Home Investors Fill Portfolios With Bricks and Mortar -
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Published on: 3/27/2006
Last Visited: 3/27/2006
Mike Wilson recalls going to meetings of the Indianapolis Landlords Association in the late 1990s and listening to a "good old boys club" talk about property management problems such as how to fix toilets and get rid of cockroaches.
"They were managing properties, not buying," said Wilson, who at the time had just started purchasing single-family homes as investments.
With a hunger for knowledge and a hunch that there were others like him, Wilson took a spot on the board of the association and set about to change it with a few other like-minded investors.
Today, the organization, since renamed the Central Indiana Real Estate Investors Association, boasts more than 600 members, up from about 50 when Wilson started attending.
Plumbing and pests aren't on the meeting agendas anymore.Instead, local and national speakers discuss topics such as bank- owned homes, finances, negotiations and economic trends.
Organizational changes fueled some of CIREIA's growth, but Wilson gives much of the credit to a national trend: A lot more people are investing in real estate these days.
CIREIA's not the only evidence of that.
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Other home investors have recently made a specialty of preventing foreclosures, Modglin and Wilson said.
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"There's an enormous amount of opportunity here," said Wilson, now the treasurer of CIREIA and president of IREIA, the new statewide group.
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"Anytime you get violent swings in the market, people pull out of stocks," Wilson said.Faced with a decision of where to invest, many people choose real estate, he said.
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When Wilson started investing in real estate, he spent three or four hours every night educating himself on issues like insurance and setting up corporations.
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It's a far cry from the days of meeting to discuss toilets and cockroaches, said Matt Griffith, who serves with Wilson on the IREIA board.
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