We Have Exciting News To Share With You!

Are the rumors true? Have we decided to branch out into property management? Well, I’ve got some exciting news to share with you.
Looking to sell a home in Athens, Georgia? Click here for a Home Price  Evaluation
Looking to buy a home in Athens, Georgia? Click here to perform a full home search

You may have been wondering—are the rumors true? Are we doing property management? I’m excited to announce that we have opened up a second brokerage that will focus on strictly managing rental properties for clients. We’ve named our sister company Iron Horse Property Management.

I had clients come to me for years asking me to branch out into property management, and I was always hesitant because my main focus was on sales. I wanted to be great at sales and make that the main focus of Woodall Realty Group.

Now I feel like the timing is better than it was in the past. The reason for this is our sales team is staffed with four full-time agents in addition to myself, our systems and processes are really dialed in, and we helped over 200 families last year. We expect to help even more families this year, and our business is steady enough that I felt we could finally branch out into property management.

A big concern that I've had was that I didn’t have the time during the day to focus on the daily aspects of moving tenants in, handling repairs, moving tenants out, and all the things that come along with property management. My solution was to find and hire a great property manager who has years of experience and, in my opinion, is one of the best in Athens, Jennifer McMahon.

You'll get the same great service through Iron Horse Property Management that you get through Woodall Realty Group.

Jennifer has worked with two other property managers in Athens over the years and has done a great job. She’s a go-getter, a hard worker, and she will be handling the day-to-day aspects of the property management. She’ll be taking care of all of the things that you as a landlord don’t want to do and help things run more smoothly.

So, now we will be able to offer the same great service through Iron Horse Property Management that you get through Woodall Realty Group. If you have rental property that you’re managing yourself, or you’re dissatisfied with your current property management, give me or Jennifer a call.

Our goal with Iron Horse Property Management is to give you peace of mind while maximizing the return on your investment. We want to make owning rental property a completely passive investment for you so that you just receive income each month and not have to worry about it.

If you or someone you know has questions about Iron Horse Property Management or any other concerns, give us a call. We would love to be here for you.

Using Real Estate to Fund Your Retirement

I recently discussed funding your kids' college through real estate, and today I wanted to talk about funding your retirement through real estate investing. 

Think about your current plan - are you putting money in stocks and your 401K, are you banking on social security, or are you just saving money? If you don't have a good savings interest rate, you're going to have to save a lot of money to prepare for retirement.

Consider the possibility of purchasing a few single-family rental homes or condos and financing them on a 15 or 30-year mortgage. You would have tenants who pay rent that's more than the mortgage for monthly cash flow, and in 15 or 30 years, that property would be paid for. If you have five houses paid for when you retire, that's a pretty good income.

Rental properties can generate monthly cash flow as well as equity.

Five houses renting at $1,000 a month is $60,000 a year in income, and if you have houses with $2,000 rent, you're looking at six figures in income from rental property alone. 

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki is a good book to read to change the way you're thinking about money. He talks about acquiring assets and allowing them to produce income to fund other areas of your life. I encourage you to think along those lines. 

For this reason, I want to see how much interest there would be in an investment workshop. If you're interested in attending a three-hour workshop about the ins and outs, the good, the bad, and the ugly of residential real estate investing, email me at Justin@WoodallRealtyGroup.com. We’ll get you on a list to keep you updated about a potential event. 

I hope this topic has been informative and has challenged your thinking today. If I can ever do anything for you, give me a call or send me an email.

Jackie Ruined Her Life Going to College?

A recent headline on Consumer Reports' August edition really caught my eye: "I Kind of Ruined My Life Going to College."

What are they talking about? Well, 42 million people owe a total of $1.3 trillion in student debt. What’s even more scary is that 45% of the people with student loan debt said college was not worth the cost. Additionally, 47% of these people said given the chance, they'd go to a lower cost school if they could do it over.

This bears the question: What is your plan to send your kids to college? 

If you can begin planning now, you want to start saving. Savings accounts don't have great interest rates now, so you have to save a lot. You could invest in stocks, but who knows what the market is going to do?

What if you used residential real estate as college funding for your kids? If you purchase a property that you can rent out when your kids are young, it can be paid for in 15 to 20 years, giving you options when the time comes for them to go to college. 

"What is your plan to fund your kids' college?"

You can sell the home and use that equity to fund their college. You could also continue leasing the home and use the monthly cash flow to pay for college.

A third option would be buying a house here in Athens if your kids are going to UGA, for example. You could rent the house to them to eliminate room and board costs, and charge their roommates rent to pay for college expenses. 

Remember, this strategy is not for everyone, but it's an option that I wanted you to be aware of. I think it's tragic for students to leave college with so much debt. It's hindering them from buying their first homes and saving for retirement, among other things. 

If you have any questions about buying a rental or income-producing property, I'd love to help you out. Give me a call or send me an email and let's talk about whether this is a good option for you and for your kids' future. 

