Author Archive

About the Fast Track To Wealth Seminar on Jan 24, 2015 with Ron LeGrand

Posted on January 3, 2015 by

From the desk of Ron LeGrand…

A Day With The Master
To Discuss America’s Perfect
Home-Based Business

This Recession Won’t Last, And When It Goes,
So Will The Best Chance In Your Lifetime For An Average Person To Get Rich In Florida Real Estate

If you’re not making obscene amounts of money in real estate right now, you’re missing the best opportunity of your lifetime to get rich. This recession has opened doors for both beginning and seasoned investors, the likes of which I haven’t seen in my 30 years, and I hate to think most people will sleep right through it… and it does not require money, credit, experience or a license to get started.

Why Is This Important To You?

It’s simple! If you don’t take action now and get on the bandwagon, the greatest opportunity to create wealth on The Fast Track may pass you by before you even know what happened.

Ron LeGrandMy name is Ron LeGrand and I’ve set aside a full day on Saturday, January 24th, 2015 from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm (registration starts at 8:30 am, class at 9:00 am) to share these secrets with you. You’re invited to attend if you truly want to make this year your best year ever and let this recession make you rich. I call this all-day seminar The Fast Track To Wealth and the title says it all. Click here to Register Now!

But Who Am I, And
Why Should You Listen To Me?

I am the world’s leading expert in quick turning residential real estate and Dustin invited me to spend the day sharing how I make millionaires.

Over the past 30 years, I have bought and sold over 2,500 single-family homes, and still do 6-12 every month now on auto pilot with less than 2 hours a week of my time.

I tell it like it is, and those who follow my system make a lot of money, some become millionaires. I show people the real business of buying and selling real estate with little or no money or credit and how to build a fortune quickly with my time-tested, proven and trademarked techniques.

Here’s A List Of The Sessions Covered
At My All-Day Fast Track To Wealth Seminar

Session I. Making Big Money With No Money Or Credit

Read More→

Subordination

Posted on December 5, 2014 by

This technique will be used frequently and is one of my favorites to make a property easy to fund. It simply means the seller will take back a second, allowing you to get a new first to cover down payment and other costs.

The big advantage is it sets the stage for you to negotiate a deal that’s easy to fund because you can borrow the first at a low LTV making a hard money loan easy to get.

Example:

Seller wants $1,000,000 for an apartment complex that needs $100,000 in work. She owns it free and clear and fixed up and rented, you feel it’s worth $1,800,000. Seller says she’ll take $100,000 down and the balance within 24 months but will subordinate to a new first and take low or no payments or interest on the $900,000 second.

Purchase price $1,000,000
Down payment $ 100,000
Seller second $ 900,000

New hard money 1st $300,000
Less down payment -100,000
Less rehab costs -100,000
Cash to you $100,000

Financing structure
New 1st $300,000
Seller 2nd +900,000 – no or low payments
$1,200,000

Your exit is to buy, fix and refinance with a good, permanent loan, or sell. You should be able to get a $1,350,000 loan (75%) or more and pull out cash once it’s stabilized. Read More→

Why I Still Teach

Posted on November 11, 2014 by

“Tell Me, and I Forget; Teach Me, and I May Remember; Involve Me and I Learn” ~ Benjamin Franklin

I just finished a very successful Quick Start Boot Camp here in Jacksonville, and I remember why I keep teaching. We had people from all over America and a couple Canadians, and even a Brit in the class of 175 students.

On the first day, I called for all who were doing deals to stand up and then invited them to the front of the room as a group. Frankly, I was shocked at the number. You see, quick Start is where people get the basic training to start their business, not usually where more seasoned veterans hang out. Oh, we always have some returning for a refresher, but I had about 50 people stand and come forward this time, and I asked all to tell a little about their businesses.

