Month: April 2010

Guard Your Escrow Deposit Fiercely A wholesaler and longtime friend called me to ask if either I or any of my students was looking at two specific properties. He gave me the addresses but they didn’t strike a bell with me. I asked why and he went on to relate that he had contracts on both.  The Realtors® involved had stolen…
Read more

Have You Tried This Real Estate Marketing Strategy? Driving for dollars as a real estate marketing strategy has been the source of literally millions of deals for investors, and even buyers looking to live in these properties. Many investors have become millionaires by simply driving neighborhoods, or having bird dogs do it for them. But…
Read more

Property Inspections – Could It Be A Source of Competition? Now it’s happened twice in a short period of time so you need to know about it so it doesn’t happen to you. We have the usual players in the following deals – an investor, a seller, and a property inspector.  In the second case we’ll discuss, another investor looking to…
Read more

Distressed Real Estate Investment See How Lenders Are Trying to Change the Game It’s happening – some lenders have had it with all the stuff they have to get through to get out of distressed REO properties and are looking for answers to make their lives simpler. They are targeting Realtors® in a number of ways.  First they are in…
Read more

Getting Started In Real Estate Investing Is the Seller’s Head in the Sand or Do They Want Pie in the Sky? A student sent me an email asking about a property and whether it could be a deal. She had started prospecting for the homeowner months and months before.  He suddenly called her back. She…
Read more

Land Banking Schemes and Eminent Domain Land banking is the systematic process where a city, county, state or the Federal Government acquires land for the benefit of the public. Sounds pretty simple.  So why would there be controversy about this practice? Maybe you haven’t heard anything about it because it is often a best kept secret. It can be a best kept secret because possible…
Read more

Real Estate Wholesaling Warnings An uncommon occurrence that lately seems to be happening all too often to newbie and experienced investors is when a buyer changes the terms of the contract at or just before the closing. I know you are thinking that you have a contract so that can’t happen, but let’s look at exactly how these guys are getting away with it.…
Read more

Remote Real Estate Investors – Do They Exist? Every once in awhile I get a call from an investor or homeowner who has a property for sale and their question is almost always the same, “Will you buy it?” The issue is that the property is usually in another state. While the price may seem…
Read more

I get the question from newbies and especially Realtors® all the time, “Is it really possible to legally do real estate investing with no money, no credit and no risk?” Realtors® tend to believe that it is frankly impossible to do real estate transactions without borrowing money or having cash to close a deal. Actually, there are many ways to do deals with no money,…
Read more

Before we look at the subtleties of a traditional real estate method of calculating an offer to a seller, let’s preface this overview with where the calculation should be used. In general, there are three types of possible purchases – bank owned foreclosures (REOs), non-REOs, and income properties. For this exercise and to make it very simplistic, we’ll look at non-REOs.  These are basically purchases from homeowners…
Read more