All Forum Posts by: Mike Smith

I joined the mentorship in December 2020 after following Pace's free content for a long time. You can (and should) learn a whole lot from the free content alone, but being inside the mentorship is a whole other level. The knowledge and resources you need to succeed are all collected for you in a single place, but more importantly you become part of a nationwide network of professional investors. Everything you need to move your business forward is found inside the Subto family.

I'm from Salem too. I'm trying (unsuccessfully so far) to wholesale and/or fix and flip so I can start buying rentals. I don't check BP much these days but I'm always happy to network with other local investors.

I love to see a young person being ambitious and planning for their future. I wish I had been thinking about wealth when I was your age. You're off to a good start.

Having said that, the thing you don't realize right now is that your desires are going to change as you age. Not just your desire for wealth. Your goals for having a family, for getting an education (formal or informal). Even the things you like to have for breakfast or the hobbies you pursue in your down time. It all changes. You can't stop it.

You've already started learning by being here. Keep it up. Pick a path and get after it. But don't get overly focused on specific goals for 40 years from now because they won't mean a thing by the time you get there. 

A lot of "pre-foreclosure" listings on Zillow aren't even on the market yet. Some of them have been listed on Zillow for 1000+ days, but you can't actually buy them yet. You can check out Auction.com for actual foreclosure listings, buy you'll have to pay the full price in cash when the auction ends. Otherwise, some foreclosure listings ultimately do end up as traditional listings, but you'll be in competition with every other traditional buyer.

As for maintenance issues, every house is different. A lot of foreclosures need a ton of repairs, but some are in good shape. 

I see from your profile you're talking about high school.

I don't place a lot of importance on formal education. But high school is so unbelievably easy to complete that anyone who doesn't have a diploma can reasonably be assumed to be an idiot. Now maybe you'll be a successful investor and the people you do business with won't ever need to know you dropped out. But if you run into any hiccups you may find yourself needing a W-2 job at some point. Having a high school diploma could mean a huge difference in your earning potential in the event you have to work for someone else. Every extra dollar you earn is an extra dollar you'll have to invest.

Besides that, at 16 you can't even sign a contract. No matter how smart, how capable, or even how educated you are, there are a ton of things you can't do right now just because of your age. What else are you going to do with your time for the next two years? Being here on BP and researching real estate is an excellent use of your free time, but finishing high school isn't going to interfere with that.

Just finish high school and then get to work. That is unless you're talking about leaving traditional high school early and getting your GED. I wouldn't consider that dropping out.

I suppose that's possible, but very unlikely. People lie to us all the time, so we get fairly good at sorting out who is credible and who is not. Simply claiming the landlord is lying without any documentation to back it up is not going to get a squatter very far. If we're looking at a legitimate landlord-tenant disagreement it will be pretty obvious and we'll advise the parties they'll have to work it out in civil court. If a person starts squatting in a vacant property and they never had a right to be there, that will also become obvious pretty fast and we will remove them.

I'm a cop in Oregon and deal with this occasionally. Every state will be different but I tell you how we deal with it. First of all, for criminal (trespass) purposes, we don't recognize "tenants." A person has either established residency or they have not. And if they have, they have all kinds of rights to remain there until legally evicted. A lack of a lease or rent payment have absolutely nothing to do with it. If a person who has residency there has invited/allowed someone else to stay there, it is not a trespass and that person can establish residency, even if it violates the lease of the legitimate resident.

There is no specific definition of how residency is established. Spending a couple nights at your buddy's house with the expectation you'll go home afterward doesn't establish residency. Sleeping there for two weeks with no end date discussed.... maybe. Things like receiving mail there help establish residency. To convict someone of trespass we have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were not supposed to be there, so if they're in the gray area of residency, the state has to prove that residency was not established.

In the case of squatters they establish residency if the property owner knows or should have known that the people were living there. My agency went through this in serving eviction notices on a massive homeless camp that had existed on private property for 10+ years. Since the owner knew about it and did not make it an issue, they had to go through the eviction process when they finally decided to clean it up. Before that, we basically had to assume that anyone in the camps was a resident and could not be removed. 

Here's the email I got from Veristone on March 22. I haven't heard anything since (I haven't been trying to contact them).

"Effective immediately, Veristone is suspending new lending activity. We are taking the threat of COVID-19 seriously and are continuing to monitor the immediate impact that it will have on the economy and real estate markets. Our decision to suspend new loan activity will hopefully be short lived.

We are NOT closing our doors; however, we are choosing to navigate cautiously until we can have a better idea of when the market will return to some form of normality.

Although most of our staff is working remotely, we remain available to all clients. Communication between current clients and Veristone will be key during this time so please reach out to us as needed.

Stay healthy,

Veristone Management"

This is very complicated. Oregon is a community property state, but if they are California residents and the divorce is being handled there I would imagine California law will determine how all of their assets are split. She needs to bring this up with her attorney.

Check our Northwest REIA for meetups. There's a meeting in Salem once a month, and a bunch of other meetings in the Portland area.