Robyn Thompson - "Queen of Rehab"

[Tim Pommett]

I attended my first DFW REI Club meeting last night, and definitely plan on going back. There were roughly 70-80 people there to see Robyn Thompson - aka the "Queen of Rehab" - teach part of her curriculum, and it only cost $20 to attend. I'll share my thoughts on her lesson with y'all in case you ever hear about her. Note that I am a complete newbie, and have zero previous experience in real estate investing

Robyn tours the country teaching her methods on rehabbing. She has successfully purchased over 350 homes in 15 years, and has a no BS attitude. She obviously knows her stuff. Obviously this was an hour long presentation, not her full 5 day course, but I got a sense for the pros and cons of her teaching style.

Pro's: She's an expert, plain and simple. She has a lot of tips and tricks, and knows how to command a room. She claims to be wildly successful and a multi-millionaire.

Con's: She didn't focus on principles or fundamentals, and instead listed off a bunch of random "insider secrets" that a newbie like me shouldn't even worry about. Her biggest selling point was for direct mail: her patented "Horsey Letter". She says you don't want to come across to a desperate seller as a cold, only-cares-about-the-numbers business owner, but a normal human being. So, she was VERY specific about fonts, templates, even the style of stamps to use on direct mail, even going as far to say, "If you don't have a cute puppy or horse in the background of your letter, your response rate will drop from my typical 12% to the average 1-2% response rate". And of course, she spent the last 10 minutes selling her $2000 five day course.

Don't get me wrong, she had a lot of useful information, and I'm sure it's more likely that she would cover the fundamentals in her full course, something that is difficult to cover fully in a 90 minute presentation... But over half of the audience was completely new to REI. I mean, shouldn't the focus be on how to overcome your fear to even get started? Rather than focus on what color ink you should use to hand-write, NOT PRINT, the addresses on your direct mail? That's the biggest thing that bothered me.

I'd love to get some thoughts and feedback, especially from anyone who has taken the full course

[J Scott]

I actually have an endorsement for Robyn...

I've only spent $69 on "guru" courses/seminars in this business, and that consisted of a half-day presentation she in Atlanta back in 2008. I hadn't yet purchased my first house, and Robyn's info was very basic, very obvious, but also well presented and informative. She is very systematic (as I am), and I've structured my business very similarly to how she said she structured hers...though I don't give her credit for that...I only know one way to run a business and that's what I do.

Much of that half-day course was upsell for DVDs and such (and her bootcamp, now that I think about it), but the information offered between the upsells was very useful to someone who had never done a deal. I can't imagine the $4000 for the bootcamp would have been worth it based on what was presented there, but I would definitely say that the $69 I spent on the half-day training was money well spent.

Btw, I probably should be giving Robyn credit for the fact that I wrote "The Book on Estimating Rehab Costs." Someone gave me a copy of her $900 DVD set on rehabbing a few years ago, and it was the most pathetic attempt at a rehab training video I could possibly imagine (for any Mystery Science Theater fans out there, it was 10x worse than anything they covered). Had I paid $9 for it -- let alone $900! -- I'd have been demanding my money back. But, that's when I first started thinking about the fact that there was no good information out there on rehabbing and estimating costs.