This is just an incredible tale of not giving up.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 08:20 PM | Permalink

The second most asked question after “What is your name?”

The most important question of all.

So what do you say to that?

Do you say, “I am a teacher at Dearborn High School.” Or “Mechanical Engineer, work at Saturn.” Or “ I own a plumbing business.” Or “ I am real estate agent” Or “I am raising my kids right now.”

If you do, STOP!

From now on tell everybody, “ I am a real estate investor and I buy and sell bank foreclosures in (insert your target Michigan city / county).” Do it for 90 days and be astonished at the conversation it will start.

Look there is a tactical aspect to it – I have gotten deals / leads from the guy cutting the grass at my house, a guest at a party, guy sitting next to me at Beni Hana (really fun Japanese steakhouse - they have these grills built into guest tables, you get to sit with complete strangers), at a neighborhood barbeque… the list goes and on.

What difference does it makes what you do for a living anyway to these folks? I don’t think they will get you a promotion OR they are really interested in your vocation. Most likely they do something like you do also. But buying and selling bank foreclosures is a topic that brings back really great responses. Such as:

“Hey my dad has always been talking about investing in foreclosures. You two need to talk. Let me give you his phone number.”

“ My administrative assistant sisters live in Clinton Township and her mortgage just jumped $400 per month. She is about to leave the house and move back to her mother’ s house. May be you can help her? Can I get your phone number for her?”

“ I have always been interested in doing the foreclosure thing. Just don’t have time. May be we can do something together? Huh!”

“ My brother has been trying to do this but he cannot find any foreclosures in Macomb County. I don’t what he is doing wrong. May be you can help find some foreclosures and both of you can make some money.”

Sounds good?

Amazingly people actually go to a REIA meeting or a foreclosure auction and when asked, “What do you do?” describe their day job.

There is another reason you should do this: You should always see yourself as the person you want to become. If you don’t think of yourself as a real estate investor and don’t introduce yourself as one than nobody else will either.

Including your self.

From now, for the next 90 days, give yourself a NEW title – “ I am a Michigan Real Estate Investor and I buy and sell bank foreclosures in _______”

Change the conversation from stupid weather, traffic conditions and general gloom and doom.

Try it for 90 days. You will be amazed at the contacts and relationships that you will attract toward yourself.

See yourself as a real estate investor, both inward and outward, and pretty soon you will be one of us.

Also final reminder; tonight the early bird discount for QuickStart Bootcamp expires. We only 1 seat left and then the doors are closed. If you are committed to coming – I would suggest moving and moving really fast BEFORE somebody else takes your spot. Any questions, call Nora at 248-561-3535.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 05:22 PM | Permalink

All the exits on I-696 looked the same to me when I came to America 12 years ago. I actually meet a person last night at a wedding who used to work with me, in my first job, 12 years ago. I was cleaning bathrooms and stacking videos till midnight, six sometimes seven days a week.

He was my manager at that time. I was without a car and there were no buses that could take me to Southfield so he used to feel bad for me and take me to wherever I needed to go. The freeways felt very confusing to me because all the darn exits looked the same. I tried remembering the numbers but I could never.

I realized much later that once you start driving on your own – you don’t have to remember anything; it just happens on autopilot. He was teasing me last night about me never being able to figure out where we needed to go. This was before Google Maps and portable GPS and I used to have this map book but still got lost all the time.

All the darn exits on I-696 looked the same to me.

But it took couple of real estate deals to make me realize that I was wrong.

Not all exits are the same. Some of them will actually make you money. They rest will actually suck your bank account dry.

Especially if you buy and sell bank foreclosures in Michigan.

Here is something that is overlooked almost daily by a large number of Michigan real estate investors.

What is that one thing that you CANNOT negotiate?

You can negotiate the buying price with the bank that is selling you the foreclosure. December is right around the corner. They don’t want these Michigan foreclosures. They will discount in suburbs. They will discount even when the foreclosure ONLY needs paint, carpet, cleanup, kitchen cabinets.

