Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Investor Palooza 2010 - Real Estate Investor Training That Rocks http://ping.fm/YmWgn?eid=231682471712&ref=ts
Monday, December 21, 2009
On Dec 23rd learn exactly how to shrink and manage your debt with Skip Skolnick! 9 PM EST http://ping.fm/g7eSu
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Real Estate Investors Serving the need for fresh water in Africa. Can you help? http://ping.fm/LxsvW
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Grab two real estate investor boot camp trainings for just a buck!
http://www.dollarbootcamp.com Join Larry Goins for two complete real estate investor boot camps for just a buck!
Earn Filthy Riches on Dirt Cheap Real Estate
http://www.FilthyRiches.com/replay. See how the Filthy Riches model is proven to make up to $43,937 and change without rehabbing or complicated real estate flipping. Make money in real estate while helping families get into good and safe homes.
Earn Filthy Riches on Dirt Cheap Real Estate
http://www.FilthyRiches.com/replay. See how the Filthy Riches model is proven to make up to $43,937 and change without rehabbing or complicated real estate flipping. Make money in real estate while helping families get into good and safe homes.
Earn Filthy Riches on Dirt Cheap Real Estate
http://www.FilthyRiches.com/replay. See how the Filthy Riches model is proven to make up to $43,937 and change without rehabbing or complicated real estate flipping. Make money in real estate while helping families get into good and safe homes.
Healthcare Marketing: Take a Lesson from Starbucks on Social Media « MARKETING YOUR HOSPITAL http://ping.fm/bZRo1
Shrinking pool of foreclosure buyers? | Real Estate and Technology News for Agents, Brokers and Investors | Inman News http://ping.fm/64kwm
2010: Google, RPR and the economy | Real Estate and Technology News for Agents, Brokers and Investors | Inman News http://ping.fm/TaX9z
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Grab two real estate investor boot camp trainings for just a buck!
http://www.dollarbootcamp.com Join Larry Goins for two complete real estate investor boot camps for just a buck!
If there was an easy way to do fast flips in real estate and you could learn for free, would you grab it right now? http://ping.fm/9d3u8
Monday, December 14, 2009
Grab two real estate investor boot camp trainings for just a buck!
http://www.dollarbootcamp.com Join Larry Goins for two complete real estate investor boot camps for just a buck!
Grab two real estate investor boot camp trainings for just a buck!
http://www.dollarbootcamp.com Join Larry Goins for two complete real estate investor boot camps for just a buck!
video Grab two real estate investor boot camp trainings for just a buck! - real estate investor boot camp, larry goins, real estate investor training - videos kewego http://ping.fm/MzpTY
RE/MAX Executives Forecast that Short Sales Reforms Will Speed Recovery of Chicago Real Estate Market http://ping.fm/X4nUF
Bay Area real estate investors snap up rental properties - ContraCostaTimes.com http://ping.fm/obCGK
California Department of Real Estate official discusses lending fraud - Local - SanLuisObispo.com http://ping.fm/t4NMJ
Friday, December 11, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Private Liquidations is available NOW!!! Grab your copy before they are all gone! Get it here! http://ping.fm/GfGfa
Learn all about Larry Goins' new course live right now! http://ping.fm/njW0T Make big bucks on a $5K house!
Private Liquidations goes live at noon TODAY. Learn to earn big money in real estate. Easy. http://ping.fm/guMR7
Inventory declines for 17th straight month | Real Estate and Technology News for Agents, Brokers and Investors | Inman News http://ping.fm/72c1w
Real Estate and Technology News for Agents, Brokers and Investors | Inman News http://www.inman.com/
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
If you could make a difference, would you run across America barefoot? Tellman would. http://ping.fm/HxuFP
Tomorrow night encore of Filthy Riches. I'll be giving away a course and four cruises! http://ping.fm/Pk8Xj
"Commercial Short Sales Unleashed" is here-500 to claim their copies get it for free
http://ping.fm/nHl84
http://ping.fm/nHl84
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Filthy Riches Webinar
Learn exactly how Larry Goins makes more money on a $5K house than most real estate investors make on a $100K property.
FilthyRiches - Larry announces his new real estate investor course! Tonight! 9PM EST http://ping.fm/kEyK4
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Grab two real estate investor boot camp trainings for just a buck!
http://www.dollarbootcamp.com Join Larry Goins for two complete real estate investor boot camps for just a buck!
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Grab two real estate investor boot camp trainings for just a buck!
http://www.dollarbootcamp.com Join Larry Goins for two complete real estate investor boot camps for just a buck!
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Grab two real estate investor boot camp trainings for just a buck!
http://www.dollarbootcamp.com Join Larry Goins for two complete real estate investor boot camps for just a buck!
Grab two real estate investor boot camp trainings for just a buck!
http://www.dollarbootcamp.com Join Larry Goins for two complete real estate investor boot camps for just a buck!
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Real Estate Investor Virtual Boot Camp for a Buck
You are literally not going to believe this! I’m giving away the FARM!
I created a special video to tell you all about what I have been up to especially for you and your real estate investing career.
See the video and full story here: www.DollarBootCamp.com
A while back I hosted a couple of SOLD OUT Dream Big and Wake Up Wealthy Boot Camps where attendees paid $1,497 each just to attend and learn from some of the best of the best in the real estate arena.
For a very limited time, you can get TWO complete $1497 courses ($2,994 total) for just $1. Just spend one skinny little George Washington for $2994 worth of real estate investor training. Just a buck for two complete boot camps worth of training.
See the full story here: www.DollarBootCamp.com
Myself and 13 top investor trainers bring you the secrets to succeeding in real estate investing...
Here is what you will learn when you snatch up my “Dream Big and Wake Up Wealthy” curriculum:
Wholesaling
Retailing
Property Management
Negotiating
Finding Deals
Contracts
Fund Your Deals
Commercial Real Estate
Commercial Financing
Private Money
Short Sales
Self Directed IRA's
Hard Money Loans
Rehabbing for Profits
Building Buyers Lists
Reading Appraisals
Working With Realtors
Virtual Investing
and Much, Much More!
Now you can have both events on video... for just a buck!
These are not national speakers who are only giving a preview and trying to sell their courses!
These are real trainers who I know personally and they are teaching only.
See the full story here: www.DollarBootCamp.com
You see EVERYTHING the paid attendees saw!
Look for yourself...
40 Videos From 20 DVD's
How cool is that?
See the full story here: www.DollarBootCamp.com
Please forward this to anyone you know involved in real estate so they can take advantage of this limited offer!
If you are involved in an investors association please tell your group leaders so they can let your members know about this too! You and they will be glad you did.
Get these $2,994 seminars for $1 now:
Check it out: www.DollarBootCamp.com
Enjoy,
Larry Goins
PS: Get it now as this special offer will only be available for a few days before I take it off the market for good.
PPS: You now have absolutely no excuse for not succeeding in real estate! I am giving you all of the tools for only $1.
PPPS: This is the exact same course I still sell on my regular website for $997 so I can't make this offer more than a few days!
I created a special video to tell you all about what I have been up to especially for you and your real estate investing career.
See the video and full story here: www.DollarBootCamp.com
A while back I hosted a couple of SOLD OUT Dream Big and Wake Up Wealthy Boot Camps where attendees paid $1,497 each just to attend and learn from some of the best of the best in the real estate arena.
For a very limited time, you can get TWO complete $1497 courses ($2,994 total) for just $1. Just spend one skinny little George Washington for $2994 worth of real estate investor training. Just a buck for two complete boot camps worth of training.
See the full story here: www.DollarBootCamp.com
Myself and 13 top investor trainers bring you the secrets to succeeding in real estate investing...
Here is what you will learn when you snatch up my “Dream Big and Wake Up Wealthy” curriculum:
Wholesaling
Retailing
Property Management
Negotiating
Finding Deals
Contracts
Fund Your Deals
Commercial Real Estate
Commercial Financing
Private Money
Short Sales
Self Directed IRA's
Hard Money Loans
Rehabbing for Profits
Building Buyers Lists
Reading Appraisals
Working With Realtors
Virtual Investing
and Much, Much More!
Now you can have both events on video... for just a buck!
These are not national speakers who are only giving a preview and trying to sell their courses!
These are real trainers who I know personally and they are teaching only.
See the full story here: www.DollarBootCamp.com
You see EVERYTHING the paid attendees saw!
Look for yourself...
40 Videos From 20 DVD's
How cool is that?
See the full story here: www.DollarBootCamp.com
Please forward this to anyone you know involved in real estate so they can take advantage of this limited offer!
If you are involved in an investors association please tell your group leaders so they can let your members know about this too! You and they will be glad you did.
Get these $2,994 seminars for $1 now:
Check it out: www.DollarBootCamp.com
Enjoy,
Larry Goins
PS: Get it now as this special offer will only be available for a few days before I take it off the market for good.
PPS: You now have absolutely no excuse for not succeeding in real estate! I am giving you all of the tools for only $1.
PPPS: This is the exact same course I still sell on my regular website for $997 so I can't make this offer more than a few days!
Monday, October 26, 2009
How to Win a Free REI Training!
My buddy, Patrick Riddle, is having a cool contest
over on his blog called "Battle of the REI Blogs"
that I'm participating in ...
He's assembled an A-List of real estate investing
bloggers to compete to see whose blog is #1 in the
eyes of our readers.
... and I need your help ...
I up against the cream of the crop, the top shelf
real estate investing bloggers and need your vote!
You see, the winner gets to award 5 of their voters
(could be YOU) a FREE Private Money Blueprint Home
Study System.
But to win ... I need lot's of votes :)
Click here to Enter the Contest!
While you're over there, check out the other bloggers
... each one has a custom profile that includes a link
to their blog and their social media links (Facebook,
Twitter, Youtube) ...
This will provide you a great opportunity to build
your network and get acquainted with some tremendous
real estate investing resources.
Each blogger/blog has their own little niche and can
help you build a rock soild foundation for your REI
education.
... but remember ... vote for me!
Go check out the contest NOW
Thanks for your support!
P.S. There's been a little trash talking going on
between the REI bloggers, and I'd LOVE to put the
"big dogs" in their place ... click below to vote
for me ... thanks!
over on his blog called "Battle of the REI Blogs"
that I'm participating in ...
He's assembled an A-List of real estate investing
bloggers to compete to see whose blog is #1 in the
eyes of our readers.
... and I need your help ...
I up against the cream of the crop, the top shelf
real estate investing bloggers and need your vote!
You see, the winner gets to award 5 of their voters
(could be YOU) a FREE Private Money Blueprint Home
Study System.
But to win ... I need lot's of votes :)
Click here to Enter the Contest!
While you're over there, check out the other bloggers
... each one has a custom profile that includes a link
to their blog and their social media links (Facebook,
Twitter, Youtube) ...
This will provide you a great opportunity to build
your network and get acquainted with some tremendous
real estate investing resources.
Each blogger/blog has their own little niche and can
help you build a rock soild foundation for your REI
education.
... but remember ... vote for me!
Go check out the contest NOW
Thanks for your support!
P.S. There's been a little trash talking going on
between the REI bloggers, and I'd LOVE to put the
"big dogs" in their place ... click below to vote
for me ... thanks!
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Meet Larry in Vegas Nov 7 and 8
For your eyes only - your last chance to access the top secret playbook of today's top real estate investors - two days only in Las Vegas...
Now is your chance to FINALLY make money in real estate!
What is your top desire in real estate investing?
If you are like most people, you just want to make more money! What if you could spend two days in Las Vegas with Larry Goins and his team of real estate investors and learn how to buy and sell real estate for profit in ANY economy?
Commercial Real Estate
Residential Real Estate
Rehab and Resell
Wholesale
Flip
And do it all SUCCESSFULLY and Profitably!
It all comes down to minimizing risk and maximizing returns with commercial and residential properties to buy and sell for quick profits.
How can YOU do that?
By attending the all new, all inclusive Ultimate Investor Expo in Las Vegas November 7th and 8th. This is the last live event Larry Goins will be putting on for 2009 and you can't afford to miss it if you hope to make money in real estate investing!
Just click the link below and you can register today!
http://www.UltimateInvestorExpo.com
Time is running out! Seating is limited! The opportunity is huge! And I sure would hate for you to miss it! So click the link right now and I'll be seeing you in Vegas!
http://www.UltimateInvestorExpo.com
Larry Goins
PS We started out with 140 seats, but only 38 remain. Don't wait and be number 39 and get turned away! Register today! http://www.UltimateInvestorExpo.com
Now is your chance to FINALLY make money in real estate!
What is your top desire in real estate investing?
If you are like most people, you just want to make more money! What if you could spend two days in Las Vegas with Larry Goins and his team of real estate investors and learn how to buy and sell real estate for profit in ANY economy?
Commercial Real Estate
Residential Real Estate
Rehab and Resell
Wholesale
Flip
And do it all SUCCESSFULLY and Profitably!
It all comes down to minimizing risk and maximizing returns with commercial and residential properties to buy and sell for quick profits.
How can YOU do that?
By attending the all new, all inclusive Ultimate Investor Expo in Las Vegas November 7th and 8th. This is the last live event Larry Goins will be putting on for 2009 and you can't afford to miss it if you hope to make money in real estate investing!
Just click the link below and you can register today!
http://www.UltimateInvestorExpo.com
Time is running out! Seating is limited! The opportunity is huge! And I sure would hate for you to miss it! So click the link right now and I'll be seeing you in Vegas!
http://www.UltimateInvestorExpo.com
Larry Goins
PS We started out with 140 seats, but only 38 remain. Don't wait and be number 39 and get turned away! Register today! http://www.UltimateInvestorExpo.com
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Websites You Can Use August 09
Hey, this is Larry Goins and in this month’s issue of web sites you can use I wanted to give you some web sites that are online that give you some really good tools not only for finding properties but evaluating properties, obtaining comps, deal making, and some social networking or social media sites that are real estate specific.
The first one is a community site. It’s a great site. I know the owner personally. It’s http://www.BiggerPockets.com. It has a lot of good information. It is a really good community site. It is a Web 2.0 site. It is very useful and I like it a lot for networking. I like the owner as well. He’s a great friend of mine, Joshua Dorkin.
The next site is http://www.Zillow.com. A lot of you know that I’ve never been a big fan of Zillow as far as evaluation of properties goes. But they have really tightened up. Not only is the value information on properties better but it now shows comparatives as well. It is one of the most popular real estate sites. People know it and respect the information. You can go to http://www.Zillow.com and post properties for sale to generate leads, go to a buyers list, and search for properties, etc.
The next site is http://www.RealEstateABC.com. They have a property evaluation tool that is similar to Zillow but it uses Google Maps. It has some really cool tools like adjusting the values of properties given certain market conditions and variables. You’ll like this one a lot. One of the neat things about real estate sites that interface with Google Maps is that you can check out an entire neighborhood visually right from your computer!
http://www.Trulia.com basically scrapes or compiles all the different real estate sites and finds different listings pulling the information all together in one place that is really easy to look at and use. The format is awesome. They use Google Maps and RSS Feeds and have a lot of different property listings. I love it and you can find a lot of good deals right there for your real estate investing business.
Another really cool web site is http://www.PropBot.com. This site’s creator, Joel Webb, is a really good friend of mine who also created The Creative Investor. I’ll tell you more about that in just a minute. PropBot.com is a site that pulls listings from millions and millions of different listings at thousands of different sites. Realtors can have their properties listed there. It uses API so it interfaces with a lot of other web sites. Other people have their sites and listings post on PropBot automatically. It’s a great place to look for properties and even search for certain keywords. Especially when you invest like I do and you aren’t concerned with locations, you can find properties that match certain keywords such as “handyman special” or “fixer upper” or for certain price ranges.
The next site is http://www.TheCreativeInvestor.com which is also a Joel Webb flagship site. It’s a community site with a lot of good information and articles. You can join for free and network and use the forums. It is a very useful site for investors and a great place to find buyers, sellers, investors, etc.
Check out http://www.PropSmart.com. It is another site that searches the internet for property listings. It also uses Google Maps and provides lots of useful information for mapping out properties you might be interested in and for finding real estate listings.
