Abandoned Properties - Money-Making Secrets

May 29th 2007 Posted to Abandoned Properties, Distressed Properties, Finding Deals, Marketing, Ugly Houses

Reggie Brooksby Reggie Brooks

Listen in as Heather Seitz interviews Reggie Brooks

When I began my career as a real estate investor in 1985, I stumbled across a little known area of real estate that had the potential to make us a ton of money. This was an area of the market that went unnoticed by most people. This was the area of abandoned properties.

How To Profit From Abandoned Properties

You might pass these properties on a daily basis, but just never paid much attention to them. You could be passing up hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits! These are properties that the owner has walked away from for whatever reason. It could be a divorce situation, an illness, a death in the family, a job relocation, or any number of other reasons. Do we care why? Absolutely not! Don’t waste your energy trying to figure out why sellers do what sellers do. (more…)

Hard Money Loans: How to Get the Best Rates

May 28th 2007 Posted to Financing, Frequently Asked Questions, Hard Money

Hard Money LoansWhether you’re a seasoned real estate investor or brand new to investing, you will – at some point in your career – need to turn to hard money!

Many people turned away from hard money except on the REALLY UGLY properties for much of the early 2000s or if they had pretty beat up credit. This was because conventional lenders were giving money away for all intents and purposes! Virtually anyone – first time home buyer to seasoned investor – could get 100% financing on their properties and it didn’t seem to matter how many properties one had!

Well… welcome to 2007! The “conventional” lenders (like Chase, Indymac, Countrywide, etc.) have tightened their reins, and for good reason!

Before we go into how to get hard money, let’s talk about some of the pros and cons of hard money versus conventional financing! (more…)

Embedded Commands

May 21st 2007 Posted to Foreclosures, General, Interviews, Negotiating, Short Sales

Bill Twyfordby Bill Twyford

The key to success is knowing how to communicate with others. Whether you are a real estate investor, work at a fast food restaurant, or are a doctor, without good communication skills people won’t like you. Have you ever met someone and didn’t like them, but didn’t know why you didn’t like them? They just “rubbed you the wrong way.” Subconsciously you did not like their communication skills. My goal is to teach you to master your communication skills so that you can have others eating out of the palm of your hand.

Sounds good, where do I begin? Embedded commands. What the heck are embedded commands? Embedded commands are patterns of language that bypass conscious reasoning and speak directly to the subconscious mind. Embedded commands influence people at the subconscious level. This allows you to direct people to take specific actions.

Our subconscious mind is in a constant search for patterns. Using one embedded command at a time is not a pattern. You have to basically, bombard your customer with command after command to get what you want. Our conversations have become so routine that our mind has virtually fallen asleep. Our subconscious mind runs on auto-pilot. (more…)

5 Steps to Successful Real Estate Marketing

May 21st 2007 Posted to Finding Deals, Foreclosures, Guerrilla Marketing, Industry Trends, Marketing, Real Estate Market

Direct MailThere are essentially 5 steps to being successful in real estate marketing. Before we go into the 5 steps of real estate marketing, I want to encourage you to become a student of marketing. The moment that you are able to find your own deals - on demand - the more money you will make! It’s a direct correlation. When I started out in real estate, I didn’t understand how to “really” market for deals. I was depending upon real estate agents, local real estate investing groups, etc. I did a lot of deals, but I realized I wasn’t making the kind of money I knew I could in estate.

Follow these five steps to successful real estate marketing and you’ll be on your way to filling your own funnel full of five-figure deals.

  1. Define Your Target Market:
    You must be focused… If you run in too many directions, focusing on too many real estate markets, you’ll always be skipping around, never getting ahead. You need to learn overcome objections; you need to know how to handle the different situations that arise. Once you master one market, then you can duplicate your system across market after market. For instance, you may choose to start working with foreclosures or out of state owners. Once you get the real estate marketing system in place for one, add the other. Then, you can simply duplicate it over and over again!

    The single most important thing to remember is that you MUST target motivated sellers…. PERIOD.

(more…)

Foreclosure Help – Are Lenders Stepping Up?

