Atlanta Real Estate Investors Alliance Blog

QuickBooks provides multiple ways to get information about your customers, and their payments, and your company itself. The software’s Snapshots provide quick, thorough overviews.

What do you do when you need to get information in QuickBooks about customers or about payments they’ve made in QuickBooks? You have several options. You could, for example:

• Create a report
• Go to their Customer pages
• Click on Receive Payments on the Home Page and use the Find arrows (not very elegant or fast, but would be an easy way to find recent payments).

One of QuickBooks’ strengths is its flexibility. It helps you find the exact information you’re looking for in a variety of ways. Which one you choose at any given time depends on what screen you’re working on at the moment and precisely what slice of data you need. Read More→

To succeed at real estate investing, or business, or life, requires bone – the right kind of bone.

Because real estate investing is pretty easy to understand – you buy a house and then either sell it or keep it as a rental – lots of folks are interested in becoming investors. Want proof? Look at all the traveling dog-and-pony shows coming through town offering their “free” seminars to a “select few.”

We get lots of calls from would-be investors who’ve attended one of these get-rich-quick-snake-oil events. Most actually believe that real estate millions can be acquired by working only thirty minutes a week and without meeting face-to-face with sellers. That’s like a doctor trying to build a successful practice having office hours from 9:00 to 9:30 a.m. and without seeing any patients. Crazy, right? Read More→

The best statement about real estate is “Don’t wait to buy real estate. Buy real estate and wait.” by T. Harv Eker. Understanding the current market allows Buyers to maximize their ability to evaluate properties, receiving the highest value in their home search, and, Sellers to position their property to maximize money in their pocket while minimizing time on market.  

Real estate is a supply driven market. When supply is less than 6 months, (currently 3.7 months), it is a seller’s market, a market condition that started in 2012. With fewer listings on the market, median prices rise, and sellers get a higher percentage of their asking price.

The number of sales, or, demand has increased this year after 2 flat years while the supply remained low. All these are indications of an improving market. Distressed properties are a negligible portion of overall sales, further reducing their negative affect on market prices. Those changes caused improvements on measurements that were already strong. The medians of sales price, sales price to list price(S/L) ratio, and days on market (DOM) were greatly improved. Read More→

The majority of veteran real estate investors are quick to share the good but rarely share the bad and or mistakes that comes with investing in real estate. When things are going great you will feel like you can do no wrong. You’re purchasing the majority of your leads, all the renovations are coming in on budget and/or your homes are selling with very few days on market. The truth is, if you invest long enough you will encounter some of the bad experiences all investors before you and after you will experience.

My most recent mistake could have been avoided but I gave one of the sellers a bit too much trust. This one particular property took an entire year to close. There were about 33 heirs that needed to sign off on the sale of the property. Most of the heirs were cooperative but there were a few that refused to sign until the other 29 people signed, claiming they did not want to waste their time. While there were 33 heirs only one person lived in the home. He seemed like a good guy who was just down on his luck so I agreed to let him stay in the home past closing so he could use his profits to relocate. Read More→

Your career in real estate is like a marriage. If you let it get boring, you’re going to make mistakes. If you don’t build it on a solid foundation, it will fall apart. In both cases, you might just lose a lot of money!

So how do you keep things new in real estate? You challenge yourself to be inspired; you stay eager to learn new things.

Do I follow my own advice? YES. Recently I took two real estate courses, and I am renewed. I am excited! These classes will help my success, and I want to share the information with you so that you can be inspired too.

In fact, in my weekly groups, I work with people like you who want to succeed. I can help you by sharing what I have learned in classes and from experience. Read More→

In this series of articles I am going to teach you the art of using Master Lease Options to purchase real estate. I don’t know how many articles it will take to convey all the info I have…so stay tuned!

A master lease option (MLO) is a form of creative financing most often used to deal with distressed assets. I buy and teach commercial multifamily real estate so these articles will be about “master” lease options. If you are investing in single family deals then you would use a lease option. The “master” part only comes in when you are dealing with multiple units at one time otherwise it’s a lease option. You can use the info I am going to teach here to buy single, multi or any type of real estate asset.

A master lease options is simply a document or contract that you will use to control the operations and the future sale of a property without actually owning it. Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Master lease options are done in the real estate business all the time by people who know how to do them. The agreement is made up of two separate contracts, the master lease and the purchase option. Combined they form a master lease option. These two documents should always be kept separate. I will go into more detail on that in future articles. Read More→

The last several months have been huge for real estate investors and homeowners who are fighting back against the banks. Court case after court case has been decided in the homeowners’ favor, and things are only looking better going forward. JPMorgan Chase has just been ordered to pay an additional $48 million in fines for using fabricated documents and now we find out that since 2014 the banks have been buying rescission insurance. But what does all of this mean for real estate investors?

In November of 2012, the president of DOCX, a subsidiary of LPS, pled guilty to producing over one million fraudulent mortgage assignments to be used in foreclosures. In many of these cases, the assignment was created to “prove” that a trust had acquired the mortgage on which it was trying to foreclose. This wasn’t some mistake; signatures were forged, job titles were made up, and notarizations were added after the fact to make things look above board. These fraudulent assignments were used in trusts controlled by Wells Fargo, US Bank, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, Bank of New York, and JP Morgan Chase among others. Read More→

It’s a LOT more common than you might think. Many doctors label it as a ‘disease,’ and often prescribe medication as a way to make their patients feel “normal” (whatever that is).
It can drive teachers crazy, and make many seemingly normal people feel like there’s something wrong with them.

Of course I’m talking about ADHD: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Did you know that it’s a very common trait among entrepreneurs??

So if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you feel affected by it – or might know someone close to you who is.  Read on…

The typical ways that this can affect you include: Having trouble focusing on one thing at a time; Constantly getting distracted by things or people; Having challenges getting back to what you were working on before you got distracted, and so on… Read More→