Another great site is http://www.HousingMaps.com. It’s a really great site that has lots of useful information. Housing Maps let’s you search for properties in certain price ranges and pull up listings. It puts them on a map and gives you really good information. It’s powered by Craigslist and Google Maps.
You know I buy and sell 5-10 or more houses per month without ever looking at a single one. Now you have a whole set of online resources so you can do the same thing!
The first one is a community site. It’s a great site. I know the owner personally. It’s http://www.BiggerPockets.com. It has a lot of good information. It is a really good community site. It is a Web 2.0 site. It is very useful and I like it a lot for networking. I like the owner as well. He’s a great friend of mine, Joshua Dorkin.
The next site is http://www.Zillow.com. A lot of you know that I’ve never been a big fan of Zillow as far as evaluation of properties goes. But they have really tightened up. Not only is the value information on properties better but it now shows comparatives as well. It is one of the most popular real estate sites. People know it and respect the information. You can go to http://www.Zillow.com and post properties for sale to generate leads, go to a buyers list, and search for properties, etc.
The next site is http://www.RealEstateABC.com. They have a property evaluation tool that is similar to Zillow but it uses Google Maps. It has some really cool tools like adjusting the values of properties given certain market conditions and variables. You’ll like this one a lot. One of the neat things about real estate sites that interface with Google Maps is that you can check out an entire neighborhood visually right from your computer!
http://www.Trulia.com basically scrapes or compiles all the different real estate sites and finds different listings pulling the information all together in one place that is really easy to look at and use. The format is awesome. They use Google Maps and RSS Feeds and have a lot of different property listings. I love it and you can find a lot of good deals right there for your real estate investing business.
Another really cool web site is http://www.PropBot.com. This site’s creator, Joel Webb, is a really good friend of mine who also created The Creative Investor. I’ll tell you more about that in just a minute. PropBot.com is a site that pulls listings from millions and millions of different listings at thousands of different sites. Realtors can have their properties listed there. It uses API so it interfaces with a lot of other web sites. Other people have their sites and listings post on PropBot automatically. It’s a great place to look for properties and even search for certain keywords. Especially when you invest like I do and you aren’t concerned with locations, you can find properties that match certain keywords such as “handyman special” or “fixer upper” or for certain price ranges.
The next site is http://www.TheCreativeInvestor.com which is also a Joel Webb flagship site. It’s a community site with a lot of good information and articles. You can join for free and network and use the forums. It is a very useful site for investors and a great place to find buyers, sellers, investors, etc.
Check out http://www.PropSmart.com. It is another site that searches the internet for property listings. It also uses Google Maps and provides lots of useful information for mapping out properties you might be interested in and for finding real estate listings.
Another great site is http://www.HousingMaps.com. It’s a really great site that has lots of useful information. Housing Maps let’s you search for properties in certain price ranges and pull up listings. It puts them on a map and gives you really good information. It’s powered by Craigslist and Google Maps.
You know I buy and sell 5-10 or more houses per month without ever looking at a single one. Now you have a whole set of online resources so you can do the same thing!
In Real Estate Investing The Fortune is in the Follow Up
In Real Estate Investing, The Fortune is in The Follow Up
By Larry Goins
Using Auto Responders to Stay in Constant Contact!
An Auto responder is just what it sounds like. It is software that automatically responds to e-mail that is sent to you or sent out when someone goes into your database. It can be set up as a single email response or multiple responses delivered at various intervals. The neat thing is it’s all automatic once you set it up. You can set up a response to an inquiry from your website or set up a response from someone who sends you an email while you are out of town. Everyone has received email from an auto responder. Have you ever purchased a product online and immediately you received a “thank you” email or an email with a link to download a product. These are all examples of auto responders. “An Auto responder is A Seller Who Never Sleeps” “An Auto responder is the Cheapest Personal Assistant you will ever hire”
1. “Your Auto responder, combined with savvy marketing, is the speediest way to immediately boost business!”
2. “Email Auto responders are a time saving tool that sends your selling message out automatically at standard intervals.”
3. “An Auto responder is an immense time saver.”
4. “An Auto responder turns website visitors or prospects into buyers”
5. “Auto responders make the difference between having a real estate business that works hard for you and you constantly having to work hard for your real estate business”
Now, how do we use them in real estate investing? Let’s take a look at four ways. We have included samples of the ones we send out for each in your course to make it easy for you. Now even though I have already written the auto responder text for you it will take you about an hour to set up yours and customize them but once they are set up you can go for years without having to do anything else. Think about this, how many investors do you think are following up with every realtor, investor, FSBO and retail buyer every week? When I ask that to a live audience I have yet to have someone raise their hand. Another important thing I want to mention is that a lot of investors, especially new investors, do not like to talk to the seller or realtor. Using our system, we have many deals where we talk to the seller or realtor only once and then the rest of the negotiating is done by email. Is this great or what!? You could even take this one step further by emailing the seller or realtor and asking the three questions and then once you get your response, email your offer.
1: REALTORS: Every time we talk to a realtor about a house, we ask them if we can email them when we are looking for a property in a particular area or price range. We then set up a series of emails that go out to the realtor every week for six weeks. The first one is a “thank you and enjoyed talking to you” email. It also reminds them to keep looking for properties for me. The second one reminds them who I am, reiterates that I am still looking for houses and also asks them for a rehab contractor referral. Is this great or what? The third one reminds them still that I am looking for more houses and then it asks them for a referral of a good appraiser and so on. Now, when you start sending these emails to every realtor you talk to and they start sending you referrals of contractors, appraisers, attorney’s home inspectors and lenders you will notice a name or two that keeps popping up. THERE’S YOUR GUY! If several realtors are recommending the same people, it’s a good sign, right? After you send out the initial series of auto responders weekly then the next email auto responders go out every month to keep in touch with the realtor.
2: FSBO’S: When we get calls from FSBO’s, we always ask them for their email address so we may keep in contact with them as we are very busy and hard to get on the phone. Just remember that not all sellers will have email but a very high percentage will. Once you get them into your database, you can set up a series of emails to send them every week to see how they are proceeding with selling their house. It is a good idea to give them a few tips to help them sell their house and at the same time let them know you are here and ready, willing and able, to save the day when they are ready. If you do as we do and always make an offer on the first call then you can even refer to your offer in each email to let them know you are still ready when they are. Even if you didn’t make them an offer but say something like “as we discussed I am still ready to buy your house at the numbers we previously discussed when you decide that you are ready.” I have included the text for your email auto responders already so you do not have to write your own.
3: RETAIL BUYERS: We also use them to keep in touch with tenant/buyers who might have called us on a house we have already sold or maybe they were qualified for financing but we are still looking for a house for them. This is a great way to keep in touch with them so they don’t go shopping with someone else. You can also send custom emails with specific properties and even links to your website (if you have one) to view the properties. In our twelve months of auto responder text you will continue marketing to the Tenant/Buyer until they buy from you or anyone as you will see when you read the actual auto responder text. We are also asking for referrals AND having them bird dog for properties they like and then we just buy them and resell them to the tenant/buyer.
4: INVESTORS: Every time an investor calls you about a property you have or if you call an investor about a house, you should add them to your database and subscribe them to an “investor” auto responder. I have provided a series of auto responders to go out every week for three weeks, then every month after that. All of the auto responders I have provided follow the same pattern. The first three go out every week and then the rest go out monthly. This can be set up automatically. I have included several auto responder services in the included search system bookmarks with your course. Some are free and some charge. I personally used to use One Shopping Cart (1shoppingcart.com). There is a link in your bookmarks to go to it. They not only have auto responders but also database management, email broadcast, web forms to put on your website, a shopping cart and much more. We now use our exclusive websites that have built in auto responders that I had developed based on our Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! System and if you would like to find out more about it, you can visit www.MyInvestorWebsite.com. In fact, our websites already have the auto responder text built right in so you don’t have to do any of the work in setting it up which will save you a little time. I have already done the work for you. After you get your auto responders set up, I hope you will use your newfound time wisely. Don’t forget to spend some of it with your family!
I hope you have enjoyed this article taken from my course called the Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! which teaches how we buy and sell 5-10 properties a month, have them sold in less than 2 hours and never leave the office or look at them. For many more articles and a 10 part ecourse on how to create your own Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! as well as over 50 training audio recordings you can listen to online, download and collect, simply go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com where you will gain instant access to all of this and 51 Exclusive Editable real estate investing Forms and Documents all FREE! You will also get two FREE real estate investing eBooks, A free Personal Coaching Profile to help you jump start your real estate Investing, FREE Nationwide Wholesale Property Listing Notification, FREE Weekly Training Teleconferences with Different Topic Each Week, FREE subscription to Larry Goins “Almost” Weekly Investing Newsletter, FREE Admission for Two to Investor Palooza 3 Day Training Event, FREE Admission for Two to Larry Goins 3 Day Boot Camp, Plus over 31 Exclusive Articles on real estate Investing and Much More! Just go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com. Thanks and I look forward to working with you, Larry Goins
By Larry Goins
Using Auto Responders to Stay in Constant Contact!
An Auto responder is just what it sounds like. It is software that automatically responds to e-mail that is sent to you or sent out when someone goes into your database. It can be set up as a single email response or multiple responses delivered at various intervals. The neat thing is it’s all automatic once you set it up. You can set up a response to an inquiry from your website or set up a response from someone who sends you an email while you are out of town. Everyone has received email from an auto responder. Have you ever purchased a product online and immediately you received a “thank you” email or an email with a link to download a product. These are all examples of auto responders. “An Auto responder is A Seller Who Never Sleeps” “An Auto responder is the Cheapest Personal Assistant you will ever hire”
1. “Your Auto responder, combined with savvy marketing, is the speediest way to immediately boost business!”
2. “Email Auto responders are a time saving tool that sends your selling message out automatically at standard intervals.”
3. “An Auto responder is an immense time saver.”
4. “An Auto responder turns website visitors or prospects into buyers”
5. “Auto responders make the difference between having a real estate business that works hard for you and you constantly having to work hard for your real estate business”
Now, how do we use them in real estate investing? Let’s take a look at four ways. We have included samples of the ones we send out for each in your course to make it easy for you. Now even though I have already written the auto responder text for you it will take you about an hour to set up yours and customize them but once they are set up you can go for years without having to do anything else. Think about this, how many investors do you think are following up with every realtor, investor, FSBO and retail buyer every week? When I ask that to a live audience I have yet to have someone raise their hand. Another important thing I want to mention is that a lot of investors, especially new investors, do not like to talk to the seller or realtor. Using our system, we have many deals where we talk to the seller or realtor only once and then the rest of the negotiating is done by email. Is this great or what!? You could even take this one step further by emailing the seller or realtor and asking the three questions and then once you get your response, email your offer.
1: REALTORS: Every time we talk to a realtor about a house, we ask them if we can email them when we are looking for a property in a particular area or price range. We then set up a series of emails that go out to the realtor every week for six weeks. The first one is a “thank you and enjoyed talking to you” email. It also reminds them to keep looking for properties for me. The second one reminds them who I am, reiterates that I am still looking for houses and also asks them for a rehab contractor referral. Is this great or what? The third one reminds them still that I am looking for more houses and then it asks them for a referral of a good appraiser and so on. Now, when you start sending these emails to every realtor you talk to and they start sending you referrals of contractors, appraisers, attorney’s home inspectors and lenders you will notice a name or two that keeps popping up. THERE’S YOUR GUY! If several realtors are recommending the same people, it’s a good sign, right? After you send out the initial series of auto responders weekly then the next email auto responders go out every month to keep in touch with the realtor.
2: FSBO’S: When we get calls from FSBO’s, we always ask them for their email address so we may keep in contact with them as we are very busy and hard to get on the phone. Just remember that not all sellers will have email but a very high percentage will. Once you get them into your database, you can set up a series of emails to send them every week to see how they are proceeding with selling their house. It is a good idea to give them a few tips to help them sell their house and at the same time let them know you are here and ready, willing and able, to save the day when they are ready. If you do as we do and always make an offer on the first call then you can even refer to your offer in each email to let them know you are still ready when they are. Even if you didn’t make them an offer but say something like “as we discussed I am still ready to buy your house at the numbers we previously discussed when you decide that you are ready.” I have included the text for your email auto responders already so you do not have to write your own.
3: RETAIL BUYERS: We also use them to keep in touch with tenant/buyers who might have called us on a house we have already sold or maybe they were qualified for financing but we are still looking for a house for them. This is a great way to keep in touch with them so they don’t go shopping with someone else. You can also send custom emails with specific properties and even links to your website (if you have one) to view the properties. In our twelve months of auto responder text you will continue marketing to the Tenant/Buyer until they buy from you or anyone as you will see when you read the actual auto responder text. We are also asking for referrals AND having them bird dog for properties they like and then we just buy them and resell them to the tenant/buyer.
4: INVESTORS: Every time an investor calls you about a property you have or if you call an investor about a house, you should add them to your database and subscribe them to an “investor” auto responder. I have provided a series of auto responders to go out every week for three weeks, then every month after that. All of the auto responders I have provided follow the same pattern. The first three go out every week and then the rest go out monthly. This can be set up automatically. I have included several auto responder services in the included search system bookmarks with your course. Some are free and some charge. I personally used to use One Shopping Cart (1shoppingcart.com). There is a link in your bookmarks to go to it. They not only have auto responders but also database management, email broadcast, web forms to put on your website, a shopping cart and much more. We now use our exclusive websites that have built in auto responders that I had developed based on our Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! System and if you would like to find out more about it, you can visit www.MyInvestorWebsite.com. In fact, our websites already have the auto responder text built right in so you don’t have to do any of the work in setting it up which will save you a little time. I have already done the work for you. After you get your auto responders set up, I hope you will use your newfound time wisely. Don’t forget to spend some of it with your family!
I hope you have enjoyed this article taken from my course called the Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! which teaches how we buy and sell 5-10 properties a month, have them sold in less than 2 hours and never leave the office or look at them. For many more articles and a 10 part ecourse on how to create your own Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! as well as over 50 training audio recordings you can listen to online, download and collect, simply go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com where you will gain instant access to all of this and 51 Exclusive Editable real estate investing Forms and Documents all FREE! You will also get two FREE real estate investing eBooks, A free Personal Coaching Profile to help you jump start your real estate Investing, FREE Nationwide Wholesale Property Listing Notification, FREE Weekly Training Teleconferences with Different Topic Each Week, FREE subscription to Larry Goins “Almost” Weekly Investing Newsletter, FREE Admission for Two to Investor Palooza 3 Day Training Event, FREE Admission for Two to Larry Goins 3 Day Boot Camp, Plus over 31 Exclusive Articles on real estate Investing and Much More! Just go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com. Thanks and I look forward to working with you, Larry Goins
How to Set and Achieve Your Goals in Real Estate
How to Set and Achieve Your Goals in Real Estate
By Larry Goins
I want to ask you two questions. One, do you have a Will? And two, do you have written goals for the next one, three, five and ten years? If you answered yes to the first question but no to the second, you are planning more for your death than you are while you are here. Think about it. I want to challenge you to start setting some goals, but remember if a goal is not in writing, it is simply a conversation. It must be in writing and it must have a deadline. Here are a few guidelines for setting goals. Oh, by the way... you need a will also.
Goals Must be Specific
I want you to be specific and include details but start rough. When you start rough for example, you want a Mercedes. You do not have to get into the details about what color, what options, that sort of thing, just write it down. Make your list huge, what kind of home do you want, what you want for your family, college education, spend more time, travel, anything you can think of. You can come back later and prioritize them and set them up as to what you want in one month, three months, six months, twelve months, then three, five, ten, twenty, thirty year goals. The more goals you have, the happier you will be, the longer you will live, and the more prosperous you will be.
Goals Must be Believable
Remember this, your goals must be believable, by you, or you will not pay the price. They must be believable, they must be just out of your reach, but you must know you can reach them, if you really strive to do it.
