Real Estate

All of these venues carry risk and reward, but they also have distinctive differences that set them apart from one another. The most lucrative would be to develop a property from square one, but these types of investments carry more risk and work. To develop a project from scratch enables investors to have more autonomy, which permits them to more openly express their creativity. Buying an existing property requires investors to pay a premium for the property because the initial risk of failure has already been taken by another developer. To buy into another developer's idea is also laden with risk as well as reward. Developers provide the insight, while investors, provided needed equity. This is for those who have multiple commas in the bank account but have little desire, other than making more money, to enter the real estate market. These people are usually professionals who are too involved with their own profession to spend the time that is necessary to nurture a project from its conception all the way through its evolution. Lastly, REITs are for those who do not have enough money to invest solely or frivolously but still want a piece of the profitable real estate market. Birmingham has a very credible REIT, Colonial Properties Trust, and REITs will be discussed later in this paper because of their significance to the overall real estate market. Whatever gateway is used, real estate offers an escape from the groupthink that often imprisons many conventional investors. .
             There are many ways to enter the real estate market, but there is one prerequisite to all of these: personal fiscal responsibility. Before people can make their mark in this discipline, they must commit to personal finance reform. By this I mean that potential developers must start somewhere, and that place is their own finances, in order to create adequate equity that can be invested without jeopardizing their future.