tending upwards as well. Expect them to average around 6.7% for the second half of the year. Still that is much better then the 14% we saw back in the ’70s. But there are a number of ARMs that are beginning the reset cycle that will be painful for a lot of people. So that will not be good for the market.
The odd part of the market is the high-end home. Homes over $1,000,000 are selling quite well, often for more then the list price. “The low end is getting creamed. The middle is struggling. The high end is running on its own dynamic.” That is hardly ever unusual, when you have more money the longer you can go before buckling down, and if you have enough to last 5-7 years you can ride out a typical recession.