Goals Must be Measurable
You cannot set a goal to be financially independent. There is no way you can measure that. You need to set a goal for the amount of income you want per month, per year, the amount of equity that you want in properties – one, three, five, ten and twenty years. It must be measurable. That way you can break it down to what I call “reduce it to the ridiculous”. If you know you want to earn $100,000 a year, you know that is $8,333 per month. That’s just one deal a month where I live. One of the things I have learned is, successful people set their goals quickly and they make adjustments as they go along. Just like successful people make decisions quickly, they do not vacillate in indecision or what I call sometimes; get mixed up in a funk of negativity.
Goals Must be Congruent
Your goals must also be congruent with your actions. You cannot set a goal to work harder, longer hours AND a goal to spend more time with your family. Those are not congruent. They must be congruent with your actions.
Visualize What You Want
Another good thing that will help you with your goals is to visualize what you want. If you see yourself as already having achieved the goal, you will fake out your mind and your mind sees the goal as already having been achieved. It’s called “fake it till you make it”. I used to do this all of the time. Just take a minute or two each day and think about life as it is with your goals already accomplished. It’s really easy when you get used to it.
Work Your Goals
The next thing you want to do is work your goals, work on the priority that moves you closer to your goals every day.
Number Your Goals
Number your goals in the order of importance. Not only is the goal important but so is the reason. Sure your want a car, but why do you want the car? Sure your want more money, but why do you want money? You want to be able to spend more time with your family, you want to be able to travel, you want to buy a Hummer, and you want to have an ocean front condo or send your children to the best college. Whatever it is, the reason must be there. The reason is more important than the goal itself.
Review, Monitor and Make Adjustments
Another thing you need to do is review, monitor and make adjustments on your goals. You have to be flexible. Some things are not going to happen, you have to face that; but you need to continuously strive to get better every day. If you will work harder on yourself than you do on your job then you will always be growing. Remember that last sentence and write it down as it is worth repeating.
The Goals Must Have a Deadline
As I mentioned first, your goals must have a deadline. A goal without a deadline is just a conversation. When beginning to set your goals, I want you to set your goals in four basic areas:
Financial
You will set goals based on income, equity or net worth and cash flow. All of these are financial goals.
Fitness
This is your health. If you don’t feel good, chances are that you are not working at your maximum capacity. So, I want you to set some fitness goals to stay healthy. Remember “an apple a day”? What if this is right and you are not doing it? Start small though, you don’t try to tackle all of these at once; but you need to be healthy not only for you but for your family as well.
Family
Set family goals. What is an example of a family goal? Maybe you want to take four vacations a year. Maybe you want to visit a new state, three times a year or five times a year. Maybe you want to go see the Grandparents two or three times a year; but maybe not. Anyway, you get the point.
Faith
You need to set some spiritual goals, some faith goals. I am not going to get into a lot of detail about that but that will help you along your way. Remember, if you slip in one area of your goals, you are probably slipping in some other areas. Another thing I want you to think about is the people you associate with. Take a minute and think about this. If you think about your ten closes friends annual salary and divide it by ten, then that is pretty close to what you make. I’m not telling you to get rid of your friends, all I’m saying is whom you associate with, is who you are like, so please keep that in mind. Don’t get rid of your friends, just get some more that are where YOU want to be financially. Most of the people I hang out with now, we all make over $500,000.00 a year. That just blows me away. I never imagined I could make that kind of money…. Well I guess I could, as we are talking about goal setting and visualization aren’t we?
I hope you have enjoyed this article taken from my course called the Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! that teaches how we buy and sell 5-10 properties a month, never look at them and have them sold in less than 2 hours. For many more articles and a 10 part ecourse on how to create your own Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! as well as over 50 training audio recordings you can listen to online, download and collect, simply go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com where you will gain instant access to all of this and 51 Exclusive Editable real estate investing Forms and Documents all FREE! You will also get two FREE real estate investing eBooks, A free Personal Coaching Profile to help you jump start your real estate Investing, FREE Nationwide Wholesale Property Listing Notification, FREE Weekly Training Teleconferences with Different Topic Each Week, FREE subscription to Larry Goins “Almost” Weekly Investing Newsletter, FREE Admission for Two to Investor Palooza 3 Day Training Event, FREE Admission for Two to Larry Goins 3 Day Boot Camp, Plus over 31 Exclusive Articles on real estate Investing and Much More! Just go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com. Thanks and I look forward to working with you, Larry Goins
By Larry Goins
I want to ask you two questions. One, do you have a Will? And two, do you have written goals for the next one, three, five and ten years? If you answered yes to the first question but no to the second, you are planning more for your death than you are while you are here. Think about it. I want to challenge you to start setting some goals, but remember if a goal is not in writing, it is simply a conversation. It must be in writing and it must have a deadline. Here are a few guidelines for setting goals. Oh, by the way... you need a will also.
Goals Must be Specific
I want you to be specific and include details but start rough. When you start rough for example, you want a Mercedes. You do not have to get into the details about what color, what options, that sort of thing, just write it down. Make your list huge, what kind of home do you want, what you want for your family, college education, spend more time, travel, anything you can think of. You can come back later and prioritize them and set them up as to what you want in one month, three months, six months, twelve months, then three, five, ten, twenty, thirty year goals. The more goals you have, the happier you will be, the longer you will live, and the more prosperous you will be.
Goals Must be Believable
Remember this, your goals must be believable, by you, or you will not pay the price. They must be believable, they must be just out of your reach, but you must know you can reach them, if you really strive to do it.
Goals Must be Measurable
You cannot set a goal to be financially independent. There is no way you can measure that. You need to set a goal for the amount of income you want per month, per year, the amount of equity that you want in properties – one, three, five, ten and twenty years. It must be measurable. That way you can break it down to what I call “reduce it to the ridiculous”. If you know you want to earn $100,000 a year, you know that is $8,333 per month. That’s just one deal a month where I live. One of the things I have learned is, successful people set their goals quickly and they make adjustments as they go along. Just like successful people make decisions quickly, they do not vacillate in indecision or what I call sometimes; get mixed up in a funk of negativity.
Goals Must be Congruent
Your goals must also be congruent with your actions. You cannot set a goal to work harder, longer hours AND a goal to spend more time with your family. Those are not congruent. They must be congruent with your actions.
Visualize What You Want
Another good thing that will help you with your goals is to visualize what you want. If you see yourself as already having achieved the goal, you will fake out your mind and your mind sees the goal as already having been achieved. It’s called “fake it till you make it”. I used to do this all of the time. Just take a minute or two each day and think about life as it is with your goals already accomplished. It’s really easy when you get used to it.
Work Your Goals
The next thing you want to do is work your goals, work on the priority that moves you closer to your goals every day.
Number Your Goals
Number your goals in the order of importance. Not only is the goal important but so is the reason. Sure your want a car, but why do you want the car? Sure your want more money, but why do you want money? You want to be able to spend more time with your family, you want to be able to travel, you want to buy a Hummer, and you want to have an ocean front condo or send your children to the best college. Whatever it is, the reason must be there. The reason is more important than the goal itself.
Review, Monitor and Make Adjustments
Another thing you need to do is review, monitor and make adjustments on your goals. You have to be flexible. Some things are not going to happen, you have to face that; but you need to continuously strive to get better every day. If you will work harder on yourself than you do on your job then you will always be growing. Remember that last sentence and write it down as it is worth repeating.
The Goals Must Have a Deadline
As I mentioned first, your goals must have a deadline. A goal without a deadline is just a conversation. When beginning to set your goals, I want you to set your goals in four basic areas:
Financial
You will set goals based on income, equity or net worth and cash flow. All of these are financial goals.
Fitness
This is your health. If you don’t feel good, chances are that you are not working at your maximum capacity. So, I want you to set some fitness goals to stay healthy. Remember “an apple a day”? What if this is right and you are not doing it? Start small though, you don’t try to tackle all of these at once; but you need to be healthy not only for you but for your family as well.
Family
Set family goals. What is an example of a family goal? Maybe you want to take four vacations a year. Maybe you want to visit a new state, three times a year or five times a year. Maybe you want to go see the Grandparents two or three times a year; but maybe not. Anyway, you get the point.
Faith
You need to set some spiritual goals, some faith goals. I am not going to get into a lot of detail about that but that will help you along your way. Remember, if you slip in one area of your goals, you are probably slipping in some other areas. Another thing I want you to think about is the people you associate with. Take a minute and think about this. If you think about your ten closes friends annual salary and divide it by ten, then that is pretty close to what you make. I’m not telling you to get rid of your friends, all I’m saying is whom you associate with, is who you are like, so please keep that in mind. Don’t get rid of your friends, just get some more that are where YOU want to be financially. Most of the people I hang out with now, we all make over $500,000.00 a year. That just blows me away. I never imagined I could make that kind of money…. Well I guess I could, as we are talking about goal setting and visualization aren’t we?
I hope you have enjoyed this article taken from my course called the Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! that teaches how we buy and sell 5-10 properties a month, never look at them and have them sold in less than 2 hours. For many more articles and a 10 part ecourse on how to create your own Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! as well as over 50 training audio recordings you can listen to online, download and collect, simply go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com where you will gain instant access to all of this and 51 Exclusive Editable real estate investing Forms and Documents all FREE! You will also get two FREE real estate investing eBooks, A free Personal Coaching Profile to help you jump start your real estate Investing, FREE Nationwide Wholesale Property Listing Notification, FREE Weekly Training Teleconferences with Different Topic Each Week, FREE subscription to Larry Goins “Almost” Weekly Investing Newsletter, FREE Admission for Two to Investor Palooza 3 Day Training Event, FREE Admission for Two to Larry Goins 3 Day Boot Camp, Plus over 31 Exclusive Articles on real estate Investing and Much More! Just go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com. Thanks and I look forward to working with you, Larry Goins
7 Traits of Successful Real Estate Investors
Seven Traits of Successful Real Estate Investors
By Larry Goins
Who doesn’t want to make more money? With the exception of a few bank CEOs, not anyone, right? In working with real estate investors for several years as a mentor and trainer, I’ve discovered seven traits that successful investors possess. Don’t panic! You don’t have to be born with these traits to be successful. You do, however, have to be willing to develop them in yourself. To make more money, you have to be successful, right? To be successful, you have to be willing to do what successful people do and work like successful people work.
Without further ramblings, let’s look at the seven traits I’ve identified which successful real estate investors need to acquire and refine to take their real estate investing to the highest level.
1. A “Get ‘R Done” Attitude
Buying a real estate investing course or attending a training seminar is easy. Taking the education out to the streets and doing the deals requires motivation and discipline. As a society, we are programmed to over-analyze, over-complicate, and under-action things. Never does this predicament hold truer than with something that is new to us. A lot of folks call this “paralysis of analysis”. They don’t take into account that fear of failure is sometimes at work here as well.
When you get ready to pick up the phone for the first time and make an offer on a property, don’t focus on everything that could go wrong. Put your mental energy into doing the deal and focus on everything that should go right. You can’t remain inert out of fear of making a mistake. Remember, the worst thing that can happen is that the owner says no to your offer. That’s not the end of the world. You just pick up the phone and make another offer.
But don’t forget to ask the owner or realtor if they have anything else that might be on the market to which they would be receptive to a cash offer today!
If you sit in front of your phone and do nothing, nothing is all that gets done. When you jump outside your comfort zone and start dialing about some properties, deals get done. I totally value investing in your real estate education. I, also, value and appreciate students who get out there and work with what they’ve learned. I know you won’t do everything perfectly when you are just starting out. You are still very much in your learning process. But doing is a big part of learning.
No driver education student ever got there license sitting in a classroom or even behind the demo wheel of a demo driving program. Until you get behind the wheel of a real car on a real road, you aren’t driving. And until you get on the phone with a real property owner, you aren’t investing in real estate.
Why is Nike’s slogan so memorable? Just do it. Making the first move in real estate investing is going to be the hardest. But once you make that move, it becomes easier and easier every time. So successful real estate investors are like Larry the Cable Guy. They get ‘r done!
2. A Willing Mind and a Positive Attitude
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Successful real estate investors are willing to set out on the journey of investing and have a positive attitude that they will succeed. Why? First of all, he who doesn’t try is lost, to loosely quote. Second of all, anyone who thinks they will fail is certainly right!
You have to approach your new real estate investing business with a positive attitude that you will succeed and a willingness to try something new. Your attitude plays almost as big a role in your success as does your mindset and your education. No matter what you want to be successful at, you have to be willing to work at it or no amount of positive attitude will make you successful. And no matter what you think you can do, you won’t be successful unless you are willing to learn and work at it.
Successful real estate investors are open to education and believe in their own ability to be successful. They see an incredible opportunity in real estate investing and set out to be successful at it. Nobody starts anything planning to fail. If you are willing and believe in yourself, and know that I believe in you too, you can be successful at real estate investing.
3. A Desire to Learn.
If you don’t want to learn how to be a successful real estate investor, you won’t be. Successful real estate investors can no more be successful if they don’t believe in themselves than they can if they aren’t willing to learn from the pioneers who have gone before them. I know you can do this. I know you bought the course or requested the free CD or subscribed to my e-course. Now what are you going to do with the incredible opportunity before you?
Successful real estate investors never, ever stop learning. There are many ways to buy and sell real estate and different ways work better for some people than they do for others. Real estate markets change, mortgage availability changes, and your own interests may change. You don’t have to be a master of rehabbing, hard money loans, lease-to-own deals, note buying, and all the other ways that people are making money in real estate. You do have to be a master of the ways that you want to make money in real estate. Stay willing to learn. And don’t just be willing, thirst for the information that is available to you.
4. A Serious Attitude About Your Business
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was a house. And neither will be your real estate investing business. You have to get up every day and treat your business like a business. My Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine students don’t play at being real estate investors. They don’t print up business cards, hand them out, and wait for the phone to ring. Whether they are working their business full time or part time they maintain a serious attitude about their business.
Successful real estate investors don’t play at buying and selling properties. They might not be doing deals and making offers every day, but every day that they are working at their business they are working at it like they mean it. You can’t be successful if you aren’t taking your business seriously. Like most things in life, you will get as much value out of real estate investing as the effort that you put into it.
To be successful in anything, you have to focus some energy and effort and time into it to reach your goals. You have to treat real estate investing seriously. This doesn’t mean that you have to be in your office forty hours per week. But it does mean that you need to have an office, a dedicated space, for your business. Successful real estate investors treat their business seriously and put all their efforts into it when they are working at it. Remember, this isn’t just another job. This is your career, and your future. Be serious about it.
5. A Consistent Effort
Successful real estate investors work at their business consistently. This doesn’t mean they don’t take vacations, or have jobs, or spend time with their families. It means that when they say they are devoting 20 or 30 or 40 hours a week to their real estate careers, they are doing it consistently. Most things that we take on fail if we don’t work at them continually.
One of my team members has a yard that goes from full shade to full sun as you walk around her home. Growing grass has been a battle for her the entire 12 years she has lived in the house. She has a nice, green yard because she works at it consistently. She mows regularly, she waters when it’s dry, and she re-seeds when bare spots appear. There wasn’t a one stop process that worked for her because different areas or aspects of the yard required different seeds, different care, and different nurturing.
Your real estate investing business is a lot like a yard that needs consistent care. You can’t rehab and lease and wholesale and flip every property the same way. Some properties require a little more work than others. But they all require consistent effort.
You can be a successful real estate investor by doing small things on a consistent basis to ensure that you grow more successful every day. Success isn’t about doing what is necessary only once or twice or even three times. It’s about doing what is necessary consistently. You can be successful by doing things over time to build your business consistently.
6. A Motivated Attitude
I have yet to meet a successful real estate investor who didn’t really care whether or not he or she was successful. It just doesn’t happen. Nobody is successful in this business by accident. Oh, sure. You might luck out and do a deal without having all your ducks in a row. But if you aren’t motivated to be successful, you won’t be successful.
Some days you won’t see any positive results. Some deals will fall apart. Some owners won’t be willing to sell at a price that gives you 70% of ARV. The market may turn or the buyer may lose their financing. That’s okay. Stay motivated. You aren’t ever going to be more successful than you are motivated. It just won’t happen.
