For property listings and finance details: http://www.SafeCashFlow.com Oklahoma City boasts strong economic fundamentals for real estate property investors. High local incomes, low unemployment, and affordable housing (relative to local incomes) result in safe, consistent cash flow for residential buyers. Local property management is in place for a "hands off" ownership experience. And for investors looking for financing -- either inside or outside of their self-directed IRAs -- leverage is available with terms from 50% loan to value up to 80%. Forbes magazine ranked Oklahoma City as the Number 1 most recession proof city in the U.S. at the peak of the credit crisis, in 2008. If you aren't familiar with Oklahoma City, it has a greater population of 1.3M and from the population growth perspective, it is growing at about 60% more than the national average, according to Census. I'm going to talk about that in a second. Geographically, if you don't know where it is, it is in the middle of the country, it borders Texas to the north. Oklahoma City itself is kind of like a small Dallas. In fact, lots of people who purchase Oklahoma City real estate investments have a Dallas area code. Oklahoma City is politically speaking one of the most conservative states in the country, which means two things for us as landlords: Number 1 -- economically, it is one of the easiest places to start a business, Number 2 - It is also a very landlord friendly state. It only takes up to 3 weeks to evict a non-paying tenant. So, of course, one of the first boxes we want to check as investors or landlords is how long does it take to evacuate the tenants, we want that to be very fast, and in Oklahoma City if the tenant fights you, it's not a problem to get them out to start cash flowing on your property again. Entrepreneur magazine ranked Oklahoma City as one of the top 10 best cities to start a business. It is Number 5 best city to start a business in the country, which is awesome for us capitalists! Small business drives job creation. Another box checked. Oklahoma City sits smack in the middle of the state of the Oklahoma and it is the capital of Oklahoma. As I mentioned before, population growth is strong, hence, a low vacancy rate of only 2% in our neighborhoods. According to Census, from 2010 to 2020, it is expected to grow by another 15%-16%. This is a heat map of United States, you are kind of seeing a contrast from the rest of the country. It grew by 1.5%, 1.6% in all of last year, which is one of the top growing MSA or Metro Statistical Areas in the whole country. Again, USA Today recognizing the growth of Oklahoma City. One of the most important statistics for us a landlords and real estate investors of residential properties, is unemployment. We we want to know whether there are tenants who have incomes that can pay our rents, so the unemployment rates are very important. Fact: Oklahoma City has the number one lowest jobless rate with of any city with a population of over one-million people in the whole united States. So, not only do Oklahomans make good money and high incomes relative to local purchase prices, but the cost of living in general is lower in Oklahoma City, which makes it one of the better places for the retirees to move. That means we are in front of the baby boom population that controls about 75% of the wealth in United States and that's always another box that we want to check off. Housing prices are not just affordable from an absolute measure compared to the rest of the United States, but they are very affordable compared to the local incomes and that is very important, because if the mortgage payments are low compared to what that family brings home, then you have very safe price levels on housing. If a crisis hits, because the housing payments are so low, the housing market is sheltered better than most US markets. All of the properties -- single family homes -- are in front of FHA buyers. Exit is easy with a large, growing universe of local home buyers. The debt to income ratios are very low which will bolster property values and protect against crisis. I'm seeing the houses where the mortgage payments are only 13% of their gross household incomes. Again, the affordability measure is relative to local incomes, which is more important than affordability in general. And you are going to notice that Oklahoma City prices are rising because of a surge in new constructions, where the cost is higher than resale houses. Only about the 5% of the mortgages were upside down in the Oklahoma City at the height of the credit crisis. In contrast you saw other mortgages like Phoenix, Arizona and lot of the other markets in Florida, and Las Vegas that had really high default rates because we had a lot of people that were over-leveraged.

• published: 09 Jul 2013
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