When you’re doing your first few deals—or doing your first few deals in a strategy that you haven’t explored before—you need help.

Maybe it’s help evaluating the deal. Maybe it’s help with negotiation or contracts. Maybe it’s help understanding how to ‘price’ the rent or sale price. Maybe it’s help understanding how the financing will work. But you’ll find yourself needing advice from people who’ve ‘been there, done that, got the T-shirt’ over and over again throughout your real estate career.

This is no small matter; it’s easy to lose a deal (or worse yet, do a bad one!) because there’s ONE hangup. ONE question that needs to be answered or ONE problem that needs to be overcome

1:  EVERY Friday morning at our online Haves and Wants meeting. It’s very common for members to attend with the “Want” of “I need someone to walk me through how to do this subject to deal I found” or “Can someone help me with evaluating a property I’m trying to buy?” and to get assistance either then and there,
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Lordy, people, there are SO many ways to put together real estate deals. SURELY there’s one out there that you’ll like/understand/benefit from.

If you don’t like full-on wholesaling—maybe because ugly houses repel you, or some of the areas that work well aren’t neighborhoods in which you want to spend time, or you don’t like making super-low offers—then learn how to do creative deals, and flip those.

Creative financing techniques—buying properties using seller-held mortgages, contracts for deed, lease/options, and subject to the existing loan—are usually thought of as ways for you, the buyer, to control real estate for some period of time so that you can exercise some exit strategy that requires control.

For instance, you might buy a property subject to the existing loan so that you can renovate it and rent it for the long term. Or you might get a “split funds” seller mortgage for a year because you intend to renovate and resell the property within that year. Or you might control the property with a lease with the option to buy so that you can sell it with a lease with the option to buy (with, o
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On our July 9^th episode of Real Life Real Estate Investing, we opened the lines for one of our favorite formats—Q&A Day. Vena tackled your real-world questions about buying, selling, renting, financing, managing, and more. If you missed it live, don’t worry—the answers are just a click away. Listen to the recording here 

And don’t forget to tune in every Wednesday at 5 PM Eastern—https://streamdb3web.securenetsystems.net/cirrusencore/WMKVFM.

Several times in the past few months, I’ve found myself explaining to students that the reason they couldn’t sell their wholesale deal was that they’d overpriced it, and the reason they’d overpriced was that they’d made a common logical error in figuring out the value.

See if you can tell what it is:

The subject property has an after-repaired value of $100,000, and the house has an outdated kitchen, bath, furnace, and flooring.

However, the house also has a section 8 tenant living there who’s been there for 5 years and doesn’t want to move. The house is rented for $1,000/month, and the annual section 8 inspection just came back requiring that the basement walls be painted and that one room of carpet be replaced--$1,500 in work, total.

You are offering this property to landlords for $68,500 because $100,000 x .7 - $1,500 in repairs = $68,500.

Why is it not selling?

The answer is that it’s not a good deal, and you’ve conflated two different ways of analyzing a property. Read More...

Indulge me in a fable, and see if it jibes with your current, or perhaps past, experience as a developing real estate entrepreneur:

You’re standing on a sidewalk with your nose an inch away from a brick. It’s a good brick. You’ve studied it for a while, and you’ve come to the conclusion that it’s reddish, rough, and surrounded on all four sides by parts of other bricks. You’ve looked at it long enough to decide that it’s a pretty great brick.

Someone walks by and asks, what are you doing? Looking at this brick, you reply.

Are you sure it’s a brick you’re looking at? the stranger queries. You might want to take a step back, because there’s more to see here than you think.

So, you take a step back, and you realize that he’s right: the brick you’ve been so obsessed with is just one of many. In fact, from your new perspective, you notice out of the corner of your eye that there’s also something else--a hole, with glass and wood in it. I
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If you don’t think that real estate investing is a relationship business, you haven’t been paying attention. 

It’s your connections with other investors that bring you the local knowledge, the referrals to the right professionals, the money, the partnerships, and the deals that let you prosper now, and for years to come.   

But these relationships don’t ‘just happen’ for most people. You have to be intentional about building and maintaining them, just like you’re intentional (I hope) about building a rental portfolio, or a buyer’s list, or a marketing plan.   

Cincinnati REIA exists, in large part, to provide a platform for you to find and interact with like-minded folks who can encourage and help you be successful, but you have to do your part, too. Here are some tips for the 95% of us who aren’t just natural ‘connectors’:  

1. Be intentional about your professional development. There’s no job you can have or business you can be in where your value isn’t enh
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As you can imagine, I meet a LOT of real estate entrepreneurs every year.

And something that I’ve noticed about many of you, including newbies and old pros, is an energy you give off that I can only describe as clenched-upness.

Even folks who are excited, on the surface, about starting or expanding their real estate businesses are often simultaneously radiating a sort of anxiety about the whole thing.

Yes, I understand that what I (and your sellers and buyers and private lenders, by the way) am really feeling is your underlying fear.

Whether it’s a fear that you’re being sold a bill of goods by all the folks (like myself) who tell you that there’s unimaginable money in real estate, or a fear that it works but you can’t do it, or a fear that you WILL succeed and then be judged because you have money and your friends and family don’t, it’s definitely there—at least in most people that I meet.

But there are others, and some of them ARE brand new, who are JUST excited, because (sometimes in the face of all evide
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Let’s face it: making deals complicates our lives.  

When we first become involved in real estate, buying a property can be very anxiety-provoking: I mean, really, even though we’ve done all our due diligence and run the numbers 15 different ways and talked to our favorite mentor about it and it STILL looks like a great deal, how do we ever REALLY know? And this leads to self-esteem problems, as we’re constantly second-guessing ourselves and berating ourselves over our lack of confidence. 

And even for seasoned investors, taking on a new deal is stressful—an accepted offer means that we have to find a buyer, or start a rehab, or put an ad in the paper to get a tenant. Plus, there’s the additional bookkeeping when the checks roll in, and, of course, the taxes to pay on the profit at the end of the year… 

Since stress and anxiety lead to psychological and medical conditions, including high blood pressure, overeating, bad hair days, fear of success, and a whole host of others, making deals should obviously be avoided at any cost. So, I think it’s important, for the sake of our own health and well-b
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