The numbers were staggering. A few were seven figure earners. Some built sizable businesses and a couple had become trainers. All my children. All starting from a point of ignorance. None taking no for an answer. Here’s another quote from old Ben… “We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
Read More→

Follow Up and Close the Sale of a Lease Option or Owner Financing Deal

Posted on October 7, 2014 by

Okay, we’re almost at the end of our series of articles on how to get through the entire process of buying and selling on a lease purchase, ACTS or owner financing deal. The last two steps in our process are to follow up with your buyer to get them to the closing table, and set up the closing so you can actually get it down and collect the final check.

Alright, so let’s assume that to this point you have been out into the market place and attracted prospects to call you and have found one or more that have enough money to get your attention. Now, you’re ready to move forward. In our case, we try to find 2-3 prospects, and, of course, the ones with the most money rise to the top quickly. Unless they get screened out from something we discover about them, they usually win the battle.

Once they are located and they have seen the house, now it’s time to get an oral commitment from them that they want it. Then, it’s time to do your due diligence prior to setting a meeting. When we put a lease option tenant buyer in a house or sell it with owner financing, there are a few things we want to see in the form of a report. That list is a credit report, a Megan’s law report for sex offenders, a background check, a criminal check, a debt-ratio report, and proof of income. Read More→

Constructing and Presenting Offers to Buyers

Posted on September 8, 2014 by

Last month, we talked about locating buyers and finding out if they had any money and/or credit, which is the definition of prescreening them. In this issue, the next step is getting them to the point to where you have a meeting of the minds and collect a deposit so you’re only a few days away from either lease optioning it to them or selling it with owner financing. Of course, this is assuming that our exit strategy is either lease purchase or seller financing. If it’s not and your intent is to cash out with a qualified buyer, your mission is to simply determine that their credit is good enough, which is usually a credit score of 620 or better, and/or their debt ratio is good enough and they have enough down payment to satisfy FHA or the lender’s needs. This is done by putting their application in the hands of your mortgage originator and letting them come back to you and tell you whether they will qualify or not. Once that’s done, on these cash buyers, it’s just a matter of setting up an appointment with the loan originator and letting him get the application and take it from there.

But in the case of seller financing or lease purchase, now it’s up to you to be the loan committee, and to do that you’ll need to have collected the facts and then have the meeting, get the commitment and set up the closing; we can do this all in one meeting. Before you call a meeting with the potential buyers, you should know how much money they have to put down, what they can afford per month and what their credit score is. Of course, all these numbers have to be satisfactory to you. Once you have arrived to the conclusion that you like this potential buyer, you then set the meeting. This is where you will determine if they have any more to put down and if you can get any more per month from them, and make sure there’s nothing about them that turns you off so bad you do not want to move forward. Read More→

Pre-Screening Prospects

Posted on August 7, 2014 by

Last month we talked about locating prospects, meaning buyers, and discovered that the two main ways we do it is, putting out signs and running ads on sites like craigslist. This month, we must discuss how to pre-screen those prospects when they get to us so we can determine the difference between someone we should work with and someone we should ignore.

We must start by deciding how we are going to capture these leads as we generate them. They will come in two forms: 1. Phone Call 2. Online. The first thing we must do is figure out how we are going to take the inbound calls. We use PATLive. Here, you have the choice of either having them taken live, or driving them to a voicemail box and just leaving enough information for you to decide whether you want to call them back. And here, my friend, is the key to pre-screening. The goal is to collect enough information to determine if they are worthy of your time. We’ll come back to that in just a minute.

If you use a voicemail system, check with PATLive on what’s called an IVR, Interactive Voice Response system. They can now set it up so the machine can ask several questions from your buyers without any human intervention. You might note, this is how we receive all our leads that we drive in from the radio at Global Publishing. A voice recorder handles all of the information and does a couple of upsells before they even get off the phone. This use of the IVR has changed our industry and now PATLive can make it available for you as a real estate investor. Read More→

Selling Houses Fast

Posted on July 7, 2014 by

In our last several issues we covered the entire process of buying houses step-by-step. Going forward, we’re going to cover the process of selling houses, but they include the same five steps, which are:

  1. Locating Prospects
  2. Prescreening Prospects
  3. Constructing and Presenting Offers
  4. Follow Up
  5. Close Quickly

