The first step a real estate investor must do when starting investings in real estate is to create a meaningful investment plan. Think about what you can logically expect to achieve, write it down, clearly define it, and use it as a foundation for all your subsequent investment decisions. Novice investors often jump into a deal for the wrong reason and get burned. But every acquisition should be part of an investment plan, and when a property can fit into the plan without overburdening or sidetracking you from your goals, then pursue it; otherwise walk away. Let’s take a look at a couple of things to get you started.

• Determine how much cash you have available to invest comfortably. It’s always a good idea to keep some cash in reserve for the unsuspected, so start conservatively. You can always dip into your reserves later when your experience and confidence increases.
• Set the feasibility of your future net worth. How much would you like to be worth? Make it meaningful by setting an attainable goal. Just saying, “I want to be a millionaire by the end of the year” may define your desire for financial independence, but it may not be realistic to begin with, and will only lead to frustration later. There’s nothing wrong with goals that are challenging, just keep them attainable.
• Tie your investment plan to a timetable. Setting a timetable inside your investment plan gives you a scale to determine when a readjustment or fine-tuning of your investment plan must be made. For example, if your plan called for you to own ten apartment units in 2005 and you own only five, you know that your goal is only 50 percent attained and your plan needs to be adjusted to keep the timetable in line. Plus, timelines enstill better time management. Most people work better if they know something must be completed by a deadline.

Real estate investing is seldom for the fun of it. Hey, when you want fun, you take the family to Disney World, certainly not to help you resolve a tenant problem in one of your apartment buildings. Real estate investing is about making money, and the reason you purchased that rental property in the first place was to make a lot of it. It seems appropriate, therefore, to consider at least six reasons why rental property values do go up. If you’ve been struggling to make money on your real estate investment, this one’s for you.

1. Inflation. Inflation increases rental property value simply because of the increased cost to replace the property. The increased cost of land, building permits and fees, materials, or actual construction.
   
2. Improved infrastructure. The effect due to development around the property is perhaps the most predictable. Roads, electricity, water, and sewer sytems, police and fire protection, parks, hospitals, and so on have a major effect on the value of property.
   
3. Economic conversion. When the use of a property changes. For example, when new zoning laws allow you to convert a small apartment building to offices; a single-family home into a four apartments.
   
4. Increased bottom line. It goes without saying that real estate investors buy a rental property’s cash flow (bottom line). Assuming other factors don’t change, an investor who is able to increase the bottom line (cash flow) will increase the resale value of an income property.
5. Capital improvements. Unless the value of the land makes capital improvements superfluous, adding extra apartments to a building, or an extra bedroom or bathroom when the market demands it, can increase value.
   
6. Supply and demand. The shortage of available rental property at a time when the demand for rental income property is high drives rental property values up. It’s not to be viewed as a national statistic (i.e., what’s happening in California may not influence Florida), so its important to pay close attention to the local market. But when when your town or region has room to absorb more, and investors are there to buy, your rental property value will increase.
   

ProAPOD real estate investment software offers a wide-range of features and tools that often go unnoticed by users. So it seems appropriate to occassionally take a break from our normal real estate investment tips and point out what ProAPOD’s real estate investing software solution offers.

Case in point, the zoom control feature. Depending on your monitor’s resolution, the forms provided in ProAPOD can appear quite small. Particularly if you’re using a lap top with something like a 1140 x 900 screen resulution. This can make a real estate investment analysis more time consuming, difficult, and frankly, the whole real estate investing analysis process less pleasurable. ProAPOD anticipated this and designed a toolbar feature that allows you to enlarge or reduce what appears on your screen when ProAPOD is in use (does not affect your monitor’s setting). To use it click Tools | Zoom… and then select the size that fits you best. This can be done for each form merely by opening the form and clicking a Zoom setting. ProAPOD makes it easy. Available in all editions, including ProAPOD’s real estate investor software solution.