3 Big Items about Michigan Real Estate in the News:

1. In the Sunday’s Business Section of Detroit News – a front page story about new businesses flocking to Ferndale. It is always amusing to hear people musing about missing out on the hot market of todays for example Birmingham, Royal Oak, Traverse City, Canton, Belleville and the evergreen Ann Arbor – but at the same time making no effort to see what is going to be hot in the next 24 months.

I have talked about Ferndale a lot recently to my coaching group students who live or invest in Oakland county even talked about briefly as an example of a good long term play during my last workshop in May.

If you think about it then off course it makes a lots of sense – only 3% of the city’s retail and office space is empty, it is right next door to Royal Oak which is young, hip, vibrant and very expensive right now.

Property values in Ferndale have soared ove 100% in the last decade according to Detroit News. More then 50 new businesses have opened up since 2002. Not to mention a $7 million dollar project to build 32 lofts.

I would suggest that if you are looking to buying Michigan real estate for a long term play – either lease options on single family houses or apartment complexes / duplexes for cash flow – Ferndale deserves a strong consideration from you.

2. Migration happening away from typical suburbs of Oakland and Wayne counties into further Northern areas – once again important thing to mark on your investing calendar if you are familiar with these areas. It is really interesting to see how Canton or Milford have literally transformed ourselves in front of our eyes.

Imagine knowing 7 years ago how hot Canton is going to get and buying houses there. Question for you is do you know what are the “hot spots” for the next 3 years in your county or surrounding suburbs?

Are you watching what is happening in your city or surrounding city? There is lots of money in knowing what other real estate investors don’t know. You can buy houses in foreclosure, land, duplexes and just watch their values go through the roof in these hot areas.

As we speak, I have my own watch list of the hot areas in Michigan – 3 towns that I am watching with great interest and waiting for the right time to make a very serious move.

Do you have a list like that in your computer or is it just luck that is determining where and what to buy???

3. The rise of the suburban downtown – If you wanted to see how the big boys sell real estate then Sunday you have to be in downtown Royal Oak – I went to see the cermony surrounding the opening of the sales office of Main North Terraces in Downtown Royal Oak.

Live Jazz band, free food and drinks – result 40 condos sold in 3 hours – base price $300,000 – for a 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom condominium in a 10 story building.

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Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new star is on the rise. My buddy Monna Lizza - incredibly good R&B artist just completed her first single. It is absolutely fablous and at Mark Ijlal Inner Circle we are all wishing here a kick butt album.

You can download the single here. Enjoy.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

News Flash From I.S.S (Ijlal Secret Service)Fresh from the underground, here are some of the pictures that were taken in the dark of the night of the first Spy On My Wall Program that I just finished only few hours ago. What incredible four days - check these 4 New ISS Agents out:

Here they are pumping a Super REO Agent out of all the information he could bear to give out.

Here Bob and Bonnie Hoyer, Double Agents from Port Huron, Michigan are being debriefed on their blazing fast network building techniques:

Graduation day ; despite the brutal hours and non-stop action, (one Spy described these 4 days as a Mind Melt, yet another said that it has redefined what real estate investment could be in Michigan):

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Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You can read Dave and Kris Koester of Burton, Michigan real estate story in the previous post but here is the picture that I got today from them. Good Deal and a very nice house.

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Posted by Mark Ijlal at 10:09 PM | Permalink

On Thursday I was on the road all day with Nora and Nora – we had a list of foreclosures that we were looking at – mostly suburban Northern Oakland County – and we came across this beautiful old house in Birmingham, which looked like it just had some major remodeling done to it recently. The builder had a sign in the front and the front door was open.

Nora calls out to me (we were in Nora’s Land Cruiser and I was as usual driving) and says lets go and check this house out. We walked in, the owner was talking to the builder – we introduced ourselves as real estate investors looking to buy some houses in Birmingham and asked him if he would mind if we could look around his beautiful house.

Obviously he was happy to show us around and then we asked the builder if he could be kind enough to look at house we just saw and give us some ideas of what could be done with this house. And he off course agreed to drive with us couple of streets over.

We drove, saw the house, he gave us his opinion and then we ended up talking for a good hour. We told him that we were looking to buy some properties here and we are looking for good partners in the area.

In the next hour this is what happened:

1. He gave us a complete insider view of what is happening in Birmingham.
2. Gave us pointers on how to evaluate teardowns in Birmingham.
3. Turns out he has no idea about raising private money but he is kick butt builder who has been doing high end remodeling for years. Tons of references.
4. He is building a house right now, his first deal and not any client, right down the street – net profit after five months is around $100,000 net. Not bad for his first build.
5. We both left with a definite understanding that we would be talking more and see what we can do together.

Here is lesson for all of us here – it pays to tell people what you do, what you want to do and ask them if they can help you anyway. What he told me in 60 minutes about Birmingham would have taken me probably 12 months to discover by myself.

It pays to talk to your contractors, lenders, next-door neighbors (Hint: they are happy that somebody is buying and renovating the house – even people in West Bloomfield don’t want to live next to a vacant house.) and more importantly since they live there they might know somebody who came to their house and might want to move there.

