Loans Closing and Things Looking Up

It looks like hard money loan #11 is scheduled to close next Friday, the 11th. All in all, my partner says the California area where we have our hard money loans seems to be a seller’s market right now. We’ve currently got four properties in escrow. A couple buyers backed out, but new buyers were quick to appear. I expect to have my other loans paid off soon.

In multi-tenant property news, I received a nice detailed state of the market analysis from one of the principles involved in my Houston apartment deal. He lives in Arizona and his report is about the Phoenix area. For background, he talks about the factors that all conspired to get  us where we are today. Of course, the housing bubble hit the apartment arena as well as single family homes and people were buying apartments based on wildly optimistic pro forma numbers. But then the market softened and the large numbers of single family homes started hurting the apartment market. Many of these SFHs were put up for rent or left for foreclosure. Then the home buyers tax credit kicked in and many renters stopped renting and took advantage of the tax credit and glut of SFHs to become home owners.  But things are looking up now. Jobs are starting to come back and layoffs have slowed. Local businesses, such as restaurants and home improvement stores, are seeing business pick up. It looks like the apartment sector is starting to make a comeback. This person had stopped buying properties in the Phoenix area in 2005, when valuations were sky high. He now feels it might be time to start buying again.