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Justin

"If you can imagine it you can create it. If you can dream it, you can become it."
William Arthur Ward

"If you don't know where you're going, chances are you will end up somewhere else"
Yogi Berra

What to put in an offer when you’re buying investment real estate

What to put in an offer when you're buying investment real estate

via Invest in Kitchener Waterloo Real Estate Investment Properties by Benjamin Bach on 2/3/10

A friend of mine asked me this morning what clauses we usually put in an offer, when we're helping our clients buy and sell an investment property in Ontario.

While every purchase and sale will have unique features demanding custom clauses – often a few Schedules worth of them – most of the time, we use the same base of conditions and clauses when our clients are buying a rental property.

Conditions:

Real estate agreements are either 'firm' or 'conditional.' A firm offer is one where the are no additional conditions on the part of the buyer, and conversely, a conditional offer is where the buyer has some time to do due diligence, such as needing to get approval for financing, having the property inspected, or making sure that the city will let you develop an apartment building on the parcel of vacant land. Most of the time our clients put in conditional offers.

The typical conditions we use are: a financing condition, an inspection conditions, and verification of income and expenses & supporting documents.

If the property we were looking at was a potential development site, we'd probably put in a Zoning condition – allowing us to research and verify that we could develop and build what we wanted to – and an environmental inspection, to make sure that we weren't buying a potentially contaminated site.

It's important to verify the income and expenses, and review the actual leases and bills. We want to run our own eyes over those documents; trust but verify! Also, the bank or lending institution is going to want to see the information as well, as they do their own financial due diligence on the investment property.

Clauses:

In addition to the conditions, we usually will include a number of additional clauses in the Schedule A (and often we'll append more Schedules, depending on the offer. The most I've written is 4 additional schedules to the agreement of purchase and sale. The client was a lawyer ).

If you were purchasing an property that was already rented with tenants, one of the clauses would be that the rents and leases are all legal according to tenancy laws of Ontario, and that the landlord doesn't have any pending or upcoming issues with the Landlord and Tenant Board.

I include a clause asking for the current lodging licence, if it is a student rental that requires one. Also, make sure that the license is current when the property closes – If we don't complete the transaction till August, I still want the license to be in place then!

I like clauses where the seller hands over all architectural & electrical plans, and any information they have on hand about possible expansions of the property. It's amazing what owners have, and how useful it can be in a few yeas when you want to make some changes to the proeprty!

Depending on the type of property, there will be additional clauses; every property is unique, so each agreement of purchase and sale will vary. We recommend all of our clients run offers by their lawyer, and it's a good thing for you to do too.

What clauses and conditions do you include when you're buying a property?

Related posts:

1. State of the Student Housing (investment) Market
2. 2009 Kitchener Waterloo Investment Real Estate Market Update
3. Property Management for KW investment property

Trends in Canada

Aging of our population - by 2036, seniors are projected to more than
double, from 4.7 to 10.9 million

- Consider implications on healthcare spend, obligations on family
members, quality of care providers, etc

Justin

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Zappos.com's $1.6M Mistake That Boosted its Brand

Amazing company...

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Zappos.com's $1.6M Mistake That Boosted its Brand

Zappos.com, the popular shoe site that embraces exceptional customer service and successful use of social media, made an expensive mistake over the weekend that cost them $1.6 million but ultimately used the blunder to boost their brand image.

So what happened? Zappos.com's sister site, 6pm.com, ran into a technical glitch that priced everything on the site at $49.95 or under for several hours on Sunday morning. Items that ranged up to thousands of dollars could be bought at $49.95.

When Zappos.com realized the mistake, they shut down the site to fix the problem and restore the original prices. But here's the best part: the company honored the prices they mistakenly sold the products at. Aaron Magness from Zappos.com stated, "While we're sure this was a great deal for customers, it was inadvertent, and we took a big loss (over $1.6 million - ouch) selling so many items so far under cost. However, it was our mistake. We will be honoring all purchases that took place on 6pm.com during our mess up."

What can marketers and business owners learn from this?

Staying consistent with their core value of building honest relationships with their customers, Zappos.com held up their end of their promise to deliver phenomenal service. Instead of allowing the media to criticize the mistake, they used the press to display their commitment to consumers. The free publicity helped generate buzz for Zappos, secured its reputation for stellar customer service, and greatly increased the reach of 6pm.com across the web.

For many businesses, it is important to remember that social media and traditional media can play a huge role in generating buzz for your company and impacting your brand image. Taking advantage of PR, even in bad situations, can help your company shine amongst your competition. By flipping an unfortunate incident on its head, your company will not only gain credibility for admitting its mistake but also receive customer trust for handling the situation in a transparent and honest way.

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6011/Zappos-com-s-1-6M-Mistake-That-Boosted-its-Brand.aspx

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Justin

"If you can imagine it you can create it. If you can dream it, you can become it."
William Arthur Ward

"If you don't know where you're going, chances are you will end up somewhere else"
Yogi Berra

Business ideas

Other possible business ideas:

• Real estate kit
• Green kit
• Green rating = zagat ratings
  Social networking that incl reviews and ranking by members
• Local green guides in book form / iPhone app/internetbased guides
• Green yellow pages - listings of all green business in local area. Look up Ecometroguides and Dotherightthing.com -
• Green consulting business. Look up: interfaceraise
  

How to up your innovation quotient

Hanging out with idea generators: Who sparks you?
- get together every 4-6 weeks to stimulate the creative juices...

Establish a sounding board (advisory board of directors)
- meet 2x/yr

Brainstorming sessions

... From the 60 sec innovator, jeff davidson

Justin

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