Ways to Improve Your Credit Score

by: Janna Weiss

 Credit scores are more important than ever now that lenders have tightened their purse-strings. Experts see signs of improvement on the horizon, but there are plenty of dark days yet ahead. Until the credit crunch eases, you should do everything you can to make sure your credit score will qualify you for the purchases you want to make. Here are three fast ways to improve your credit score, legally and legitimately.

First, the bad news: your credit score will not improve by leaps and bounds overnight. If you have bumps and bruises on your credit history, it will take months or even years to make them go away entirely. Now, the good news: there are steps you can take today that will prevent further damage to your score and make lenders look at your credit applications more favorably.

Become an Authorized User

It’s the old Catch-22 we’ve all experienced: You need credit to get credit. So where does that leave young adults who are trying to build their credit for the first time? Credit prospects can be bleak unless you have a family member who is willing to add you to their credit card accounts as an authorized user. If you can get added, you will reap the benefits of the account holder’s good credit history. (Just be sure that there is a good credit history to be had, because you’ll also face the disadvantages of the account holder’s bad credit history.) This arrangement, called “piggybacking”, has helped many young people establish their credit. Note that FICO’s new credit scoring model still recognizes piggybacking between relatives, but strangers who try it will get little to no reward.

Check Your Credit Report – Seriously

We all know that it’s important to check credit reports when you want to qualify for credit, but you also need to check yours regularly for fraudulent or erroneous charges. The vast majority (79%!) of credit reports contain errors. You don’t want to miss out on a new house or car just because the credit reporting agency made a mistake. Also, by checking your report on a regular basis, you can see which lines of credit have been opened in your name, giving you a chance to stop identity theft early while the damages are still minimal. You can get a free copy of your credit report at www.annualcreditreport.com. The FTC web site contains information about disputing items on your credit report.

How to Find Attractive Commercial Real Estate For Sale Using The Internet

As a new Professional Commercial Real Estate Property Scout, one of the first things people learn is how to find promising properties which could be attractive investments.  There are several different approaches, but today let’s just discuss one of the most popular.

How to Find Promising Properties Using the Internet

One of the best, quickest and easiest ways is to find commercial real estate for sale is using the power of the Internet. The reason most professional Property Scouts love this approach is they can do anytime, it’s low cost, and best of all, they can search for properties around the country without leaving the comforts of home.

What’s great is commercial real estate agents and brokers are starting to become very computer savvy and beginning to list their properties they have under contract online. Usually they upload pictures, descriptions, characteristics data and other relevant information into massive real estate listing databases.

Right now, there are millions of properties online.  Most are segregated into the following categories:


1.    Multi-Family (Condominiums and Apartment Complexes)

2.    Office Complexes

3.    Retail Properties

4.    Mobile Home and RV Parks

5.    Mixed Use Buildings and Warehouses

6.    Raw Land That Can Be Developed


The key to finding properties is knowing where to look.  And by far the easiest place and most success-certain place to look is commercial real estate listing database websites.While there are hundreds, if not thousands of these websites on the Internet, one of the most popular is one called http://loopnet.com.  Another popular one is called http://www.costar.com/.

These websites are probably the biggest, containing literally millions of properties to search through.  They have free services and they also have premium services.  Most property Scouts who are serious sign-up for the premium services.

Why?

Because one of the services you get is to be able to specific the criteria you are looking for and then as new properties are uploaded that meet that criteria, the website will alert you via email.  This especially attractive especially when you are very discriminating and have a particular profile of the type and attributes of the property you want.

You can get very detailed in your profiles also. For instance, it’s easy to search for raw land in a particular geographic area with specific qualities, with specific owner attributes, and special financing terms.  The  Property Scouts of Maverick Real Estate Investments, Inc. are trained in detail in which properties yield the most profit and which are not so attractive.

The key is to have a crystal clear profile of the type of property you want.  The more general you are the more properties will “pop up”, but one doesn’t have the time to search through hundreds or thousands of properties one by one.  

You want to be discriminating. You want to think quality instead of quantity.Once you know and understand your property profile, and once you have learned to navigational basics inside a specific website, then you can start to fully exploit all it’s features and functionality.  For instance, it pays dividends to learn how to use advanced search functions, like using descriptive keywords to find the properties you want.

Let’s say you may want look for properties in the path of progress.  One of the most certain indicators of this is having a Walmart in the area.  So you could search for “Wal-Mart” in the notes associated with a properties being searched.  Usually a smart broker will be thoughtful enough to put that in the description or notes regarding a property for sale.

Some website have lots of functions and other have rather minimal unctions.  Usually, if a Property Scout values their time, they’ll take the time to learn a specific listing website and ALL it’s functions and stick with it.  In other words, they try to become an expert within a certain website, so that they can be efficient and not let potential opportunity slip through their fingers.

The bottomline is searching the Internet for promising commercial properties is kind of like using Internet search engines.  One doesn’t have time to search through millions of them.  You want to find the ones that are most relevant to what you are searching for.

The same thing applies to finding promising commercial real estate on the Internet.

To find out more about Commercial Real Estate investing, Maverick Real Estate Investments, Inc., or the Property Scout profession, Click Here