The January 2017 Edition of The Profit Newsletter, the official newsletter of the Atlanta Real Estate Investors Alliance, is now available for download. There are 50 pages this month full of upcoming meetings, workshops, webcasts, educational articles and other valuable information for your real estate investing pleasure and success. Download it and check it out!

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How do you succeed as a real estate investor?  How do you succeed as a person?  Simple: Stay the course!

But what course?  Whose course?  Heck, how do you know if you’re even on the right course?

Your course begins with an idea – YOUR idea!  What feels right to you?  Answer this question: What were you put on earth to do?  Ever thought about this?  I mean, after all, you’re here for a reason, right?  What’s that reason?

For eighteen years, I sold Electrolux vacuums door-to-door.  It paid me a lot of money.  Only one problem: I wasn’t put on earth to sell vacuums door-to-door.  So why didn’t I quit much sooner?  Because everyone around me told me that I’d be a fool to walk away from the huge money-earning potential Electrolux offered.  Read More→

Last month, we talked about the words we use and how powerful they are. This month, we’re going to take it to the next level.

So there’s a famous study that was done a while ago by Dr. Albert Mehrabian, that showed that only 7% of our communication is conveyed through words, 38% is from our vocal tonality, and the rest (55%) is through ‘nonverbal elements,’ such as your posture, gestures, and facial expressions.

Based on what I wrote in my last article, I believe that our words represent a lot more than only 7%, but that’s not what this article is going to be about. No, in this article, we’re going to get into that other stuff – specifically: Tonality – HOW we say what we say. 

Call me crazy for trying to write about something you HEAR.  Obviously, this would be a lot easier for me to demonstrate in a video, or on an audio recording. But we don’t have that luxury here, so I’ll just have to flex my writin’ skills!  Read More→

When looking for an investment opportunity it is always worth considering buying foreclosure properties. You should absolutely take the time to explore all avenues to make this the most profitable. The best thing you can do for yourself is learn about ways to purchase a home any party lost. As they say, “their loss could be your gain”.  REIA Comps can help you navigate the twists and turns of the buying process. 

Unfortunately, homeowners being foreclosed on know that once the bank forecloses, their house with be up for auction. At that point, the property will be sold to the highest bidder. By working with homeowners before their foreclosure is finalized, you can pick up their home at a fraction of the price before it goes public. It’s a common practice among real estate investors and brokers. I want you to keep reading and learn how to pick up these deals.  Read More→

Atlanta continues to be one of the hottest real estate markets to rebound since the recession continuing through third quarter 2016.  But, before we analyze the numbers, sellers must realize the following:

1. Price and condition account for 80% of buyer interest and acceptance for any property. What needs to be done to present your house in the best possible way?
2. Nobody can dictate at what price your house will sell. The market will determine the price that buyers are willing to pay. When you price your house too low, the market will raise the price due to multiple offers over the price
3. Rather than using emotion, guesswork or assertions to arrive at your listing price, a good agent helps the Seller understand the real Atlanta market data, showing what actually happened to other sellers in the current market, as it reveals the most likely outcomes of pricing strategies for you. Using overall metro market statistics provides good agents with a large enough data set of real outcomes to feel comfortable that they will be likely to happen in future transactions, allowing us to take advantage of this knowledge to price your property to achieve your goals

For the purposes of this article, my statistics for the third quarter are about the numbered areas below.  Read More→

We all know that developing an effective marketing strategy is essential to getting any business off the ground. Educating yourself and discovering how to locate and motivate potential sellers to contact you is a must in making your real estate business a success. You must be able to locate prospects who want to do business with you. You must find the sellers who need to sell, not just want to sell their properties. This is essential to your success as a real estate investor. Coming into the new year this will an important step to growing your real estate investing business.

Marketing is also a numbers game, the more leads that come in, the more opportunities you will have to make deals. You won’t buy every deal that comes your way, but when you develop a machine that brings in quality leads, you will be able to pick and choose the deals you want to do. You will quickly learn to recognize quality prospects.  Read More→

As we get ready to start the new year, I would like to start with a basic question…would you close on your own deal?

I am an investor who loves wholesaling so I ask this question with sincerity.  Would you close on your own deal that you send to your Buyers?  Seriously, assuming you had the money in cash, would you?

