As professional investors, we at Mission spend all of our time working hard to find property that can provide investment opportunities for our customers. Our customer base is vast and varied. We sell to the international private investor; the reseller; the aspiring investor; and the personal property investor, who invests for his or her retirement to build a dream home. We feel that investing in land can be exciting and lucrative, and can give one much more control than investing traditionally, because finding property that works for you can make you money. If it is worth something, it will sell quickly. To highlight this belief, we will showcase success stories on a monthly basis, stories about our investors and their successful investments.
Our first investor is a first-time, one-time buyer from Mission, who purchased a five-acre property in Mohave County, Arizona. Mission purchased the property for $1,000 and listed it on our standard 30-day auction site on eBay. In November 2007, our investor successfully bid on and purchased the property for $5,100. A few months later in February 2008, this investor sold the five-acre parcel for $13,000, two-and-a-half times the purchase price.
What do we know about this investor? We happen to know that he lived in the area and was probably familiar with the property. Based on the turn-around time, we know he was looking to make a quick profit. It is possible that this investor already had a buyer for the property before bidding and purchasing from Mission. It would be easy to infer that this investor was lucky, but we feel that luck didn’t factor into it, but rather due diligence. This person knew what he was doing. To him, purchasing this property wasn’t risky; he knew he could make a profit.
The next example involves two investors who are return customers. Over the past two years, this duo—perhaps a husband and wife team, perhaps just business partners or friends pooling their resources—has made six purchases of property in three counties. Two of their properties are also located in Mohave County, Arizona, and were acquired from the 30-day auction format. They have sold two of these six properties. One parcel, just over one acre, was purchased for $6,800 and sold for $10,000, netting $3,200. Another parcel, a five-acre lot, was purchased for $6,100 and sold for $16,000, netting $9,900. The first parcel happened to take longer to sell than the second one, and the profit margin of the first sale was obviously not as substantial as that of the second sale. However, the return on investment from the five-acre parcel most likely paid for the rest of the properties, putting them at least at breakeven, and with four more properties to sell.
What do we know about these two? We know that they also are familiar with the area. We know that they are patient investors, taking the time to sell the right way to the right investors as they still have four parcels left and took two years to purchase all six of them. Perhaps they buy for hobby or for longer term plans. We know that they are savvy investors, however, who are willing to wait for the best deal for them.
We haven’t heard from the investor from our first example since his successful purchase. Perhaps he is watching and waiting for that next great piece of land that works for him, perhaps he’s looking elsewhere. Maybe he’s enjoying his profit! The folks in our second example are loyal, return customers, seemingly enjoying taking their time investing. In any case, these investors made wise choices practicing due diligence. All of us have become successful investors.
Our work at Mission is not just meant for someone wanting to retire. Most of our customers are investors hoping to make a profit in a reasonabe amount of time. Stay tuned for examples of other success stories. Maybe one of them will come from you!
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