All Forum Posts by: Corey Demuth

do you have a healthy buyers list? you could cut him a check for the 500 if you're confident that you can close. if you don't have buyers lined up, you may be putting the cart before the horse. how do you know its a great deal if you don't have a few buyers already in mind who are looking for this kind of property? a good deal for who?

It also sounds like you are coming off as not being entirely sure you can sell the property. Maybe something you said or just a general vibe you gave off has given the seller the idea that you may just waste his time by tying the property up for a month or however long your contract is. You definitely do not want to give any other impression than that you will solve his problem by moving the property promptly.

Trying to write up a contract that does not tie up the property is a bad idea because:

A.) your buyer can go around you and just cut you out of the deal, very easily

B.) your seller is likely to come back to you a week later and say "well joe moron down the street just offered me 5k more than your offer"

C.) you may waste a lot of time and effort if you go through all the motions only to find that he found another buyer

anyways, I am not trying to be overly negative just giving you some food for thought. good luck!

Originally posted by Kevin Colwell:

I work at a credit card processing company and just wanted to make it known that it is against Visa/MC rules and regulations to charge a customer an additional fee to pay via a credit card. Now this is not to say that you cannot up your prices across the board and give cash paying customers a discount. However if you are to charge an additonal fee to cover your processing charges that is a violation of the terms of service and your account could be terminated. Please feel free to PM me if you have any questions that you would like me to anwser about accepting credit cards.

People SAY this all the time but I would love to see it in writing because everyone does this. Most small businesses won't accept a credit card for less than 10 or 15 dollars.

The apartment complex I live in has instituted the ability to pay by credit card just recently. They charge a $15 fee if you choose to do this.

$0.25 + 3% seems like a very strange arrangement. Most businesses I know of pay more like $1 + 1.5 - 2 % of the transaction cost. So for small transactions they really get screwed.

For Fresh Meadows, if I put my $1400 rent on a visa, that would cost them about $22 assuming they pay $1 + 1.5%. Minus the $15 fee they pass on to me, that means it only costs them $7. Not having to deal with the paperwork of taking checks and getting your money immediately seems worthwhile for that. Also, this is a massive corporation that owns hundreds of multi-unit properties in queens so I would imagine they investigate the issue with their lawyers before implementing it. People like that don't breathe without consulting their lawyer or accountant (sometimes both!)

Paying 3% for a cc transaction is really getting screwed. If someone really offered you those numbers, seek an alternate provider with better rates. Especially since rent charges will all be large, paying a higher base charge (such as $1 instead of $0.25) will be in your best interest. Only really small businesses where the charges are very low can benefit from a higher percentage and lower base charge.

YES you can do a lot with 50k. I would recommend you do some reading on here and think about what avenue you want to try first; such as buying properties and rehabbing them, buying properties and renting them out, wholesaling, etc.

Wholesaling is pretty unique in that it allows you to get started with very little money (just minor advertising and such) and without taking a lot of risks. The thing is, if you sink your 50k into a house that turns out to be a nightmare project, it may be hard to recover and it could turn you off to the idea of real estate investing. By wholesaling a few deals first, you will at least get some experience under your belt and certainly learn a great deal about analyzing property for potential problems and determining its real "worth." Then after you do a few deals you could move on to another facet once you have a little hands-on knowledge under your belt.

With 50k you could feasibly acquire a property to rent (by financing part of it and making a large down payment), but I would not recommend it; many investors agree that this kind of "buy and hold" is better for later on when you have a ton of cash available so you can buy property dirt cheap and not pay interest by financing.

Definitely read some of the threads about landlording on here before you consider doing it now; there is a lot more stress involved than most people realize at first, and your profit margins will be very low at first. Most investors are pretty shocked to learn that 100 dollars a month per unit is considered a good income stream for rentals! The expenses really eat a lot of the rent you collect!

Good luck!

there is another thread on this, it's called subject 3 financing and it is in the creative real estate financing category. David chimed in and had a lot to say in response to comments others had made about his video being unprofessional, but did not reveal any details about what subject 3 actually means or entails.

I guess you could try PMing him.

maybe I misread this but if they are partners and do everything in one person's name then yeah of course it's not really an issue, but then one partner has to trust the other to pay him fairly

the safest way is to just work like a maniac basically do your regular job and do REI as well, you will be putting in 50-70 hours a week but its safer than gambling that your REI will take off right away. For most people, it's a slow start.

also most of your wholesaling is probably going to occur in the evenings and on weekends anyways, as you will find that if you try meeting people in the daytime on weekdays, they often aren't around.

first, if you have your buyers list ready BEFORE you contract a property, you will have an advantage. because if you take an investor to the property early in your contract, he has to wait a month or two if he wants to go around you. and if he seems shady you can try to match another buyer before the 1st idiot can go around your back.

you are going to find people like this everywhere, its a result of the bottom-line thinking that is becoming so popular in america. everyone wants to cut out anyone who is perceived as a "middleman." but the important key is, is this person adding value? if not, then i agree, they should be cut out of the equation.

if you are a decent wholesaler, you are bringing deals to investors who may not have time to find their own property, or lack the drive/skills to find decent properties, or are afraid to set foot in the ghetto where some of these deals are located, etc.

if someone gave me that line, i would just write them off in my head because obviously he is close-minded. the question of whether you make an assignment fee is irrelevant; his only concern should be how much profit does he stand to make? pure and simple.

if you went to two different car dealerships and found the same car for the same price, then you found out that one of the salesmen was making a higher commission, should you care? you probably want to, kind of, because you are letting your emotions manipulate you, but what you SHOULD be thinking is that if the end price you pay is the same, it does not matter.

another way you may be adding value to the transaction is by negotiation; who knows, you may be getting a better price out of the seller. suppose the investor went to the seller and got the price down to 60. if you can get the price down to 50, even if you take a 7500 assignment you still made the investor more money.

in the future, however, i wouldn't blatantly dump it on them that you are a wholesaler. i would talk to them about a property, see if they are interested, and then when it eventually surfaces that you just have a contract on it, if he raises questions about that then just say "if you think it's a great deal what difference does it make whether it's wholesale?" if the numbers work, he shouldn't care. good investors are not quibbling over who made what cut, they are thinking about how can they possibly squeeze more deals out of each month and make more money.

if you start talking about a property with someone and they jump all over you about "are you a wholesaler" or "are you just going to assign this" i wouldn't waste your time with them, those people are too dense and it's not worth spinning your wheels trying to convince them to do business. they will be a pain in the *** every step of the way. focus on finding people who want you to make them more money.

good luck!

step by step guides with images tend to work best. it really depends on what level of computer literacy your main target audience has (on here it's quite varied)

honestly these real estate "gurus" are not much better than the motivational crowd-pleasers that multi-level marketing companies hire to get everyone all fired up and wanting to keep trying, rather than give up (and stop doing the MLM).

as soon as someone starts telling you how they went from rags to riches or how fast you can do it, you should be skeptical. most of these people are almost certainly full of crap.

What scares the **** out of me is that both bush and now obama seem to have no issue with massively increasing our debt to asia (we borrowed ungodly amounts from japan to finance the iraq war) with no real practical plan for repaying that debt. the younger generation (including myself) is liable to get screwed royally when that debt needs to be paid back down the road, WITH INTEREST.