Real Estate investing in the GO Zone

This is all possible because of real estate investing - focusing on where the big dollars are out there. What we want to share with you is the GO Zone. It's the single greatest most dynamic opportunity in real estate investing today. Dave's probably the single foremost authority on the GO Zone. Why dn't you share what it is and what it means?

Back in August 2005, you may remember this little storm that hit the southeast of the Untied States called Hurricane Katrina. There was almost $100 million worth of damage in one or two days. It was the single largest natural disaster in our nation's 200-year history.

Congress had to make a decision - were they going to simply let the place wash out to sea? Or were they going to re-build, re-develop, and re-vitalize by providing tax incentives that were unprecedented?

If it had been a small tax incentive it wouldn't have made a difference. So they offered us, as real estate investors, a 50% first-year tax write-off if we would invest in the 5 states impacted - Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

When all was said and done, however, the only three states that qualified for the legislation that they enacted, the GO Zone Act of 2005, were really Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. We had to make some choices. But we couldn't make choices about where to invest until we went down there and looked for ourselves.

So in January 2006 we landed in one of the most god-forsaken places that you could imagine because of all the devastation that had occured. We realized that one of two things was going to happen - either the place was never going to recover, or there was going to be so much government funding thrown at it that it had to recover. It was basically going to be a blank canvas that they'd be able to repaint any way they chose.

Fortunately it was the latter. And now you and I, the real estate investors, have the opportunity of investing in the next few months and meetin the deadline for the GO Zone expiration. We've got the opportunity to get the largest tax benefits we've ever had in all of our history and our previous generation's history, and be able to do it while investing in real estate.

That's what Chief and I have already done, and it's allowed us to be able to have the kind of flexibility we have here. It allows us to live where we want, and invest only where the numbers make sense.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• FlipShare