Fortunately today, locating prospects to buy houses from you is almost free, and, in fact, many of the things you do will be free. Here in Jacksonville, where we buy 6-12 houses per month and sell them, mostly to lease option tenant buyers, there’s only a couple of things we do. The main thing is running ads online to attract buyers to call us, and obviously there’s no cost to that. The only other thing we really do is put signs out in front of houses we have ready to sell and pointer signs in several places around the house to drive people to it. Read More→

Closing the Deal

Posted on June 9, 2014 by

Last month, we talked about follow up and got to the point where we were ready to prepare contracts and even had a dis­cussion on some of those. This month, we are going to finish the “closing the purchase” process regardless of what kind of deal it is we’re closing. That means getting a contract and, when applicable, getting it to the at­torney and letting him or her close the deal.

There are several types of deals you will be closing. The first is a lease option with a sandwich lease which you intend to stay in and then sublease out to your tenant/buyer. The second is a lease option that you intend to assign to a buyer, which we now call an ACTS deal. The third is an owner financing deal which you intend to buy and close with owner financing and stay in the deal. The fourth is an owner financing deal which you intend to put under contract and then assign to a buyer and get out of the deal. The fifth is a taking over debt subject-to deal, which you likely intend to stay in, and the sixth is an all cash deal. The only thing left is an option that does not involve occu­pancy of the house or installing tenant buyers. We’ll ignore that for the sake of this article.

In the case of a lease option agree­ment, whether it be a sandwich or an ACTS, this agreement is signed in the house, or you leave it with the seller, and they bring it to you the day after or whenever you can get them to finally put their signature on the dotted line. Once this happens, there’s nothing else for you to do except find a tenant/buyer for the property, and when that’s done, your attorney will close the tenant/buyer with the ap­propriate lease option agreement while simultaneously contacting the seller and getting anything else signed we need for our own protection. Of course, this is the easiest closing you will do because as soon as the seller signs the agreement, in effect, you’re closed. There’s no formal closing at an attorney’s office until you locate the tenant buyer. Read More→

Follow Up – Part 2

Posted on May 6, 2014 by

At this point, we’re down to the area where we’re ready to fill out a contract. And we’ll come back to that in step five after we get through the follow up step which is the next one on our list. But before we do all of that let’s talk about the other steps involved in getting to the point where we’re ready to fill out a contract. I guess the first one is knocking on the door at the appointment time you’ve set. What I usually do when they answer the door is say, “Hi, I’m Ron. I’m here to take a look at the house.” They’ll greet you and invite you in and I’ll say, “Can I take a walk through the house?” and they say “Yes” and I say “Okay, no dogs or naked people?” and then they chuckle and say, “No”, and I do exactly that, take a walk through the house.

My walk through the house will take less than three minutes because I’m not going to pick it a part and point out any obvious issues that the seller is already aware are there. If the walls need painted, we all know that, I don’t have to point it out. If the house has an odor, no sense in mentioning it because there’s nothing the seller is going to do about it. Regardless of what the situation is, you do yourself no good by making the seller feel small because of the issues that are readily apparent with the house. The best thing you can do is walk around, take a look, shut up, and get to the next step.

The next step, in my case, is I always simply ask the seller, “Do you have any questions?” If they say yes, I’ll answer them as briefly as I can and go on to the next step. Be careful here, when you answer questions, your goal is to answer them briefly, not get in to a teaching seminar. The worst thing you can do for yourself is get diarrhea of the mouth. Your job is to get in the house, get the job done, and get out of the house. You’re not there to make friends. You’re not there to have a fireside chat. You’re there to answer questions, get an agreement, and leave. And believe me, the seller wants you out of the house probably worse than you want to get out of it. So when you ask questions, answer them briefly, shut up and move on to the next one until they’re out of them. Read More→

Follow Up – Part 1

Posted on April 8, 2014 by

Last month we discussed presenting offers. This month, we’ll talk about the next step which is follow up; the fourth in our five steps to success. There are actually three times when you’re going to need to follow up so we’ll discuss each one.

