If you are on your way to making a fortune through house flipping, you need to have strategy and tactics for making good deals:

1. Save means earning. Investing in real estate is always beneficial and you’ll never experience a fault as real estate rarely loses its value unlike luxurious cars or jewelery. The higher the real estate price is, the more you can earn while flipping. Take this for granted.

2. Maintenance and renovation. Make the newly bought house an ideal place to live and spend time. of course, you may neglect this step and sell the house without doing necessary maintenance but this reduces the market value of real estate and considerable lowers your income while flipping.

3. Get a professional advice. If you save money on property inspectors you may lose important issues that you could then put forward while advertising your property. Professional assessors are read to value your house and give you legal acknowledgment of your house condition.

4. Set average price. Do not overestimate the house you are going to sell as this may turn out to be a pricy offer no one will lay his/her eye upon.

5. Impove the interior. Anyway, the most attractive will be a house that is equipped with modern furniture and a few items that make a house a real home. Spend some thousands on this and you will earn three times more after the house will be sold.

6. Mind the location. The surroundings mean a lot and if you are going to make a fortune out of flipping you are to think over the possible high revenue location and infrastructure.

7. Prepare quality advertisements. This is the most essential part of real estate flipping as how you prepare your ads and what facilities you are going to stumble upon mean that you either sell it for several thousands more or ten and higher thousands. You should know what your potential buyers are seeking for and compose such ads that will definitely satisfy even a sophisticated buyer.

8. Monitor the real estate market. Every day you are to look through hundreds of offers and be ready to dig into the details as well as pretend as a potential purchaser and call the sellers to find out more. Flipping doesn’t mean just buying and selling but also analyzing and rectifying.

Following these simple practical tips will definitely be of use to anyone interested in real estate flipping. Do not forget that the greater part of success is in your hands and your unique and innovative approach to any activity you are involved in.

Bankers, developers, a lawyer and real estate agents allegedly worked together to defraud TD Bank of $3.8 million in bogus mortgage loans. The alleged scheme ran from 1998 to 2000. Police claim two brothers, Kam Cheung Chan and Patrick Chan, enticed their victims to invest in two condominiums.

Police said the Chan brothers had victims fill out a mortgage application but didn’t ask for any money up front, waiving the down payment.  Bank employees who were allegedly in on the scam made sure the mortgage loans sailed through. Then the suspects kept the cash. The thieves were apparently selling parking and storage spaces, not condos, for about $300,000 each.

Unsuspecting investors were promised a cut of profits when the properties sold. But they never got a penny. “Sometimes they were recruited off the street or at investment seminars,” Ellis said. “You have to realize these people were … unsophisticated (about) real estate transactions.”

Five suspects face 135 charges. Canada-wide warrants have been issued for two more suspects.

The TD Bank at Weston Rd. and Finch Ave. provided the funds for the mortgages. Bank officials blew the whistle on the case when problems arose with the accounts.

Kelly Heckler, spokesperson for Toronto Dominion, said the bank has re-evaluated its security measures. “We have long since tightened our procedures. We reviewed what happened and how it happened. But for security reasons I am not going to get into details.”  Heckler wouldn’t say whether the stolen funds were recovered.

Patrick Chan, 61, of Richmond Hill; Lascelles Williams, 36, of Pickering; Saquib Majeed Baig, 38, of Markham; Steven Mucha, 53, of Toronto; and Roland Williams, 70, of Mississauga face fraud and other charges. They are scheduled to appear in court on Feb. 25.

Canadawide warrants have been issued for Ling Ling Cho, 45, of Markham, and Kam Cheung Chan, 54, of Mississauga, who are also wanted on charges of fraud.  It is amazing the scam ran for such a long-time, great to see this one taken down.

The purchase gives Amsterdam-based ING Real Estate, the world’s largest property fund manager, control of a company with assets of about 1.6 billion euros across the Netherlands.  The seller, Dutch pension fund Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP, will receive a 365 million euro stake in two ING property funds.

KFN’s properties have almost 600,000 square metres of space, are 94 per cent occupied and attracted interest from 14 companies, ING said. The company’s 10 biggest tenants include PricewaterhouseCoopers, Vodafone Group PLC and the Dutch government and account for more than a quarter of rental income.  Looks like another positive move my ING.

The roads aren’t great and driving standards aren’t high. Property prices are usually quoted first in euros, then British pounds, then Bulgarian leva. Domestic buyers are not the prime target. The country, part of the European Union since last January, is hungry for foreign investment and with a little promotion and some hard work it just might get it.

As of Feb. 1, Toronto home buyers will pay a new fee to the city in addition to the existing provincial land transfer tax. It will nearly double the tax bill for home buyers, raising the tab on a $375,000 home to $7,575 from $4,100. Housing unit sales were up approximately 21 per cent in the GTA in the fourth quarter, compared with 7 per cent in surrounding areas, according to data from the Toronto Real Estate Board.

The strong fourth quarter helped the Toronto market shatter previous sales records in 2007, according to data released by Royal LePage. The average price of a two-storey detached home in the city hit $506,900, up 8 per cent from last year. The price of a detached bungalow rose 8.9 per cent to $413,375, and that of a condo unit rose 10.4 per cent to $280,505.

Two years ago a two-storey home in the city averaged $461,282, while a bungalow went for $362,611 and a condo unit $242,202. After the current wave of buyers subsides, both price gains and sales should start to decline. Let’s just hope the decline is not too steep.