All Forum Posts by: William MacBride

Hi
I just got a little surprise this morning. It turns out my girlfriend and I are already an incorporated real estate business called "Alpha and Omega Real Estate Servives, Inc." She somehow got incorporated without my really being consciously aware of it by paying some company called "The Tax Club" 900 dollars. and they're also gonna help handle her taxes (or something). Anyway that's not really the point of my post.
She bought one of these real estate programs a little while ago put out by a guy named Tim Mai. Included were forms called a Flex Option Agreement. It basically states that seller agrees to let the "buyer" try to sell their house at a higher price to an "end buyer" and pocket the difference. If either the buyer doesn't find an end buyer in that amount of time, or the seller finds their own end buyer, the contract is null and void. Nobody owes anybody anything further.
This kind of seems like your basic low risk sort of arrangement. I just wanted to know if:
1. This document and type of arrangement is fully legal.
2. If it's something that commonly done and fairly easy to arrange.
3. If anybody has anything to say about Tim Mai's program
4. Any other comments you think relevant
Thanks,
Will

p.s. is it better to be incorporated or to be an LLC?

Another really basic question:
How do you get an FSBO house appraised? Do you have a real estate agent do it? If so I assume there'd be a cost with that and also the possibility the real estate agent could list it also and market it better thus selling it first. Or am I just letting my imagination run amok?
Anyway if somebody could just go over a few appraisal options it would be great.

Thanks,
Will

Nifty. Thanks everyone.

I found the following definition of bait and switch on wikipedia: "In retail sales, a bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the party putting forth the fraud lures in customers by advertising a product or service at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute is."
It goes on later in the article to mention real estate: "Unscrupulous real estate agents commonly engage in bait and switch by continuing to advertise attractive properties in their windows that they have already sold."
That wasn't what Owen was suggesting.

Hi. Thanks for the replies. It seems odd that finding out about a certain area's prices so you could better understand the real estate opportunities would be illegal. I mean, what statute or law even covers that? Unless you were breaking into offices and stealing file folders or something. if you were just finding out what certain houses had sold for it would just be educating yourself. Last time I looked that wasn't illegal in the U.S.A.
I don't know anything much about real estate law of course, but Owen Dasher's suggestion was fairly general so I don't see how that could be against the law. Isn't what he outlined basically what you do when doing "comps" - Find a property of interest, and see what houses in that subdivision or zip code have sold for?

Will

Thanks for both your replies. We're going to an investor meeting tonight. those were some good suggestions Connie. As far as working a job, Mike, I will never work a Just Over Broke again as long as I live, let alone 2. It's funny how people think "work hard" means "get a job" when in actuality it means "give your all to what you really want to do." being somebody's "employee" unless it's what you WANT to do is a great way to dull your spirit and put yourself at the effect of the low level aims of another person, for low pay. Not my idea of working hard.

Will :mrgreen:

Hi,
I figured I'd just ask straight out what the best way for me to get started in real estate investing would be. Here's the situation: I've lost like 25 grand in the stock market and I only have around 3 thousand dollars total now in the world. I do handyman/carpentry work and also woodworking but I just got back from a long trip overseas and spent some dough. My girlfriend is all psyched to get into real estate but unfortunately her approach has been to buy every program on it she sees an informercial for, rather than just start out slow and get the basics down. To date she's sunk thousands of dollars, literally, into all kinds of coaching programs, investor lists, real estate systems, blah blah blah despite my earnest pleas for her to stop, and not hooked up a single deal or made a cent.
So I figured I could be a better coach than some dude in India, or Indiana, or wherever, paid 12 bucks an hour if I just LEARN about it the right way.
So how do you think somebody in my situation should get started? I still have a need to get clear who the real "players" in it are. I don't even have good credit and My g.f. doesn't even have a high enough income right now, for us to get a loan from a bank to buy something. So that leaves us in the position I assume of having to be some kind of "finder" or get into the middle of the deal process in some way.
So I'm just asking what somebody would recommend. We're short on money and experience, but big on interest, goal setting, and spirit. That's why I've been thinking "bird dog." But what other kinds of ways to get into it would anybody recommend?
I've already found an investor group meeting. We're gonna go to it this week. I guess just to get our feet wet because we really don't have too many properties to peddle yet. A few here and there from craigslist and stuff.
Anyway you get the picture. I'd love to hear anybody's step by step type thing of what they'd do in my situation.

Thanks a lot,
Will :mrgreen:

Thanks a lot Connie and Jon!

Whats the quick formula tom calculate monthly interest payments for a fixed rate mortgage? i.e. just to start with any total balance and quickly figure out what it would cost per month and/or per year with interest and pricipal.
Also I wanted to ask, with fixed rate mortgages, the payments stay the same, so does that mean that more and more of the principal is being paid by the payment and less and less interest time goes on? I.E. the interest gets charged on the remaining balance, not the total balance, but the payments stay the same so more goes to pay off principal? I'm having trouble figuring out how to calculate this.
I realize this is really basic but I'm new to this.

Thanks a lot,
Will

I'm really new to this and I just want to get some basic clarification about how you get started "hooking up" deals between motivated sellers and investors.

My understanding is that a lot of people starting out in real estate get in as "middle men" of one kind or another. It seems fairly obvious how you find properties for sale to begin with, but how do you find "investors" - everyone one from hard money lenders to rehabbers or even end buyers? I get that you have to "market" the house to prospective buyers and investors.

one of the things that's confusing me is, frankly, the internet. For instance my girlfriend just showed me a house she was looking at off some list of houses for sale in california. Then to get an estimate of its value she went to "zillo" .com and did a quick search and it gave her a number, the "tax assessment value" which is different from the "fair market value" I guess. This all seems too easy and I don't see what the role of the finder or middle man really is. but mainly here I'm asking like: ok so you've got this house, how do you get someone inetrested in buying or investing in it wen they could have just looked it up on that site themselves and eliminated the middle man?

But even aside from all that, lets say I find some house that isn't listed on some site or other, and I think a rehabber would be able to fix it up and sell it for a reasonable profit. What's the most usual route to take to find a list of rehabbers or investors? How do I put together this "buyer list" I keep hearing about?

thanks,
Will