Real Estate Concepts are FREE(Sometimes You’ll Get What You Paid For)

A guide to the frequently awesome, frequently worthless world of massively open online courses.

Two things about real estate education have become clear. First, you need it more than ever to stay competitive in a super, fast-changing market place. Second, the model so-called gurus are using to deliver that education is broken.

So sometimes it’s hard to get excited about hearing some millionaire real estate guy on the radio announce he’s “looking for investors in your area” or receiving an invitation in the mail to attend his/her event or respond to an email with online registration to a free event…

Right now, for the unbeatable price of $0, many seminar companies are is teaching a class on foreclosures, REOs, generic commercial real estate to thousands of people online — no application required. Many other seminar companies have also started open courses for everyone.

The seminar world is buzzing with the notion that this could change, well, everything. “I’ve been saying it for 5 years, we are at a pivotal moment,” Hedge Fund Manager, Author, and Educator Cherif Medawar. “A few forces are combining: extraordinary technological progress with economic need. With sites like YouTube.com and VIMEO.com people seeking education can find hours of free video and MP3s there. The actual training companies need to recognize this and adjust.”

True, we’re a long way from here to the day when students would flock to the back table and pay $5,000 for a live 3-day training at the Hilton, but the online world of knowledge has big issues, especially the FREE stuff.

A typical free online class includes a few short-recorded lecture modules. About 50,000 online students most likely have taken a real estate education series online. Here’s what they got: a sense of accomplishment if they actually finished and a PDF from Guru X suitable for printing and framing.

Another fact about the FREE online education you see offered on Facebook, LinkedIn, and in your email box is that most people will not finish the course because there is no one pushing you along, monitoring your progress, or even testing you. People who start these complimentary courses watch the first video and then give up because the course is $0, and there is also ZERO value in your time investment… this scenario is followed up by phone calls from call centers selling more books, tapes, and useless classes.

Free is for me, BUT you get what you pay for. In order to hone any skill, you must apply it. Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT have been researching free courses versus investment needed courses and they agree students need the structure and time-management discipline. The classroom may be a “virtual” classroom, but the homework, testing, and application is far from virtual. Most importantly your teaching experience is a must when it comes to the actual deals!

If online classes were nothing but an elaborate seminar adult-enrichment program, the story would end here. But the growth of free online courses is happening at a time when the link between where you learn something and where you get the real-life real estate experience is breaking down. Over the past 12 months, Cherif has learned that most student-investors’ attention flags 15 minutes into his webinar. Using online tools allowed him to create a “flipped” classroom—lectures are the homework while consulting time is for collaborative work together.

Plus the tools and resources real estate investors now use to compete in any market are ONLINE. Apps, software, and Skype make the world of investing in real estate a lot smaller. But if you aren’t educated you can never keep up!

Change is here and this is what you need to know to make the most of education and a strategic plan to invest in real estate. In Cherif’s CMREI courses you will invest some money in the course, but you will have hands-on guidance and follow up!

You’ll chat with real estate contacts Cherif deals with on a weekly basis, you’ll learn with the experts and chat with students online; and there’s homework, which may be graded by a CMREI Educational Director or Cherif himself. Some classes offer a few online meetings in which Cherif address questions posed by students. Although there may be bi-weekly schedule online meetings, it’s flexible to your schedule. And most importantly there is a series of tests. Post testing, you are required to go out and line up deals.

The flipped model means that star teachers and investors, like Cherif, are now virtually exportable to students with less money to spend on training, but a huge passion to change their financial landscape! Cherif Medawar Real Estate Investing is transcending the world of education.

“In two webinars we did what it would normally take 3-days in a classroom to do here,” says Medawar. “Plus I have a group of student-investors from all over the Country. Sharing strategies and feedback makes the conversation so much more profitable!”

Armando Ramirez, a retired Police Officer in Southern California has completed three classes on investing and says the content is strong and the price is right. “The courses offered the chance to explore without having to deploy resources beyond time. I’m not having to leave my home. AND I get the one on one support during the LIVE presentations,” says Ramirez.

Cherif’s courses open up higher education and application to the price-slashing economics of the web. Building an online class isn’t cheap: A good one can cost $100,000, CMREI Vice President, Ashlee Jones, explained.

“The fact is a more expensive online course might be a better value in the long run,” says Ramirez. “If it helps more people finish the entire program and go on to implement and make money a few bucks are worth it!

“In the medieval period, the university was a citadel and walled off and separate. 20 years ago adult education and strategies for building wealth were brought to a seminar in your local area, offering the information to the local masses,” says Medawar. “We are post-citadel-seminar. It is the application and ability to go into the world and line up the deals that define our success now. Content is free. The GUIDE who is showing you and leading you to the spire is who you must invest in.”

There’s no easy back door to success. Before 2015, knocks at your door get enrolled with Cherif in an online program. A small investment is the first HUGE step to make a difference next year.

The fact is YOU CAN NOT (or will not) do it alone no matter how much free information you have at your fingertips. Let Cherif Medawar guide you.