Tampa Real Estate Investors Alliance Blog

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I have a friend in Colorado Springs who owns a bank. Several years ago I complimented him on his employee retention. My banker and I both understand that his most important assets walk out of his bank each night to go to their respective homes and that his job is to get them to come back each morning. His key to hiring great employees is to screen for proper job skills, attitude and moral code and then empower them to be the best that they can be.

Jim Collins states in his book, Good to Great, that all great companies put the right people on the “bus” and that great people will know where to drive the bus. He is saying that great companies hire the best people that they can find and then let these people “drive” the company where it needs to go in order to make the company soar. Great employers do not micro-manage or hire for specific tasks as much as empower great people to grow into their potential and be great at what they do.  Read More→

Value is subjective to each party of any real estate deal and value doesn’t have to be determined in dollars. Today people have been taught that the dollar is the only way to determine value. Let me give you an example of what I mean. When you go to the grocery store and go through the checkout lane with your chosen product that costs nine dollars, you give the clerk a twenty dollar bill; you are expecting eleven dollars in change back. This is what people today have been taught how to determine value, in dollars.

Dollars don’t have to have anything to do with value, here is an example. A lady who lives in my area was struggling financially, having trouble paying her rent every month because she was unemployed and couldn’t find work in her field. This lady was dealing with much stress because she owned property in New Hampshire that was vacant land that didn’t make her a penny. As a matter of fact, the cause of your stress was because the property taxes for her property in New Hampshire were due and she didn’t have the money to pay her property taxes. She had a real dilemma.  Read More→

When I first started in real estate, I spent over $250,000 flying all around the world attending boot camp after boot camp, learning all the different ways I could get involved in creatively buying, selling and holding real estate.  It seemed like it was always the same group of people flying around the world with me and taking the same training.  The only difference I noticed was that many of the people who had attended these trainings had never even made an offer on a property.  They never used the knowledge that they received and just kept on going to more and more seminars.  And as we all do, we exchanged business cards with individuals we met at these meetings.  At that time it was my husband, step-son and I attending all of these trainings.  When I got home from many of the meetings, I would get telephone calls from individuals who still didn’t understand the process of the training they received.  Read More→

When you are looking to make offers, remember your obligation is to the most important person in your company; the shareholder. Most often, the shareholder is you. Have your list of what a profitable deal looks like, armed with your REIA Comps information and some courage your list can be successful. 

The key to meeting your goals and having your success as an investor is a thorough understanding of VALUE.  Understanding the value of a potential investment property is the basis for profits.  Taking stock in the real estate market and learning how to properly analyze the market is paramount.  This enables you to make a maximum profit when buying real estate for flipping or reno and sale.  Read More→

“My system for staying young is to work a lot, to always have a project on the go.” ~ Carlos Fuentes

Before insurance companies started offering plug in cameras designed to improve your driving and lower your rates there was already an industry standard port. The ODB-II port is existing technology standard in most every car produced after 1996. Automatic uses this existing port, at first it would connect to a bluetooth device and was only good for reducing your gas waste habits. Hard stops and other things would be flagged and brought to your attention. The second iteration of Automatic Pro adds GPS to track your route if your smartphone is out of battery life. You will still need a smartphone and bluetooth to sync the data later. Read More→

Last month I wrote about beginner’s rules and the first presentation a person could do when looking to raise capital.  I talked about the mistakes that I made early on. I just changed the names to protect the innocent, me.

I want you to think about being able to raise private money from local sources, business people, retirees, and people who have money sitting in banks or accounts that are barely earning them a .01% rate of return.  If you are one of those people, then we need to talk.

So, picture yourself walking up to people and building a relationship. Is this scary? Is this awkward? Is this a cake walk?  Read More→

This is probably the biggest tip I tell wholesalers all the time.  When you are interested in a property, make the offer!  That’s it!

It’s such a simple tip.  See property, have interest in it.  Make an offer.  Yet for reasons continually inexplicable to me, too many investors simply don’t make the offer!

I recently sold a deal that I got seven offers on within 24 hours.  The irony is I had it at a higher price in purpose for a test I was running and no one offered on it.  When I lowered the price, all of sudden everyone was interested.  When I sold it, several of the others said ‘that was a good deal!’  To which my response was, ‘it was but you could have had it sooner had you just made the offer.’  The look on their face was shocking as if to say ‘you mean we can offer a bit less than the asking price?’

Let’s clear this up right now…  Read More→

Sure, there are reasons – good reasons – to not own rental property: tenants, vacancies and repairs, to name three.  But have you ever spent time thinking why owning investment real estate might be a good idea?

Last year, my father-in-law was rushed to the hospital with what doctors thought was a massive stroke.  When the ambulance arrived, he was taken directly to ICU where a ventilator was inserted, and to prevent further injury, he was given medicine to induce a coma.

Kim and I had to live at the hospital for several weeks.  Gotta tell you, an ICU’s waiting room is full of interesting life lessons. Read More→

Not finding quite everything you need in QuickBooks Online? Here are some handy add-on apps available.

QuickBooks Online may work for you just fine as is. After all, it was designed to meet the needs of the millions of small businesses that want to manage and track their income and expenses, create records and transactions, and run reports to gauge their financial health.

QuickBooks Online was also designed to grow along with your business. But there’s no need for Intuit to add internal features to do so. In fact, that would make it too expensive and unwieldy for many companies.

Instead, Intuit has partnered with other small business websites to provide add-ons—applications that extend the usefulness of QuickBooks Online in one or more areas, like accounts receivable and payable, inventory, and expense-tracking. They integrate easily to share data and do the extra work you need. Here are some of them to consider.  Read More→