Minnesota Real Estate Investors Association, Inc.

Imagine this scenario… 

You find a good piece of real estate that you decide to buy. 

You have little money to buy it, but you decide to use whatever money you have as part of your down payment. 

You get qualified for a 90% LTV loan. 

You call around and you are able to raise the remaining money you need for the down payment from your close friends and family. 

You promise to pay them a generous interest rate of 8% for lending you their hard-earned money. 

The following month, you find another good real estate property that you want to buy.

You have no money to buy it, but you know you can raise the money. 

You have great income and credit and once again you get qualified for a loan with 90% LTV.

You call around and you are able to raise some of the money from your close friends and family. Again, you promise to pay them a generous interest rate of 8% for lending you their hard-earned money. 

This time, you remember about a line of credit you have, and so you decide to use all of it to close the deal.

You’ve now raised
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We live in uncertain times.  After the mortgage meltdown and the almost collapse of the financial industry, the real estate market has been going through several ups and downs.  The median sales price in my area went from its peak of $238,000 in June 2006 to a low of $138,500 in February 2012, back up to $210,000 in June of 2013 and we are on our way back down, currently sitting at $179,850 for January 2014.

There have been some wild swings in the past few years and the people that understand that and have kept a close eye on the trends, and have not been afraid of the market have made a lot of money the past few years.  However, I have seen most people sitting on the fence and haven’t done anything.  I can understand the feeling of uncertainty and being afraid to make a mistake, but let’s face it, if you’re afraid to make a mistake, you will never make it big.

You’re probably thinking right now “That’s easy for you to say Mike; you’ve been at this for a long time and have more experience than I do”.  While for many of you, that may be true, however, for your info, I have probably made more mistakes than most of you ever will, and I am still making mistakes.  But that is not holding me back.

That is one of the most common traits I see from those who are successful, even in this wild and uncertain market.  They are not afraid to make a mistake, and often do, but they don’t let that hold them back.

Everyone wants to minimize their risk of making a mistake and losing money or damaging their credit, myself included.  However, I see way to many people with paralysis of analysis and never do anything.  So what’s holding you back? 
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“Get Off Your Butt and go Buy a House.”  This is a statement I had heard years ago from an old friend when I was complaining about being a broke struggling want to be investor, so I listened to her and did it. That was back in the late 90’s and it was a good ride for many years.  But the last few years have been tough on a lot of real estate investors, me included.  Many of us had to hunker down, retrench and then recover from our battle wounds.  The length of recover was/is directly proportional to the magnitude of your original symptoms.  Some people unfortunately didn’t have the financial or emotional strength to weather the storm which I completely understand as I was almost one of them.  But now it is time to look forward and plan for the future rather than having to deal with repercussions from the past. 

I understand that there will still be a few things we all need to deal with from the past few years as we move forward, but move forward we must, and this is the year to do it.  Even though last year was a relatively good year for real estate investing, it was still a tough year for many investors because of all the competition and the lack of inventory on the market.  I personally struggled finding rehabs as well.  Between my partner and me, we looked at over 400 properties, make close to 200 offers and only got one MLS offer accepted.  Looking back, off all the properties that we made offers on that sold, they were all in multiple offer situations.  Even though we had plenty of cash to buy and always offered quick closings without contingencies, we were always out bid with very similar offers.  Many of those other properties that didn’t sell are still on the market and still overpriced. 
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When I first started real estate investing back in the early 1990’s, it was a struggle to find good training for beginners.  So I eventually got my real estate license and through marketing, I found a few local and successful investors who took me under their wings and that is where I got most of my training, but it was still very limited, because those investors only did one thing, but they were good at it.  However, for me to get out on my own and do things their way would require me to have a rich uncle who died and left me a fortune to invest with.  But I didn’t have a rich uncle so I had to learn something different.

That is when I started looking for alternative training sources, and in my state, there was no local resource.  That is when I started seeing a rise in infomercials and I started buying their training courses, and I got upsold to their seminar, and then their coaching programs.  And slowly, I started to do a few deals that I never even knew could be done before I bought those courses.  I started creating seller carry back notes, selling those notes to raise the down payments.  We did substitutions of collateral, wrap around mortgages and then I learned how to buy pre-foreclosures.  I was doing short sales for years before the term short sale was first used outside of the loss mitigation departments.  I was rehabbing and then I learned how to Wholesale, which I said couldn’t be done, until I bought a course on wholesaling and I made it work J

I learned all that because of infomercials.  However, these days, our inbox is loaded with infomercials.  And finding resources to learn real estate investing is easier than ever before, thanks to the internet, emails and webinars.  It seems like no matter where you turn, there is another infomercial in your inbox, on your smart phone, on the TV and everywhere you look.
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Real Estate Investing requires us to maintain a buyers list, seller leads, and other various prospects. Now that more investors are using the internet for real estate marketing investors need a way to maintain those lists in efficiently and effectively. This is where Auto Responders come into play...

