Exchange This Old House
For A Hilton Head Rentals Villa

Let’s say you’ve decided to sell your old house for a lump sum of cash. The question then becomes, what am I going to do with the money once I get it? There it sits in your bank account.

If you’re like me, your biggest fear at that point is some version of the following. “If I don’t put at least some portion of this money to productive use, it’s just going to end up being frittered away.” As we all know, one of the biggest “fritterers away” of good money is Uncle Sam.

Another option is trading your old house in for a better piece of real estate. Tax-wise that has some distinct advantages as part of a 1031 exchange. We discussed the mechanics of the 1031 exchange in the “Sell It” section.

So let’s just lay the mechanics aside for a moment and talk about the other half of the exchange. What do you want for a trade-in on your old house? To answer that question I can only share with you what I wanted. You’ll have to decide what’s right for you.

I’m sure you noticed that this section doesn’t have a subtitle. I struggled to choose a subtitle for this section. I considered a number of possibilities:

• “Hilton Head Vacation Travelogue”
• “How I Fell In Love With Hilton Head, South Carolina”
• “Northern Boy Finds Roots in Old South”
• “Diary of a Real Estate Buying Retreat On Hilton Head, South Carolina”

Let’s delay that decision to the end of the story. Then I’ll let you pick the one that’s right for you.

What’s the first word that pops to mind when you hear the phrase, “out-of-state real estate investment.” More often than not the word is “speculation.”

You may have heard horror stories of people who invested in “Florida swamp Land” or were taken to the cleaners by some clever operator. Yes, there are potential dangers in any investment. But if we close our minds to everything it blinds us to genuine opportunity when it does come knocking. It’s one thing to be skeptical. It’s another thing to be pig-headed or paralyzed by fear.

Especially today, when real estate is depressed in so many areas, it is worth our time to expand our geographic horizons. We should be open to pockets of opportunity wherever they may be found. Such pockets do exist and with a little help you can find them.

After all, when you stop and think about it if you’ve ever invested in the stock market you’re doing the same thing, aren’t you? You’re trusting someone in a distant place to do what? You’re trusting them to provide you with information on which to make an intelligent investment decision. Why should it be any different with real estate? Especially if you do your “due diligence” research.

A classic example is Hilton Head ocean front rentals in Hilton Head, South Carolina. I’m giving this to you in what may be an unexpected format. I don’t want to bore you first thing with a bunch of tables filled with facts and figures. There’ll be plenty of time for numbers later on.

For now, I’m just going to tell you a story. This is my story -- my diary if you will -- of a recent weekend I spent evaluating the purchase of an ocean view condominium -- the Hilton Head rentals -- in the sunny South. The setting was Hilton Head, South Carolina on the Atlantic seaboard I was looking for a 1031 exchange.

I was helped along the way by some very hospitable islanders I traveled over 3,000 miles from my home in Oregon to attend a guided tour of this property. But, I didn’t walk into it blind. I gave it a lot of thought and study ahead of time. But I share this story to get your mental wheels turning. I hope you will think outside the box -- the box in this case being the place where you live.