If you’re looking for investment real estate in Fort Collins, you’ve hit the mother lode. This page is considered the ultimate guide to searching for and learning about buying investment properties in Fort Collins.
First, we have several different searches for identifying different types of investment properties in Fort Collins. Click on the link to jump to the part of the page that is most interesting to you.
- Distressed Properties (may be “motivated” or “discounted”)
- Multi-Family Properties (good for buy and hold, “house hacking” and your first Nomad™ property)
- The Least Expensive Properties By Bedroom (find possible rentals)
Plus, we have a bunch of additional resources for people looking to get involved with investment real estate like:
- Class recording on How to Get Your First Deal Done
- Class recordings on our real estate investing podcast
Distressed Fort Collins Investment Real Estate
If you’re a fix and flip investor or handy and looking for a property that may be “distressed” or have a “motivated seller” then you may want to look at the Fort Collins properties listed for sale in another form entirely.
We can search inside the MLS to identify potentially discounted properties that we can purchase as investments. We do this by searching for a number of specific keywords to see if they appear in the MLS listing. The following are some custom searches to try to identify properties that might be deals for you. Properties often appear in more than one list of searched properties.
Fixer Uppers
One type of potentially discounted property are properties that need work. The following properties are for sale, in Fort Collins and have the word “fixer” in the MLS description.
Show Fort Collins Fixer Uppers Property List
Motivated
Looking to find a motivated seller? These properties have the word “motivated” in the MLS description.
Show Fort Collins Motivated Property List
Tender Loving Care aka TLC Properties
When real estate agents describe properties that need some work, some say the property needs a little “TLC”. So, we can often identify these properties by searching for the abbreviation “TLC” in the MLS description. Here’s any properties currently listed for sale in Fort Collins with “TLC” in the description.
Show Fort Collins Properties Needing TLC List
Damaged Properties: Flood, Water, Fire, Smoke, Hail and Other Damaging Agents
Look for properties that have damage as another possible opportunity to find Fort Collins investment-grade real estate investments for fixing up. Maybe you want to buy a discounted property that has flood damage. Perhaps you’re OK with finding a property that has fire and/or smoke damage. Maybe, just hail damage. Regardless of the type of property you’re looking for, this search will show the properties in FoCo that have the word “damage” in the description to try to identify ones that might have flood, fire, smoke, hail or other damage to them so that you can buy them at a discount to fix them up and get a deal.
Show Fort Collins Damaged Properties List
Abandoned Fort Collins Properties
Occasionally… albeit rare… a property will be listed as having been “abandoned”. For that reason, we have the following search of properties with the word “abandon” in the MLS description. However, you’re more likely to find properties that use the word “abandon” in another way that will give us false positives for actual deals here. But, just in case, here’s the list of properties with the word “abandon” in the MLS description.
Show Fort Collins Abandoned Properties List
Properties Needing Repairs
Another word that identifies possible properties that need of repair: “repair” itself. The following are Fort Collins properties with “repair” in the MLS description.
Show Fort Collins Properties Needing Repairs List
Handyman Specials
These properties have the word “handy” in the MLS description to try to capture properties listed as “handyman specials”.
Show Fort Collins Handyman Special Properties List
Fort Collins Meth Properties
It takes a special type of real estate investor to want to deal with a full meth remediation on a property, but if you happen to be that type of investor up for the challenge this list is for you. The following list of properties has the word “meth” in the MLS description to try to identify possible properties that have been contaminated with “meth”.
Show Fort Collins Meth Properties List
Multi-Family Investment Real Estate in Fort Collins
Some investors are looking to buy duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes. Maybe because they want to “house hack” or maybe this is your first property as a Nomad™.
Owner-occupants wanting to buy duplexes, triplexes or fourplexes can even buy these multi-family properties with nothing down VA financing (if you’re a veteran) or with 3.5% down payment FHA financing if you’re willing to move into the property. If you not moving in, you’re likely looking at 25% down payments at a minimum for the multi-family property conventional financing.
The following are properties described with the word “plex” in the description to try to capture all the multi-family properties available for sale in Fort Collins.
Fort Collins “Plex” Property List
Or, search for a specific type of “plex” in Fort Collins with these special searches:
Least Expensive Investment Real Estate in Fort Collins
A down-and-dirty, easy way to look at properties that might make a good rental in Fort Collins is to quickly look at the least expensive properties for sale for each bedroom count. In other words: the least expensive 1 bedroom units, the least expensive 2 bedroom units and so on.
The idea is that rent is largely driven by the number of bedrooms, so finding the least expensive properties with a set number of bedrooms, you can see the ones that are likely to have the best cash on cash return on investment. You can use this as a first-pass search to identify possible good cash flowing rental properties. Of course, once you identify a possible rental, you should use a deal analysis spreadsheet like the one we provide to fully analyze the property.
The World’s Greatest Real Estate Deal Analysis Spreadsheet
Search Fort Collins Investment Real Estate by Cash on Cash Return On Investment
If you’re looking to discover deals that would make good long-term cash flowing rentals, then you’re very likely analyzing the properties for Cash on Cash Return On Investment when you do your analysis with the real estate deal analysis spreadsheet.
Don’t you wish there was an easy way for you to essentially analyze all the properties listed for sale and sort them by the ones that have the highest Cash on Cash Return On Investment? Well, there is, but it requires that I do some work on my end to set it up when a client needs it.
Search Fort Collins Investment Real Estate by Likely Discount
If you’re looking for discounted properties in Fort Collins that you can buy that are below their current fair market value, the question becomes how do you determine that?
One way is to compare the ratio of property taxes to the list price. Why does this work? Since property taxes are an estimate of what the property may be worth, we can look at the ratio of the taxes (one measure of property value) to the price (another measure of property value) and look at the properties that have favorably ratios.
No sure-fire, 100% accurate way exists to determine which properties are under-valued, but when I did a study of fix and flip deals, this turned out to be the best way to identify which deals were actual fix and flips.
Again, this method requires that I do manual work on my end, so I only do it for clients.
How to Get Your First Deal Done
I’ve been teaching real estate investing classes in Fort Collins since 2003 for the Northern Colorado Real Estate Investor Group. You can attend our live classes in Fort Collins for free.
Each week we teach a different class topic covering every area of investing from analyzing deals and asset protection to partnerships, property management and tenant screening and everything in between.
In the recording, “How to Get Your First Deal Done”, Brian tries to teach every class all in one two-hour class, but it gives you a really good overview of the investing process and what to expect trying to buy investment real estate in our local market.
IMPORTANT NOTE: We usually require that people register here on this website to view this and some of the other videos, but I wanted to make sure you had access to this one. There are well over 100 different class recordings like this.
Real Estate Investing Podcast
Most weeks we record the real estate investing class we hold in Fort Collins.
And, most weeks we publish the class recording to our Nomad™ Real Estate Investing Podcast (available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and all your favorite podcast websites).
We typically keep a sampling of some of the more important classes for beginning investors up all the time on the podcast.
Plus, we rotate the four most recent class recordings (which can be anything from very basic info to extremely advanced real estate investing content). Once we add a new one, we remove the 5th oldest and put it in the vault for clients of my real estate brokerage to access as a special perk for them buying and selling properties with us. There are well over 100 class recordings in the vault for clients at this point.
Check out a list of some of our real estate investing classes.