Tag Archives: real estate

Why Bankruptcy?

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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.
    Continue reading →

Real Estate Going Green?

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When we were putting together the latest issue of the Real Estate Rant (www.RealEstateRant.net), Brandon recommended an article on “Going Green”!

I didn’t pay much attention to it because I didn’t realize just how much momentum the topic had gained! (So, with my tail between my legs, I must concede that he was on to something…) And because of that, I decided to write a little something on the topic with the Live Earth concert on 7-7-07.

Last night, I was watching the Live Earth concert and I was blown away by the magnitude of the event.

Plus, I learned lots of little tips that allow me to contribute my own small part towards helping the environment. These tidbits piqued my interest so I started to doing some research just to get a grasp on how big the “green” movement is.

Just go to Google.com and type in “green real estate”. There are 81,700,000 results at the time I’m typing this email… WOW!

So, why the sudden interest? Perhaps it was fueled by Al Gore’s inconvenient truth. Or maybe the rising costs of energy. Or possibly… that residents of planet earth realize that our resources are limited. Continue reading →

Flipping Homes, House Flipping: What’s The Deal?

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Flipping Homes… Flipping Houses… What is everyone flipping over?

In the past five years, you’ve obviously heard the buzz surrounding flipping homes. There’s a new TV show popping up weekly, it seems. And it’s hardly even possible to keep track of them all these days.

But, what’s the real scoop behind all the “flipping houses” buzz? And is it right for you?

In this article, we’re going to dispel some of the myths surrounding flipping homes and also give you the steps in case you want to jump in. First off… the term “flipping houses” often refers to two different things:

  1. Wholesaling, also known as “assigning the contract,” is when you simply put a property under contract and “sell” the contract to someone else, usually another investor.
  2. Retailing, or “rehabbing” is when you actually buy the house you are going to flip, do the repairs, and then sell the house, usually to an end buyer, or homeowner.

On TV, they’re showing the latter: buy-fix-sell.

There is a lot of money to be made flipping houses, but if you don’t do it right, you can also LOSE a lot of money. What you don’t see on the television show is how they find their properties, how much it costs to acquire the properties and, in most cases, the profit. It’s funny how these programs very rarely tell you HOW MUCH the person REALLY made from the deal (not the gross profits, but what they put in the bank after all is said and done). Continue reading →

Housing Bubble: Fact or Fiction?

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The housing bubble has been inflated because of the media… PERIOD!

Think about it. People watch the nightly news or pick up a copy of their local newspaper and it’s “doom and gloom” everywhere you turn!

But do you remember back a few years ago when it was “the hottest real estate market” in history? The truth of the matter is that the “housing bubble” that everyone was panicking over is more hype than it ever was reality!

If you actually take just a few moments to do a little research and come to your own conclusions, you’ll see that the media is defining our market not necessarily the facts.

Sure… no one would disagree that the housing market has slowed across much of the country and that some areas are harder hit than others. Of course, if you’re in one of the areas that was hardest hit, you still may very well be feeling the pinch. Continue reading →

Finding Buyers

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“Do NOT Make Your Buyers Feel Like Hairy Monkeys!”
by R. Preston Ely

Times they are a changin’.

Whereas in 2005 finding a buyer for your wholesale deal was as easy as Alyssa Milano in Poison Ivy II, we are now faced with a much more challenging predicament. I have personally coined this annoying situation as “Reality.”

“Reality” sucks. We all know this. Normally I can effortlessly bend it to my will, but it’s actually putting up a pretty good fight this time. You see, what I want it to do is put things back the way they were a couple years ago. A couple years ago, if I so much as sneezed I would have rehabbers (buyers) lined up around the block thinking that was a secret signal that “the deal was in,” or something. Here’s a typical scenario from “back in the day” (which was a Wednesday by the way):

Rehabber #1: He sneezed. It’s on!

Rehabber #2: Oh hellz yeah. It probably has at least $9,000 of equity in it just like the last one. I’m paying cash.

Rehabber #37: You guys are idiots. He has a cold. It doesn’t mean anything (as he secretly shimmeys his way closer to me while butting everyone else in line).

Rehabber #1: How do you have that much cash?

Rehabber#2: I refinanced my house and pulled the equity out.

Duh. Where does anyone get money from these days? Idiot. I bought my house in 1999 for $125,000,and it just appraised for $750,000. I did a 125% LTV cash out re-fi with negative amortization at .0027% APR so my payment is only $1.75 a month. They wrote me a check for over $600,000. Cool huh? Have you seen my new boat?
Continue reading →

Hard Money Loans: How to Get the Best Rates

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Whether 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 the new market: 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! Continue reading →

Embedded Commands

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by 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. Continue reading →

5 Steps to Successful Real Estate Marketing

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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. Continue reading →

Foreclosure Help – Are Lenders Stepping Up?

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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… Continue reading →