It takes time and dedication to see significant results in your real estate investing. If you are feeling a little bit discouraged, take time to motivate yourself by listening to the training materials that got you into real estate investing in the first place. Bookstore shelves are crammed full of motivational books, tapes, CDs, and videos.
We all have off days. Sometimes even I need a little help to stay motivated. However, if you are motivated, the deals and the money will come. Conversely, if you aren’t motivated, nothing much is going to happen.
Successful real estate investors get motivated and stay motivated. You can do it, too.
7. A Humble Attitude
Successful real estate investors are good, humble folks. The more money they are making, the more humble they become. Don’t take my word for it. Look around at a local REIA meeting or one of my boot camps. Nobody knows everything there is to know about real estate investing. Not even me. When you maintain a humble attitude, you remain willing to learn. There is always something more or something new to learn in real estate.
If you aren’t humble, you aren’t open to new ideas and new teachings. When you aren’t open to learning, you aren’t staying on the top of your game. As soon as your game slips, you cease to be successful. It’s funny how that works. Plus, when you aren’t humble you just aren’t very much fun to be around. People like to do business with people who make them feel good about themselves. Even motivated sellers are turned off by investors who talk down to them, or belittle them. Be humble. Maybe humility is as close to Godliness as cleanliness?
Successful real estate investors approach their work day with an air of humility that makes them a pleasure to be around and a pleasure to do business with. I couldn’t have built a successful buying and selling machine in my office if I weren’t humble. And you will find it difficult to build a network of buyers and sellers if you aren’t humble, either.
That’s it. These seven personal attributes are the most important tools in your real estate investing arsenal. Without them, you are paddling backwards in a canoe with a hole the size of a watermelon. But with them, you are well on your way to being a successful real estate investor, too.
By Larry Goins
Who doesn’t want to make more money? With the exception of a few bank CEOs, not anyone, right? In working with real estate investors for several years as a mentor and trainer, I’ve discovered seven traits that successful investors possess. Don’t panic! You don’t have to be born with these traits to be successful. You do, however, have to be willing to develop them in yourself. To make more money, you have to be successful, right? To be successful, you have to be willing to do what successful people do and work like successful people work.
Without further ramblings, let’s look at the seven traits I’ve identified which successful real estate investors need to acquire and refine to take their real estate investing to the highest level.
1. A “Get ‘R Done” Attitude
Buying a real estate investing course or attending a training seminar is easy. Taking the education out to the streets and doing the deals requires motivation and discipline. As a society, we are programmed to over-analyze, over-complicate, and under-action things. Never does this predicament hold truer than with something that is new to us. A lot of folks call this “paralysis of analysis”. They don’t take into account that fear of failure is sometimes at work here as well.
When you get ready to pick up the phone for the first time and make an offer on a property, don’t focus on everything that could go wrong. Put your mental energy into doing the deal and focus on everything that should go right. You can’t remain inert out of fear of making a mistake. Remember, the worst thing that can happen is that the owner says no to your offer. That’s not the end of the world. You just pick up the phone and make another offer.
But don’t forget to ask the owner or realtor if they have anything else that might be on the market to which they would be receptive to a cash offer today!
If you sit in front of your phone and do nothing, nothing is all that gets done. When you jump outside your comfort zone and start dialing about some properties, deals get done. I totally value investing in your real estate education. I, also, value and appreciate students who get out there and work with what they’ve learned. I know you won’t do everything perfectly when you are just starting out. You are still very much in your learning process. But doing is a big part of learning.
No driver education student ever got there license sitting in a classroom or even behind the demo wheel of a demo driving program. Until you get behind the wheel of a real car on a real road, you aren’t driving. And until you get on the phone with a real property owner, you aren’t investing in real estate.
Why is Nike’s slogan so memorable? Just do it. Making the first move in real estate investing is going to be the hardest. But once you make that move, it becomes easier and easier every time. So successful real estate investors are like Larry the Cable Guy. They get ‘r done!
2. A Willing Mind and a Positive Attitude
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Successful real estate investors are willing to set out on the journey of investing and have a positive attitude that they will succeed. Why? First of all, he who doesn’t try is lost, to loosely quote. Second of all, anyone who thinks they will fail is certainly right!
You have to approach your new real estate investing business with a positive attitude that you will succeed and a willingness to try something new. Your attitude plays almost as big a role in your success as does your mindset and your education. No matter what you want to be successful at, you have to be willing to work at it or no amount of positive attitude will make you successful. And no matter what you think you can do, you won’t be successful unless you are willing to learn and work at it.
Successful real estate investors are open to education and believe in their own ability to be successful. They see an incredible opportunity in real estate investing and set out to be successful at it. Nobody starts anything planning to fail. If you are willing and believe in yourself, and know that I believe in you too, you can be successful at real estate investing.
3. A Desire to Learn.
If you don’t want to learn how to be a successful real estate investor, you won’t be. Successful real estate investors can no more be successful if they don’t believe in themselves than they can if they aren’t willing to learn from the pioneers who have gone before them. I know you can do this. I know you bought the course or requested the free CD or subscribed to my e-course. Now what are you going to do with the incredible opportunity before you?
Successful real estate investors never, ever stop learning. There are many ways to buy and sell real estate and different ways work better for some people than they do for others. Real estate markets change, mortgage availability changes, and your own interests may change. You don’t have to be a master of rehabbing, hard money loans, lease-to-own deals, note buying, and all the other ways that people are making money in real estate. You do have to be a master of the ways that you want to make money in real estate. Stay willing to learn. And don’t just be willing, thirst for the information that is available to you.
4. A Serious Attitude About Your Business
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was a house. And neither will be your real estate investing business. You have to get up every day and treat your business like a business. My Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine students don’t play at being real estate investors. They don’t print up business cards, hand them out, and wait for the phone to ring. Whether they are working their business full time or part time they maintain a serious attitude about their business.
Successful real estate investors don’t play at buying and selling properties. They might not be doing deals and making offers every day, but every day that they are working at their business they are working at it like they mean it. You can’t be successful if you aren’t taking your business seriously. Like most things in life, you will get as much value out of real estate investing as the effort that you put into it.
To be successful in anything, you have to focus some energy and effort and time into it to reach your goals. You have to treat real estate investing seriously. This doesn’t mean that you have to be in your office forty hours per week. But it does mean that you need to have an office, a dedicated space, for your business. Successful real estate investors treat their business seriously and put all their efforts into it when they are working at it. Remember, this isn’t just another job. This is your career, and your future. Be serious about it.
5. A Consistent Effort
Successful real estate investors work at their business consistently. This doesn’t mean they don’t take vacations, or have jobs, or spend time with their families. It means that when they say they are devoting 20 or 30 or 40 hours a week to their real estate careers, they are doing it consistently. Most things that we take on fail if we don’t work at them continually.
One of my team members has a yard that goes from full shade to full sun as you walk around her home. Growing grass has been a battle for her the entire 12 years she has lived in the house. She has a nice, green yard because she works at it consistently. She mows regularly, she waters when it’s dry, and she re-seeds when bare spots appear. There wasn’t a one stop process that worked for her because different areas or aspects of the yard required different seeds, different care, and different nurturing.
Your real estate investing business is a lot like a yard that needs consistent care. You can’t rehab and lease and wholesale and flip every property the same way. Some properties require a little more work than others. But they all require consistent effort.
You can be a successful real estate investor by doing small things on a consistent basis to ensure that you grow more successful every day. Success isn’t about doing what is necessary only once or twice or even three times. It’s about doing what is necessary consistently. You can be successful by doing things over time to build your business consistently.
6. A Motivated Attitude
I have yet to meet a successful real estate investor who didn’t really care whether or not he or she was successful. It just doesn’t happen. Nobody is successful in this business by accident. Oh, sure. You might luck out and do a deal without having all your ducks in a row. But if you aren’t motivated to be successful, you won’t be successful.
Some days you won’t see any positive results. Some deals will fall apart. Some owners won’t be willing to sell at a price that gives you 70% of ARV. The market may turn or the buyer may lose their financing. That’s okay. Stay motivated. You aren’t ever going to be more successful than you are motivated. It just won’t happen.
It takes time and dedication to see significant results in your real estate investing. If you are feeling a little bit discouraged, take time to motivate yourself by listening to the training materials that got you into real estate investing in the first place. Bookstore shelves are crammed full of motivational books, tapes, CDs, and videos.
We all have off days. Sometimes even I need a little help to stay motivated. However, if you are motivated, the deals and the money will come. Conversely, if you aren’t motivated, nothing much is going to happen.
Successful real estate investors get motivated and stay motivated. You can do it, too.
7. A Humble Attitude
Successful real estate investors are good, humble folks. The more money they are making, the more humble they become. Don’t take my word for it. Look around at a local REIA meeting or one of my boot camps. Nobody knows everything there is to know about real estate investing. Not even me. When you maintain a humble attitude, you remain willing to learn. There is always something more or something new to learn in real estate.
If you aren’t humble, you aren’t open to new ideas and new teachings. When you aren’t open to learning, you aren’t staying on the top of your game. As soon as your game slips, you cease to be successful. It’s funny how that works. Plus, when you aren’t humble you just aren’t very much fun to be around. People like to do business with people who make them feel good about themselves. Even motivated sellers are turned off by investors who talk down to them, or belittle them. Be humble. Maybe humility is as close to Godliness as cleanliness?
Successful real estate investors approach their work day with an air of humility that makes them a pleasure to be around and a pleasure to do business with. I couldn’t have built a successful buying and selling machine in my office if I weren’t humble. And you will find it difficult to build a network of buyers and sellers if you aren’t humble, either.
That’s it. These seven personal attributes are the most important tools in your real estate investing arsenal. Without them, you are paddling backwards in a canoe with a hole the size of a watermelon. But with them, you are well on your way to being a successful real estate investor, too.
Why You Need to Set Goals to Achieve Your Dreams in Real Estate
Why You Need to Set Goals to Achieve Your Dreams in Real Estate
By Larry Goins
It’s easy enough to dream big about your future in real estate investing. We all have lofty expectations of what we will get out of life – our careers, our families, our networks of friends, etc. But without a vehicle to get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow, those great expectations are barely attainable. When you put the key into your vehicle by setting goals, you begin to chart out a roadmap for reaching your highest potential, and achieving all your dreams.
Without a charted course, your vehicle just sits in the driveway reminding you of all the things you could have achieved if you’d only had a plan. I was once told that “prior planning prevents poor performance”. As a young man, this was just another silly saying that the establishment put in the way of me doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Hindsight is truly 20/20 vision and I can see that a lot of time can be wasted when you don’t have a clear path laid out for reaching your brightest future.
When you write down your goals, you begin to plot the path to help you achieve your dreams in real estate investing. In fact, when you begin to lay out goals, you start your vehicle on the road for a journey far greater than perhaps even your wildest dreams!
Goals Must Lead to a Specific Destination
Imagine contacting Triple A for a trip tick to Alpena, Michigan. And they provide you directions, and recommended hotels, and favorite dining spots to the Michigan state line. Although your directions are specific, and your course is charted, you aren’t ending up where you intended to go because your directions don’t give you a specific destination. You’d have a better chance of arriving in Alpena with only a loose selection of interstates and byways without all the extra information, as long as it gets you where you intend to go. When you initially set out your goals, they don’t have to be so detailed as to cover every stop along your journey, but they do have to get you where you want to go. Your goals should lead you to the end that you desire – the reason you began investing in real estate in the first place. Perhaps you don’t initially know exactly what you need to do every minute of every day to get where you want to go, but if you select your destination then you can goal plan backwards to reach your dreams.
Goals Must Be Meaningful and Achievable
Your goals must mean something to you. It isn’t enough to want to make a million dollars in real estate, you have to have a reason to want to make a million dollars to achieve it. Even the lucky dog who wins the lottery meant to buy his ticket. Likewise your goals must be achievable. It doesn’t even matter if naysayers doubt the validity of your dreams or your ability to achieve them. It does matter that you believe that your goals are achievable. Perhaps they seem a little out of reach today, if you’ve just purchased your Ultimate Buying Machine or received your first copy of my Ultimate Investor Report Newsletter. But you must truly believe that you can reach your goals, and reaching them must be something that you have a purpose driven approach to accomplishing.
Goals Must Be Quantifiable and Measureable
It isn’t just enough to want to be successful in real estate investing. You must really, really want to accomplish a specific goal that can be quantified on the front end and measured on the back end. It may be that you want to be a Larry Goins’ Prodigy and sell 5-10 houses per month online. It may be that you want to earn $2.5 million per year or that you want to build a portfolio of rental properties generating $250,000 per year. Perhaps you want to create a nest egg that enables you to travel or retire or provide things for your children that your parents couldn’t provide for you. Whatever your goals are, they are essential to succeeding in the world of real estate investing. And unless you can quantify and measure them, in the back of your mind you will never really know whether you reached the destination at the end of your road map or not.
The bonus of setting quantifiable and measureable goals in real estate investing is that you can break them down to a ridiculously simple morsel that you can measure on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annually basis. If you know that you wish to make $2.5 million a year, then you can break that down into an accomplishment necessary in smaller chunks. You can further quantify, with an understanding of the number of houses you need to look at and make offers on, what your goals need to be on weekly and monthly goals to reach your long term goals.
It’s important that you don’t get side-barred trying to set your goals. The most successful people that I know set big goals and make big plans. They don’t vary from the course they know there vehicle needs to take to reach their goals. And you shouldn’t either!
Goals Must Be In Agreement With Your Actions
You cannot set a goal to lose weight and reach it by dining at McDonald’s four times a week. You cannot set a goal to get a new boat and reach it by never looking at boat ads. You cannot set a goal to walk on the moon and reach it by staring at the stars. And you cannot set any goals in real estate and then reach them without stepping out and starting to make your deals. Dreams do come true, but not by accident. Make sure that you set goals you are capable and willing to act accordingly to reach.
Picture Your Goals Already Met
No matter what I say when I teach the art of buying and selling 5-10 houses per month without ever leaving my office, some people just can’t picture it happening for them. They buy the course. They attend the class. They think long and hard about all the reasons it won’t work for them. And then they do nothing.
Don’t picture yourself failing. Don’t picture yourself struggling. Picture yourself at the end of your two, five, or ten year plan with all your goals met and your real estate investing dreams come true.
You don’t have to spend hours and hours each day picturing yourself with your goals achieved. But just a few minutes a day helps you to trick your mind into believing that you have already achieved the goals that you’ve set for yourself. This keeps your mind from dirty dog downing you into forgetting that you can do exactly what you set out to do with your real estate investing vehicle. And it is a lot of fun! A few minutes a day you get to picture yourself on a white sandy beach, or driving the car of your dreams, or living in your own luxury home custom appointed with all the features you associate with living exactly how you set out to live when you planned your goals. But don’t forget to come back to today, or you will find it a lot harder to reach your goals. This concept of creative visualization is all about getting what you really want out of life. Those things you focus your mental energy on creating, are the things you ultimately get. That’s why it is so important not to give your conscious mind a chance to dirty dog down your subconscious into thinking you cannot reach your goals. You can!
Systematically Complete Your Goals
Now it is time to create the little mini-morsels of goals from your big goals. You know how much you want to make per year. You’ve figured out how much you have to earn per week or per month to reach those bigger goals. Its time to start knocking the mini-goals off your to do list one at a time. Remember, you must plan your work and then work your plan.
Separate and Prioritize Your Goals
I am assuming at this point that your goals are about more than just money, or even just the things that money can buy. Maybe you want to ensure that your kids can attend any college they want, or that your grand children won’t have to worry about getting student loans. Perhaps you want to support a charity or ministry that has been dear to your heart but not so near to your wallet for years. Or maybe you want to see your spouse back at home with the kids instead of working in an office. Perhaps even you want to leave the corporate grind and return to a home based office yourself.
At this point, you probably have a pretty good idea what the reason for each of your goals is. You can begin to think of each goal as its own vehicle to reach the reason. The goals is the means to reach assorted ends that you want for yourself or your family.
