Atlanta Real Estate Investors Alliance Blog

This is your life. You have decided that real estate investing is something you want to do. But…

Are you sinking or swimming?

Right now, I am teaching a 58 year old friend to swim. I can see his fear. He is thinking, “What if I drown?” or “What if I can’t do this and I look silly?” We all have fears about uncertainties; fear is natural and good—it can keep us out of trouble! But, when fear controls you, when it stops and paralyzes you, when it keeps you from success, it is a problem.

Remember: There is no such thing as a dead end.

Your fears can be conquered easily through calculated action and baby steps.

How is your business like learning to swim? Like my friend, you probably have fear. Maybe you fear loss of financial security or not being able to know a bad deal from a great deal. Maybe you fear failure, or you fear what people will think if you make bad decisions. Maybe you even fear success. The problem is that fear will wear you out and kill your drive. Just like the swimmer, you need to know when to swim and when to float. You need to learn to trust the system and yourself. Read More→

I recently conducted the first two days of one of my boot camps and shortly thereafter spent two hours on the phone doing one-on-one calls with students. There’s a common mistake I see students making over and over again, and it doesn’t seem to matter if they are new or been around awhile. That mistake is: doing everything they can to feel busy except the critical things required to stay in business.

It’s so easy to be busy. Anyone can do it, and most people would say they’re very busy almost all the time. I hear things like: “If only I had more time, the days just aren’t long enough, so much to do and so little time.” A rat in a circular cage is busy running in circles, but getting nowhere. Pretty soon he has a heart attack and dies. Being busy will not make you rich. In fact, it can have the opposite effect and prevent you from ever achieving wealth. Don’t get me wrong. Rich people are busy too. I’m very busy most of the time with something always chasing my attention. There’s always an endless supply of things to work on that suck up my time. The difference is I constantly and consciously work on…only those items I can’t delegate and are worthy of my attention.

Minutia is a deadly disease that steals away the most productive time of your life and robs you of the great things you could accomplish…if you only had time. Well, I suppose I don’t have to tell you that we all have the same amount of time in a day and no bonus hours will ever be added. Rich people and poor people alike are granted the same opportunity to turn that time into greatness or waste it the same way, day in and day out until they’re dead. Read More→

Investing in real estate is one of the most advantageous and attractive avenues to use to build a business and ultimately wealth. I would say it has three times the potential of making money than most any other business. Using REIA comps to guide your investment choices protects against the turns made by market forces. I want to share with you some advantages that I believe will be most beneficial for you.

As a rule, there is more stability. Real estate investments are traditionally considered a stable and rich gainer, provided if one takes it seriously and becomes a student of the game. As a rule of thumb, if you have an area where there are plenty of resources available and low stable mortgage rates, you have good reason for investing in that real estate market. On the contrary, if you find a property in a place, which is under high inflation, it may not be a prime location.

With real estate, necessity is the mother of all inventions. Acquiring all the knowledge and skills through experience of selling and purchasing properties requires guidance and consistency. The support REIA comps provides gives you a leg up on property valuation and purchase. Take the time to gain education and hone your craft in order to have a formidable business. Doing market research, using or developing the right real estate strategies can make deals happen for you in the right manner. Read More→

What the heck is a Squeeze Page? And why should you care?

Ok, so there’s this whole “thing” called Internet Marketing. All the kids are doing it these days. The thing is… it works! And one of the neat things that work in Internet Marketing is Squeeze Pages, because they get you LEADS for your business…BIG Time!

I wrote this article because a lot of people have been asking me lately about what’s working in the world of internet marketing to help real estate investors get more leads from the internet. When I ask them if they have any Squeeze Pages up, they either give me a blank stare or silence. Or both.

So if that’s you, then this article is for you & people like you – people who have very little to no knowledge or experience in the powerful yet confusing world of internet marketing.  Trust me, it’s very, very easy to get lost down this rabbit hole. I’ll save my story for another day. Read More→

How secure is your retirement nest egg? If you own a Real Estate IRA, you might have an idea about what kinds of protections your retirement income has; but if you’ve never heard of the things, now’s as good a time as any to learn what your options are.

While many people associate an investment in real estate with speculation, the truth is that real estate can be a highly secure way to ensure that you have enough for retirement. Not only does real estate provide an opportunity for growth, but it’s capable of providing you with a stable income that you can use when you need it the most. And with the following three protections built right in to the Real Estate IRA structure itself, you’ll see that these investments can be much more secure than you originally thought. Read More→

You Must Get Your Personal Debt Under Control If You Want to Quickly Achieve Financial Freedom. This Can Be Done Much Faster Once You Eliminate All of Your Highest Interest Rate Consumer Debts First.

This month I want to start with examples of how you can eliminate your personal debts much, much faster without sacrifice or having to bring in one more penny every month. I am going to explain to you how to pay off your consumer debts much faster which will save you thousands of dollars of interest you will never have to pay. Here is an example of what I am talking about.