When you are taking your real estate marketing online you will ultimately be obtaining emails that need to be catered to in certain ways. In fact, there are two major elements to any auto responder: On the one hand you have the auto responder itself which is a program that sends out a series of emails to a lead. This works particularly well for following up with seller leads leads because the actual content doesn't require any updating. On the other hand we have the broadcaster which sends out one single email blast to a list. This comes in particularly handy with buyers and investors that you will be updating with the most current content.

Finding quality information on using auto responders can be a daunting task. So what we have to together in this post is a list of recommended readings the will give you a great foundation for learning how to use auto responders.

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It probably won’t work for you if you still think that it won’t. I used to think that for a few years because I wasted a lot of money on direct mail marketing a few years ago, so I stopped direct mail and migrated to online advertising and that worked for a while. But the pendulum has swung back again and I am now getting some good results from direct mail marketing again.

My response rates are still low, but the responses I am getting are better quality leads than I have been receiving from online advertising and fishing through the MLS. I started a couple marketing campaign s a couple of months ago, with little to no results. But I just started hitting the same list a second time and in the past week, I have received 4 good leads. One I have an offer in on a free and clear property, one the seller is still stuck in fantasy land and the other has two rental properties that need short sales, but the numbers look good enough to try them. 
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When it comes to all the technology and options that we all now hold at our finger tips, whether we know it or not, it’s important to recognize that because tools exist it’s not a reason to use them! There is a lot of buzz going, especially in a relatively new internet environment, that suggests that your business NEEDS to implement these tools. This message has its pro’s and con’s because it exposes people to new tools, but sends a message that they must be used. Such a message can really overwhelm and confuse investors who are just trying to get a grasp of the tools available. The confusion stems from one undeniable truth.

“Tools are meant to serve a purpose, not the other way around!”

We’ve been working hard to get the message out that it is incredibly essential to get a website (preferably one of ours because they are specifically made for investors with years of experience behind them), but when we pull you into the internet age we are bringing you into a whole Home Depot of tools.
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This blog post is a little bit of a spring cleaning exercise that is meant to cover some of the professional matters of real estate investing. Together we are going to be covering some points that you will want to keep in mind as you absorb 1,000s of facebook updates, in addition to the average number of marketing contacts that you encounter on a daily basis. There are 3 things that I want to make as clear as day for you that I see mucking up YOUR path to becoming a successful real estate investor:

1. The dream of getting rich quick
2. The hype that takes advantage of that dream
3. Your very own view of your business

The dream of becoming wealthy and successful is something that we can all relate to, but where do we draw the line in the sand between that dream and reality? If you’re not quite sure what I’m talking about stick with me here… There is no shortage of people online and on facebook right now selling dreams, using big numbers of what students have made, and checks they’ve cashed. However, keep in mind that their success does not translate directly to your success, as many a disclaimer will tell you. This is very important to note because anybody these days can create a system and the fact of the matter is that many of these “gurus” hire freelancers to write their materials and do their marketing.

In my opinion the only value these “gurus” provide is how to hype and sell a dream. 
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On our Monday night Training Webinar, I was asked a question from one of our students about driving traffic to their free website that everyone receives with their free account at Real Estate Promo. I gave them a suggestion to find another investor who has a property for sale right now and get their permission to market that property(s) on their websites. Then start creating ads on craigslist, kijiji, backpage and other online / offline marketing medias. This sparked a lot of interest and questions, so I decided to post a blog about the idea for everyone.

One of the struggles new investors have is activity. They spend all their time learning how to invest in real estate, but they don’t take a lot of action right away. This is probably due to fear and their misconception that they need to learn everything before they take any action. I am sure a lot of you seasoned investors can relate to this feeling of a newbie. Our Free Weekly Webinar Training is designed to not only to educate the new investors, but also to encourage them to take action, even if it is just small little baby steps to get started.

One of the struggles for seasoned investors is selling/renting their inventory. Personally from my own experience, my biggest struggles is when I have a property for sale, I spend all my time trying to fill the property that I stop doing what I am good at, which is locating and negotiating good deals. After I have that property filled, I then get back to finding more deals. All that time I have been marketing and driving traffic to my website. But if I don’t have any properties for sale on my website for a month or two, I am wasting good traffic from buyers, so I occasionally will market properties from fellow investors, just so that I have activity on my website. 
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