北美炒房记

I have been investing in real estate heavily during the last 5 years. My conclusion is that you just need to make the decision by yourself, run a calculated risk, and profit from it.

I came to Northern Virginia in 2000 with nothing but a debt of $10K. When I was buying my first house in spring of 2001, my colleague was strongly against my idea of such a purchase as the market was already up quite a bit. Her advice prompted me to do a research on the house price and income of the county. I just found that the median income was more than $80K and the median RE price was less than $200K. I was convinced that it was a wonderful time to buy. So I bought my first house. It was a five bedroom three full bath single family house for only $267K.

Then in 2002, my next door neighbor wanted to sell theirs and move into a larger one. I bought it for $265K. As the price had already gone up quite a bit, this one had only three bedrooms and 2 full baths. My colleague called me crazy.

Then in 2003, I bought a townhouse for $300K. My colleague told me that I was “INSANE”.

Then in 2004, I bought another townhouse and 2 condos.

In 2005, I sold my first SFH for $527K which almost doubled the price I bought.
Then I bought another condo.

This year, I sold one condo for a profit of $55K, and, bought three condos.

Now I end up with 8 properties and roughly a million dollars as equity.

Right now, the market is really slow and the price has dropped around 10% from the peak of the last year. If Miat is correct and the market is going to be flat for several years, I will have the opportunity to purchase many more before the next run-up.

If you think you are correct, either in RE or stock market, just go ahead and do it- buy, sell, hold, or just wait. Do not be confused by the others’ advices.

Lots of people think that I am just lucky, but I don’t agree. I HAD KNOWN the RE market had to go up when I jumped into the RE market in 2001.


BTW, my salary is not high at all compared to the other folks in this forum.