Let’s say the payment of your highest interest rate debt is $212.83 minimum payment. If you will add the $93.00 (a good number for a family of four at a nice restaurant) you saved by not dining out each month with your family will total $305.83 ($212.83 + $93.00 = $305.83). If you pay that amount each month for this debt until it is paid in full, it will greatly shorten the payback time of that debt saving you hundreds or even thousands of dollars of interest. Read More→

We’ll be ringing in the New Year soon. Will you have wrapped up your 2015 finances by then?

There’s something very satisfying about turning our calendars to January. It always feels like a fresh start. We resolve to develop new, better ways of using our work and leisure time. We reflect on what we accomplished in the last 12 months, and we look forward to achieving even more in the next 12.

But sometimes we have a nagging feeling that we forgot something. And it often has to do with our finances, both personal and professional.

You can take steps now to make New Year’s Day less worrisome. Doing some extra work in QuickBooks during December will ensure that you’ll start 2016 ready to move ahead, rather than scrambling to see what you missed on January 2. Read More→

Despite what you may be hearing in the news, foreclosures are increasing nationwide. Sure the media has been trying to paint a rosy picture by showing areas where foreclosures have been decreasing, but those are only specific areas. When looked at nationwide, things do not look so great. Foreclosures are bad enough, but the fact that the vast majority of these are sham foreclosures pushed through by pretender-lenders with no right to foreclose should be a source of national shame. Fortunately there have been two major court decisions that show the tide is continuing to turn against the banks and in favor of homeowners and real estate investors.

In US District Court for Oregon, a judge reaffirmed that the Supreme Court of the United States settled that a rescission is effective at the time that the notice is sent, whether or not it is sent within the three-year period set out by TILA. The bank in this case was arguing that the law was never intended to let borrowers cancel their loan transactions. The court specifically shot this notion down, saying that, while the banks and trustees have an interest in the finality of these transactions, consumers have a “countervailing interest in avoiding wrongful foreclosure.” This is a HUGE decision because it affirms that, no matter what the banks say or what lower courts try to argue, a rescission is effective as an operation of law the moment it is dropped in the mail. It does not matter if the rescission is done 15 years after the loan is consummated. If the bank fails to contest the rescission during the 20 day period established by TILA, the note and mortgage are gone. Their only option after that period is to go to a court that has the proper jurisdiction and prove that the rescission is wrongful and that they can prove standing without using the note or mortgage (now legally nonexistent) as evidence. Read More→

Lots of real estate courses out there talk about the subject of co-wholesaling or JV’ing. (Joint Venturing for short) It sounds simple enough. If you are new, work with someone experienced to do business together that seem trustworthy. If you are experienced, work with people you know and trust. You can market their deals for them and hopefully bring them a Buyer. It’s very simple so what could go wrong?

In a word: Everything

If there is one topic that I think is one of the most scathing I hear from Buyers, it’s co-wholesaling. It ranks right up there with off base renovation estimates.   How can something so simple be so problematic?

Let’s take a look at the issues so you can see how to avoid these pitfalls and have more success with this underutilized subject. This is a simple subject as long as you get it right. Read More→

Entrepreneur’s minds go a hundred miles an hour in many directions. This can be great at times and at other times not so great. In the case of real estate investors, it tends to be the latter. Real estate investors have a habit of learning how to make money in one aspect of real estate investing and then another and then another etc.

Before the investor realizes it, he/she is just doing what comes easiest and not considering the most profitable exit strategy. Or worst, the investor has not fully learned one strategy and is not maximizing profit. How can you solve this issue? FOCUS!

Investors usually progress in the following order: bird dog, wholesaler, flipper, landlord, and lender. This is not mandatory but it tends to be a natural progression for many. At the beginning bird dog will usually only bird dog because it is all they know how to do. Naturally, by being in the real estate investing community, they begin to learn how to wholesale.

At this point, the wholesaler will still be pretty focused but then he/she begins to buy-fix-sell properties. This is where it gets tricky. Should the investor wholesale a property he/she finds or invest in the property himself/herself. This question comes up every time the investor puts a property under contract.

Then after a few homerun deals the investor decides it is time to begin keeping a few homes as rentals. A few months go by and now the question to wholesale, fix-sell, or fix-rent begins soon after placing a property under contract. Read More→

As you probably know if you have been reading my articles, I strongly advocate using direct mail to locate highly motivated sellers for your Real Estate Investing business no matter what market you live in and no matter what your real estate market is doing. With the market being in its current state of affairs, there are more motivated sellers than ever before if you know how to find them.

As a seasoned Real Estate Investor I fully understand that I need to be locating the most highly motivated sellers in order to construct the very best deals. Remember, the profit on a deal is made when you buy a property.

In addition, while many investors enjoy working with pre-foreclosures, short sales, REO properties and buying houses on the court house steps, these properties take time to close on and there is a lot of competition for them.

In the meantime you need to be able to continue to fill your funnel with cash producing deals in order to keep your business moving forward. Working with motivated sellers that your competition knows nothing about is definitely the way to accomplish this goal and direct mail is the best technique to draw in these very motivated sellers. Read More→