Scroll down, click on Comment and tell me what are you three biggest challenges in your real estate investment business. I am doing a LIVE teleseminar next Thursday and this would be a great opportunity to torment me with your questions.

Tell me what is bothering you - cant get money to do your deals? cant find good deals? realtors hate you? tired of mailing postcards that dont get response from preforeclosure leads? cant deal a house for the life of it? contractors are trying to poison you? your signficant other has been looking at you rather funny everytime you say the word real estate?

Anything goes!

Strictly about buying and selling foreclosures though, no rental questions come next week.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

About writing goals:

Try this - instead of writing a list of things that will eventually stress you out every time you look at them :

I will do 10 deals this year.
I will make $350,000 in 2005.

And come March, you cannot even bear to look at it anymore.

Now try this technique that I learn from John Carltons last night, tried it and it worked fabulously well for me:

Write a letter to yourself, dated one year from now and talk about all the things that you have accomplished. Very powerful to visualize that you have already achieved what you wanted in your life.

So instead of above, it goes something like,
“Dear Mark, is it not great that you just bought a 100 unit apartment complex without putting $1 out of your pocket?”

I wrote a letter to myself about business, education, personal and vacation goals and truth be told this is the first time I have written a goals sheet that I felt really good about. Took me 20 minutes to do so. It felt a little strange when i started writing it but after five lines it was flowing like magic.

Try it!

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:34 PM | Permalink

Money magazine seems to thinks so: Detroit News Real Estate seems to think so : I have been there bunch of times and I agree – Ferndale is a happen’in place to be. Good place to buy and hold – condo’s / duplexes – for the next 3-5 years.

Ferndale diversity attracts residents
The town offers proximity to Detroit and a mix of people and establishments.
By Shawn D. Lewis / The Detroit News
Detroit News, February 1, 2005

FERNDALE -- This is undeniably one of Oakland County's coolest cities. Soaring housing values prove it.
With its eclectic mix of blue-collar workers and the blues-martini set, Ferndale's housing values have doubled during the past 10 years. And following a drought of new homes since 1993, City Manager Thomas Barwin said 200 new homes are scheduled to be built soon. Nearly 150 of those are condominiums.
Sidewalks, proximity to restaurants and bars and dependable city services are among the selling points to newcomers.
"We moved here about 90 days ago from Milwaukee," said Todd Gustke, 32, a recruiter.
"We liked living in Milwaukee in the downtown area, but my wife is from the Detroit area and we wanted to be closer to her family, so we moved here," he said.
Before settling on Ferndale, they looked at Royal Oak, Rochester and Grosse Pointe.
"But when we saw Ferndale, we knew instantly that this is where we wanted to be," Gustke said.
They wanted an older community with sidewalks, big trees, close to downtown Detroit and "frankly, a bit of diversity."
Higher taxes than they paid in Milwaukee also will be part of their yearly budget. But Gustke said he doesn't mind, "as long as I see that I'm getting something for it."
The Gustkes bought a 1920s bungalow with three bedrooms.
"It has hardwood floors and old-world charm, and what I like about the city is that every house is different. They don't all look the same."

Copyright Detroit News, 2005

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 01:04 PM | Permalink

This is interesting stuff. If you ever wanted to raise private money and for a second thought nobody has money to give, check this list out:

Ultra Affluent Investors
Million Dollar Net Worth
California 56,611
Michigan 11,922
New Jersey 13,691
Total: 82,224

Million Dollar Portfolios
California 100,745
Michigan 86,440
New Jersey 20,310
Total: 207,495

Whoa! Lots of people with money to invest! Do you want names, addreses so may be, just may be you can send them a nice letter about getting a ROI of 8% to 12% on thier investment dollars secured a real estate.

Just a thought; :-)

Thanks for all the kind emails I got from the teleseminar last night. Mucho appreciated. The recordings should be up shortly. I will send an email out to everybody.

Seminar Udate: We have 3 Bonus DVD's left - that is it! So if you want the DVD and miss out - dont say I didnt warn ya! Call the office at 248-577-9100 and talk to Monica. Cry, grovel or threaten - your choice but you should see this stuff - pretty powerful reality real estate in action.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:32 AM | Permalink

My Apprentice member Brandon Wilkins emailed me this

Ga.: Atlanta Sees Quickest Foreclosures

( February 1, 2005) -- Foreclosures in the metro Atlanta area more than doubled between 2000 and 2004, according to an analysis conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Georgia has one of the fastest foreclosure processes in the nation, allowing lenders to sell homes in as little as 37 days. Homeowners have little recourse, considering that the process is not monitored by the government or the courts.

