HOW TO GET A FREE HOME IN FLORIDA ...OR ALMOST ANYWHERE ELSE YOU WANT TO GO The secret of this strategy is arbitraging the difference between local and tourist rental rates. Typically, business and vacation travelers pay much higher rental prices than locals. You have only to contact an agency to find the truth of this. In Florida, for example, an especially attractive spot for visitors, it can cost a lot of money to rent a house. But as a friend of ours discovered recently, not much of that money ends up in the hands of the landlord. Our friend paid $4,000 to rent a house. While there, he made friends with the landlord, a man who lived nearby. The landlord only received $1,500 of the rent our friend paid. The rest went to middle men. Houses in that part of Florida sell for about $100,000. So, here's the obvious strategy. Buy the house and use your connections to rent it out. All you have to do is to run ads in specialized travel magazines...in your local newspaper...or in foreign travel and lifestyle publications to reach tourists visiting the U.S. Here is how the numbers work. You pay $100,000 for the house. Just to keep it simple, borrow the money from your local bank...maybe using a home equity line on your dwelling. You might have to pay about $12,000 a year to pay off that loan. But look, if you can rent the house for just three months of the year at $4,000 per month -- you've done it. You've got the house FREE. Plus, you have free use of it nine months of the year. Or perhaps you could rent it for another couple of months and make a profit of $8,000. Or maybe you'd rather lower the rent to get a more steady tenant...and be content to acquire the property FREE over the period of the mortgage. We have used the example of a house in Florida. But it could be almost anywhere you'd want to go. Because if you would like to travel somewhere, chances are, others would, too. The only hitch is that the place must have a two-tiered rental market that you can take advantage of. In top, prime resort areas, the local rental rates and the tourist rental rates tend to run together. In that case, you'll be lucky to get enough in rentals to cover the mortgage. But in many, many places...you will be doing your fellow tourists a big service by letting them rent your property at two to three times the going local rate.