Happy New Year! I know a lot of you are looking for a “break out” this year and some are looking to continue their multifamily growth in 2015. No matter what your goals for the year are, they all begin with one very important concept… Focus!

At the beginning of every year most people make crazy resolutions that they never keep. We make resolutions to eat better, get on a crash diet, start that extreme workout program etc. While these resolutions start with the best intentions we usually don’t follow them through or at least not to the extent we had planned on.

In the business world this is what I call the battle of the “Comfort Zone” vs “Shock Zone”. This can probably be applied to our daily lives as well. When I first became a real estate student I realized a very important lesson. The need for FOCUS! Read More→

The banks are turning on each other! Over the past few years, Americans have become aware of the financial fraud that was committed against the country by the major banks. The more the public hears about the Federal Reserve spending $60-70 billion dollars every month to buy garbage loans back from the banks that created them at 100 cents on the dollar, the more upset they get. Well it looks like the banks are starting to get upset with each other, too. Bank of New York Mellon (BONY) has sued JP Morgan Chase for misrepresenting the value of a pool of loans that was sold to BONY for nearly $1 billion. You would think that BONY would expect this sort of thing from Chase. After all, it has been common knowledge for years that the banks have been lying about the values of their loans and mortgage backed securities since the beginning of the housing boom. In fact, we now have the first person testimony of a person who tried to stop the fraud at Chase.

According to Chase whistleblower Alayne Fleischmann, Chase knowingly bundled up garbage loans with good ones, slapped a good rating on them, and sold them off to investors. These garbage loans were referred to as “scratch and dent” in the industry because they were a lot like dinged up cars – worth nowhere near the same amount as cars in good condition. This isn’t just an accusation though. Chase has admitted to selling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of these loans to investors by lying about their quality. Not only do they admit to doing this, they also admit that they were warned by people like Fleischmann that they were committing fraud by knowingly selling these mortgage backed securities. Read More→

In the previous article (if you missed it, see Part I), I mentioned about all the things you’ll need to do before and during attending a seminar to maximize the investment of your time and resources.  

However, that’s not enough. If you really want to capitalize (and I’m assuming you do, otherwise you’d not be reading this), you MUST implement these post seminar suggestions. Actually, these are more than just “suggestions” they are requirements to truly maximize the experience of being there.

1. What To Do With The Business Cards

I hope you collected tons of business cards (or exchanged contact information electronically) to expand your contacts and sphere of influence. Now what do you do with them? Stack them in some corner of your work desk at your office or home perhaps with the rubber band? No, that’ll not do. I hope you’ve some kind of contact management software (I use Infusionsoft.com).   Type them (preferably your assistant) into your contact manager or you can use a business card reader to make it faster. I give my stack of business cards (with notes on back) to my assistant and they go into my CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software for follow up actions. On the back of the card, I write down where and when we met and anything that stands out about that person in the notes section of the contact. Read More→

Investors and homeowners alike are almost intuitively inclined to have a higher opinion of their existing or potential properties than other parties. This would include potential buyers, lenders, brokers and even appraisers. However, this wasn’t always the case during the bubble years of the last decade. We know inflated real estate appraisals contributed to the excesses. The data within REIAComps has consistently shown investors how to determine both solid acquisition value and after repair value for residential real estate.

For those of you already connected to REIAComps, the control and feeling of confidence you have over your deals is priceless. Having valuation data at the ready adds power and knowledge to your tool belt. Use REIAComps to investigate the changing values of dwellings no matter what market area you are in.

When we look at the half-dozen years after the financial crisis, everything got turned upside down. We know Appraisers became in most cases overly conservative.  Every one saw Appraisal values were consistently lower than homeowner value opinions from 2007 to 2013. We could even say this factor was a drag on the U.S. housing-market recovery.  Read More→

I have been asked by new and veteran investors if they should consider getting a real estate license. My response is usually, “Sure, why not?” I do not want to push them into it nor do I want to convince them not to do it. I simply want them to consider for themselves their own pros and cons of having a license. Personally, I like having my license and could not imagine being an investor without one.

Are there cons to having a license? Yes, but the cons are insignificant or temporary. The one con that most investors and real estate agents alike share is the cost of having a license. Just getting licensed is an investment. You need to take some classes and make a minimum score before given permission to take the actual exam to get licensed, which cost a few hundred dollars. Once you are licensed and depending in what state you are in you must pay a National Realtor Association fee, local Realtor fee, MLS fee and brokerage fees. In order to keep the license you must also pay to take continuing education courses. However, if you close enough properties they will more than pay for these fees. Another con you may have as an investor is having to work for a brokerage. Read More→

It is the goal of this column to answer questions about QuickBooks® and how it is used in the REI arena. Know how to record transactions in the proper way and have your set of books in good shape when it comes time for taxes. It is our intention to do this by you the members submitting questions to Karen@smallbusinessadvisor.biz, and getting answers here in this column.

QuickBooks Pro 2015

If you have QuickBooks 2013 or 2014 and are thinking about purchasing 2015 version – there are a few changes to this update. I will point out just a couple here but there are many more.

The same as 2014, QuickBooks Pro 2015 has a “What’s New”yellow bar on the side of many of the windows that have new features. When you click on the bar an overlay feature will pop up to indicate where the new features are. Most of these are in your shortcut windows. Once you have viewed them and are comfortable that you know the features you can turn off the yellow bar under the “Help” drop down list. You can always turn it back on if you need to refresh your memory about a feature. Read More→