Tampa Real Estate Investors Alliance Blog

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You want success, right?  That’s essentially the purpose of any kind of training. However, It doesn’t matter how much “how to” you absorb, it will not cause the result you want – which is the achievement of a specific goal or milestone.  How much action are you putting behind what you learn?

Let me say something to all of you out there trying to get traction in real estate investing and haven’t been able to do it yet. First I want to state the obvious, Don’t Give Up.  But now I have to give you some cold, hard facts.

The only difference between the few successful people vs most other people out there is the amount of TV you watch.

I know that sounds funny, but it’s true.

9 out of 10 people WASTE the most valuable asset they have, which is time. You can’t ever get it back, and the minutes you’re taking to read this is an investment in your future. Time spent watching worthless TV is robbing you of your life.

Part of this mental preparation is understanding the disciplined principal that you can’t always give in to mental candy, which is what TV (and music) are.  You have to lessen your donuts, i.e. the mental candy of TV and frivolous music or you can’t achieve anything. Read More→

Over the last two months we discussed Step #2 of “Determining Your Marketing Plan in 7 Easy Steps” which was to “Determine Your Market”. We broke Step #2 down into 2 parts which were to determine “Who and What is Your Market?” and “Where is Your Market Place?” This month we’re going to move along to Step #3 which is to “Determine Your Marketing Methods”.

Webster defines a “method” as a careful or organized plan that controls the way something is done. Coming up with an organized marketing plan is exactly what the 7 Steps are all about so we want to put some careful thought into the methods we will use to get our desired results.

In Step #1, you determined how many leads you need to achieve your personal and business financial goals. In Step #2, you determined who you want to market to and where you want to market.

In Step #3, you need to determine what marketing “methods” you will use to promote your real estate investing business to your desired prospects in your market area so you can generate your desired number of leads each and every week/month to reach your financial goals. Read More→

I recently had a telephone conversation with one of my students who asked me what I thought was going to be the next best strategy to use to do more deals in 2014. My student is thinking the market is making a real come back. He is very excited because he is seeing house prices starting to go up, house sales are increasing every month and he had just been told by a traveling Guru that the market has huge profit potential and the market is headed back to 2006 price levels just like it was before the crash.

I can truly appreciate his bright eyes and positive enthusiasm. This student is someone who spends time and money constantly in seminar land listening about the latest niche that will be the next million dollar method for investors to create wealth. I must admit that some of the most recent strategies being pitched could, if done using thorough research and use the correct paperwork could be profitable. My problem with all of these new strategies…. Most of these new strategies aren’t really new. Many have been around for years. The problem, many new investors quickly bore with each strategy as they hear about the next great money making idea that is making investors wealthy. Most of these new strategies will require large sums of money to learn and implement. As market conditions continually change another will soon appear and the investor is again quickly off in a different direction without perfecting the last. Read More→

Buying and rehabbing distressed properties can be a lucrative business but it can also be risky. Rehabbing and flipping often generates quick checks but may also take some upfront cash to get the deal done. Here are some tips for rehabbing property with seller financing so you keep more of that cash in your own pocket.

If a property is in need of repairs or it won’t cash flow at that price the seller is asking then you may have difficulty getting a bank loan for the deal. Get the seller to finance the deal. Create an offer that will give the seller the price they need but only if they will carry back the loan on the property in a first position mortgage.

If a seller will carry back the loan then you will likely need to pay the asking price or close to it. Your offer must create value for the seller. The majority of the time when a seller carries back a note on a property they are usually more concerned about the price they are getting than the terms of the loan. This can be in your favor. Create an offer that is close to or at full price but with an interest rate and terms that will allow for small payments and bigger cash flow. One example would be making a full price offer with interest only payments. The full amount of the loan would be due when you sell or refinance the property. The risk here is that you don’t pay down any of the loan amount but it would be much easier to cash flow. This works well if the market is appreciating quickly. You can cash flow the deal and then flip it in a few months for a big check. Read More→

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→

Did the title of the article get your attention? I thought so. Money does love speed. Money in general loves speed. That means getting off your “you know what” and putting in to action whatever it is that needs to be done in your business (and in life). And the faster you do it, the more likely you are to be rewarded for it, financially. This will be one of my resolutions for this year – act with more Speed.

Let’s face it. You’re not getting any younger, the clock is always ticking. And, the sooner you realize the inherent value of speed, I promise you this; the more seriously you take your goals, the more urgency you will build into your daily habits.

Ever watched a commercial for some gadget or concept that you had thought of in the past and said “hey – that was my idea”? It may have been your idea and you should have acted on it. Instead, somebody else did and now they are billionaires. (Yep – I thought of Facebook too, but Mark Zuckerberg beat me to it).

But I’m not talking about just ideas. In general, things tend to work out better when you act on it faster. I don’t recall ever succeeding at something because I got there last.

Naturally, I’m going to relate this concept to Real Estate Investing, where Speed = Money. Because Money loves Speed. Read More→

Every once in a while, I like to take a close look at my business to make sure I’m still reaching my full income and personal potential. Hopefully, you do the same from time to time, because it takes diligence to maintain success for the long haul.

Students of mine know that if something isn’t working well, it means one of three things: their business is underfunded, underexposed, or undermanaged.  This basic principle hasn’t changed since I started investing in real estate in 1997.

But how you meet that third requirement – adequate management – has changed a lot, because one of the keys to good management is the productive use of available technology. And boy, has technology changed since 1997!

Do you remember when a car phone was cutting edge, but it was a huge, expensive, ugly block of a thing with a foot-long antenna. There was no texting, and that phone sure didn’t take pictures, or save documents, or keep track of my appointments, or give me directions, or, well, do anything except make a phone call. And even though I was pretty tech-savvy, I was still very dependent on low-tech solutions like filing cabinets and calculators and old-fashioned film cameras. Read More→

By this time, most people are at least aware that mortgage banks were less than honest in how they created and sold mortgage backed securities over the last 15 years. It has driven a lot of negative sentiment towards the banks since the housing market crashed in late 2007, but very few people have a clear understanding of exactly what the banks did. That is completely understandable because the banks set up an extremely convoluted system of fake transactions specifically to avoid people catching on to what they were doing. In this article I am going to attempt to break it down into simple terms.

As the housing market heated up in the early 2000s, investors began to invest in what are known as mortgage backed securities. These are securities that consist of large pools of mortgages. The idea behind these investments was to capitalize on the housing boom while minimizing their risk.

In order to do this, investors had to work through brokers who compiled mortgages into securities on the investors’ behalf.

The way the investors would invest in these funds was use their money to fund a trust that would acquire mortgages either by originating them as the lender, or by purchasing existing mortgages. In a perfect world, the trust itself would then be the lender or purchaser designated on the mortgage. Read More→