Tampa Real Estate Investors Alliance Blog

Welcome back! In Part 1 of this article, we covered how crucial it is to have a website if you want to sell/educate/entertain/enlighten/etc. just about anything to anyone in the world in the current century. We also discussed HOW to actually get a FREE, performing website up & running quickly.

Having a free website is great! You get to put some content up for the world to see. You start to learn how to add images, videos, etc. to your site. You can get people to add comments to your site. And you can quickly gain confidence on how all this internet “stuff” works.

This is particularly an attractive option IF you don’t run a “real” business, or if you’re only concerned with sharing your thoughts or ideas with the world. So if you’re happy with that, great! You can stop reading now.

However, if you DO run a legitimate business, or if you’re interested in making money or being perceived as legitimate… or if you want to learn how a true website is made these days, then keep reading! Read More→

Howdy! As I am writing this in early October, I’m celebrating my one year anniversary of quitting my job as well as our 50^th deal, as we closed deals 48, 49, and 50 last week. We are also a couple of weeks away from our one year anniversary of our 1^st deal back in late October 2012. So as I reflect back on these milestones and the last year, I wonder how to attribute our early success. Was it luck?

Sure, you can call it luck. I’m fine with that. So let’s talk about how to get lucky. But first, let me tell you a quick story about our 1^st few deals. We started researching real estate investing and wholesaling real estate last spring (2012). We started reading some books, reading real estate investing blogs, and listening to podcasts. That summer we finally got into the game and started doing some marketing – bandit signs, driving for dollars, and yellow letters. We started going to REIA (Real Estate Investors Association) meetings religiously. The 1^st few deals we put under contract went nowhere for various reasons – bad title, priced too high/won’t sell, seller backs out – we learned a lot. We also started to get very discouraged and nervous about this working out. Bad luck right?

Then in October of 2012 we finally did our first deal ($5K) and we realized that this stuff really works and is for real and obviously gave us a massive confidence boost. In November we did (2) more deals – small deals – but we were gaining some momentum and learning along the way. With one of those deals, the seller told us they had (12) more properties they wanted to sell. So I went ahead and said we would take all of them for a good deal and wrote up a purchase contract for all (12) – $275K – and we had to close within a few weeks. Crazy huh? Crazier yet was that the next week we got (2) more deals under contract that had to close within a few weeks (before Christmas). We had done (3) deals in our entire lives and now we had (14) deals that we had to close on. Would you consider that lucky or just us being freaking nuts? Well let’s find out what happens next. Read More→

More people are becoming millionaires today than ever before in the real estate business. So what makes these wealthy entrepreneurs so different? They chose the road to wealth and real estate as the vehicle to get there.

When choosing the road to wealth, there are some important distinctions that set the truly successful people apart from everyone else. Some of these include the ability to visualize a specific outcome, pursuit of a dream, constant motion and a relentless determination to reach the goal. Giving up is not an option. Like the saying goes, “Quitters never win; winners never quit!”

I have found in the real estate business that there are two kinds of people, the “doers” and the “wannabes”. There are truly focused folks who get up every morning with a clear and defined direction who want to make their business work no matter what it takes. They pursue their dream relentlessly and continue to grow on a daily basis, garnering all the education they can along the way to take them even further along in their business.

Then there are the people who go to seminars or buy books and tapes and do absolutely nothing with them once they get them home. I have personally witnessed this over and over again. They have one excuse after another why they can’t do this business. For them, the status quo is the easy way in any situation. Read More→

As a regular writer for the Atlanta REIA and Tampa REIA, I look forward to sharing with readers current, timely concepts and ideas regarding the valuation of real estate in many markets. Perhaps even better than sharing in these articles, is knowing REIAComps helps to quickly see how the location of your market impacts the profit of a deal year to year and in some cases, month to month.

Each month, I will share facts on local real estate statistics, market trends and provide useful tips for buyers and sellers. Additionally, I sometimes will discuss the lending process, real estate appraisals and other topics residential real estate investors can benefit from.

Now, in most cases nearly all investors are familiar with the “age old rule” concerning real estate: “Location, location, location.” Many times, the high importance of location is overlooked when examining broader national or even regional real estate trends.

In your own market, property values and selling trends will frequently differ vastly between counties, subdivisions, school districts and neighborhoods. Often there is a huge difference in home values between streets within even assumed stable neighborhoods. To prove out this point, consider the three-mile radius around your very own home. Note the variables impacting its value either positively or negatively. Some examples include the home’s proximity to traffic congestion, a school, amenities, places of worship or a busy commercial district. Read More→

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→

One of the most important rules to remember is that…
Cash Flow Starts and Stops a Business.

As my career has matured, I have realized that the best way for me to grow my business is by making others wealthy — making YOU wealthy. I want you to learn from my mistakes and enhance your life and your business. I know that you can do it with certain essentials in place.

This is why I want to share with you some fundamentals about how to get private money.

First: Qualify Them

Not everyone is an investor, and you need to know who will be the best prospect for you. Here are some qualifications to look for in potential lenders: Read More→

Recently I was talking to several of my students who each said they wanted to buy 100 houses next year. These students had listened to one of the gurus who had bought and sold over one hundred houses in one year and is now teaching people how to duplicate what he had done. I listened closely to these bright eyed, inexperienced students tell me they wanted to do the same as the guru, which frightened me to death. Later over dinner, I mentioned what I had just heard to my wife. She encouraged me to tell my tale of woe about the years of agony we experienced because I got too big for my britches and against my wife’s better judgment I had tried to do the same thing myself.

What the students were thinking about doing frightened me because several years before I thought I knew enough about buying and selling houses that I could easily buy 100 houses in a year. I thought it was a noble goal and I clearly believed I could create my fortune in months, not years. At the time the market was right to be able to buy houses at the rate of 100 houses per year. That is why I want to tell my story so every overzealous beginning investor will think before they set about to try to do the same. Read More→