Just trying to get a head count here before I go ahead and set a date, so do let me know at purvabrown@msn.com right away.

If you’re buying your first property with an eye toward investing in the future or are actively investing into rentals, this seminar can save you thousands of dollars in tax payments when you sell. Yes, yes, it’s perfectly legal. Section 1031 in the Internal Revenue Code allows you to defer all of your capital gain taxes to the IRS (15%) and the Franchise Tax Board of California (9.3%) if you buy another property of equal or greater value.

But you must know what you’re doing. And you must use a qualified intermediary.

So attend the seminar and empower yourself.

After writing about short sales making up a major chunk of the Sacramento real estate market and what they are, the next question that follows of course is if short sales are a good deal for the buyer.

The answer is, it depends.

It depends on a lot of things, the most important being of course - will it even go through? I had the unfortunate experience yesterday of having to withdraw one of my listings because the home had two mortgages on it and the first lender could go into auction and sell the home to recover all of their principal. The second note however might not get anything. In other words, the first lender had no motivation to sell short and the second lender was getting nothing anyway.

The other thing the answer to the above question depends on is of course, what are the comps? How much are the comparable properties in the neighborhood selling for? The seller of the short sale may have paid exorbitantly more and the place might not even be worth a look unless it really is a good price for the buyers.

Thirdly, and probably the most importantly, what condition is the home in? Chances are, if the sellers haven’t been able to pay the mortgage, they haven’t been able to make any repairs to the home. How many of these repairs are serious?

If it were me, I would look elsewhere. There are many properties on the market that are not short sales that are still good deals. To look for short sales in particular seems to me a huge undertaking of patience for not a very high return. But if you are determined, they sure are out there!

See for yourself. Here are the latest statistics hot off the MLS:

Total number of homes for sale on or before July 31, 2007: 11,016 with a median price of $329,960

Total number of homes pending sale between July 1, 2007 and July 31, 2007: 1038 with a median price of $315,000

Total number of homes sold between July 1, 2007 and July 31, 2007: 928 with a median price of $330,000.

The median price is up only $2,000 from last month and sales have fallen since June 2007. In June, Sacramento county recorded 1068 sales.

Average days on market remain between 50 - 60 days.

Lots to look at and flat prices. Good time to buy!

Recently I complained that I had bought a book called “How to Finance Any Real Estate Anywhere” and found the concepts just too hard to understand. (Really, it’s like math - if you can’t add, you can’t multiply!) I mean, I knew that the author knew what he was doing. He just couldn’t explain it well enough on the page.

So anyway. I picked up Frank Gallinelli’s “What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cashflow” and found it absolutely fascinating. If you like numbers (or if you like the RIGHT numbers) and analyzing the heck out of every deal, this is the book for you.

The writer also has a website where you can buy software that can track your investments and a few other free calculators. Worth a visit.

I spent the majority of the day today trying to protect my buyers in a purchase transaction and responding to this post. Well, it was fun.

I get the sense that a lot of people do not like real estate agents. And perhaps they have run into a few (God knows I have!) that we hope are out of the business now. So people are a little jaded and very wary.

Good for them.

An investment is an investment is an investment and should be considered very carefully.

That being said, I just heard (on audio CD in my car) Seth Godin’s THE DIP. And I think if you’re already invested in this real estate market and have no more to invest, don’t really want to sell but are watching home prices fall and all the negative news out there, you should read this book.

The Dip applies to everything, not just business. If you master the dip, you soar into success. Basically, the writer says that when you try something new there is the initial surge of interest that carries you through for a while. It’s new, it’s interesting, it’s fun. You might even have some beginner’s luck. But if you are in it for the long haul, you will inevitably run into the dip. And how you deal with it tells you whether you will succeed or give up.

Read the book.

Sacramento real estate investors are (finally!) standing up and taking notice. The Handyman’s Special might be sold pretty soon. Now, with this being a short sale, it still has to go through all the right channels with the lender (Countrywide) to be approved, but since it had been approved earlier at $239,000 without knowledge of the pest report, this one should be a pretty simple “yes” or “no” based on price.

In a short sale, the lender is usually willing to look at only one offer at a time, so of the ones that come along, I’m hoping we get a decent enough offer to submit to Countrywide. That being said, there has been genuine interest. Yesterday and Monday felt like a hearkening back to the real estate boom market we had in 2004, what with the number of Realtors® and others interested.

Want a closer look at the property? I plan on showing it Sunday between 9:30 and 10:00am. Feel free to come!