Real estate in KY?

Two years ago my Wife and I mortgaged our first home together. The location of our house is ruaral suburban right on the 4th hole of a golf course.
There has been alot of prime real estate development closing in tightly around us, average value of houses on an . 5 acre is around 200k.
Now a 5 acre piece of land has opened up right beside us and we were wondering about investment opps, it is selling for 180k.
Is it possible for a couple with only 50k of income a year to fund a purchase of this property and maybe build 2-4 highclass appartment buildings on it?

Or is this a pipe dream?

Let me give you a little insight.

One of the reasons we bought our property in the first instance was because it included an appartment in a seperate building. We have sucessfully kept the appartment occupied for 2 years with different tennants. Appartment life is booming in Elizabethtown, however there seems to be a niche for a more upscale setting and the location Ive been talking about is ideal. My wife and I feel that we have a more than adequet skills to take on the challenge of this proposed complex (part of her present career is housing allocation and her mother is a local HUD director). The only thing we lack is the expertise, guidance and backing.

If we do discover that we are ill-equipped to take this endeavour on, we both know that the potential proffit to be made of buying the land, then lot-splitting or just hanging on for a few years to resell at higher cost is too good of an opportunity to dismiss!

If you are simply going to rely on your income to get a loan then you will not be able to do it. There is going to be too much money to borrow and you will need to have experience with what you are doing if you are relying on future income to qualify for what you planning.

That being said, everyone has been told no that ever did something great, so if you get a business plan together and can convince a banker to go to bat for you then you might be able to pull it off.

The key to the whole thing is that you will be able to bring in more money than goes out by something that makes it worth going into business. If your returns are beat by a riskless investment rate (govt bonds) then you should not go into business. The only way you will know this is if you put together a business plan that show what you think will happen, what will be the best case, and what will be the worst case. You may want to have different levels of worst case scenario and leave out some of the really bad ones but do work them up and look at them to make sure you know what you are getting into.

Anything you can do to make things more certain will help. Finding tenants ahead of time for example will be hard but will help immensely.

Good luck if you decide to go ahead, you simply need to perservere. You can always find another like-minded investor to work with you if all else fails(one with money). If not I highly recommend getting into another smaller apartment or single family house to continue your real estate investing. You will be able to qualify much more easily if you build it a little at a time.

First you want to develope a business plan, and Incorporate. See an attorney, when your ready to explore financing. I do commerical mortgages.
You would want to get some commitments from possible renters in the area. email me and let me send you application to look over. bwebermale@sbcglobal.net