You can negotiate the home owners insurance – just shop around. You can knock off anywhere from $100 to $300 off the homeowners insurance with good credit, good track record of not making any prior claims etc. Your buyer might be able to do the same.

But what you cannot negotiate is the property taxes on the foreclosure you are about to buy and flip.

The three exits on I-696 that lead to Southfield – Evergreen Road, Southfield Road, and Greenfield Road are not the same as the one that gets you off on Coolidge and then Woodward.

The first three exits take you to foreclosures with very high property taxes. They might be good deals and most of the times actually Southfield has good number of foreclosure deals but Mama their taxes are HIGH, HIGH and HIGH. When you go to flip the darn thing – your buyer will have a hard time actually being able to pay such high taxes or it will become the deal breaker.

Skip one exit over to Coolidge or one more over to Woodward and you have Oak Park and Ferndale where a similar foreclosure (3 bedrooms, 1.5 to 2 bathrooms) will come with much less property taxes – making it more easier to flip.

No matter where you live in Michigan and choose to buy and sell foreclosures – there are freeway EXITS like those around you, which lead you to cities with cheaper property taxes. There are also freeway EXITS that you should not get off on but rather keep on driving.

You should know where to get off and where to keep on driving in Michigan.

In that knowledge is the difference between flipping a house FAST and sitting on a house for months. Most Michigan real estate investors concentrate on the EQUITY or the price they want to buy the foreclosure at.

The first question that I ask is,

“How much are the property taxes?”

A good thing to do especially if you are new to the game is have a checklist of such questions, printed and kept with you with you go and look at list of foreclosures in Michigan.

I had the pleasure of hanging out with three kick butt REO brokers last week and one of them casually remarked that he has

“60 REO listings right now and 300 coming out of redemption”.

There are lots and lots of foreclosures available, no matter where you live in Michigan, and lot more coming in 2007-2008.

You cannot look at all of them.

You cannot buy all of them.

It helps to start knowing what to look for in a deal even before you jump in your car. Most of my students are trained to spend time in front of a computer, evaluating deals, before they leave their home or office.

Got to know beforehand what makes a good deal so instead of looking at 100 foreclosures and buy 1; you want to research 30; go look at 10 and buy 2.

That is good math.

That is smart math.

Another smart math is spending 3 days with me in Troy, Michigan. We have 3 seats left for QuickStart Bootcamp happening on November 16,17,18 at QuickStart Bootcamp 2.0 in Troy, Michigan.

It is 3 days, just 10 students and myself. We start early and go late at night. No outside speakers. Just me. No risk for you. Sit in for an entire first day. Don’t like what I am showing you. Get your tuition back plus $500 Gas Card. No reasons needed from your end. I really don’t care. A place to come and get the edge, the knowledge, and the sources to go and get deals, money and checks unleashed toward you.

Click here for QuickStart details and see for yourself why my students are kicking butt and taking names all over Michigan.

All the exits on I-696 are not the same. All real estate investing training is not the same. QuickStart 2.0 is a different level. A different game.

December is right around the corner.

You don’t want to miss out on THE BEST MICHIGAN FORECLOSURE BUYING OPPORTUNITY OF 2007.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 09:55 PM | Permalink

This is truly the golden age of REO’s in Michigan. Here are couple of things that you need to know about what is NEW in the world of Asset Managers and Real Estate Owned By Banks (REO’s) which are, just in case if you don’t know, are foreclosures in Michigan where the homeowners have left, title has been transferred back to the bank and you can literally take possession next Friday.

Obviously the great things about buying Michigan REO’s have never changed:

- NO back property taxes; the bank pays for them all.
- NO back utility bills; even the water bill is escrowed by the title company. Just get a final water reading and fax them a copy once you have bought the REO and turned the electricity and water back on.
- NO waiting; find one on Friday and if you know where to go and get the money fast (I don’t mean hard money here, that is Sloooooow, 30 days, pain) in Michigan, you can close next Friday and walk out with the keys and a check to fix the house immediately.
- NO drama – you are talking to the pros here, people who move hundreds of houses every year. Nobody is judging you because you are new to the game. They don’t have time to do it.
- NO title issues – banks will not put a REO out there if there were any title issues. When you buy, you get clean title. Which is the way it always should be.

