Hi,
In the last few months, I have gained interest in real estate investing and started frequenting this forum and a few others (reading, not posting). I am a 24-year old HVAC technician from Las Vegas with good credit and money to invest. However, after looking into it, I discovered that it would probably be more profitable to offer some type of product that catered to these investors rather than to invest myself.
There are thousands of investors out there who all think they are going to become rich buying/selling real estate. Thus, good opportunities are few and far between. As some say, during the gold rush, it wasn’t the gold prospectors who became wealthy. Rather, it was the guy selling them the gold pans and tools who became rich. My question to real estate investors is: what type of tool or service would make your real estate business operate more efficiently and profitably?
I think I may have a pretty good idea, but I would like to get some opinions. About 6 years ago, I became interested in stock, futures, and forex trading. I researched the topic and started to develop my own systems. However, in the long run none of these systems were profitable. The problem with liquid securities is that they are far too efficient. Profitable opportunities are reserved for those with insider knowledge or extremely complex genetic algorithms run on supercomputers. The small retail trader doesn’t stand a chance in the long run.
About 3 months ago, I gave up on trading after losing a small sum of money. I then shifted my focus to real estate. Over the years, I was able to develop quite a few indicators that were supposed to help me profit from moves in exchange rates. I took these same indicators and applied them to housing data. I found that when compared to liquid instruments, real estate data was much easier to forecast. There are simple long-term trends and cycles are extremely easy to decipher.
My idea is to create a database of real estate prices from all over the country, broken down my zip code. I will then apply my indicators to these prices in order to forecast a change in prices in that particular area. Subscribers can pick and choose certain areas and an alert will be sent to them when there is a forecasted change in direction.
Would anyone be interested in a service like this? If so, how much would you be willing to pay for it?
I appreciate your input.