Number each of your goals and begin to prioritize them so that you can reach them in not only their order of importance, but in a timely fashion that they can meet the reason for which they were set. For example, if you wish to send your kids to college through your real estate investing profits, you want to reach that goal by the time they reach age 18, right?
Review and Revise Your Goals
Sometimes things change. Maybe your real estate investing career takes a back seat to other priorities for a while. Perhaps your exemplary child is graduating a year early and the college money is needed sooner rather than later. Or that same child has received a full scholarship to the school of their choice and you suddenly have more money to put into your real estate portfolio than you expected.
You have to stay just a little bit flexible with your goals. Things change. And if you review and revise your goals and find that you are a bit ahead or behind your previous schedule its okay. It’s no different than making an unscheduled stop on your trip. You modify your trip tick from Triple A or reset your GPS and modify your road map. You can modify your goals in the same way. But if you don’t set them, you cannot reach them.
Goals Must Have a Defined End Date
Yes, you have to be willing to modify your end dates for your goals. Not everything will be achieved on exactly the day you project. However, your goals must have a defined end date. Goals without dates aren’t really goals at all, more wishful thinkings. Yeah, you might achieve them. But the driving force of meeting a deadline goes away when you don’t have an end date.
Four Categories to Set Goals In:
FINANCIAL
Any goals that include net worth or rental property incomes or even college tuitions are financial goals. They may be directly tied to your real estate investing or they may be more closely connected to things that are more important to you personally, such as putting a child through school or setting up a trust fund.
FITNESS
You might want to tell me to mind my own business, but unless you want to die wealthy fast, your personal health and fitness goals are important to reaching your final end goals. Honestly, I’ve learned that when I don’t feel good I don’t work well either. Your health is one of the most important factors to your ultimate success in real estate investing. Furthermore, you owe it to your family – to everyone that you are creating this real estate wealth for – to live as long as you can , not just as prosperously as you can.
FAMILY
Unless you set goals that involve your family, your financial goals will only keep you from being a viable member of your family. Trust me, your spouse and your kids care a lot more about the time that you spend with them than the money that you spend on them. Yes, even your teenagers, but don’t tell them that I told you so. Most people spell love T-I-M-E. If you don’t set family goals, then you are not truly building wealth, you are only hording money.
FAITH
Everybody has to believe in something, right? This article isn’t the place to preach or even to force feed my love for Jesus on you. But let me share this with you. If you don’t have goals for your faith and your spiritual health (as well as that of your family) then once again you aren’t building wealth, you are only hording money. And it’s a known fact that you can’t take it with you.
If you are totally at a loss for where to start with faith goals, then perhaps that is exactly where you need to start. We are talking about journeys in vehicles here. You might not have a quantifiable faith goal right this second, but I encourage you to crank up the engine of your vehicle and get on the road to finding some.
Finally, think about the company that you keep. Surrounding yourself with people who have like goals and dreams helps to keep your vehicle on the road leading to your real estate investing dreams. You can’t fly with the eagles if you scratch with the turkeys. And you cannot stay on the path to your real estate investing goals if you get side-tracked with the negative cynicism of people who don’t believe that your goals are important.
“Hang onto your dreams for if dreams die hope is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” Langston Hughes
I hope you have enjoyed this article taken from my course called the Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! that teaches how we buy and sell 5-10 properties a month, never look at them and have them sold in less than 2 hours. For many more articles and a 10 part ecourse on how to create your own Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! as well as over 50 training audio recordings you can listen to online, download and collect, simply go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com where you will gain instant access to all of this and 51 Exclusive Editable real estate investing Forms and Documents all FREE! You will also get two FREE real estate investing eBooks, A free Personal Coaching Profile to help you jump start your real estate Investing, FREE Nationwide Wholesale Property Listing Notification, FREE Weekly Training Teleconferences with Different Topic Each Week, FREE subscription to Larry Goins “Almost” Weekly Investing Newsletter, FREE Admission for Two to Investor Palooza 3 Day Training Event, FREE Admission for Two to Larry Goins 3 Day Boot Camp, Plus over 31 Exclusive Articles on real estate Investing and Much More! Just go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com. Thanks and I look forward to working with you, Larry Goins
By Larry Goins
It’s easy enough to dream big about your future in real estate investing. We all have lofty expectations of what we will get out of life – our careers, our families, our networks of friends, etc. But without a vehicle to get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow, those great expectations are barely attainable. When you put the key into your vehicle by setting goals, you begin to chart out a roadmap for reaching your highest potential, and achieving all your dreams.
Without a charted course, your vehicle just sits in the driveway reminding you of all the things you could have achieved if you’d only had a plan. I was once told that “prior planning prevents poor performance”. As a young man, this was just another silly saying that the establishment put in the way of me doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Hindsight is truly 20/20 vision and I can see that a lot of time can be wasted when you don’t have a clear path laid out for reaching your brightest future.
When you write down your goals, you begin to plot the path to help you achieve your dreams in real estate investing. In fact, when you begin to lay out goals, you start your vehicle on the road for a journey far greater than perhaps even your wildest dreams!
Goals Must Lead to a Specific Destination
Imagine contacting Triple A for a trip tick to Alpena, Michigan. And they provide you directions, and recommended hotels, and favorite dining spots to the Michigan state line. Although your directions are specific, and your course is charted, you aren’t ending up where you intended to go because your directions don’t give you a specific destination. You’d have a better chance of arriving in Alpena with only a loose selection of interstates and byways without all the extra information, as long as it gets you where you intend to go. When you initially set out your goals, they don’t have to be so detailed as to cover every stop along your journey, but they do have to get you where you want to go. Your goals should lead you to the end that you desire – the reason you began investing in real estate in the first place. Perhaps you don’t initially know exactly what you need to do every minute of every day to get where you want to go, but if you select your destination then you can goal plan backwards to reach your dreams.
Goals Must Be Meaningful and Achievable
Your goals must mean something to you. It isn’t enough to want to make a million dollars in real estate, you have to have a reason to want to make a million dollars to achieve it. Even the lucky dog who wins the lottery meant to buy his ticket. Likewise your goals must be achievable. It doesn’t even matter if naysayers doubt the validity of your dreams or your ability to achieve them. It does matter that you believe that your goals are achievable. Perhaps they seem a little out of reach today, if you’ve just purchased your Ultimate Buying Machine or received your first copy of my Ultimate Investor Report Newsletter. But you must truly believe that you can reach your goals, and reaching them must be something that you have a purpose driven approach to accomplishing.
Goals Must Be Quantifiable and Measureable
It isn’t just enough to want to be successful in real estate investing. You must really, really want to accomplish a specific goal that can be quantified on the front end and measured on the back end. It may be that you want to be a Larry Goins’ Prodigy and sell 5-10 houses per month online. It may be that you want to earn $2.5 million per year or that you want to build a portfolio of rental properties generating $250,000 per year. Perhaps you want to create a nest egg that enables you to travel or retire or provide things for your children that your parents couldn’t provide for you. Whatever your goals are, they are essential to succeeding in the world of real estate investing. And unless you can quantify and measure them, in the back of your mind you will never really know whether you reached the destination at the end of your road map or not.
The bonus of setting quantifiable and measureable goals in real estate investing is that you can break them down to a ridiculously simple morsel that you can measure on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annually basis. If you know that you wish to make $2.5 million a year, then you can break that down into an accomplishment necessary in smaller chunks. You can further quantify, with an understanding of the number of houses you need to look at and make offers on, what your goals need to be on weekly and monthly goals to reach your long term goals.
It’s important that you don’t get side-barred trying to set your goals. The most successful people that I know set big goals and make big plans. They don’t vary from the course they know there vehicle needs to take to reach their goals. And you shouldn’t either!
Goals Must Be In Agreement With Your Actions
You cannot set a goal to lose weight and reach it by dining at McDonald’s four times a week. You cannot set a goal to get a new boat and reach it by never looking at boat ads. You cannot set a goal to walk on the moon and reach it by staring at the stars. And you cannot set any goals in real estate and then reach them without stepping out and starting to make your deals. Dreams do come true, but not by accident. Make sure that you set goals you are capable and willing to act accordingly to reach.
Picture Your Goals Already Met
No matter what I say when I teach the art of buying and selling 5-10 houses per month without ever leaving my office, some people just can’t picture it happening for them. They buy the course. They attend the class. They think long and hard about all the reasons it won’t work for them. And then they do nothing.
Don’t picture yourself failing. Don’t picture yourself struggling. Picture yourself at the end of your two, five, or ten year plan with all your goals met and your real estate investing dreams come true.
You don’t have to spend hours and hours each day picturing yourself with your goals achieved. But just a few minutes a day helps you to trick your mind into believing that you have already achieved the goals that you’ve set for yourself. This keeps your mind from dirty dog downing you into forgetting that you can do exactly what you set out to do with your real estate investing vehicle. And it is a lot of fun! A few minutes a day you get to picture yourself on a white sandy beach, or driving the car of your dreams, or living in your own luxury home custom appointed with all the features you associate with living exactly how you set out to live when you planned your goals. But don’t forget to come back to today, or you will find it a lot harder to reach your goals. This concept of creative visualization is all about getting what you really want out of life. Those things you focus your mental energy on creating, are the things you ultimately get. That’s why it is so important not to give your conscious mind a chance to dirty dog down your subconscious into thinking you cannot reach your goals. You can!
Systematically Complete Your Goals
Now it is time to create the little mini-morsels of goals from your big goals. You know how much you want to make per year. You’ve figured out how much you have to earn per week or per month to reach those bigger goals. Its time to start knocking the mini-goals off your to do list one at a time. Remember, you must plan your work and then work your plan.
Separate and Prioritize Your Goals
I am assuming at this point that your goals are about more than just money, or even just the things that money can buy. Maybe you want to ensure that your kids can attend any college they want, or that your grand children won’t have to worry about getting student loans. Perhaps you want to support a charity or ministry that has been dear to your heart but not so near to your wallet for years. Or maybe you want to see your spouse back at home with the kids instead of working in an office. Perhaps even you want to leave the corporate grind and return to a home based office yourself.
At this point, you probably have a pretty good idea what the reason for each of your goals is. You can begin to think of each goal as its own vehicle to reach the reason. The goals is the means to reach assorted ends that you want for yourself or your family.
Number each of your goals and begin to prioritize them so that you can reach them in not only their order of importance, but in a timely fashion that they can meet the reason for which they were set. For example, if you wish to send your kids to college through your real estate investing profits, you want to reach that goal by the time they reach age 18, right?
Review and Revise Your Goals
Sometimes things change. Maybe your real estate investing career takes a back seat to other priorities for a while. Perhaps your exemplary child is graduating a year early and the college money is needed sooner rather than later. Or that same child has received a full scholarship to the school of their choice and you suddenly have more money to put into your real estate portfolio than you expected.
You have to stay just a little bit flexible with your goals. Things change. And if you review and revise your goals and find that you are a bit ahead or behind your previous schedule its okay. It’s no different than making an unscheduled stop on your trip. You modify your trip tick from Triple A or reset your GPS and modify your road map. You can modify your goals in the same way. But if you don’t set them, you cannot reach them.
Goals Must Have a Defined End Date
Yes, you have to be willing to modify your end dates for your goals. Not everything will be achieved on exactly the day you project. However, your goals must have a defined end date. Goals without dates aren’t really goals at all, more wishful thinkings. Yeah, you might achieve them. But the driving force of meeting a deadline goes away when you don’t have an end date.
Four Categories to Set Goals In:
FINANCIAL
Any goals that include net worth or rental property incomes or even college tuitions are financial goals. They may be directly tied to your real estate investing or they may be more closely connected to things that are more important to you personally, such as putting a child through school or setting up a trust fund.
FITNESS
You might want to tell me to mind my own business, but unless you want to die wealthy fast, your personal health and fitness goals are important to reaching your final end goals. Honestly, I’ve learned that when I don’t feel good I don’t work well either. Your health is one of the most important factors to your ultimate success in real estate investing. Furthermore, you owe it to your family – to everyone that you are creating this real estate wealth for – to live as long as you can , not just as prosperously as you can.
FAMILY
Unless you set goals that involve your family, your financial goals will only keep you from being a viable member of your family. Trust me, your spouse and your kids care a lot more about the time that you spend with them than the money that you spend on them. Yes, even your teenagers, but don’t tell them that I told you so. Most people spell love T-I-M-E. If you don’t set family goals, then you are not truly building wealth, you are only hording money.
FAITH
Everybody has to believe in something, right? This article isn’t the place to preach or even to force feed my love for Jesus on you. But let me share this with you. If you don’t have goals for your faith and your spiritual health (as well as that of your family) then once again you aren’t building wealth, you are only hording money. And it’s a known fact that you can’t take it with you.
If you are totally at a loss for where to start with faith goals, then perhaps that is exactly where you need to start. We are talking about journeys in vehicles here. You might not have a quantifiable faith goal right this second, but I encourage you to crank up the engine of your vehicle and get on the road to finding some.
Finally, think about the company that you keep. Surrounding yourself with people who have like goals and dreams helps to keep your vehicle on the road leading to your real estate investing dreams. You can’t fly with the eagles if you scratch with the turkeys. And you cannot stay on the path to your real estate investing goals if you get side-tracked with the negative cynicism of people who don’t believe that your goals are important.
“Hang onto your dreams for if dreams die hope is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” Langston Hughes
I hope you have enjoyed this article taken from my course called the Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! that teaches how we buy and sell 5-10 properties a month, never look at them and have them sold in less than 2 hours. For many more articles and a 10 part ecourse on how to create your own Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! as well as over 50 training audio recordings you can listen to online, download and collect, simply go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com where you will gain instant access to all of this and 51 Exclusive Editable real estate investing Forms and Documents all FREE! You will also get two FREE real estate investing eBooks, A free Personal Coaching Profile to help you jump start your real estate Investing, FREE Nationwide Wholesale Property Listing Notification, FREE Weekly Training Teleconferences with Different Topic Each Week, FREE subscription to Larry Goins “Almost” Weekly Investing Newsletter, FREE Admission for Two to Investor Palooza 3 Day Training Event, FREE Admission for Two to Larry Goins 3 Day Boot Camp, Plus over 31 Exclusive Articles on real estate Investing and Much More! Just go to www.LarryGoinsFreeOffer.com. Thanks and I look forward to working with you, Larry Goins
Larry's Financial Tip June 09
In February, the U.S. Government signed into law an economic stimulus act that pours $787 billion into the U.S. economy. But instead of issuing stimulus checks like President George W. Bush did, the current administration opted to pour money into government programs and public works. Does that mean that as real estate investors you won’t get to see any of the action?
Not at all! I’ve been studying and researching the stimulus plan and I’ve actually just finished writing a course on over 300 ways that investors just like you and I can benefit from the government’s money. I’m going to share with you today exactly how you can target your real estate investing to get a piece of the American pie colored green!
The Federal government is doling out plenty of money for projects. Some of that money is going to Federal projects and some of it is going to state projects or local projects. The states then hand out their share to various state and local projects. One of the biggest projects right now is road and highway repairs and construction. You don’t, however, have to be in the road construction business to cash in on this money.
Check out the Federal recovery web site at http://www.recovery.gov or your state or local recovery website to see what projects are currently underway or about to be funded. Each project will require tons of employees. The government estimates the road projects alone this year will replace as many jobs as have been lost in the auto industry. That’s a lot of people excavating, laying concrete, driving steam rollers, and holding traffic warning signs. To profit, you just need to track where those projects are being funded.
All those people have to live somewhere. Just like the Industrial Revolution caused people by the millions to migrate to the cities, the road construction projects will cause people to migrate where the work is. And the work isn’t just in cities. State and National parks are funded for road work as are cities and suburbs and even rural areas. What you have to do is research where the work will be done and look for investment properties to flip to the home improvement buyer or to lease-to-own or to rent. The next American land rush may very well be exactly where the stimulus money is going. And now you know how to get there first and have real estate to sell or rent to new residents.
To track road construction projects funded by the recovery act, go to http://www.dot.gov/recovery/.
