Atlanta Real Estate Investors Alliance Blog

The April 2014 Edition of The Profit Newsletter is available for download just in time for our Atlanta REIA Main Meeting on April 7th. The Profit is an digital, interactive newsletter for new and seasoned real estate investors delivered as an Adobe PDF file to read on your PC, Mac, Smart Phone, iPad or other mobile ready devices with a PDF reader. Many of the articles and ads in The Profit contain many hyperlinks you can click or tap to visit websites, watch videos, listen to audios, download content, send emails, comment on articles, share socially and much more! The high res version of The Profit is “print ready” for those who want to print the newsletter on their home or business printer. Also, be sure to Subscribe to The Profit Here so you don’t miss a single monthly issue.

See The Profit Archives for our past editions.

Read More→

Are you interested in finding wholesale deals at will? Do you have all the deals you can buy and sell? Are you interested in finding hot deals no one else can? If so, then you need to be at the Atlanta REIA Meeting on the 7th where I will be the guest speaker.

My name is Rock Shukoor and marketing has become one of my strong suits and I am very proud of the results I have produced over the years from most of my campaigns. At the Atlanta REIA Meeting, I will be showcasing my guerrilla marketing skills and show you how to find at least one deal a day. 

Yes, that’s right, I said ONE deal per day! I will show you at least 7 ways to find 7 great deals in 7 days and sell them to cash buyers who are always on the lookout for new deals. Your job is to find great deals well below market value and find a cash buyer to purchase them from you for a little more.

When you get good at finding great deals, finding cash buyers will be the easy part since we are now moving into a seller’s market. There are more cash buyers now than there have been in the past few years. The hedge fund companies are buying everything they can get their hands on and are helping create inventory shortage. Local investors and out of state investors that are looking for properties in the metro Atlanta area are not able to find enough great deals because all the low hanging fruit is being bought up quickly. This is where your marketing knowledge comes into play. Read More→

This month I decided to share with you my thoughts about some types of property you may want to avoid if you plan to maximize your profits from the deals you do. I have personally bought several of the houses I now recommend you think about not buying. I believe buying any of the following properties will definitely give you a financial seminar you really don’t want to take for numerous reasons.

I have taken a few of those financial seminars and I can tell you that you don’t want nor need to go there and make the same mistakes I have made. For those just getting started in the business these examples are a must for you to know so you don’t buy houses that will be extremely hard to sell or rent.

This is a two part article for April and May. 

Houses in Area’s with Many “FOR RENT” signs.

Any house located in an area with many For Rent signs leaves little hope of selling to a family who wants to live in that area and can qualify for a loan. Too many renters in any neighborhood will many times run out the families with small children who can qualify for a loan that want to buy. Read More→

I know when folks are getting started in real estate investing it’s easy to treat it like it’s a hobby. And it might be for some – especially if you have another career and investing is a side business. But with Wholesaling, you need to treat it like a job and a business, because it is.

Buying rental real estate is a great way to earn passive income and we should all strive to earn as much passive income as possible in our lives. But there is nothing passive about Wholesaling. It’s work and that work needs to be taken seriously. That’s why you need to be a “Pro” when it comes to your Wholesaling business, or else it probably won’t work out for you.

A “Pro” or Professional does the work and takes it seriously. And more than likely a “Pro” is consumed by striving to be successful. To use a football analogy, think about Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, those guys are “Pros”. They are consumed by winning and being the best. They wake up and eat, drink, and sleep football. They game plan meticulously with their coaches and teammates. They watch game film. They practice their plays, over and over and over. They are focused on learning and getting better. They are role models and leaders for their teammates because they are usually the hardest working guys on the team. They put in the time it takes to be a “Pro”. Would you agree? Hopefully you know who Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are. Read More→

Last month we discussed presenting offers. This month, we’ll talk about the next step which is follow up; the fourth in our five steps to success. There are actually three times when you’re going to need to follow up so we’ll discuss each one.

The first is when you’re dealing with a prospect after you prescreen them, which means, that it’s a yes on the property information sheet yet we’re not ready to complete a deal today. This means this prospect should be followed up on because a lot of these will be converted to deals at a later date if you do the follow up, which I will confess, most won’t.