The first is when you’re dealing with a prospect after you prescreen them, which means, that it’s a yes on the property information sheet yet we’re not ready to complete a deal today. This means this prospect should be followed up on because a lot of these will be converted to deals at a later date if you do the follow up, which I will confess, most won’t.

The second type of follow up you’re going to need is on the hot prospects where they say yes now and now you’ve got a few things you’ve got to get done to get it under contract.

The third type of follow up is the follow up after you get them under contract. Follow up is such a neglected portion of the steps that are required to make money in any business. If you will master this, you’ll make a lot of money where a lot of folks won’t and you’ll find the deals that you do get will go better because you took care of the details along the way. A small detail left out can create a large problem, and has many times prior. Honestly, most people have no system whatsoever to do the follow up; they rely too much on memory and therefore issues come up that really could have easily been avoided. Read More→

Presenting Offers – Part 2

Posted on March 10, 2014 by

Okay, now we are out at the house. Next step is to ask the seller if you can take a quick look around, and do just that. I don’t spend more than three minutes walking through the house, taking a look at it. Please do not make any com­ments if you see anything wrong with the house. You’re not there to downgrade the house. You’re there to either buy it or lease option it, and you don’t do that by upset­ting the seller. I’m sure that most sellers are clearly aware that their walls need painted or whatever you see, they can see as well.

Once you’ve looked around, the next step is to ask them if they have any questions. You’d be surprised what happens when you let them do the talking and you not doing the seminaring. Simply ask them if they have any questions. If they do, answer them shortly, to the point, but simply enough so that anyone can understand them.

If they don’t, then the worst thing you can do is start rambling off at the mouth and create questions by trying to deliver a real estate seminar. If they don’t have the questions, don’t answer the ques­tions. If they have the questions, answer the questions. Read More→

Presenting Offers – Part 1

Posted on February 10, 2014 by

In our last article, we talked about Constructing Offers, so now we have to decide how to present them. The first step is to decide what your offer’s going to be. If you’ll remember, you can either lease option the property from the seller, you can buy it with owner financing, you can take it subject-to the underlying debt or sometimes you can pay all cash when you’re dealing with FSBOs.

You make this call by looking at the math on the property information worksheets as we discussed last month and deciding what your exit strategy is going to be. Are you going to stay in the deal or get out of the deal by flipping it on an ACTS?

Your next step, when you can get a YES on the property information sheets, is either: I will sell for what I owe, I will lease purchase, or I will con­sider monthly payments. Then it’s time for you to pick up the phone and call the seller to verify the facts you have are correct and to have a preliminary negotiation of what the seller has in mind. This is where scripts are very important, and you must get to the bottom line as to the seller’s true intent before you can make an appoint­ment. Many people who are new in the business go ahead and make the appointment without being clear about whether the seller’s really motivated or not. And, even if they were sometimes, it’s not clear what we’re going to do when we get there even if the seller is motivated. So, before I go any further, let me back track just a hair. Read More→

Constructing Offers

Posted on January 4, 2014 by

Once the seller is called by either you or your virtual assistant using our property information sheet, the prospects will come at you in one of four categories:

  1. they’ll be free and clear
  2. there’ll be a mortgage with lots of equity
  3. there’ll be a mortgage with a small amount of equity, or
  4. they’ll be over-leveraged

All prospects will fall into one of these categories.

So, now our job is to look at the property information sheet and figure out what to do next after we receive this information. In this lesson, I will go through each of these and provide the script for you to make the call with the information sheet in your hand.

