by R. Preston Ely

Have someone else do it for you.

Short sales get dealt with just like everything else in my life that even remotely smells like stressful labor; they get delegated. Outsourced. Sub’d out. Avoided at all cost. The purpose of this article is to encourage you to do the same.

Life is too short to do things you hate. Don’t you feel the same way? Did you know you don’t have to do things you don’t like? You are not a prisoner. You’re free. I spent ten years of my life doing what the world considers “real” work. I’m done. Real work blows. Who is to say what is real and what isn’t anyways?

“Reality is an illusion. Albeit, a persistent one.” - Albert Einstein

Something wonderful clicked inside my head a few years back after my dangerous escape from Cubic-Hell. It’s weird because it just evolved kind of naturally. The only way I can describe it is a complete 100% aversion to doing anything at all that I don’t find enjoyable…and the ability to actually get away with it.How to outsource all your unwanted “duties” in life is the topic of another article. Let’s focus on the subject of short sales for now. (more…)

by Mark Klee & Caryn McKinney

Answer #1: Niche Marketing = Less Competition and Greater Profits.
As a real estate investor, perhaps you’ve figured out how easy it is to be unfocused in the real estate investment business. That being the case, my partner, Mark Klee, and I want to help you understand the incredible profits available to you by doing business in a NICHE market … particularly one that MOST investors are afraid to go after … bankruptcies. It’s not brain surgery to realize that any market with less competition will also offer you greater opportunities for amazing profits!

You should also realize that if you’re NOT in a niche market, you’re fighting all the other investors for the same FSBOs, MLS listings, and wholesale deals from whatever resources you have. So why not at least check out this bankruptcy niche that most investors are, indeed, afraid to tackle?

Answer #2: Market conditions are ideal
Check out the following basic facts on our current market conditions and you’ll start to see how ideally the stage is set to work with quality bankruptcy leads.

• In many areas of the country, investors are finding greater competition for fewer deals.

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by 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…)

There 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.

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The 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…)

Before 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:

• Work the foreclosure market
• Broker private mortgage notes
• RehabRehab
• Wholesale junkers
• Send direct mail letters and postcards
• And just about everything else that I heard

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 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…)

by Vena Jones-Cox

http://www.realestatetrainingacademy.com

This one of those questions that must be answered by another question, to wit: what’s a good deal? And this is not a facetious question, because the answer depends on:

1) Your exit strategy.
2) Your financial resources.
3) Your skills.
4) Your goals.
5) The risk and hassle involved in a particular property.

So let’s say this: I’ll let you in on my favorite ways to find good deals—after I explain why they’re good deals to me.

First, let’s talk about exit strategy. If I put a property under contract, one of two things is going to happen to it. If it’s in very poor shape or out of my “farm”, I’ll wholesale it to another investor for a quick cash profit. If this is the case, a “good deal” is a 1-3 unit building that I can get under contract for about 60% of its “as is” value. The other thing I might do is to close it and lease/option it for a year or two. In this case, my (more…)

Everyone is looking for a foreclosure “deal” these days – and there’s lots to choose from these days, but be careful… just because a property is in foreclosure, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a “deal”. In fact, nowadays, it takes more time to sift through the leads to find the really good opportunities within the foreclosure market.

The more potential foreclosure properties you have to sift through, the higher your chances are for finding a deal.

The top 5 ways to finding foreclosures are:

1. Bandit Signs
   Bandit signs are plain white or yellow corrugated signs with metal stands that stick into the ground. You can find preprinted signs or you can buy plain signs and handwrite your message on the signs. Place them on corners of busy intersections or in neighborhoods in which you want to purchase a foreclosure home.

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Recently, Brandon and I were elected to chair the marketing committee at Keller Williams. The company model doesn’t include a marketing “budget” for the office. Marketing is the sole responsibility of the agents within the office to orchestrate and execute.

Despite that, agents all agree when they sign on to have $50 taken out of every closing to pay for office marketing. A decent model when listings are selling. However… when the market comes to a screeching halt and sales dip, the marketing budget dips too! We were running an ad that cost nearly $5000/month largely paid for by individual agents that wanted their listings showcased in color in the Sunday classified section once/month.So… here’s what happened! We got “elected” to the committee at the end of January. The first meeting we were able to pull together was the first week of March. In the interim, prior to having our first meeting and even recruiting our committee, we immediately slashed the ad! The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results! This is absolutely true when it comes to marketing! (more…)