The second type of follow up you’re going to need is on the hot prospects where they say yes now and now you’ve got a few things you’ve got to get done to get it under contract.

The third type of follow up is the follow up after you get them under contract. Follow up is such a neglected portion of the steps that are required to make money in any business. If you will master this, you’ll make a lot of money where a lot of folks won’t and you’ll find the deals that you do get will go better because you took care of the details along the way. A small detail left out can create a large problem, and has many times prior. Honestly, most people have no system whatsoever to do the follow up; they rely too much on memory and therefore issues come up that really could have easily been avoided. Read More→

Recently I wrote about private lending and how you can work with other investors to profit together. However, the same can be accomplished with investors that might not have ever considered real estate. In fact, they may be someone you never even knew had the funds to invest in real estate in the first place. The more you let others know about what you are doing as a real estate investor the more opportunities may present themselves. Real estate investing is a sales position and the number one rule of sales is ABC, “always be closing!!”

Everyone always says to have your elevator pitch ready and I have to agree. No matter where you are or what you are doing you should always try to bring up what you do. I have learned that most people are intrigued with investment real estate, especially when they see tons of reality television shows about it nowadays. Usually bringing it up is effortless because most people who do not know each other ask the other what they do for a living. Be ready to answer all the questions and have business cards ready. As you tell the group what you do you will see some of the people’s interest increase as you speak. Make sure to give everyone a card but when you get a moment take the people that showed the most interest aside and set up a meeting. Your chances of finding more investors, whether they are buyers or lenders, will increase the more you do this. Read More→

Time is the most important part of our life that we can never get back. When I started as an Investor back in 1998, I worked a full time job as a legal secretary, was married with 2 children ages 2 and 6, a step-son age 20, and worked part time in my real estate career. Time Management was very important to me as I needed to be able to earn 1 year’s salary before I was able to quit my job and work a full time real estate career. Just like most new investors, we attended numerous boot camps to sharpen our skills and take that leap of faith into the real estate arena. I chose this article about time management because I do a One Day Safari with my individual students by coming to their own home to evaluate how they are spending or wasting their time and how can I help them improve their production in addition to reviewing multiple other marketing and business systems to move them forward.

As I write this article, I need you to “act as if” I am sitting in your home, evaluating your production and asking you, ARE YOU WASTING TIME? The most important part of your business is to make sure that you have a designated workplace separate from all of the noise and interruptions of your life. Well? I tried having my office upstairs so I could keep track of my children when I quit full time…that didn’t work. I had a private phone line and a business line set up at my home. When the business line would ring, I used to grab the phone no matter what time of the day it was. I was hungry for a deal! After trying this for a couple of months, I decided it didn’t work because as soon as I would get on the telephone the kids would always want something and I literally would have to run into the basement or my bedroom and lock the door. However, the kids still followed, knocking on the door and wanting something! Even though I was working full time as an investor, I had to put my kids in day care and/or work around their schedule (i.e. naps, bedtime). I decided it was best that I would set up my office in the basement. I got tired of running to the office phone for deals, so I decided to work normal business hours 9 to 5 p.m. However, if you hunger for deals, you may want to answer the phone every time it rings, day or night. Read More→

As if there isn’t enough to do, real estate investor, contractor, business owner, host to my video blog and busy husband, father and grandfather, I’m adding new books to my list of activities.

Finding the time to write has been challenging with a wife in graduate school, five children and two grandchildren to keep up with. I figure my next full book will take me a good year to write.

For those of you already connected to REIAComps , the control and feeling of confidence you have over your deals is priceless. Using REIAComps to investigate the value of houses as they come to market, against other less reliable sources is a no brainer.

But back to the book, the title I am thinking of is something like “How to Add Value to a House, which will represent responses to repeated questions I’ve had over the years and is more of a “what to and why to” rather than a “how to”.

It will talk about the specific renovations you should target; it talks about why some areas of a house are valued more than other areas. It will actually be about how to maximize the potential of any house you are renovating. Read More→