Surround yourself with people who are enthusiastic about life and buying and selling foreclosures in Michigan. You don’t get to pick your parents and siblings – everybody else; friends, lovers, business partners, vendors, private investors, other Michigan real estate investors whom you can flip houses to, loan officers, real estate agents, title companies, attorney’s – is your choice.

You are allowed to make mistakes, Lord knows I have made mine, but you are NOT allowed to keep them around once you realize that they are not getting it by making your life and business hard.

Here is what happened recently to a fellow Michigan real estate investor who does very well buying and selling houses in East Side of Detroit – he is using a loan officer who has a problem with telling the truth when it comes to telling him a closing date.

He lies.

He lies some more.

There are excuses.

Then some more excuses.

Problem is that the people who this Detroit investor is flipping the house are renting right now. Their lease is about to end any day and they are getting very agitated. This investor has a $20,000 NET profit tied up in this deal. He is getting agitated because every day the deal is not closing; and there is no check with his name at the title company.

So whose fault is all this? Is it the loan officer? I don’t think so.

It is this Michigan real estate investor who is to be blamed here. Why? Believe it or not this is the third time this loan officer has done this to this real estate investor in Detroit so far in 2007. But due to a bizarre cocktail of laziness and stupidity this investor keeps insisting on using the same loan officer again and again.

On the other side of the mirror is yours truly meeting 4 brand new REO realtors in the tri-county area in the last month. Two of them are complete idiots. One of them is competent. And the fourth one is a keeper for years to come and I will not share him with anybody. He is that good. I found him. I get to keep him.

The other three real estate agents business cards get tossed on the sidewalk when I left their REO’s. And now I am going to do everything I know to build a great business relationship with the remaining one in the months to come.

Have you ever noticed in an office how the bosses / managers always spend their most time with the losers? But never with winners. Their thinking being that winners are winning anyway, we need to fix the ones who are not.

I say why even bother? Fire the losers, nurture the winners. Works for Jack Welsh. It can sure work for you and me.

In Michigan right now, thousands of real estate agents, loan officers and contractors available for you to pick. Lookout for winners who are not that hard to spot because they are ones who keep getting the job done on time. Lose the losers on the first sign of trouble. Rinse and repeat and in no time you will have your own dream team ready to go.

Do not be tempted to fix the losers you will come across. You know, try to turn chickens into eagles. Sounds tempting. Impossible to do.