All Forum Posts by: David Stewart

Erroneous double post...

I can certainly see how this cabal of elites (pretty sure they must be billionaires) would gain a huge benefit from destroying $101 trillion in investor assets in 48 (but not 72) hours. I mean, the gain from doing that has to be immense.

They don't sound very motivated. Motivation is not words but prices. None of these people appear to have a motivation other than getting top (or higher than top) dollar for properties. (Except maybe the wife of the first couple, but the payoff amount is not a wholesale price, as there is no room for an investor. If ARV is $103K, and someone has to sell it retail eventually, there's about $9300 in expenses to selling it. 103K-9.3K is 93.7K, for something acquired possibly at $83.5K + a few thousand in closing costs. Who'll buy it from you for a margin of almost nothing?)

Have the seller send a locksmith over to open the house, and have the locksmith make a key (or take a new lockset with you, and change it on the house with written seller's permission). I think it would be worth the call to enable you to get a much more accurate idea of what you're dealing with, so you can sell it more knowledgeably and (pace Mr. Paicely) at a higher price.

I'm new to BP Pro in last month, though a largely inactive member over three years. I've really wanted to do REI since about 2003. As a substitute I got licensed and have been an agent since 2003, listing for 5 years, and selling new homes for a builder from 2008 to present. So I've been in real estate, just not investing. I did some investing boot camps in 2004, and really wanted to get into the field, and want to now.

The barrier: A very skeptical wife who thought--and still thinks--that any form of real estate investing is a sure road to financial ruin. Why? Well, because you have to take out bunches of mortgages, with big down payments, creating big monthly payments, with no certainty of finding good tenants whose rent will be dependable and exceed the mortgage payments, and anyway, how does that make up for the big down payment and the mortgage you owe? Also, fixing up places is so expensive and tradespeople are not reliable and it always costs a lot more than you think it will, and then selling it is expensive and you can't depend on getting a price that covers the purchase and rehab. And people are awful--tenants would be horrible people to deal with, and would ruin any home we bought, and we would end up losing money repairing over and over (which we don't know how to do ourselves). All of this is the road to financial ruin. We should just do what we understand from having done it--stick to mutual funds and stock investments.

And besides, though it might not have been true in 2004, now we're too old--67 and retired her, 60 me (and near retirement). And it's the wrong time in the market to do it. (And always is and always will be.)

It's hard to talk about the subject sensibly, and when she sees my books about real estate investing... well, the other night, in my office she saw a book on my desk, "Building Wealth One House at a Time." The remark was "Yeah, you do that by not buying it." And I'm reluctant to actually make any moves that we don't agree on. We consider our capital to be shared, not individual, so agreement is pretty important to us.

So I've been searching for something that would present real estate investing in a short (because it will be very difficult to convincer her to give it the time of day), but thorough, and clear manner, to show how real estate actually does produce gains--passive income from rentals, immediate gains from, e.g., wholesaling. I haven't found yet something that I think can make a case convincingly to her. So I'm asking for suggestions here. Have any of you faced this challenge? How did you see it through? Do you know of anything I can show her that can make the case better than I've been able to do?

 There's no link to get the ebook on that page.

 Just waiting on California...

As I look around on BP, and listen to podcasts, I hear a lot about private lenders and hard money lenders. Some of the podcasts and books talk about how "you can be the lender." I can be, that is. But can I be? Is it something that is a doable business for an individual?

I see posts from HMLs and PLs. Most if not all I've seen have lending corporations. The directory is all companies who do loans from $50K to $10 million.

I have some money. I'd like to earn decent return on it, and like the idea of financing real estate rehabs, either as a partner (the money), private lender, or hard money lender. But is that a field now taken over by corporate entities? Is there a place for the individual lender?

Sarah, it's not going at all at this time. I have just (re-)started researching RE investment recently. I wrote the above post as a thought piece (or pre-plan) after reading a few forum threads on legal issues with wholesaling, especially in FL. I was just trying to come up with a legally invulnerable method of wholesaling.

I’ve always liked Top Producer.