If you  have to think about the answer, then is it really a deal you should be sending out to your Buyers?  Of course one can say ‘well it is not an area I invest in but others do’ and I would respect that of course.  However, what I have found is a lot of wholesalers are not confident enough to where if they had to close on the deal, that they would actually do it.

In which case, I ask, why would you present that deal to your Buyers?  Read More→

Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about the different ways real estate investors can achieve their goals and dreams in the fastest way possible. I get asked this question frequently by students who are just getting started in the real estate investing business. As I thought about the different strategies of how real estate goals can be achieved, I came up with the three most common ways most investors use today.

First of all wholesaling is what I hear about the most. The problem as I see it with wholesaling is two-fold. First, wholesaling real estate is to me just like having a job. Once you get a property bought and either “pre-habbed” or if you assign your purchase agreement you are creating the Hamster On the Wheel way of doing business. You buy the property, you fix the property then you sell the property. At that time hopefully you get a check. You use some of the money you get to pay for your living expenses and if there is any money left you might use the excess to pay for a portion of the next deal you do.  Read More→

On the Front Page of The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday Nov. 30, it stated “Home Prices Hit record levels”. If you read this article, you will think it is over, the window of the “massive profits in real estate” opportunity has slammed shut. If you did not buy any property since the great recession, you have missed the boat. In your old age when you go into the smelly retirement home, that your Social Security or what’s left of it will pay, you will remember this lost opportunity of buying real estate in the 2012-2016. Yes, it is true the national average states that prices have recovered. If you sat on the fence, you have missed that once in a lifetime opportunity. You decided that the market wasn’t right and you would wait. Those who waited have lost the greatest opportunity in this decade or life time to hit it big and coast into retirement. You might as well go to your “JOB= Just over broke” opportunity and sell your health, back, brain and soul to the company. Don’t invest in any more real estate courses… Save your money, you will need it for your retirement.  Read More→

Expected returns are hard to come by. Stocks are at elevated P/Es on a historical basis, and yields are near all time lows. With economic growth sluggish, at 2-3 percent per year, any major gains will have to come from multiple expansion – and who can count on that? Earnings multiples can fall as easily as rise. This is what caused many of us to gravitate to self-directed IRA strategies in the first place!

Bonds aren’t much better, in the publicly traded market. There’s some downside protection, in theory.

Fortunately, electing to use self-directed IRA strategies allows you to transcend the limited publicly-traded stock and bond world, and explore hidden opportunities that are invisible to most investors – but which still offer reasonable yields – at acceptable risk levels, or at least with some security.

One such opportunity for self-directed IRA investors: Discounted Owner-Financed Real Estate Notes.

Here’s how it works:  Read More→

As an Investor, having a Realtor to work with is important in your business if you are buying or selling houses on the Multiple Listing Services.   Many new Investors rely on their Realtor to send them “good deals” to buy, hold, fix and/or flip.  However, a Realtor does not know what good deal means to an Investor.  A good deal for us could be the cash flow that you receive on a rental property or it could be the profit that you would receive from reselling the home.  As Investors, you are taught a MAO “Maximum Allowable Offer” Formula in which you use to make offers on homes for buying, fixing and reselling.  The formula varies based on your own situation.  The average formula used for Investors who have to get hard money to purchase the home would be:  ARV (After repaired Value) x 65% – Repairs = MAO.  Let me give you an example:  $100,000 (ARV) x 65% = $65,000 – $10,000 Repairs = $55,000 Maximum Allowable Offer.  This formula would then leave you with $35,000 for holding costs, cost of money, closing costs of purchase and resale, and then profit.  Your MAO formula would be different if you are purchasing the home as a Landlord and/or you have your own money to fund the deal.  You may be willing to pay between 70-75% of the After Repaired Value for the home – Repairs = Your MAO.  Read More→

In a previous column, we talked about setting up bills in QuickBooks Online. Now it’s time to pay them.

We recently laid out the benefits of using QuickBooks Online for bill entry and payment. It’s faster than manual methods. It leaves an electronic record of your accounts payable. And it helps ensure that bills are paid accurately and on time.

As we discussed, QuickBooks Online employs a two-step process for bill payment. Once you’ve completed the first (setup), the hard part is done, and you can move on to fulfilling your financial obligations. Let’s take a look.

Warning: Because you may be “handling” a lot of your bills twice in QuickBooks Online, this system can take some getting used to. We’ll be happy to walk you through the process until you’re comfortable.  Read More→