For more really cool ways that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act can actually help your real estate investing business or any small business, check out my new course coming soon at http://www.StimulusOpportunitySecrets.com.
Not at all! I’ve been studying and researching the stimulus plan and I’ve actually just finished writing a course on over 300 ways that investors just like you and I can benefit from the government’s money. I’m going to share with you today exactly how you can target your real estate investing to get a piece of the American pie colored green!
The Federal government is doling out plenty of money for projects. Some of that money is going to Federal projects and some of it is going to state projects or local projects. The states then hand out their share to various state and local projects. One of the biggest projects right now is road and highway repairs and construction. You don’t, however, have to be in the road construction business to cash in on this money.
Check out the Federal recovery web site at http://www.recovery.gov or your state or local recovery website to see what projects are currently underway or about to be funded. Each project will require tons of employees. The government estimates the road projects alone this year will replace as many jobs as have been lost in the auto industry. That’s a lot of people excavating, laying concrete, driving steam rollers, and holding traffic warning signs. To profit, you just need to track where those projects are being funded.
All those people have to live somewhere. Just like the Industrial Revolution caused people by the millions to migrate to the cities, the road construction projects will cause people to migrate where the work is. And the work isn’t just in cities. State and National parks are funded for road work as are cities and suburbs and even rural areas. What you have to do is research where the work will be done and look for investment properties to flip to the home improvement buyer or to lease-to-own or to rent. The next American land rush may very well be exactly where the stimulus money is going. And now you know how to get there first and have real estate to sell or rent to new residents.
To track road construction projects funded by the recovery act, go to http://www.dot.gov/recovery/.
For more really cool ways that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act can actually help your real estate investing business or any small business, check out my new course coming soon at http://www.StimulusOpportunitySecrets.com.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing
By Shannan Hearne
Last month we talked about six powerful ways to drive traffic to your real estate web site. Over the next few months we will discuss these six tools in depth to help you attract more buyers and sellers, so you can sell more properties. Email marketing is an affordable, effective tool for marketing your web site and growing your contact base. Here are some simple tools and rules to keep in mind when email marketing.
Sell With Your Subject Line. If the subject line of your email message isn’t compelling, people are never going to make it to the message itself. If you want to excite someone about a new property you have for sale, use high power selling words in the subject line like “look”, “hot deal”, or “house of the week”. When you write the subject line of your email, put yourself in the reader’s shoes and think about what would make you open the message. Don’t overuse the same subject words and phrases, either. If the buyers you really need to attract need to be looking for a dog of a house, call it a dog of a house. Misleading subject lines might get a high open rate, but they don’t win you friends and influence people.
Meaningful Messages and Relevant Content. Most of us get more email than we need. Some of it we recognize for the garbage it is and hit the delete button. Some of it we are tricked into opening and then irritated with the sender. Separate yourself from the email marketing masses by sending meaningful messages with relevant content. Send property for sale message to your buyers and property sought messages to potential sellers. A nice way to send meaningful, relevant messages to your whole list is to occasionally, “send some love” as we put it in our office. Valuable information that is truly of interest to your whole list is a welcome email. And don’t forget to send holiday messages and congratulatory messages to new property owners.
Design Emails for Deliverability. What good does it do you to have a 20,000 name mailing list if your email marketing messages don’t make it to 15,000 of them? Not much! Take the time to design email messages for ultimate deliverability. Avoid words that you would spam block from your own inbox. Carefully craft emails that say what they mean and mean what they say. Whatever you do, check them through a spam detection program before sending to your list.
Keeping “You” in Your Newsletter. I genuinely hope that you will email a newsletter. There is no better way to keep in touch with your mailing list. But keep the newsletter a truly you document. Use your own content. Share information that is both relevant to your list and of interest to you as well. If you are a real estate investor who just happens to be an excellent fly fisherman, share little tidbits about your fishing life with your readers. Even if they don’t fish themselves, they will remember you as the real estate guy or gal who casts a fast fly and reels in the deals. Put a piece of yourself in each newsletter. You can refer to Larry’s Goins On section of this newsletter for examples of how this can be done.
Don’t Forget the Web Version of Your Email Newsletter. This isn’t really an email marketing tip, but it’s important to remember. If you are going to go to the trouble of sending a newsletter, be sure to publish it on your website as well. There are two powerful reasons to do this. First, it keeps the newsletter available for posterity sake so tomorrow’s subscribers can read it even though it was emailed today. Second, it gives your website all important keyword density and content, which improves your search engine rankings. Don’t waste your time and energy writing it once and then throwing it away, post it online and let it live forever. One easy way to do this is to create a blog connected to your site and uploading your newsletters to your blog site. We will talk about blog’s in depth soon.
Get to Know Your Customers and Build Trust. When you email your customers, you are doing two things. Telling them who you are and selling them something. Give them the respect of getting to know them, too. Invite them to interact with you by completing surveys or sending responses to questions. Find out what they are interested in, and then let them know that you care because they care by sharing information of interest to them in future messages. People like to do business with people they like. Show your customers how likeable you are by caring about them. This is one of the best ways to build trust. If they trust you, they will buy houses from you and sell houses to you. Think about the emails that you always open no matter how crazy the subject line or the content. They come from people that you like and trust. Make sure your mailing list feels that way about you and your emails.
Targeting and Demographics. If you are marketing properties in Michigan by writing an article about the Great Lakes, will you get much of a response from people in Florida or New Zealand or Texas? Target your email marketing. Send your messages to the people on your list who fit the demographics for your marketing message. It is so important that you maintain your mailing list in a manner where you can segment and send messages to the most appropriate people. This lets you email market to your list more often, without wearing people out with your messages. Keep them targeted at the right demographics.
Don’t Begin Before You Double Opt-In. As you collect email contacts, make sure that your members are double opting in. This is the process by which they subscribe to your list and then click on the link in a confirmation email. This protects you from being accused of sending spam mails. Don’t market to your list until the members have double opted in. If they neglect to double opt in, send them a gentle reminder invitation to double opt in to your list. You can encourage them to do this by offering a free e-book or report for double opting in.
More Links Equal More Clicks. The more times you put a text link to a URL in your email message, the more likely you are to have people click from the email message to the actual content on the website that you want them to see. Use hyperlinks as often as is reasonable to increase the click through rates to your offers. Don’t forget to include links to your primary web address, your blog, your property listings, etc.
Build Your List or Mail Paper Airplanes. Now that you know how to market with email, you have to build your mailing list. Otherwise your email campaigns won’t have much impact. Quality is as important as quantity. But without quantity you can’t ever fully test an email campaign. Be sure that your web site offers visitors ample opportunity to subscribe to your list. Create free reports and offers to grow your subscriber list. Keep it growing and healthy by providing good, quality content in your mailings. Without a quality mailing list, your email messages are a little bit like a paper airplane. It’s cute to watch fly by, by no one see’s the message that is inside.
Email marketing is an integral part of any internet marketing. Whether you are selling real estate or grass seed, you have to continually market with email messages to keep the sales machine rolling. Remember, the least expensive form of advertising available to you is your email marketing.
By Shannan Hearne
Last month we talked about six powerful ways to drive traffic to your real estate web site. Over the next few months we will discuss these six tools in depth to help you attract more buyers and sellers, so you can sell more properties. Email marketing is an affordable, effective tool for marketing your web site and growing your contact base. Here are some simple tools and rules to keep in mind when email marketing.
Sell With Your Subject Line. If the subject line of your email message isn’t compelling, people are never going to make it to the message itself. If you want to excite someone about a new property you have for sale, use high power selling words in the subject line like “look”, “hot deal”, or “house of the week”. When you write the subject line of your email, put yourself in the reader’s shoes and think about what would make you open the message. Don’t overuse the same subject words and phrases, either. If the buyers you really need to attract need to be looking for a dog of a house, call it a dog of a house. Misleading subject lines might get a high open rate, but they don’t win you friends and influence people.
Meaningful Messages and Relevant Content. Most of us get more email than we need. Some of it we recognize for the garbage it is and hit the delete button. Some of it we are tricked into opening and then irritated with the sender. Separate yourself from the email marketing masses by sending meaningful messages with relevant content. Send property for sale message to your buyers and property sought messages to potential sellers. A nice way to send meaningful, relevant messages to your whole list is to occasionally, “send some love” as we put it in our office. Valuable information that is truly of interest to your whole list is a welcome email. And don’t forget to send holiday messages and congratulatory messages to new property owners.
Design Emails for Deliverability. What good does it do you to have a 20,000 name mailing list if your email marketing messages don’t make it to 15,000 of them? Not much! Take the time to design email messages for ultimate deliverability. Avoid words that you would spam block from your own inbox. Carefully craft emails that say what they mean and mean what they say. Whatever you do, check them through a spam detection program before sending to your list.
Keeping “You” in Your Newsletter. I genuinely hope that you will email a newsletter. There is no better way to keep in touch with your mailing list. But keep the newsletter a truly you document. Use your own content. Share information that is both relevant to your list and of interest to you as well. If you are a real estate investor who just happens to be an excellent fly fisherman, share little tidbits about your fishing life with your readers. Even if they don’t fish themselves, they will remember you as the real estate guy or gal who casts a fast fly and reels in the deals. Put a piece of yourself in each newsletter. You can refer to Larry’s Goins On section of this newsletter for examples of how this can be done.
Don’t Forget the Web Version of Your Email Newsletter. This isn’t really an email marketing tip, but it’s important to remember. If you are going to go to the trouble of sending a newsletter, be sure to publish it on your website as well. There are two powerful reasons to do this. First, it keeps the newsletter available for posterity sake so tomorrow’s subscribers can read it even though it was emailed today. Second, it gives your website all important keyword density and content, which improves your search engine rankings. Don’t waste your time and energy writing it once and then throwing it away, post it online and let it live forever. One easy way to do this is to create a blog connected to your site and uploading your newsletters to your blog site. We will talk about blog’s in depth soon.
Get to Know Your Customers and Build Trust. When you email your customers, you are doing two things. Telling them who you are and selling them something. Give them the respect of getting to know them, too. Invite them to interact with you by completing surveys or sending responses to questions. Find out what they are interested in, and then let them know that you care because they care by sharing information of interest to them in future messages. People like to do business with people they like. Show your customers how likeable you are by caring about them. This is one of the best ways to build trust. If they trust you, they will buy houses from you and sell houses to you. Think about the emails that you always open no matter how crazy the subject line or the content. They come from people that you like and trust. Make sure your mailing list feels that way about you and your emails.
Targeting and Demographics. If you are marketing properties in Michigan by writing an article about the Great Lakes, will you get much of a response from people in Florida or New Zealand or Texas? Target your email marketing. Send your messages to the people on your list who fit the demographics for your marketing message. It is so important that you maintain your mailing list in a manner where you can segment and send messages to the most appropriate people. This lets you email market to your list more often, without wearing people out with your messages. Keep them targeted at the right demographics.
Don’t Begin Before You Double Opt-In. As you collect email contacts, make sure that your members are double opting in. This is the process by which they subscribe to your list and then click on the link in a confirmation email. This protects you from being accused of sending spam mails. Don’t market to your list until the members have double opted in. If they neglect to double opt in, send them a gentle reminder invitation to double opt in to your list. You can encourage them to do this by offering a free e-book or report for double opting in.
More Links Equal More Clicks. The more times you put a text link to a URL in your email message, the more likely you are to have people click from the email message to the actual content on the website that you want them to see. Use hyperlinks as often as is reasonable to increase the click through rates to your offers. Don’t forget to include links to your primary web address, your blog, your property listings, etc.
Build Your List or Mail Paper Airplanes. Now that you know how to market with email, you have to build your mailing list. Otherwise your email campaigns won’t have much impact. Quality is as important as quantity. But without quantity you can’t ever fully test an email campaign. Be sure that your web site offers visitors ample opportunity to subscribe to your list. Create free reports and offers to grow your subscriber list. Keep it growing and healthy by providing good, quality content in your mailings. Without a quality mailing list, your email messages are a little bit like a paper airplane. It’s cute to watch fly by, by no one see’s the message that is inside.
Email marketing is an integral part of any internet marketing. Whether you are selling real estate or grass seed, you have to continually market with email messages to keep the sales machine rolling. Remember, the least expensive form of advertising available to you is your email marketing.
How to Bust Debt Fast with Tenants
How to Bust Debt Fast With Tenants
By Larry Goins
There are numerous ways that you can eliminate your debt. They all start out and end up the same way – increase your income and apply it to your principles. One vehicle that you can use to bust debt fast is rental properties.
Let’s assume that you invest in a property at about 70% After Repair Value including your purchase, rehab, and closing costs. Once you have fixed the property up, you should be in a position to re-finance at 75-95% of the loan to value and pull out the cash, your cash, that you original invested in the property. This is Tax Free cash as you don’t pay any taxes on borrowed money. Once you rent the property out, at a positive cash flow, your tenant pays your mortgage AND puts money in your pocket.
So what do you do with this money? Look at your bills. Credit cards, car payments, student loans, your own home mortgage, debt consolidation loans, medical bills, etc. Let’s assume that you have $15,000 in credit card debt. Its probably not at a great interest rate. As a student of my Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine course, you know you can make $5000 to $10000 on each and every real estate deal.
Take the credit card with the LOWEST balance, and pay it off when you refinance your first rental property. If there is any money left, apply it to your next lowest credit card, and so on. In doing this with your Tax Free money you are lowering your debt balance AND increasing your monthly income from the rents due on the property every month. Imagine if you eliminate $250 in monthly debt or loan payments every month AND you increase your monthly income by $250. That’s like getting a $500 per month raise from your real estate business, rather than putting $5000 in your pocket. So at the end of ten months you have increased your income, lessened your debt, and added to your real estate net worth portfolio.
By doing this you are also raising your credit score. Making it easier to finance your real estate deals.
Start by paying off your credit cards. Then automobile loans and student loans. Follow up with medical bills or other old debt. Then pay off your personal mortgage on your residence. Once your own home is paid off, you can re-finance with a Home Equity Line of Credit at prime. That is the cheapest money you can put your hands on.
Once you reach this milestone, and you talk to someone about a property you can actually ask, “What is the least amount you can accept for this property if I write you a check by Friday?” You know you can do this deal because you can literally write a check against your Home Equity Line of Credit. At this point, you are living debt free with the single exception of the properties that your tenants are paying for with their rent checks.
This is one of the very powerful ways that my Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine course can truly improve your quality of life and allow you to spend more time with your family and less time chasing the almighty dollar.
Larry Goins
For many more articles and a 10 part e-course on how to create your own Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! as well as over 50 training audio recordings you can listen to online, download and collect, simply go to www.TheCoachingClub.com where you will gain instant access to all of this and 51 Exclusive Editable real estate investing Forms and Documents all FREE! You will also get two FREE real estate investing eBooks, A free Personal Coaching Profile to help you jump start your real estate Investing, FREE Nationwide Wholesale Property Listing Notification, FREE Weekly Training Teleconferences with Different Topic Each Week, FREE subscription to Larry Goins “Almost” Weekly Investing Newsletter, FREE Admission for Two to Investor Palooza 3 Day Training Event, FREE Admission for Two to Larry Goins 3 Day Boot Camp, Plus over 31 Exclusive Articles on real estate Investing and Much More! Just go to www.TheCoachingClub.com. Thanks and I look forward to working with you, Larry Goins
By Larry Goins
There are numerous ways that you can eliminate your debt. They all start out and end up the same way – increase your income and apply it to your principles. One vehicle that you can use to bust debt fast is rental properties.
Let’s assume that you invest in a property at about 70% After Repair Value including your purchase, rehab, and closing costs. Once you have fixed the property up, you should be in a position to re-finance at 75-95% of the loan to value and pull out the cash, your cash, that you original invested in the property. This is Tax Free cash as you don’t pay any taxes on borrowed money. Once you rent the property out, at a positive cash flow, your tenant pays your mortgage AND puts money in your pocket.