Avoid This Real Estate Money Wiring Scam

Looking to sell a home in Athens, Georgia? Click here for a Home Price  Evaluation

Looking to buy a home in Athens, Georgia? Click here to perform a full home search

I wanted to give you a heads up on a scam that's going on throughout town. Luckily, it hasn't affected any of our clients, and I want to make sure you can be prepared, so it doesn't affect you. 

If you're nearing a real estate closing or any situation where you may need to wire funds to a closing attorney, you cannot afford to miss this alert. 

Basically, a fraudulent third party crook is posing as the attorney's office, sending emails to buyers as they near their closing date. They will send an email saying that the buyer needs to wire a certain amount of money for their down payment or a certain amount of money if they're making a cash payment in order to be ready to close on the right day.

Somehow, they're gaining access to this information, and sending out these emails just a few days before close. These emails have the name of someone from the attorney's office and look like they came from the attorney's office. They look very legitimate from what I'm told.

I heard a story that a buyer mistakenly sent $77,000 to the wrong person as a result of one of these scams, and that money is likely going offshore or overseas somewhere. It's a big scam, and it needs to be stopped.

I wanted to let you know so that you can protect and guard yourself against this scam. We're also telling our clients who do need to wire money to call the recipient first, to make sure you have the correct instructions and that any emails did come from them, and not a crook who is impersonating them.

As always, if there's anything I can do for you, a friend, family member, or coworkers, please feel free to give me a call.

What Makes Our Job so Great?

Looking to buy or sell a home in Athens, Georgia? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price  Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (706) 621-6085 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

As we bring 2014 to a close, I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks to all of you. Your support and your referrals have allowed us to help over 100 families buy and sell real estate this year.

For us, it's not really about the sales or the numbers, it's more about the ability to help families meet their individual goals. Nothing makes us happier than helping a family out of a bad living situation and into a good one. We would like to share with you a few examples of this that we have encountered just in the last year.

• We helped an older couple move out of their long-term home and into a smaller place. They got a much more appropriately sized property and were also able to become debt-free in the process. 
• We were able to help another family create a steady flow of income by investing in 3 rental properties.
• Finally, we had a client who had a 4-hour commute each day to work and back. We found him and his family a home closer to his office, so he was able to spend more time with his family.

It's these kinds of things that we really enjoy helping people with here at the Justin Woodall Group. If you have any questions for us at all, feel free to give us a call or send a quick email.

Why There are Better Places to Begin Your Online Home Search

Looking to buy or sell a home in Athens, Georgia? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price  Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (706) 621-6085 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

If you have been paying attention to the news recently, you may have heard that Zillow has entered into an agreement to purchase competitor Trulia for $3.5B in stock. These companies make their money by charging Realtors, like us, to become premier agents on their site and to buy ad space. It will be interesting to see what this merger creates, because neither company is profitable, yet their stock prices seem to be high. 

These sites are all well and good, but we have a few problems with them that we'd like to let you know about. The first thing to talk about is the "zestimate". The zestimate is a computer generated valuation of a property. The computer uses an algorithm to compute what it thinks a property is worth. We have seen zestimates be right on target, but more often than not we have seen them be way off.

Another problem with these sites is that some of their information and data is inaccurate. It's not uncommon for us to get a call from a client about a property they are interested on Zillow, only to find that it has been sold for weeks and is no longer available. 

If you want to have an accurate online home search experience, we have a few sites for you to check out. athenshomesearcher.com and athensareahomesearch.com are two sites that you need to visit. They feed directly from the Athens MLS and are more up-to-date and accurate than Trulia or Zillow.

A home search website is simply a tool for looking at properties and is in no way a substitute for a real estate agent. The reason we say this is because most of the best deals we get for our clients often happen before a property is even listed. When you can sell a property for a client without having to put it on the market and at the same time help a client buy a property without having to compete with other buyers, it's a win-win for all parties involved.

If we can do anything for you, a friend, family, or a co-worker, please feel free to give us a call. We would love to point you in the right direction!

Let Us Be Your Resource for Much More than Real Estate

Looking to buy or sell a home in Athens, Georgia? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price  Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (706) 621-6085 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

Let Us Be Your Resource for Much More than Real Estate

 

Today I just wanted to let you know that you can use us as a good resource for referrals. If you need a good roofer, a good plumber, or any other type of contractor, please do not hesitate to ask us for a referral.

We know landscapers, plumbers, carpenters, cleaners, roofers, construction workers, lenders, and more. We work with these people everyday and are more than willing to point you in the right direction so that you can get satisfactory service out of anyone that we refer to you.

We know who is trustworthy and who is not. If you're not on our list and want to be included on our list of preferred vendors, then give me call and we can speak about putting you on there.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns about Athens real estate, then please do not hesitate to contact me. I am more than willing to help you out.

Thanks for tuning in!