This woman bought 8 rental properties, including 1 for just $1,800, in 'America's most unlikely real-estate boomtown' — how she turned things around, plus 3 easy ways to invest in real estate

Rental properties can require a lot of hands-on labor

While Hunter paid very little for the two homes she purchased, that was far from the end of the story.

As explained in the article, she had to invest $85,000 in renovations for the house she bought for $2,000 to ready it for renters. On the second house, purchased for $1,800, she spent $130,000 to convert it into her office.

Hunter also moved to Detroit permanently and became a real estate agent last year to further her business efforts. She takes a risk by funding the cost of the renovations on business credit cards. She spends time carefully researching neighborhoods to find good properties and is cautious in choosing contractors.

She also spends more upfront now to buy her properties, but far less to renovate them. She looks for houses that she can turn around quickly and spends around $5,000 to $10,000 to fix them up.

“At this point, I focus on things I can turn over pretty quickly, such as cosmetic rehabs,” she said. “I look for homes in the $80,000 range, because you spend less on repairs.”

While her business has been a success so far thanks to this hard work, she also has benefited from a major turnaround in Detroit's real estate market. The median sales price was just $58,900 in 2009, according to Realtor.com, and the city became the largest municipality in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy in 2013, which didn't help matters.

Investors like Hunter swept in and took advantage of low prices on properties, helping to usher in a revitalization that has helped push the median sales price up to $250,000 as of May 2024, per Realtor.com. With a meteoric rise in home values, investors will obviously have an easier time making a profit than in markets that are more stable and not prone to such big price increases in such a short time.

Barely a decade after it declared bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal stated Detroit is emerging as “America’s most unlikely real-estate boomtown.”

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Passive methods of making money on real estate

Not everyone wants to sink thousands of dollars into rehabbing homes or deal with the hassles that can come with finding contractors, managing a renovation, finding tenants and collecting rent.

For those who want to invest in real estate without turning it into a full-time job, there are plenty of safe and easy alternatives. Some options include:

• Investing in real estate investment trusts (REITs), which are publicly traded trusts that own many properties and pay out profits from the rent in dividends to investors.
• Investing in crowd-funding platforms that allow you to select projects like rental properties or land parcels and pool your money with others to own a small stake.
• Purchasing exchange traded funds that give you exposure to the real estate market, either by doing things like pooling money to buy interests in many REITs or investing in businesses operating in the real estate industry

Each of these options allows you to get the benefits of exposure to real estate without personally having to try to collect rent, contract with handymen or do the many other tasks necessary to own property of your own.