So what do you do with this money? Look at your bills. Credit cards, car payments, student loans, your own home mortgage, debt consolidation loans, medical bills, etc. Let’s assume that you have $15,000 in credit card debt. Its probably not at a great interest rate. As a student of my Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine course, you know you can make $5000 to $10000 on each and every real estate deal.
Take the credit card with the LOWEST balance, and pay it off when you refinance your first rental property. If there is any money left, apply it to your next lowest credit card, and so on. In doing this with your Tax Free money you are lowering your debt balance AND increasing your monthly income from the rents due on the property every month. Imagine if you eliminate $250 in monthly debt or loan payments every month AND you increase your monthly income by $250. That’s like getting a $500 per month raise from your real estate business, rather than putting $5000 in your pocket. So at the end of ten months you have increased your income, lessened your debt, and added to your real estate net worth portfolio.
By doing this you are also raising your credit score. Making it easier to finance your real estate deals.
Start by paying off your credit cards. Then automobile loans and student loans. Follow up with medical bills or other old debt. Then pay off your personal mortgage on your residence. Once your own home is paid off, you can re-finance with a Home Equity Line of Credit at prime. That is the cheapest money you can put your hands on.
Once you reach this milestone, and you talk to someone about a property you can actually ask, “What is the least amount you can accept for this property if I write you a check by Friday?” You know you can do this deal because you can literally write a check against your Home Equity Line of Credit. At this point, you are living debt free with the single exception of the properties that your tenants are paying for with their rent checks.
This is one of the very powerful ways that my Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine course can truly improve your quality of life and allow you to spend more time with your family and less time chasing the almighty dollar.
Larry Goins
For many more articles and a 10 part e-course on how to create your own Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine! as well as over 50 training audio recordings you can listen to online, download and collect, simply go to www.TheCoachingClub.com where you will gain instant access to all of this and 51 Exclusive Editable real estate investing Forms and Documents all FREE! You will also get two FREE real estate investing eBooks, A free Personal Coaching Profile to help you jump start your real estate Investing, FREE Nationwide Wholesale Property Listing Notification, FREE Weekly Training Teleconferences with Different Topic Each Week, FREE subscription to Larry Goins “Almost” Weekly Investing Newsletter, FREE Admission for Two to Investor Palooza 3 Day Training Event, FREE Admission for Two to Larry Goins 3 Day Boot Camp, Plus over 31 Exclusive Articles on real estate Investing and Much More! Just go to www.TheCoachingClub.com. Thanks and I look forward to working with you, Larry Goins
Following Up and Cashing In with Real Estate
Following Up and Cashing in With Real Estate
By Larry Goins
Client or lead follow up is necessary yet difficult for most of us to perform. Why? Because we are busy with other more pressing aspects of our business on a day to day basis. Busy with the activities that bring in consistent revenue; booking appointments, selling, and creating new opportunities through lead generation. Not to mention finding real estate to buy and sell. This leaves us with very little time for follow up. However, successful business people know that when they do not stay in consistent contact with their customers they are literally throwing away thousands of dollars right out the front door. Successful entrepreneurs know that the fortune is in the follow up. Following up means letting no one fall through the cracks.
In real estate, like in most businesses, the fortune truly lies in the follow up. One of the tools that I constantly encourage my real estate investing students to use is Auto Responders. An auto responder is a software package that automatically replies to email that is sent to you or automatically sent out when someone is added to your database as a result of making an inquiry or searching for information on your website. Auto responders do a tremendous amount of your online marketing work for you. They make you look like the most attentive and customer-centric real estate investor around.
People like to do business with people that make them feel good. When you inquire about people, when you show interest in the things that interest them, and when you respond to their needs with immediacy you make them feel good. When they feel good, they want to stay in touch with you and do business with you. How much money is that worth in your real estate investing business?
Auto responders can be a single one-time email or a series of multiple email responses delivered at pre-determined intervals. The time saving power of auto responders is that once they are set up they run automatically. You can set up a response to an inquiry from your website or set up a response to someone who sends you an email when you are out of town. Auto responders provide consistent follow up without any extra man-hours required from you or your office staff.
You have probably already received an email from an auto responder. If you have purchased a product on the internet and immediately received a “thank you” email or an email message with a link to download a digital product then you have received an auto responder. If you have ever signed up for an email course and received pre-scheduled emails with the content you have received auto responders.
Auto responders are no-cost, round-the-clock working sales staff for your real estate business. Imagine the power of an instant email reply to an inquiry on your web site about a property. The person requesting information is instantly responded to. How powerful is that? Suddenly the follow-up that you provide to your leads is instantaneous and continual. If the fortune is in the follow-up, then you are suddenly generating no-cost, round-the-clock income with your auto responders.
An auto responder coupled with sound and savvy marketing techniques, is the speediest way to immediately boost business. Auto responders can store and send any electronic information that you want to drip market to your leads or release over time. You can pre-write and store messages, newsletters, announcements, specials, open houses, etc. Auto responders will carry your message to your leads over and over again.
Email auto responders save time and money while sending your power selling messages out automatically at standard intervals. Auto responders can provide both instant responses to inquiries and long term, steady information to your leads. Think about what online businesses you are most aware of, the one’s that you think of the minute their area of expertise is mentioned. It’s the businesses that stay in touch consistently and automatically that you remember. I promise you that the emails you receive round the clock from companies are not being written at the exact moment that they are being sent to you. They come steadily over time through an auto responder system.
An auto responder saves you time. Why answer the same question over and over again? You can set up email accounts for specific inquiries and write auto responders that answer the inquiries. For example, if you have three properties for sale you might want to set up an email address for each property and write auto responders for each one with the information relevant to the property. At the same time, you can capture the email addresses of people who inquire about each property and segment them in your database. So the next time a similar property or deal is available, you know exactly who to start marketing it to.
An auto responder works around the clock to turn your website visitors or prospects into buyers. Imagine having a professional sales copy writer emailing marketing messages to your list over and over again. That is exactly what you have with an auto responder.
Auto responders take you from working constantly for your real estate business to letting your real estate business work constantly for you. Think about this. The last time you went on vacation, or took a day off, or spent time with your family what happened to people who inquired about properties you had for sale or properties they were offering? They probably had to wait for you to return to your office to get the information they needed. Some of those people might have already found another property or real estate investor to work with, because to their perception you were unavailable when they needed your help.
The answer isn’t to work around the clock. The answer is to put auto responders to work for you.
Auto responders can follow up with every realtor, investor, FSBO, and retail buyer every week without you sending a single email or making a single phone call. When you use our Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine system, you get four pre-written auto responders to jump start your own buying and selling machine. Using our system, we put together a lot of deals where we talk to the seller or realtor only once and then the rest of the negotiation is done via email. How easy is that?
Here are the four basic auto responders that every real estate investor should be using because the fortune is in the follow up.
REALTORS: Whenever you talk to a realtor about a property, ask them if you can email them when you are looking for a property in a particular area or price range. Then you can set up a simple series of emails to go to the realtor every week to ask them to keep looking for properties for you. Let them know that you appreciate them taking the time to talk to you, and remind them who you are and what you are looking for. Keeping in constant contact puts you in the forefront of their minds when they have a property that would suit an investor’s needs.
FSBO’s: Any time you talk to an owner of a property for sale, ask them for their email address as a standard part of capturing their information. If they balk tell them how busy you stay in your real estate investing business and how hard you are to get on the phone. Get them in your database and then set up a series of auto responder emails to keep in touch with them to see how their house selling is going. Share with them tips on creating curb appeal, or market changes that might effect their property, etc. Remind them that you are available if they need help selling their home. Write a nice, friendly auto responder that encourages them in their FSBO endeavors yet offers to help them should they need it.
RETAIL BUYERS: Don’t forget about the gravy train of your list. Retail buyers are people who have purchased from you, or who qualified for financing but couldn’t find a property they liked, or called about a property that you have already sold. You want to keep in touch with your potential buyers via auto responders so that they are thinking about you when they are looking for a property. I would encourage you to even send custom email auto responders to your tenant/buyers letting them know that you are always looking for referrals and have them searching out properties they like for you to buy and resell to them.
INVESTORS: Whenever an investor calls you about a property you have or if you can an investor about a house they are holding you should be sure to add them to your database and set them up to receive an investor auto responder. I have provided a series of auto responders to send out every week for three weeks and then once a month after that in my Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine course. Investors are always looking for properties and you want to remind them regularly what you have available that might be of interest to them.
Auto responders are an easy way to keep your business in the minds of all your leads. Don’t neglect this powerful tool in your real estate investing business. The fortune still lies in the follow up. But there is no law that says the follow up has to be terribly time consuming. Let auto responders keep your investment income growing and growing.
By Larry Goins
Client or lead follow up is necessary yet difficult for most of us to perform. Why? Because we are busy with other more pressing aspects of our business on a day to day basis. Busy with the activities that bring in consistent revenue; booking appointments, selling, and creating new opportunities through lead generation. Not to mention finding real estate to buy and sell. This leaves us with very little time for follow up. However, successful business people know that when they do not stay in consistent contact with their customers they are literally throwing away thousands of dollars right out the front door. Successful entrepreneurs know that the fortune is in the follow up. Following up means letting no one fall through the cracks.
In real estate, like in most businesses, the fortune truly lies in the follow up. One of the tools that I constantly encourage my real estate investing students to use is Auto Responders. An auto responder is a software package that automatically replies to email that is sent to you or automatically sent out when someone is added to your database as a result of making an inquiry or searching for information on your website. Auto responders do a tremendous amount of your online marketing work for you. They make you look like the most attentive and customer-centric real estate investor around.
People like to do business with people that make them feel good. When you inquire about people, when you show interest in the things that interest them, and when you respond to their needs with immediacy you make them feel good. When they feel good, they want to stay in touch with you and do business with you. How much money is that worth in your real estate investing business?
Auto responders can be a single one-time email or a series of multiple email responses delivered at pre-determined intervals. The time saving power of auto responders is that once they are set up they run automatically. You can set up a response to an inquiry from your website or set up a response to someone who sends you an email when you are out of town. Auto responders provide consistent follow up without any extra man-hours required from you or your office staff.
You have probably already received an email from an auto responder. If you have purchased a product on the internet and immediately received a “thank you” email or an email message with a link to download a digital product then you have received an auto responder. If you have ever signed up for an email course and received pre-scheduled emails with the content you have received auto responders.
Auto responders are no-cost, round-the-clock working sales staff for your real estate business. Imagine the power of an instant email reply to an inquiry on your web site about a property. The person requesting information is instantly responded to. How powerful is that? Suddenly the follow-up that you provide to your leads is instantaneous and continual. If the fortune is in the follow-up, then you are suddenly generating no-cost, round-the-clock income with your auto responders.
An auto responder coupled with sound and savvy marketing techniques, is the speediest way to immediately boost business. Auto responders can store and send any electronic information that you want to drip market to your leads or release over time. You can pre-write and store messages, newsletters, announcements, specials, open houses, etc. Auto responders will carry your message to your leads over and over again.
Email auto responders save time and money while sending your power selling messages out automatically at standard intervals. Auto responders can provide both instant responses to inquiries and long term, steady information to your leads. Think about what online businesses you are most aware of, the one’s that you think of the minute their area of expertise is mentioned. It’s the businesses that stay in touch consistently and automatically that you remember. I promise you that the emails you receive round the clock from companies are not being written at the exact moment that they are being sent to you. They come steadily over time through an auto responder system.
An auto responder saves you time. Why answer the same question over and over again? You can set up email accounts for specific inquiries and write auto responders that answer the inquiries. For example, if you have three properties for sale you might want to set up an email address for each property and write auto responders for each one with the information relevant to the property. At the same time, you can capture the email addresses of people who inquire about each property and segment them in your database. So the next time a similar property or deal is available, you know exactly who to start marketing it to.
An auto responder works around the clock to turn your website visitors or prospects into buyers. Imagine having a professional sales copy writer emailing marketing messages to your list over and over again. That is exactly what you have with an auto responder.
Auto responders take you from working constantly for your real estate business to letting your real estate business work constantly for you. Think about this. The last time you went on vacation, or took a day off, or spent time with your family what happened to people who inquired about properties you had for sale or properties they were offering? They probably had to wait for you to return to your office to get the information they needed. Some of those people might have already found another property or real estate investor to work with, because to their perception you were unavailable when they needed your help.
The answer isn’t to work around the clock. The answer is to put auto responders to work for you.
Auto responders can follow up with every realtor, investor, FSBO, and retail buyer every week without you sending a single email or making a single phone call. When you use our Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine system, you get four pre-written auto responders to jump start your own buying and selling machine. Using our system, we put together a lot of deals where we talk to the seller or realtor only once and then the rest of the negotiation is done via email. How easy is that?
Here are the four basic auto responders that every real estate investor should be using because the fortune is in the follow up.
REALTORS: Whenever you talk to a realtor about a property, ask them if you can email them when you are looking for a property in a particular area or price range. Then you can set up a simple series of emails to go to the realtor every week to ask them to keep looking for properties for you. Let them know that you appreciate them taking the time to talk to you, and remind them who you are and what you are looking for. Keeping in constant contact puts you in the forefront of their minds when they have a property that would suit an investor’s needs.
FSBO’s: Any time you talk to an owner of a property for sale, ask them for their email address as a standard part of capturing their information. If they balk tell them how busy you stay in your real estate investing business and how hard you are to get on the phone. Get them in your database and then set up a series of auto responder emails to keep in touch with them to see how their house selling is going. Share with them tips on creating curb appeal, or market changes that might effect their property, etc. Remind them that you are available if they need help selling their home. Write a nice, friendly auto responder that encourages them in their FSBO endeavors yet offers to help them should they need it.
RETAIL BUYERS: Don’t forget about the gravy train of your list. Retail buyers are people who have purchased from you, or who qualified for financing but couldn’t find a property they liked, or called about a property that you have already sold. You want to keep in touch with your potential buyers via auto responders so that they are thinking about you when they are looking for a property. I would encourage you to even send custom email auto responders to your tenant/buyers letting them know that you are always looking for referrals and have them searching out properties they like for you to buy and resell to them.
INVESTORS: Whenever an investor calls you about a property you have or if you can an investor about a house they are holding you should be sure to add them to your database and set them up to receive an investor auto responder. I have provided a series of auto responders to send out every week for three weeks and then once a month after that in my Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine course. Investors are always looking for properties and you want to remind them regularly what you have available that might be of interest to them.
Auto responders are an easy way to keep your business in the minds of all your leads. Don’t neglect this powerful tool in your real estate investing business. The fortune still lies in the follow up. But there is no law that says the follow up has to be terribly time consuming. Let auto responders keep your investment income growing and growing.
Driving Traffic to Your Real Estate Web Site
Driving Traffic to Your Real Estate Web Site
By Larry Goins
Once you have a web site to tell the world about all your great real estate deals, you need buyers visiting and bookmarking your site. Unlike the “Field of Dreams” where if you build it they will come, your real estate web site needs traffic or visitors to sell properties.
Even if you have the best buys on the market, if potential buyers and investors can’t find your web site, then they can’t buy your properties. Let’s look at the tools that you will need to drive targeted, buying traffic to your web site.
Over time, if your web site has quality content (see my article on Attracting Prospects and Leads to Your Real Estate Web Site for design tips) you will rank well in the search engines for keyword phrases like “investment property for sale” or “homes for sale in (your geographic location)”. But when you first launch your web site, you will need to utilize additional tools until you have good natural organic search engine traffic. More on that in a minute.
If you do not yet have a real estate web site, check out the great tool available from my buddy Rob Yaggie at http://www.UltimateInternet MarketingMachine.com/.
Until you have good organic search engine traffic from natural rankings for relevant keywords, these tools can help you drive more traffic to your real estate web site. Nothing is more frustrating than to launch a web site and then have no one visit it.
