7 Things You Need to Track as a Real Estate Investor

Do you have a real estate investment property?  How do you know whether your investment was a good investment?  For example, lets say you purchased for $100,000 about 20 years ago and today, the property is worth $300,000.  Was this a good investment?

In order to find out if our investment is a good investment, we need to turn all the numbers into a rate of return.  This can be quite complicated since typically we have many things going on at the same time.  Add onto the above picture the fact that those numbers don't include Property Taxes, Insurance, initial remodeling expenses or the commissions to sell the house and now we have a completely different story.

Tracking is half the battle.  Learn more about tracking at www.trexglobal.com.  If you have a real estate investment, you should have a list somewhere that tracks each and every expense from the time the home was purchased along with the date of each expense.  Here are the items to track for the purchase of the home:

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1. Fees associated with purchasing a home
2. Insurance payments
3. Property taxes
4. Repairs
5. Improvement costs
6. Mortgage interest
7. Fees associated with selling a home

Now, it is important to note that a fee of $20 15 years ago is not the same as a fee of $20 2 years ago.  A good calculation in terms of return on investment will take into account when the expense occurred.  We will take a deeper look at this in a future post.

Come back to soon to find a break down of items to track for the purchase and sale of the home.  Here is the link to the future post.

This post was reposted from http://finlit.biz/retirement-2/7-things-you-need-to-track-as-a-real-estate-investor/, originally written on January 30th, 2013.