Pete Youngs - Rehab 101

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I didn't see anything on this guy (there was a brief post on his brother Tony however) so I thought I'd post. Pete's all about the actual rehab process; his half of the guru partnership is not about getting the deals but how to save money in the rehab process. His course retails for $1,200 but he travels around to local REIA meetings and offers it for $1,000 there with an extra incentive or two thrown in. If you don't want the bells or whistles, a used copy of the basic set on Ebay goes for $200ish.

My first impression was that Pete's production quality is low. I'll forgive a lot to get to the meat of the presentation but at least half of his DVDs are of home-movie quality without any significant editing (expect meaningless pauses while he chats inaudibly with somebody in the room on the live DVDs, and the people asking questions are almost always inaudible). His non-live material is a direct copy from his VHS tapes so be prepared for some older material. Pete's either trying to make sure everybody really understands his material or he just ran out of ideas because everything will be repeated several times over the course of his numerous DVDs and CDs. You can get the general idea of what's being said after just watching the Rehab 101 DVD itself and the rest become somewhat optional for a review or to pick up something he may not have touched on.

With the of the production out of the way, how's the material? Pete has some good ideas in spots and some real money-saving tips. I think he tends to take those ideas a little too far and errs on the side of cheapness more than I'd personally be comfortable with. This may be because I'm still a new investor but he seems to do a lot of sweeping under the rug or just touching something up enough to get the property sold. His advice on cutting the price down on contractors is also a little on the shady side. I applaud the idea of getting multiple estimates, but he then has you take the lowest price to three more people to do more comparison shopping. The first three that you worked with has no chance of getting the job; you're just supposed to get their estimates and move on. Perhaps this is widely done but if I was the contractor and knew that these sorts of shenanigans were going on I'd probably be pretty pissed.

Pete's handling of mold is a little suspect to me. When he spoke at our local REIA meeting he actually happened to be opposite a couple of mold professionals. They went up first and talked about mold removal, the proper way to go about it so that you're not running into lawsuit trouble down the road, et cetera. Pete came on and mentioned that he was a mold guy himself and sort of glossed over the rest. When we studied the materials we discovered why; Pete's solution is to use bleach on everything, which was a direct contradiction of the mold professionals' approach (they very clearly said not to use bleach because it doesn't kill the roots, and after the bleach neutralizes you're left with water on the mold which makes it worse in the end).

In the end I feel you have to kind of pick and choose what's actually good money-saving material and what's just plain cheap. I can't speak to the mold issue other than the he said/she said between him and the mold pros, but I think his way could get you in some legal trouble if it can be shown that you were aware of the problem but were just hiding it. I think he needs to polish his work considerably before he charges $1,000 or more for it, but the people snapping it up at that price obviously disagree with me. Get it cheap and used if you can.