Financial Freedom One House At A Time
They think differently than we do Ashley and I were out knocking the pre-foreclosure doors in Whitfield county yesterday. While we were there, we had an interesting experience that I would like to tell you about. The first couple of houses we went to were your normal $125-140k house in nice neighborhoods. I say “normal” because that’s the price range that the average person lives in in our…
Did we buy an alligator? Real estate investors are known for being risk takers. As a matter of fact, most of the time the reason an investor gets into trouble is because they estimated too high on what a property would sale for once they fixed it up. The outcome for this speculation is that the investor gets too thin with their numbers and overpays for the property….
Make sure they understand People tend to naturally say “No” to things they aren’t familiar with. This is a reality real estate investor must overcome in order to get a “yes” on a creative deal structures when talking to sellers. You do that by making sure they understand what you’re proposing. Take owner carry-back financing for instance. Most people are accustomed to the idea of making payments, especially…
Site unseen We’ve been getting calls lately where sellers want us to make offers on their houses sight unseen. (Yes I know I misspelled the title. You’ll understand why shortly.) We always tell them we can’t do that because it’s like buying a truck without popping the hood or taking it for a test drive. You really can’t tell much just from looking at the outside. Ashley and…
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,…