August 2007, I was hanging out with Rodney Townsend, at Ijlal Inner Circle mastermind, very late at night (past midnight) and we both started talking about the changing REO market in Michigan especially in the suburbs.

We compared notes; he told me his recent experiences with some REO’s that he had offers on and bought – the price he found them at; the jaw dropping discounts, and how many suburbs all over tri-county he was seeing the same thing.

I had pretty much the same experience – big discounts given with ease that almost sounded impossible only 18 months ago in Michigan suburbs.

The REO market in Michigan, we both agreed, is turning, in favor of the Michigan real estate investor and would pay a lot of money right now to get into buying REO’s.

I am happy to report that we were both correct in our prediction. August 2007 was good. October 2007 just seems a different world right now.

And if you are in the game right now or may be sitting on the sidelines with not too much time on your hand – pay close attention because, no matter where you live – Detroit, Lansing, Grand Rapids, Roseville, Wyandotte, or Ferndale – there is a REO in your target Michigan city with your name and $50,000 in EQUITY, just waiting for you to wake up and show up there to pick up the keys.

The NEW changes in the world of Michigan REO’s that you MUST be aware of are:

1. The emergence of a new crop of aggressive REO brokers and agents who love working with real estate agents. For some reason most REO brokers over 50 have a distorted and a strange attitude toward real estate investors in Michigan. They get all their business from us but they don’t like dealing with us.

It is arrogance and stupidity, mixed in equal amounts. They think that all Michigan real estate investors are broke; incapable of showing up at a closing with a check or worse they are not serious about buying foreclosures in their Michigan City.

Well thank God that these attitudes from the 1990’s are no longer forced upon us. There are new, young, aggressive REO brokers and agents becoming top flight Stars all over Michigan who want to deal with serious Michigan real estate investors – like my QuickStart grads who know where to get the money and how to close on deals fast – and are happy to find good deals for them.

2. Asset Managers who are getting foreclosures from West and East coast and have NO; repeat NO interest in holding on to foreclosures in Michigan. You might think that Royal Oak is HOT or Grand Blanc is the best city to live in Michigan but outside of Michigan nobody has heard of Grand Blanc or Garden City.

When Asset Managers hear the word “Michigan” they think “Detroit”. Asset Managers never had a soft spot for Michigan and now they really don’t want these foreclosures sitting on their books. You have a solid offer, financing lined up – they will discount. Period! If you can't get discounts than you are probably saying the wrong things to them or worse wording your offers incorrectly.

3. The city of Detroit made me rich when I started out in buying foreclosures and there was a time that you could not find good deals in REO’s unless you played there. But now this is a whole different game – suburban foreclosures all over the tri-county area & in the other metropolitan areas are being discounted heavily.

I remember making an offer on a REO in Sterling Heights three years ago and the REO broker almost had a stroke reading my offer,

“Son, the banks don’t need to discount. This is STERLING HEIGHTS not Detroit.”

Well those days are gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.

4. Working with buying agents – BIG MISTAKE right now. Don’t do it. Enough said.

5. No excuses ("this house needs lots and lots of repairs") needed anymore for getting $50,000 in EQUITY in a suburban foreclosure that requires no repairs besides paint, carpet, and cleanup.

You want to buy one?

They have couple of them in every Michigan City and they keep coming. What makes these discounts effortless is how the offer is structured and what you say to Asset Managers via REO brokers that actually makes it look like that you are doing them a favor buying this foreclosure.

6. Absolutely no need for spending months and thousands of dollars of borrowed money rehabbing the house and dealing with 30 contractors UNLESS you are in love with idea of spending hours at Home Depot and making money is really not your objective in Michigan real estate investing.

If you are doing rehab right now in Michigan – that is a personal choice that you made. Nobody dragged you to Home Depot and forced you to spend $20,000 there. Clean up, paint, carpet, kitchen cabinets, reglaze the tub, toss a new vanity sink – O.K. we are done.

