Real Estate and Technology news for agents,brokers

Interviewer: We are talking with Chris Hotz today, Principal and Founder of Value Builders and Chris we are talking about buying and investing in Real Estate. A lot of people thought fix and flips are going to be a great way to go. Is that market a little bit tougher than it looks now. Fix and Flips not for Faint Of Heart

Chris Hotz: Its a heck of that lot tougher than it looks. You know a few years ago anyone could make money in fix and flips because even if you did nothing to the house, the market was driving the value up by up to 10% a year. Now you really have to add value and you really have to be careful.

Interviewer: Now what are some of those dangerous that people get into on those deals?

Chris Hotz: We see people who dont have experience who have full time jobs and dont understand how much time and effort is involved and doing the fix and flip. We come across half way completed projects all the time. They call us, they say we are in over our head. We spent too much, can you help us.

Interviewer: How about foreclosures in short sales? Is that an option and a good option right now?

Chris Hotz: You know all though value builders doesnt do a lot in the foreclosure area, we certainly run into people who are very successful buying and selling foreclosed properties but again you need to learn the business. You need to know all the ins and outs because we hear horror stories there as well. People buying foreclosed properties with leans they wanted to wear off, buying properties they didnt do their research on and ending up sitting on asset that really is worth a lot less than they pay it.

Interviewer: Chris, how many projects do you like to have going at once. I mean what fits perfect in your business model?

Chris Hotz: Well, we franchisee our business where we have 8 offices in the metro area, at any given time or franchisees can handle between one in four projects simultaneously but it depends on project sites, we have had franchisees that will just do one high end home over period of 3 6 months. We have others that do smaller remodels and they can handle lot more volume.

Interviewer: What do you say to Realtors out there who say Jesus, I really like Chriss model. I would like to work with him. How do Realtors work with these?

Chris Hotz: Here we have them go to value-builders.com [phonetic] and contact us. We get 40% of our business from Realtors and this is only the very very important group of people do us. The Realtors in Denver have a great sense for whats going on in their respective areas and we lean on him for advice on property values and they call us with stale listings, properties are having a hard time selling and so forth. So we encourage any

Realtor with any listing. They are struggling to sell to give value-builders a call. We bid, no obligation. We dont use any kind of pressure sales tactics. If we cant make the owner more money, we dont take the deal no matter what.

Interviewer: All right. Finally for Realtors and consumers, whats the hot areas in Denver?

Chris Hotz: We