Duplex Chick

Minneapolis Duplex Owners Face Deadline 01.25.12

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If you owned residential income property in the state of Minnesota in 2011, consider this a friendly reminder that your CRP (Certificate of Rent Paid) must be issued no later than January 31, 2012.

A CRP is a form that helps tenants get a tax refund because they essentially helped pay your property tax for the year.

A CRP must be completed even if you sold a duplex, or purchased one during 2011. Each owner must issue a separate CRP to tenants for the time they owned the property.

Roommate CRPs are to be divided according to the the amount each individual paid.

Remember, if you forget to issue a CRP, you may be assessed a $100 penalty for each instance. In other words, if you have four tenants in your duplex, all of whom are unmarried, you could face $400 in fines.

I’ve made it easy for you. To get the forms, just click here.

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Minneapolis Duplex Market Continues To Tighten 01.24.12

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If it seems like there’s a shortage of Minneapolis duplexes for sale, it’s because there is.

Perhaps it’s because for many weeks we’ve seen statistics like this:

For the week ending January 14, 2012, there were 20 new duplex, triplex and quadraplex listings to the Minneapolis MLS.

During the same week in 2011, there were 40 new listings.

In other words, the amount of new inventory for the week had dropped by half.

In both cases, exactly half of that new inventory was brought to the market by traditional sellers– as in people who didn’t need permission from a bank to sell.

Ironically, there were just 14 Minneapolis and St Paul duplexes where sellers received and accepted purchase agreements the second week of January. Only one of these duplex owners decided to sell without bank interference.

On average, these properties pended at a list price of $78,299.

This number is down from that week in 2011, when 20 duplexes pended or sold on the MLS. Of these sellers, just less than one-third had equity in their property.

These sellers received an average sales price of $136,920.

Single family home listings followed duplexes, reporting a 5.2 percent decline in the number of new listings to hit the market. In all, there are 23.8 percent fewer homes for buyers to choose from than there were last year.

Pending sales, however, were up 29.4 percent.

The tightening market has yet to impact sales price in an upward direction.

Can’t wait to see what spring brings.

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Two Basic Facts Known By Successful Duplex Investors 01.20.12

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Last night, a group got together at my office and played Robert Kiyosaki’s game, Cash Flow.

Even though I work every day in the business of duplex and real estate investment, the game was an important reminder of some basic principles that are easy to forget.

For example, the players who fared the best were those who were the most tolerant of risk. They were the ones least afraid to plunge into an investment opportunity. There took risks the other players weren’t willing to.

Those players also understood the importance of leverage.

While the game allows bank loans to acquire stocks and businesses, in real life real estate is the only investment a bank will lend you money to buy.

Think about it. If you are looking to invest in a duplex, in exchange for coming up with 20-30 percent to buy it, the bank will pay for the remaining 70-80 percent.

And, finally, those players also clearly understood they would never get out of the “Rat Race” based on their salaries alone. They knew they needed other avenues to secure their financial futures.

Isn’t it time we all get started?

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