Move on. Do deal number 2.

And THE BIGGEST REASON you need to wake up and learn about finding and buying Michigan REO's is:

December is right around the corner. And by all indications this is going to be the month in 2007 that all records will be broken when it comes to whacking banks on their heads to get big discounts in Michigan. Banks don’t want to close their books with Michigan foreclosures hanging on their heads. They want out and they will discount.

Imagine starting January with keys to 2 REO’s in your back pocket with $110,000 in equity. No repairs needed.

The time to learn how to do it is NOW. The place to go and master it all is QuickStart Bootcamp Version 2.0 which is happing on November 16,17,18 in Troy.

No better place to come and master how to find and buy REO’s in Michigan, no matter where you live, with $50,000 in Equity, with no repairs more than paint carpet & kitchen cabinets needed. And YES! You can do this whole thing without using a $1 of your own money. That is probably the easiest thing to setup. I just got one more source of OPM - $200,000 with no collateral, no security, just sign and drive checkbook.

I only teach 10 students at a time. 6 of them are already gone. This is probably the last QuickStart for 2007. You don’t want to wait and miss out on the BIGGEST buying opportunity of the year happening in December.

It is 3 days, one on one with me, and this time in November, I will let one REO broker, a good friend of mine, come and speak to the students. This guy just came from a nationwide conference of Asset Managers and I guarantee that your ears will burn when you listen to him describe what these guys are thinking about Michigan foreclosures.

I hope that you have the skills and a plan in place to make offers on REO’s in late November and early December in your target Michigan City because if you have been waiting for a perfect time to buy your first Michigan foreclosure – THIS IS THE MONTH.

If you have any questions about QuickStart Bootcamp give Nora a call at 248-561-3535 or email her at customercare@markijlal.com , 4 Seats left and then it is all over for 2007.

Don’t miss out on buying a Michigan foreclosure in December. You will regret it.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 12:56 PM | Permalink

Ever wondered if you remodeled your own house or a Michigan foreclosure, “How much will I get back of this check I am writing when I sell?”

The above chart is from Remodeling Contractor, a Chicago based magazine, which serves the remodeling industry.

Add Fireplace - Cost $3,250 – When you sell, you will get back - $4,000
Add Full Bath - Cost $7,300 – When you sell, you will get back - $8,000
Add Greenhouse - Cost $13,500 – When you sell, you will get back - $12,000
Minor Kitchen Remodel - Cost $6,700 – When you sell, you will get back - $6,000
Siding / Insulation - Cost $6,000 – When you sell, you will get back - $6,000
Major Kitchen Remodel -Cost $18,000 – When you sell, you will get back - $16,000
Add Insulation - Cost $1,200 – When you sell, you will get back - $1,000
New Roofing - Cost $3,400 – When you sell, you will get back - $ 2,700
Add Skylights -Cost$2,800 – When you sell, you will get back - $ 2,100
Add Wood Deck - Cost $4,800 – When you sell, you will get back – 3,500
Windows / Doors -Cost $9,750 – When you sell, you will get back - $7,000
Add Room - Cost $28,000 – When you sell, you will get back - $20,000
Remodel Bath -Cost $6,200 – When you sell, you will get back - $4,650
Add Pool - Cost $19,000 – When you sell, you will get back – $6,100

One more reason NOT to blow up too much money or energy rehabbing foreclosures in Michigan since if you notice, most of the times you are not getting too much back from adding all kind of nifty little things that you might personally like in the foreclosure you just bought.

I have seen granite counters in $125,000 homes where the target buyer does not even knows the difference between granite or Corian and actually might have much happier if you did regular counter tops and gave him brand new appliances. Got to know what your buyer wants because they are the ones who make that check come to you when the house flips.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:55 AM | Permalink

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:08 PM | Permalink

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 11:01 PM | Permalink

No matter what you have been told about the joys of email / video conferencing / virtual meetings etc – majority of all deals in this world are still done, handshake to handshake, face to face, person to person.