Let’s start with free and clear houses. You’ll know they’re free and clear because the seller will tell you that when you ask, “How much do you owe?” Once you have this information, you have a prospect that will either give you a “yes” answer or a “no” answer to the owner financing question on the right side of the property information sheet. If it’s a yes answer, it’s a prospect. If it’s a no answer, it’s a suspect. If the seller will not take their equity in monthly installments, this is a dead deal unless they answer yes to the lease purchase question. If they do say yes to monthly installments, it’s now just a matter of calling them and verifying the facts you have on the property information sheets, assuming you weren’t the first to talk to them in collecting the information. When you make that call, there’s a script you can use to determine which of the two categories they fall into: Read More→

Prescreening Prospects

Posted on December 6, 2013 by

In our last issue, I dealt with Locating Prospects by using a virtual assistant to call FSBO ads. I said that’s pretty much all we do here and can’t keep up with the leads they generate. This month we’ll discuss how to determine if it’s a suspect or a prospect and quickly determine which need to be called and which need to be trashed.

It all begins with my Property Information Sheet. It’s also located in my courses. This form is the heart of the pretty house business. It’s as important to an investor as food is to a restaurant. (Nope, I couldn’t write this without a restaurant reference.)

There are several things you must know before you can prescreen a prospect. Until you get these facts, you can’t tell if it’s a deal or a dud. Many try and wonder why they are confused. You’ll always be confused without the critical facts. Read More→

Locating Prospects

Posted on November 6, 2013 by

Last month, I said we were going to spend the next few issues going through an ACTS or Sandwich Lease Option deal. The first step is locating prospects, and that’s what we’re going to cover here.

Actually, this is one of the easiest steps in the multiple steps of getting through a deal and getting your first check. Today, my team does nothing but call FSBOs to get more leads than we can handle, and in fact, recently have added more manpower because we can’t cover all the leads we get from calling the ads that sellers run online and from some off line sources as well.

Now, when I say my team, that’s actually one virtual assistant (VA) calling For Sale By Owner ads she finds online on a handful of websites. She does the research to find the websites like Craigslist and a few other sites where For Sale By Owner ads are run in our city. Then she calls them and fills out the property information sheet located on the Gold Club under Resources/Forms and Agreements. And in fact, you’ll also find a 17 minute video there under Training/Residential Real Estate/Lesson 74 where I went through the property information sheet with the purpose of you sending it to your virtual assistant to train them on how to properly fill out the form. Read More→

How to Get Your First Check, Step-by-Step

Posted on October 9, 2013 by

Several members have asked me to lay out the steps required to get your first check with a detailed description of each. That’s exactly what you’ll get, but it’ll take several editions to get it done. You may want to copy these lessons and build your own manual as we go.

Here are the steps all in one place to do a simple ACTS or sandwich lease option deal, which is the fastest way to get a check for $5,000 or more. But, before I go there, you may want to take the shortcut and order my Control Without Ownership course where it’s all in one place with everything you need from beginning to end. It sells for $997, but if you call 800-567-6128 and ask for the Mentor discount, you’ll get $200 off. The hard truth is, if you don’t, it’ll cost you many times that amount.

Okay, here we go… Read More→

7 Deadly Mistakes You Can Avoid – Part 3

Posted on September 6, 2013 by

(This article is continued from Part 2 in the August 2013 Edition of The Profit Newsletter.)

  1. Lack of action. There’s an old saying that goes “Even a turtle won’t get anywhere until he sticks his neck out.” Another old saying (that I made up) is “You’re never going to get rich sitting on your behind and waiting for it to come to you.” You have to make it happen. You have to get things started. You have to put the wheels in motion. And if they get stopped, guess who has to get them started again. You guessed right.

    Movement, action, activity, progress… they’re essential in any successful business. Without activity on your part, nothing positive will happen for you. It starts with that first call, that first conversation with a seller, even the first visit to a Realtor. But your ship can’t come in if it never gets launched.

    By action, I don’t mean running in place. Sure, you can go to the seminars and listen to the tapes so often you memorize everything I’ve ever said. You can acquire all the tools you need to do this business. But then the time comes to fish or cut bait and you find yourself standing by the creek bank watching the water flow by. My friend, all the education in the world is worthless until you put it into practice.

