What is the best deal you've put together with under $10,000 cash

[Ben Leybovich]

It's best to have both knoledge and money. But, if you had to have one or the other, you would chose knowledge - of course. In this spirit:

What is the best deal that you've put together requiring $10,000 of YOUR cash or less?

[Account Closed]

Ben Leybovich I'm not sure why you aren't getting more responses on this. I'm wondering if the current generation of REIs (or at least the ones on BP) aren't interested in creative deal making. To me, it's an old-school, pre-Bubble question...back when creative real estate meant doing deals with little money out-of-pocket, even if you had the cash. :)

I'd say my first 20 deals (back in the early 2000s) were all less than $1K out-of-pocket, for profits anywhere from $3K to $50K. In those deals I used assignments or double-closes or short-term hard money loans. I used to call it making money out of nothing, because sometimes the most I had into a deal was $100 EM, sometimes no EM. For sure I was spending money on marketing and lawyers and and cell phones and gas, etc., but I wasn't using much of my own cash to get the deal under contract and I wasn't bringing my own cash to closing. Then I transitioned into some very complicated, but very profitable deals where I bought heirs' interests in properties. That involved real cash up front, and those kinds of deals aren't usually lendable, so I was using my funds for those. Then I transitioned into a combination of private lenders and my own funds for both non-rehab and rehab deals, which is where I am now.

But there are a few deals using my own cash that stand out. I once bought a non-performing note for $5K (cash). The owners had abandoned the property years ago. I started the foreclosure immediately and it sold at trustee's sale 4 months later for $35K. That was a good and easy deal. My very first property ever was a tax sale property (vacant land) I bought at public auction for $5K. I used the balances on 3 (!) different credit cards to pay for it. (Now that I think about it, it's amazing that the tax collector accepted credit cards!) And I sold it to the neighbor for $10K. I'm pretty sure I was hooked after that.