The easiest thing in the world is to do “nothing” – blame fate, blame your city, blame me, blame your credit, blame your lack of personal money – that is so easy to do. A little easier to is to open your mouth, exercise some of the 500 billion neurons that God gave all of us and ask some questions.

It is amazing that how many people are willing to help you in Michigan real estate only if you ask. I geniunely belive that most people that you come across in your day to day life and business are more then willing to help you in lots of different ways - if you will give them a chance to do so.

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Posted by Mark Ijlal at 01:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finally somebody has written a decent article about self directed IRA in a mainstream magazine like Fortune. You can read the whole article here - Customize your IRA .

In April during DK Super Conference it was pretty funny to see a room full of really smart entrepreuners act surprised upon learning that they can invest in real estate with their IRA. The Equity Trust owner was doing his presentation and everbody kept on saying that is this legal and how come my CPA / Financial Planner has never said anything about this to me before?

Well off course the CPA's are clueless about how to make money before all they can do is to look and analyze what has already happend in your business. The financial planners have a vested interest in making you buy as many stocks and bonds a possible so why would they tell you and honestly I dont think they really know anything about this to begin with.

Here is another thought to chew if you are trying to get private money in Michigan for real estate investment purposes - all the early buyouts or layoffs from the Big 3 automakers who are walking with substantial 401K can roll over their funds to a self directed IRA and lend you money right off it hence getting tax free returns on their dollars.

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Posted by Mark Ijlal at 07:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

July 4, 1995, ten years ago, if you wanted to find and deal Michigan foreclosures, this is how it looked like:

1. You could not go online and look at the SEV for any Michigan real estate.
2. You could not run a $136 advertisement that ran for 30 days and get 197 wholesale investors within 30 days to whom your can sell Michigan real estate.
3. You actually had to “show” prospective buyers your homes because there were no virtual tours of your properties that could be uploaded on a website.
4. You had to carry business cards with a phone number and a fax number instead of a just a website URL.
5. You had to go and do some serious legwork to find out who the top REO realtors in your Michigan county are?
6. You would need a “real office” with a phone number, phyical address and may be a full time employee if you wanted to get private money.
7. You had to drive up to your conty every Friday or every month to buy a foreclosure list.
8. The only way you could find out the lien information on any preforeclosure is to actually drive to your Michigan county office, learn how to use their microfilm system and then peer through a really small lens.
9. You had to find buyers for your deals who actually had “down payment money” to buy their houses from you.
10. You had to learn how to buy and deal foreclosures from infomercial products which were taped somewhere in the 1970’s.

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Posted by Mark Ijlal at 08:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rita Dalian send this very useful link to me. Great time saver for Michigan real estat investors:

Property Tax EstimatorYou can now access estimates on property taxes by local unit and school district, using 2003 millage rates. Simply enter the Taxable Value (approximately 50% of your home value), and select your county from the drop down list provided. You will then be prompted to select your city, village or township along with your school district.

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Posted by Mark Ijlal at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robin Good is a mighty blogger in techland and he has put together a wonderful list of the Top 55 Blog Directories that you can submit your Michigan real estate investment blog to for free. I wrote a detailed description on this topic in July 2005 Mark Ijlal Factor – my real estate newsletter for Michigan real estate investors.

Here is the link: Top 55 Blog Directories

And if you want to copy me – well just use the absolutely wonderful Olga and her incredibly low priced service – for around $67 she will submit your Michigan real estate invetment blog to all the top Blog Directories. One time hit to your wallet and then you are done for a very long time. I did it and got incredible results.

Here is the link to Olga’s website : RSS Submission Service. Make sure that you mention in your order that Mark Ijlal sent ya. She did a wonderful job for me and I want her to know that this is my way of thanking her.

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Posted by Mark Ijlal at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is said that who you know is often more important, more profitable and more powerful then what you know. When it comes to making consisten profits in Michigan real estate - I strongly agree with that statement.

Last Saturday, during the workshop in Southfield, during one of the breaks, I have a guy talking to me who is from Sterling Heights. And he’s been doing real estate for a long time and he knows how to find foreclosures. Has a whole remodeling firm, knows how to fix houses and he’s in desperate need of private money because he’s very good at finding deals and he just doesn’t know how to get private money.

And I asked him, I said hey, do you know anyb other real estate investors else in Sterling Heights that’s doing what you’re doing and maybe they can help you? And obviously couple of my Inner Circle members came to my mind right away because, you know, these guys had been trying to raise some private money and they were having a pretty good success ratio so far.

And he said no, I don’t know anybody else. And that whole conversation pretty much got repeated maybe six, seven, eight times, people coming up to me and saying, well, I’m in that area. And I said, oh, you know, you need to get together with this person or that person who came to my previous seminar or that Inner Circle members.

And here is this thing in a nutshell. You have to really work at building your investor network, no matter where you live. So if you live in Port Huron or you live in Farmington Hills or you live in Ann Arbor, I would suggest to you that you need to have a list of local investors who can sometimes help you find deals, sometimes you can deal hours through them, sometimes they will find buyers for your houses and sometimes they will find more sellers to whom they cannot do anything but they’ll give it to you for a bird dog fee.

No matter where you live you need to have at least ten people in your black book who are local investors. It is astonishing to me that how many few people work on this consciously. And obviously the easiest way of doing that is ........

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Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)