    The best time to start is now. And I mean right now. I want you to get up after you’ve finished reading this newsletter and do something that will get you going on your first deal. Call a Realtor for leads. Call a couple of sellers in the classifieds. Drive around looking for FSBO signs, or place your own “I Buy Houses” ad in the paper. Just Do It. You’ll be surprised how taking a tiny step will propel you forward towards your goals. You see, any one action on your part can produce a result. Of course the more actions you take, the more results you’ll get. Read More→

7 Deadly Mistakes You Can Avoid – Part 2

Posted on August 6, 2013 by

(This article is continued from Part 1 in the July 2013 Edition of The Profit Newsletter.)

  1. Listening to poor advice. This is something you probably already know. As you go through life, there will never be a shortage of people who want to give you advice. Your parents, your spouse, friends, in-laws, kids, they all have opinions about what you’re doing and what they think you should be doing. Very often, the value of their advice is worth exactly what you paid for it . . . nothing!

    I’m not saying these do-gooders aren’t honest, intelligent and well-intentioned. However, you must ask yourself, are these folks qualified to give you advice? Have they had any experience in what you’re doing? It seems to be human nature for people to offer advice on subjects they know nothing about. What baffles me is how often the recipients of this so-called wisdom will listen to it and even act upon it without ever questioning the credentials of those giving it.

    Through many painful experiences, I’ve learned that when you take advice from people who don’t know any more about the subject matter than you do, the quality of that advice is, at best, suspect. Plus, very often, listening to unqualified advice can have a negative impact on your focus (see roadblock #1).

    So, who should you be listening to? I believe in taking advice only from people who are: Read More→

7 Deadly Mistakes You Can Avoid – Part 1

Posted on July 5, 2013 by

Over the last 23+ years, I’ve known many investors and entrepreneurs. I’ve seen every possible scenario, from overnight success to plodding, sit-on-your-butt-and-do-nothing failure. I’ve known people who would get off to a great start, and then fade away, and some who would piddle around and never seem to get anywhere. I’ve known those who made a very successful living and even a few who became super wealthy.

Is there a magic formula for success? I wish I could tell you there was. It could have saved me a whole lot of headaches over the years. And having the copyright on that formula would have made me an awful lot of money. Unfortunately, there’s no more magic in being successful than there is in anything else worthwhile in life.

However, from years of experiencing my own successes and failures, as well as witnessing those of others, I have identified a few mistakes that can short-circuit an entrepreneur’s rise to fortune. I’ve compiled a list of the most common roadblocks you’ll face on the road to becoming a successful real estate entrepreneur.

Now, you may be one of the fortunate few, and never find yourself faced with any of these problems, and that’s great. More likely, you’ll recognize parallels in your own situation in what I’m about to discuss. My goal here is to put you in a position where you can identify these pitfalls. Then, when you encounter them (and you will), you’ll be armed with the ability to direct yourself around them and get back on track . . . immediately. You won’t have to worry about these things hindering you from achieving your goals. So, let’s dive in and go down the list. Read More→

GET-ER-DONE!

Posted on June 10, 2013 by

It amazes me how some people, most in fact, who have the same amount of hours in a day, get so little done. I’ve always had a hard time understanding why people intentionally waste time and live an unproductive life. Most people are just hanging around waiting to die. Every day is the same, more or less, and a whole lifetime is spent doing or accomplishing not one darn thing worth remembering.

Not me brother. The older I get the more valuable each of those days becomes and I’m fully aware none of us are getting out of this life alive.

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re not one of those folks I’ve just described, but I bet you could make a list of those who are. Some will have your last name perhaps. If you get this week’s lesson, you paid for it, which by itself tells me you’re looking for a more active and productive lifestyle. Kudos on that decision.

It’s hard for me to understand why some people can’t get one productive thing done in a whole day. Personally, I’d rather be snowed under than bored. Never could understand how people can lay on a beach all day and do nothing. Not me bubba!

Okay, Ron, what’s the secret to getting so much done? Are you superman? Nope! Not even close. I’m a 65 year old, overweight auto-mechanic. I’m no genius. I barely got out of high school, no college, just 45 years of working for myself and making the same stupid mistakes I see people make everywhere I look. Read More→

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