Signage, Flyers, and Business Cards
It goes without saying that everything that leaves your office should have your web site address or URL printed clearly on it. Every sign, flyer, business card, post card, and ad should have your web address and a little blurb about your site. Using the site above as an example, the blurb might read, “Hot web sites for marketing cool real estate deals online 24/7”. This is the least expensive form of web marketing available to you and is still very effective. A lead might look at your business card or a post card at 11 PM at night and think it’s too late to call you about a property. But they can go to your web site and see everything that you have available even when you aren’t working. Your web site works twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
Article Writing
The next least expensive way to drive traffic to your real estate web site is by writing articles and publishing them on article directories for other publishers. Be sure to publish them on your web site as well. If you are the realtor of choice in a specific geographic area article writing can help to brand you and drive traffic to your website just by telling people how great your geographic area is. If you are the go to guy for short sales or foreclosures, then use that area of expertise to drive traffic to your web site by writing and publishing articles. It doesn’t cost a penny except for your time and articles work round the clock for your business, too.
You can submit articles to sites like www.ArticlesFactory.com or www.ArticleDashboard.com or www.ArticleDirectory.com
Organic Search Engine Hits
Being on page one of a search at Google or Yahoo when someone is looking for properties like you have to offer is the best way to get traffic to your web site. Scoring those rankings is a tricky combination of successful keyword optimization, web site traffic history, web site age, inbound and outbound linking strategies, and quality of content. If you are continually building a quality website with relevant content, you can look forward to natural or organic search engine hits in your site’s future. A well built web site will ultimately get the bulk of its hits or visitors from organic search engine hits.
Local Newspaper Advertorials
Don’t be afraid to promote yourself and toot your own horn. Get to know some writers and editors at your local newspaper and write an advertorial about a subject of interest, tying it back to your web site. If there is a tremendous amount of foreclosures in your area or a large amount of for sale by owners, write about it and link back to your web site with a little teaser of information about how you will be offering great properties, too.
Banner Exchanges
When you are in contact with other business owners in your area who have web sites, ask about exchanging links or banners to each other’s web sites. Especially business owners who are also working with homeowners. For example, furniture stores, contractors, painters, interior decorators, landscapers, and driveway pavers. You might further assist this link building partnership by posting on your website a list of general and specialized contractors who do work for you on your properties that you would recommend.
Hold a Giveaway On Your Site
Everybody loves to get something for nothing. A giveaway is a great way to attract people to your web site. You don’t have to give away the farm. You can offer a free e-book, free home seller consultation, or anything else that would be of interest to the same people who would be interested in the real estate that you have to offer. You could even connect with your local Welcome Wagon representative or co-launch a giveaway with several local businesses to up the prize ante. Make sure that you structure your giveaway so as to build your list. If people are picking up a free item or registering to win an item require them to register with their contact information so that you can continue to market to them in the future.
Work Your Mailing List
Any time that you have a giveaway, or attend a chamber meeting or network you want to be building your own internal mailing list. The list, especially if it contains email addresses, is a no cost marketing tool. You can send your articles to your list, your new properties, or even great information about what is going on in your area. Every time that you mail or email your list, be sure to include a link to your web site. If you want to be sure that people visit yoursite as a result of the mailing, you might want to only include a small blurb or teaser to the entire content that will be on your web site.
Pay Per Click Campaigns
Pay per click campaigns generate your ads on the top of search engine results pages for relevant keywords. When an internet user types in a keyword or words you have bid upon, your link is displayed at the top or right hand side of the page. It almost appears to be a regular search engine ranking result. Almost. It is actually a paid advertisement. If the searcher clicks on your advertisement, you pay per click. The rates vary greatly depending upon the competitiveness of the keywords chosen but if you are only competing with local realtors then the prices shouldn’t be too high. It’s not actually as expensive as you might think and you can control your daily and monthly budgets accordingly.
Full Blown Marketing Campaign
If you are made of money, then this most expensive but highly effective web site traffic generating tactic might work well for you. The cost per lead is higher, but it can drive very targeted buying traffic. You can find companies that specialize in successful search engine optimization or search engine marketing campaigns by searching for them on Google or Yahoo. Look for one’s with previous experience working with realtors and real estate investors.
Tying It All Back Together
Owning a piece of internet real estate is just the first step into doing business on the internet or driving traffic to your web site to sell your properties. It’s a complicated beast and truly an anomaly unto itself. Juggling your property listings, your web site content, your lead capture forms, your SEO, your syndicating listings on other sites, and your internet advertising is no simple task. An integrated approach will drive more traffic to your web site and enable you to focus more time on locating deals to sell more properties.
Larry Goins
By Larry Goins
Once you have a web site to tell the world about all your great real estate deals, you need buyers visiting and bookmarking your site. Unlike the “Field of Dreams” where if you build it they will come, your real estate web site needs traffic or visitors to sell properties.
Even if you have the best buys on the market, if potential buyers and investors can’t find your web site, then they can’t buy your properties. Let’s look at the tools that you will need to drive targeted, buying traffic to your web site.
Over time, if your web site has quality content (see my article on Attracting Prospects and Leads to Your Real Estate Web Site for design tips) you will rank well in the search engines for keyword phrases like “investment property for sale” or “homes for sale in (your geographic location)”. But when you first launch your web site, you will need to utilize additional tools until you have good natural organic search engine traffic. More on that in a minute.
If you do not yet have a real estate web site, check out the great tool available from my buddy Rob Yaggie at http://www.UltimateInternet MarketingMachine.com/.
Until you have good organic search engine traffic from natural rankings for relevant keywords, these tools can help you drive more traffic to your real estate web site. Nothing is more frustrating than to launch a web site and then have no one visit it.
Signage, Flyers, and Business Cards
It goes without saying that everything that leaves your office should have your web site address or URL printed clearly on it. Every sign, flyer, business card, post card, and ad should have your web address and a little blurb about your site. Using the site above as an example, the blurb might read, “Hot web sites for marketing cool real estate deals online 24/7”. This is the least expensive form of web marketing available to you and is still very effective. A lead might look at your business card or a post card at 11 PM at night and think it’s too late to call you about a property. But they can go to your web site and see everything that you have available even when you aren’t working. Your web site works twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
Article Writing
The next least expensive way to drive traffic to your real estate web site is by writing articles and publishing them on article directories for other publishers. Be sure to publish them on your web site as well. If you are the realtor of choice in a specific geographic area article writing can help to brand you and drive traffic to your website just by telling people how great your geographic area is. If you are the go to guy for short sales or foreclosures, then use that area of expertise to drive traffic to your web site by writing and publishing articles. It doesn’t cost a penny except for your time and articles work round the clock for your business, too.
You can submit articles to sites like www.ArticlesFactory.com or www.ArticleDashboard.com or www.ArticleDirectory.com
Organic Search Engine Hits
Being on page one of a search at Google or Yahoo when someone is looking for properties like you have to offer is the best way to get traffic to your web site. Scoring those rankings is a tricky combination of successful keyword optimization, web site traffic history, web site age, inbound and outbound linking strategies, and quality of content. If you are continually building a quality website with relevant content, you can look forward to natural or organic search engine hits in your site’s future. A well built web site will ultimately get the bulk of its hits or visitors from organic search engine hits.
Local Newspaper Advertorials
Don’t be afraid to promote yourself and toot your own horn. Get to know some writers and editors at your local newspaper and write an advertorial about a subject of interest, tying it back to your web site. If there is a tremendous amount of foreclosures in your area or a large amount of for sale by owners, write about it and link back to your web site with a little teaser of information about how you will be offering great properties, too.
Banner Exchanges
When you are in contact with other business owners in your area who have web sites, ask about exchanging links or banners to each other’s web sites. Especially business owners who are also working with homeowners. For example, furniture stores, contractors, painters, interior decorators, landscapers, and driveway pavers. You might further assist this link building partnership by posting on your website a list of general and specialized contractors who do work for you on your properties that you would recommend.
Hold a Giveaway On Your Site
Everybody loves to get something for nothing. A giveaway is a great way to attract people to your web site. You don’t have to give away the farm. You can offer a free e-book, free home seller consultation, or anything else that would be of interest to the same people who would be interested in the real estate that you have to offer. You could even connect with your local Welcome Wagon representative or co-launch a giveaway with several local businesses to up the prize ante. Make sure that you structure your giveaway so as to build your list. If people are picking up a free item or registering to win an item require them to register with their contact information so that you can continue to market to them in the future.
Work Your Mailing List
Any time that you have a giveaway, or attend a chamber meeting or network you want to be building your own internal mailing list. The list, especially if it contains email addresses, is a no cost marketing tool. You can send your articles to your list, your new properties, or even great information about what is going on in your area. Every time that you mail or email your list, be sure to include a link to your web site. If you want to be sure that people visit yoursite as a result of the mailing, you might want to only include a small blurb or teaser to the entire content that will be on your web site.
Pay Per Click Campaigns
Pay per click campaigns generate your ads on the top of search engine results pages for relevant keywords. When an internet user types in a keyword or words you have bid upon, your link is displayed at the top or right hand side of the page. It almost appears to be a regular search engine ranking result. Almost. It is actually a paid advertisement. If the searcher clicks on your advertisement, you pay per click. The rates vary greatly depending upon the competitiveness of the keywords chosen but if you are only competing with local realtors then the prices shouldn’t be too high. It’s not actually as expensive as you might think and you can control your daily and monthly budgets accordingly.
Full Blown Marketing Campaign
If you are made of money, then this most expensive but highly effective web site traffic generating tactic might work well for you. The cost per lead is higher, but it can drive very targeted buying traffic. You can find companies that specialize in successful search engine optimization or search engine marketing campaigns by searching for them on Google or Yahoo. Look for one’s with previous experience working with realtors and real estate investors.
Tying It All Back Together
Owning a piece of internet real estate is just the first step into doing business on the internet or driving traffic to your web site to sell your properties. It’s a complicated beast and truly an anomaly unto itself. Juggling your property listings, your web site content, your lead capture forms, your SEO, your syndicating listings on other sites, and your internet advertising is no simple task. An integrated approach will drive more traffic to your web site and enable you to focus more time on locating deals to sell more properties.
Larry Goins
Best No Money Down Ways to Buy Real Estate
If you've been reading articles or books on Creative Real Estate Investing, you've doubtless heard many, many different ways to buy houses, condos, townhouse and any other real estate you can think of. These include:Lease/Options (more correctly Sandwich Lease / Options)Master Lease / Option for multi-unit propertiesContract for Deed (A.K.A. All Inclusive Trust Deed, or Installment Land Contract)Subject - ToOwner CarryWraparound MortgageTraditional PurchaseConfused yet? I know that the first time I heard many of these terms I certainly was. So let's break these down briefly, and I'll explain what I like and don't like about them.Sandwich Lease / OptionThis is where you (rather your company) signs a lease with an option to purchase a property. The agreement gives you the right to sublease to another. You're the middleman leasing for a low monthly cost with a low purchase price and a long term from the homeowner, then you lease it back out for just above market rent and a future appreciated price to a potential buyer. You make monthly cash flow, and when (IF) they buy you get the difference in price. You also get a decent upfront option payment that you get to keep if your tenant / buyer moves out. Easy, huh? Well, yes and no. This is probably the easiest way of presenting a creative purchase to the homeowner, and the easiest to explain. However, sometimes the legal aspects of a lease / option are shaky, and if you have a homeowner that won't work with you, you could be in for issues. The key here is you have to protect yourself with the right agreements and escrow documents.The other side is you have to know your landlord / tenant laws and make sure you follow them and that your contracts follow them. You could be in trouble if you don't.Given the warnings above, I'd recommend this method over anything else to someone just getting started. While there is a bit of paperwork to use to protect yourself, it's the easiest to manage. And there can be great profits in lease / options.Master Lease / OptionSame as the Lease / Option but with a master lease agreement that lets you rent out individual units in a multi-unit apartment building. Contract for DeedThis is known by different names in different states. Here in Colorado, it's an Installment Land Contract. Other places it's an All-Inclusive Trust Deed, or a Contract for Deed. All the same, just different names.A Contract for Deed is just what the name says. It's a contract for the deed to a property. The contract usually involves making payments to the owner and after a period of time you guarantee to purchase the property. Whereas a lease / option gives you the right, but not the obligation to purchase, a Contract for Deed obligates you to buy.This one's a bit more complicated, but essentially the same as the Lease / Option. You buy it on the contract, then rent it out to a Tenant / Buyer. They usually won't buy so you get their monthly rent, and keep the option deposit if they don't buy.This is my second choice for people just beginning. It's easy to explain to the homeowner, it makes them feel like they still have some control, and they like the sound of it. Also, most title companies understand the Contract for Deed, and will do the closing for you.Subject ToThis is a much more difficult deal to get. This is the one deal where the homeowner will tell you how to buy instead of the other way around. I never have signed up a Subject-To by suggesting it. The homeowner has ALWAYS told me "just take the house - I'll sign it over to you". It's honestly sad to see people so desperate, but the sense of relief you see in their eyes when you say "okay" is phenomenal. Some people think that real estate investors are sharks, but I've never hugged a shark after they've had their way with me. I have, however, received a hug or a hearty handshake almost every time I've taken a house over subject-to. People are in such a bind that having someone help them out really does wonders for them.A subject-to is pretty basic on the surface. A homeowner in financial trouble signs a deed to his or her house over to you. The loan stays in their name, and you make the payments. Under the hood, though, there are a number of things you need to do to make sure you're protected. Putting the property in a land trust, signing the deed to the land trust, then naming your company as the beneficiary is just one of the things you need to do to protect yourself. Before you do this type of deal, make sure you have the right education and paperwork.This is by far my favorite way to sign up houses. But it's not for beginners. I recommend this after you've been investing for a year or two. Not because of the legal issues with this, but because I truly believe that you're very obligated to follow through on this deal. If it goes sour, you're stuck. Maybe not legally, but morally and ethically. You have to make the payments no matter what.Owner CarryYet another great way to buy. However there's one drawback - the owner almost always wants a down payment. If you've been investing for awhile and have the money that's great, but if you're just starting out and you don't it's probably not for you.This one is pretty self-explanatory. You buy the house and the owner carries a mortgage. Generally this is a property that has no existing mortgage, so the owner is allowed to write you a mortgage without worrying about the due on sale clause.Again, this is a great way to buy a property as the mortgage doesn't show up on your credit. But you need to have the cash for the down payment.Wraparound MortgageThis is basically an Owner-Carry, but there is an existing mortgage on the property. The owner "wraps" a new mortgage around that and sells the house to you with the new mortgage. The only drawback of this is you have to make sure to write your paperwork so that the due on sale clause isn't triggered. You can do this similar to the Subject-to, by putting it into a Land Trust.Traditional PurchasePlease, Please, PLEASE don't buy houses retail unless it's a really great, smokin' hot deal! Please?Here's how I like to buy traditionally. Buy a wreck of a house from a bank, from HUD, or from a wholesaler. Make sure that the price of the house, plus all the costs fixing it up don't go over 80% of the fixed up value of the house.Buy the house, fix it up, then refinance it, pull all the money out that you put in buying it and fixing it, then rent it out or do a rent-to-own. When you've refinance and pulled your money out, do it again. A good investor can do four or more houses a year this way. The only fly in the ointment here is that eventually the mortgage companies will cut you off and you won't be able to buy any more. Then you'll have to resort to the above methods. But by then you should have enough cash flow that you can pretty much sit on your butt all day if you'd like.So to sum up:As you're just getting started, concentrate on Lease / Options first. Once you've gotten your feet wet and understand what a good deal vs. a bad deal is, move on to Contract for Deed, then finally to Subject-To. Throw in some Owner Carry and Traditional purchases and in ten years you can retire and NEVER have to worry about money again.
Article Source: http://www.realestateinvestmentarticles.net
Scott Taylor is a successful Real Estate Investor, trainer and Web Entrepreneur. He has taught hundreds of students to become wealthy through Real Estate. Mr. Taylor also runs successful website businesses, and reviews Internet businesses.
Article Source: http://www.realestateinvestmentarticles.net
Scott Taylor is a successful Real Estate Investor, trainer and Web Entrepreneur. He has taught hundreds of students to become wealthy through Real Estate. Mr. Taylor also runs successful website businesses, and reviews Internet businesses.
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