Financial Freedom One House At A Time
Just get it in writing I met with a seller recently who had a beautiful house in the Sonoraville area of Gordon County. When I say beautiful, I mean it. This house was immaculately kept and well maintained. The seller was getting ready to move into an assisted living faculty and needed top dollar to provide for those accommodations for the remainder of her life. Realizing she…
It’s a family business I’ve got something on my heart that I really want to talk to you about. It has to do with a statistic I heard at a recent seminar. I heard that real estate investors, and entrepreneurs in general, get divorced from their spouses at a rate of 35%. That means at least one out of every three people I see at a seminar is…
Man on a wire Real estate investing is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for the faltering soul. To be successful at it, you have to be willing to ride the roller coaster while pushing forward. Take what happened to us last week for instance. As I was leaving my house after lunch on Monday, I get a call from one of the pre-foreclosure…
Empathy versus sympathy Empathy and sympathy are two very similar words that have related meanings. They both have to do with understanding someone else’s feelings. That being said, you have to focus on one versus the other when it comes to making offers. The late, great, Zig Ziglar has a story he uses to illustrate the difference between the two concepts. He talks about when he sold Saladmaster…
Door knocking update We have spent the last week and half door knocking at all the pre-foreclosures in Whitfield, Gordon and Bartow Counties. And I have tell you, things are different out there than when we first started this practice. When we started door knocking on pre-foreclosures in 2012, there would be anywhere from 75 to 150 properties advertised in the paper for foreclosure in each county. When…
Don’t get so busy you forget what you’re doing I got to do something I haven’t done in a long time the other day. I got to spend some one-on-one time with the guy who taught me most of what I know about real estate investing. His name is Bill Cook. The reason this was a rare opportunity for me is because Bill and his lovely wife,…
Why do an in-home interview? We have three properties on market right now for rent, and the quality and amount of applications coming in is great. This is a stark difference from the craziness we experienced in late fall of last year. Then, we had 200 applications submitted for just one property. And of those, only 20 percent were filled out completely, but most of the applicants didn’t meet…
Evaluating a big fat juicy deal How many of you romance the idea of getting that big juicy deal that nets you $75,000 or more in profit? I know I do. Logic dictates that in order to get bigger profits like this, you’re going to need to work with houses at higher price points. Right? Well, it just so happened that we got a call last…
Subject-to deals Subject-to seems to be the new buzz-word circling through many of the real estate investor teaching arenas. That’s because in our current market, subject-to deals present a great opportunity. Before I get into that, let me explain what one is. A subject-to deal is where you buy a house from someone with a mortgage in place. Instead of getting your own loan to pay off your…
Expenses Escaped Ashley and I have been blessed to have Peter Fortunato as one of our main teachers since we got into real estate investing. When it comes to creative real estate transactions, Pete is like one of those guys that does chainsaw wood carving. He walks up to something that looks like a stump to everyone standing around, cranks up his creative chainsaw mind and begins to…