Real estate – An Overview

Easy money, flexible schedules, and being your boss seem to be the buzzwords with those considering a career in residential real estate. Sales was intentionally left off the job title. Real estate is moving away from being a sales career to being a resource for consumers that are buying or selling a home.

Mark Nash author of Starting & Succeeding in Real Estate and three other real estate books and a regular columnist for RealtyTimes.com shares the inside story on how begin and prosper in today’s transitioning real estate market.

-Pre-license education will provide you with knowledge about the applicable real estate laws in your state, but will not prepare you to be successful in residential real estate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Royalty trusts, in Finance, are classic flow-through investments vehicles. The trust, like a mutual fund, holds a portfolio of assets, which can be anything from producing oil and gas wells to power generating stations to interests in land. The net cash flow, i.e. the total cash flow minus revenues, is passed on to the unit-holders as distribution.

The purpose of a Real Estate Investment Trusts is to reduce or eliminate corporate income taxes. In the United States, where they are generally more widespread as investment vehicles, Real Estate Investment Trusts pay little or no federal income tax but are subject to a number of special requirements set forth in the Internal Revenue Code, one of which is the requirement to distribute annually at least 90 percent of their taxable income in the form of dividends to shareholders.

Real Estate Investment Trusts are, therefore, a special type of royalty trust. They specialize in real property, anything from office buildings to long-term care facilities. For illiquid assets like real estate, closed-end funds of this type make good sense. Open-end or ‘mutual’ real estate funds are subject to new money and redemption problems, entirely absent in closed-end trusts. The first Real Estate Investment Trust was introduced in the United States in 1960. The vehicle was designed to facilitate investments in large-scale income-producing real estate by smaller investors. The US model was simple, enabling small investors to acquire equity interests in vehicles holding large-scale commercial property.

Read the rest of this entry »