When buying a property for real estate investing you will need to be smarter about it. You do not want to have to restrict yourself to aquiring rentals you have resources for. Many locations now have a large amount of properties with limited value. You will not be able to sell much higher than what the location brings. This is why you need to purchase at a larger discount to make a decent profit if you are doing this the old way. . Depending on your skills and the market conditions, you can call on real estate agents to give you a fair market price or you can sell the house yourself. This is where other options in the real estate arena come into play.
Buyers will begin by looking into prices in the local markets. Then, they search through property listings with the words must sell, needs work or very motivated. There are many day to day investors that use land trusts creatively to aquire property for next to nothing. It come down to this, you have to weigh your reward against the amount of your own labor spent aquiring the house successfully turned. Such is the reason strategies like wholesaling are better for down markets.