Flreia's Blog

EPA Lead-Based Paint Initiative

It’s been a month since the EPA’s new lead-based paint initiative, how has it affected your business and what’s your opinion of this new initiative?

As for our business model, this new initiative has definitely added a new crease to our buying profile.  Any property that we may purchase that’s pre-1978 we’ll definitely have to take into consideration that our rehab costs could go up anywhere from 20-35% or more, making our buy price much lower.  In the immediate future that could cause us to loose on some buying opportunities as there are many out there that do not even know this initiative even exists and will not take into consideration the potential of additional costs.

My opinion of this initiative is a bit undefined.  The underlying merits of it appear to be well intended, but the implementation seems a bit over-the-edge, especially with fines in the $32,000 range per incident per day.  Let us know what you think, we would love to get your take.

Catch our recently recorded webinar discussing the EPA lead-based paint initiative at www.REIPMagazine.com/Pete.

South Florida State of the Onion

I’ve always wanted to see it in print – State of the Onion vs. State of the Union.

If you caught the FLREIA’s FAN report this week then you probably heard how our local unemployment rate is doing. It’s a couple of points above the national average at 12.1%.  Shocking, not really.  South Florida is largely a service-based economy so when others don’t come to visit it hurts our local economy.

It’s not as bad as it probably was in the past.  I’ve lived in Florida most of my life and I’ve seen it go through the ups and downs.  There really hasn’t been too many downs, at least not like this one.  But again the skyrocketing real estate prices didn’t help.  A few years ago I saw this coming, especially when I was hearing of reports of an exodus of nurses from our community because they could not afford to live here.  They get paid pretty good and if they couldn’t afford it, how about our service workers who probably make half as much they do?

So what can we expect?  in 2008, I had predicted that we would not begin to see an improvement in our market until mid 2011.  Do I still believe that?  Have we hit bottom?  I believe we’re skipping across the bottom, but I don’t foresee the real estate market in our area gaining any momentum yet.  There’s quite a few variables.  Like I stated earlier we are primarily a service industry, tourism at the top.  If the rest of the country and the world is hurting then we can expect to feel some pain.

Lenders have made lending more difficult. (more…)

FLREIA Intro

This is our first Blog. Not actually, we’ve had other blogs in our own site, but we thought we’d move out and go public

Juan & Sharon Restrepo

with our FLREIA Blog.

What is the FLREIA you ask? The FLREIA stands for Florida Real Estate Investors Association. We are an education, networking and investment group. Our main purpose is to serve our members by giving them a venue where they can come together for networking opportunities, discover the many different ways to create wealth through real estate and are also provided opportunities to put their money to work via investment opportunities.

Our goal with the FLREIA Blog is to enhance our members and guests’ experiences with this additional resource. The blog will be available for discussions, comments and exchange of ideas. We look forward to adding more posts on a regular basis, so be sure to check back, follow us or whatever it is that you do to keep up with us.