On Wednesday, July 20, Shonda Novak wrote a piece for the Austin American-Statesman some of you might have seen, "Central Texas Existing Home Sales up 9 Percent in June; Median Price Still at $205,000." I think I've made it clear I'm a big proponent of education for real estate investors, which includes scanning the relevant news. (Seriously, if you haven't looked into a news reader for your smartphone, take the time to do it.)

While the headline on this piece pretty much says it all, there are some things from the text that are worth pointing out. We are bucking the national trend here in Central Texas and Austin specifically. Now, that's not to say the market is completely out of danger, but Austin is a big draw city -- for retirees, as we pointed…

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Earlier this week, I happened to catch a report on ABC News about the retiring Baby Boomer generation. I was already aware of the statistic that every day for the next fifteen years or so about 10,000 Americans will turn 65. These are the post-World War II babies who just refuse to age. Now that they're facing retirement, they're going to do it their way.

As the report went on, the statistics started getting pretty interesting, especially from the standpoint of real estate investing. About 42% of the Boomers say they plan to move when they retire, and of those, 49% say they're willing to go to another state. Then the cork popped out of the bottle. What's the number one Baby Boomer retirement destination?

Austin, Texas.

Yep, we have…

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You don't have to flip too far back in history to figure out that hard times bring out the scavengers. In fact, you could probably just look at yesterday's paper. Get-rich-quick schemes are as old as we are. I suspect there was some cave man running a seminar to instruct his fellow Neanderthals on finding the best cave dwellings as investments. "Pay your three woolly mammoth tusks and find out all you need to know!"

Scam gurus are everywhere right now, especially the ones in real estate who are going to try to tell you how to overcome market woes and turn pennies into millions. Heck, you can even find scam gurus who, for a price, are willing to teach you how not to be scammed! You know -- especially if you've been reading this blog for the past…

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Earlier this month, Andrea V. Brambila reported on the Top 10 Real Estate Boomtowns for Inman News, a leading source for independent real estate news for industry professionals and consumers. The basis for the projections about hot real estate markets as based on population estimates from ProximityOne, a firm specializing in demographics used for decision-making and goal-setting.

When all the numbers were crunched, they forecast population growth of 8.9 percent for the U.S. from 2010 to 2020. That means the country will likely have a population of 337.1 million by the end of the decade. This takes into account information from the 2010 census as well as patterns in the historical data on national birth, death, and migration trends.

The census tracked a…

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