May 07th 2007 Posted to Finding Deals, Foreclosures, General, Industry Trends, Personal Thoughts, Short Sales

ForeclosureThe real estate industry, or more appropriately, the mortgage industry is facing daily changes. As you probably know by now if you’ve read the newspaper or watched television in the last three months, the sub-prime mortgage market has made some huge changes… Second mortgages are quickly going by the wayside in exchange for loans with mortgage insurance, which is now tax deductible*.

If you do the math, even with PMI, loans often end up costing the borrower less than the hybrid loans of recent years.

But… the changes affect the new loans, not the existing mortgages with which sellers are facing foreclosure in record numbers. And this is the major reason the real estate market has flat-lined, depreciated, or ____________ (fill in the blank with your market). Let’s face it… homeowners got bad loans and the mortgage industry was getting wealthy. So, let’s not feel too bad for the lenders :-). They not only did it to themselves, but to homeowners and investors. Have you ever heard the saying, “Pigs get fat… hogs get slaughtered”? (more…)

Getting Started in Real Estate: Finding Focus

May 03rd 2007 Posted to Business Structure, Finding Deals, General, Personal Thoughts

Goal Setting for Real EstateBefore we get into the nuts and bolts of your real estate investing business, it’s important to start with some basic goal setting! Yes, I know that it’s no fun but it will help with your mindset and will get you focused on the right track.

Let me guess, you’ve read a book, bought a home study course (or 2, or 3 or even more!), or just got back from a 3 day “bootcamp”. Your mind is spinning with ideas and you want to do everything and you want to do it right away. I can relate. I left my first training years ago and wanted to:

I got home and tried to do all of these things all at once. I sent letters to people in foreclosure. I bought a subscription to a data service to market to private mortgage holders. I drove through neighborhoods looking for abandoned homes. I worked morning, noon and night and ran from house to house chasing anything and everything. I desperately wanted this to work and I desperately needed a real estate deal ASAP! (more…)

Real Estate Investing Tips: 5 Key Components

May 02nd 2007 Posted to Business Structure, Finding Deals, Real Estate Market

Real Estate Investing TipsReal Estate Investing is simple, but not necessarily easy!

This past weekend, I attended one of the biggest Internet Marketing seminars in the world. I could go on and on and on with ideas that I had that apply to real estate… like how to use video on your real estate sites, processes that can streamline the lead generation, and on and on and on… (I’ll be sharing some of these new ideas with you over the next few weeks)

But, I want to share with you a conversation that I had with a friend, mentor and a brilliant marketer who happened to be teaching how to use audio and video on your websites… I told him that I recommended his program to several people because he makes it SO easy… Then, he said something interesting to me that made me think.

He said, “Heather… it really is simple. You see, people can complicate anything! It’s like telling someone how to drive a car. It’s not complicated at all. Just open the door. Sit down. Turn the car on and put it into drive. But, people always make things harder than they need to be… They start asking thinks like ‘which door should I open – the left or the right?’ or ‘Do I unlock it with a key or click the button’ and on and on we go. Twenty minutes later, we’ve still not even been able to get into the car.

I liked that analogy because it applies to real estate. There are really 5 things you need to know – or steps – when it comes to real estate.

Here are the 5 Real Estate Investing Tips you need to know! (more…)

No Money Down Real Estate - Apartment Investing

May 01st 2007 Posted to General, Interviews, Multi Units, Real Estate Events, Real Estate Market

Anthony MinnutoAttend our Tuesday Tele-class where Anthony dispells the “Other People’s Money” myths and teaches you how to Create Passive Income For Life with No Money Down Apartment Buildings”

Dial In Date: February 12th, 2008
Call In Time: 9:00pm EST/8:00pm CST/7:00pm MST/6:00pm PST
Dial In Number: 218-486-3695 / Dial In Passcode: 464526#
Notes Sheet: Click Here

There are a lot of late night TV infomercials out there saying you can buy real estate using none of your own money or “other people’s money” but what they don’t tell you is that its up to you to go out and find someone who has money and convince them to lend their money to you… and if you don’t have any experience investing in commercial real estate, it’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to find someone willing to lend you their money for you to learn.

95% of Real Estate investors fail because they aren’t able to get enough private lenders. Most new investors are never even able to get their first private lender. (more…)