One of the best places to start when building a real estate portfolio, is knowing what areas are the best areas to invest. The answer is "it depends." It depends on why you are investing. Are you looking for long term appreciation? Are you looking for cash flow. Rarely do you get the best of both in the same area.

In a nutshell, we want to make sure we are going into an area that has a strong market for cash flow or appreciation. We gather information from several economic services that we subscribe to as well as read many magazines,  newspaper articles and anywhere else we can find information about what is happening in a market. The best way is to actually go there ourselves and investigate, which we do frequently.

Once we are confident that we have found the right area, we want to make sure we are buying the right properties. How do we do this? We call as many property managers as we can find and ask them what is happening in their market. What properties are in demand? What areas should we stay away from? Who are our tenants going to be? Where do they work?

Once we know the best place to invest, and the type of properties that are going to be in demand we can then advise our clients on an individual basis as to what is best for them, based on their goals, timeframes and risk tolerances.