The Great Deal Game
Few more things are more perplexing to me than a new real estate investor coming up to me and telling me that they are having a hard time finding a good, profitable foreclosure deal.
That is to me in one word summed up - astonishing. If you factor in the number of foreclosure (highest in 58 years), personal bankruptcies (up 900% in 10 years), pressure on banks to stay profitable (highest numbers of mergers and acquisitions in the last 4 years) and the overall information available on the Internet (you don’t have to drive to your county office every day) - the admittance that you cannot find anything in your home town could only be met with one advice from me - MOVE!
Because if you are looking for deals and unless extraordinary circumstances, like my good friend from Denmark BJ who informed me during the last teleseminar that only 200 houses go into foreclosure every year in his country - we have no such problem here. His problem is truly a matter of geography. But I just find it hard to believe that it is possible any level not to be able find at least 1 decent deal every month that you can acquire, renovate if necessary and sell.
I think that more importantly you need to ask yourself the question that passes the brutal truth test - what have YOU done this month to ensure that a good deal would find you?
To use an analogy of dating - your chances or attracting a gorgeous member of the opposite sex increase dramatically if you have taken a shower, dressed nice and smell great and can make fun small talk. But if you are standing quietly in the corner in a ravishing party and look like your parole office was dozing when he let you out, then you cannot blame your lack of having a date on fate or where you are standing in the room.
Your real estate investment business is YOU! Plain and simple - the LLC you formed is just there to protect you from idiots who are sue happy. But having an LLC does not guarantee you success in your real estate business the same way just because you went to the party does not means that you will walk out, hand in hand, with the prom queen.
Important things to realize early in the game are - this is truly a people’s business. Not a cliché, not a buzzword but truly the number of people on your palm pilot or rolodex will determine the number of deals coming, running, pursuing you every month.
Ask yourself that - what do you want to be? - somebody who is chasing deals every month, frustrated and pissed off because you seem to be the only rookie investor in town who cannot seem to find anything to buy or rather become somebody who attracts foreclosure deals, where deals are seemingly pursuing you and you cherry pick what you want to buy.
The first one is frustration of dangerous kind - which forces lots of new real estate investors to leave the game way too early. The second state could be engineered, in most of the cases very quickly where you become the Raging Emperor Of Foreclosures, a deal maker in your town almost overnight.
There are instruments of doing so - business cards (their design and what they say on them), what you name your business (missed opportunity of the biggest nature is misnaming your business.
(I made the mistake for 4 straight years till I figure out what was the right way of naming my business.) Your website which is easily ONE thing that nobody seems to get the importance of. Plus couple of other things that need to be done, in a certain order that I cannot discuss in this forum to ensure your objective of attracting deals every becomes reality every month.
Now here is the good news about all that - whether you have started on the right foot or not does not matter - because all the above even though done wrong from your end, could be fixed - after all I just ended up changing my corporate name after four years of testing and I am already seeing tremendous results.
Instead of giving you a summary of what needs to be done, in the future issues, I will show casing some of the best examples of becoming a deal magnet in a short time that I have seen in my business and some of my coaching group members.
Another interesting case study is my Real Estate Apprentice group who are in the process of building a brand new, from scratch real estate investment business from scratch as a group mastermind project and become known as opposed to unknown in Michigan in the next 90 days. I will be sharing their experiences in the coming months with you as they go step by step implementing my strategies in building a solid real estate investment business.