Mortgage bankers insist that the process is efficient, holds down interest rates, and enables lenders to continue making high-risk loans. However, critics contend that homeowners could fetch higher prices for their property if an alternative to the monthly foreclosure auctions held in front of the local courthouse were implemented.

"To describe what happens on the courthouse steps as a circus is being polite," says Emory University law professor Frank Alexander.

According to the newspaper analysis, most of the foreclosures occur in predominately African American communities in south DeKalb, Clayton County, and downtown Atlanta. Presently, cash-strapped homeowners must file Chapter 13 bankruptcy in order to keep their homes, but most will be unable to live within the court-ordered budget and lose their homes anyway.

Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (01/30/05); Teegardin, Carrie; Hardie, Ann;Judd, Alan

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 09:18 PM | Permalink

Well it’s 2005! Lets see, I can drive around on weekends, obliterate some really nice looking electrical poles and intersections with my beautiful yellow and red “I BUY HOUSES” signs which are definitely be take down by the disgruntled workers from the city office, who may forget all about the true entrepreneur spirit of this county and even slap me with a fine for putting these signs out and on top of it all, they will not give me the signs back for which I spent a god couple of hundred dollars, meaning I have to go back and get them printed again.

Or may be this being the information age, I can shell out few measly bucks (which are tax deductible by the way) put together a website that will help me get private money, get foreclosure leads, create instant credibility with my target black book members and assist me in selling my houses 24/7, 365 days a year for couple of buckaroos every month.

Hmm, decisions, decisions, what to do, what to do?

Nah, I think I rather do the road signs!

Few, very few actually real estate investors have grasped the truly enormous power of web in helping them grow their real estate investment business overnight. Most of them look at the Internet, as a minor nuisance. A justification could be the ignorance of not being of technical orientations may be the chief reason. I share that frustration - I have no idea on how to design websites, how to run them, what are the technical implications that goes into running the Internet.

I don’t want to know and I don’t care.

But what I do know is that if you are serious about your real estate investment business and eventually you want to grow it to the point where it is doing 2-3 deals every month - you will be leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars of easy pickings on the table by not having a good website running for your business.

Let’s see what a good real estate investment website can do for your new business –

1. It creates an enormous amount of instant credibility. For better or worse - perception is reality for our generation. People tend to give you a little more credit when they see something in writing that explains what you do and what you want them to do. I direct future potential partners / investors by conscious decision to my websites because I want to do business with them with a position of strength.

2. It is the cheapest assistant money can buy - everything that you should not be doing can be transferred to your website to do. For example a big huge mistake is to take phone calls when you are tiring to sell your property. Not only that is an enormous burden on your time but most of the time if you have a job - you will not be able to answer the ad.

Now here is the bad news - you are not the only one out there with a house to sell. Not today and not tomorrow. And yes may be your house is better, and you can perform miracles in helping them getting approved as long they are not in jail and they have a pulse.

Good for you but they still went for the guy who picked up the phone.

4. There are lots of things that we all hate doing - asking for money is probably on the top of list for most real estate investors, that is at least initially is extremely hard to do. The easy solutions is that if sitting in front of an investor makes you nervous then don’t do it instead you make you website ask for it. It has no shame, no emotional hang-ups, no fear of rejection - truly fearless is what I think is the word we are looking for.

5. It broadens your reach - who is to say that the only person who wants to buy your house, sell you their house, or invest money with your - has to live close to you. People move out of state sometime due to circumstances in their lives and they might have a property they want to sell. Somebody might be getting transferred to your town but right now is in Orange County, California. And somebody might be in Michigan, where I live but live 500 miles away but does a $2,000,000 line of credit burning holes in her pocket.

A website helps you reach all of these and more - instantly.

In all the 2005 issues, I intend to build on the 7 crucial elements on a real estate website. My Internet To Go Guy, Earl Adkins was locked in a room, given a shot of truth serum in his espresso and I made him spill his guts on this months Audio CD that is going out to my newsletter subscribers.

I can tell you that even after knowing Earl for 14 months and talking to him almost every other day, I still came out of the room with some “new” stuff to burn my ears. So when you get the CD, put your TIVO to work for you and listen to those 60 minutes. They will add some new weight to your bank account in the next 6 months.

He is also building a mega site for my Apprentice group which my newsletter subscribers will get to see next month and most importantly I will analyze each part of the site to show you how you can automate literally 90% of all the parts of your real estate business that you don’t like doing.

From The Mark Ijlal Factor,
Published Monthly For My Inner Circle Members
January 2005 Issue

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:51 PM | Permalink