A good thing for anybody reading this – whether new to the game or seasoned pro is to make a goal to make new friends and get reacquainted with old ones on a monthly basis.

There is a person behind that email address. A real person behind that fax. Call them up one day for no reason really and take them out for a cup of coffee. You will be surprised on how much goodness will come out of them.

People don’t forget others who show kindness to them without asking anything in return.

Real estate investors in any Michigan City can literally leap frog their competitors by using this simple strategy.

Instead of collecting worthless business cards at REIAS meetings – make an effort to collect friendships.

Instead of collecting email addresses by the dozens – go out with your email list to a close by Starbucks and just ask them if they need some help locating a good contractor, a good appraiser, a good property inspector… and then promote your good contacts to them. Everybody will win.

Make a goal for your next seminar - instead of just sitting and absorbing wisdom and writing down shortcuts ADD a goal to also have lunch everyday with a different person instead of eating just with your spouse / business partner AND may be hang back one day to just sit and have a good talk with some other folks who are from close by cities.

One of the reasons I have shrunk the size of Quick Start Bootcamp (October is Sold Out; next one is in November - details are here) to just 10 students now is my desire for the students to make an attempt to know each other better in those three days.

Quick Start has always been a special place where people come and form life long friendships. And now with a small size of the class – I am leaving no option but to know each other. I mean 10 people stuck in a room for three days? How can they not know each other?

The seminar is over at 6:00pm, don't go home yet, chill out and have a beer with somebody you meet today. Home is not going anywhere. Kids are not going anywhere either. Life is going to be there when you get home. But this is an opportunity for you to form good friendships and great bonds with like minded Michigan real estate investors.

Business cards collectors always bore me to death. They are in turn disappointed me in me because I have been without one for over four years now and I doubt that a day is near that I will feel a need to get one printed. But I was always good at collecting relationships that will help me get things done faster and easier in my Michigan real estate investing businesses.

I am going to a wedding next Sunday - I met this guy five years ago and flipped him couple of houses. Guy is still around. Relationship is still around. Friendship is still around. I lost his business card long time ago. He never had mine to begin with.

Go through your drawer tonight and do some fall cleaning - toss all the business cards you have been collecting with a missionary zeal and instead go and get some friendships instead.

You will have a more fun and profitable business at the end of the day in Michigan.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 10:09 AM | Permalink

1. Have a physical address on your website – prominently displayed on every single page. In this age of identity theft, online scams, and spam – if you want somebody to believe anything you are saying – make some darn effort. O.K.?

Work from home? Don’t have an office? So what? So get a Mail Box Etc / UPS Store thing going on for you. It is only $10 per month and you get a physical address. Putting your home address on the Internet is definitely NOT a good idea.

2. Have a fax number on your website – believe it or not, even in this age of Internet and YouTube; billions of faxes fly around merrily. I get tons of faxes every month. Real estate agents and asset management firms still live on faxes.

You can get a cheap fax machine from Staples for around $40 and if you are thinking only getting incoming faxes – you can get an Efax account.

The way Efax works is you get a regular fax number, but somebody faxes you something, instead of a machine spitting out the fax – you get an email from Efax with the faxed document as a PDF file.

Very Cool… I have both – my fax number on this website is an Efax number that I had for over 4 years now. You can read more about Efax here here

3. Use big fonts – I have no idea why you would want to make my eyes water trying to read your size 2 font? Make it BIG, easy on the eyes and we will read it.

4. People, People – use paragraphs. I screw this up sometime too, late on the night but it is very hard to read rambling, 97 line long blocks of text. Break it up.

5. Make Peace With Your Small Shop - O.K. I know for a fact that you are a ONE person shop running out of your basement, so please don’t use the words like “We are a group of real estate investors who have decided….”.

I use to do that a lot, but luckily for me, realized one day how stupid it all sounded. I mean nobody in Michigan really cares if you are big or small – as long as you deliver on what you said you would.

6. Put the name of the cities that you are doing this in Michigan way top on every page. So say you want to flip houses in Livonia, Garden City, and Westland – those three names should be displayed every where on your website.

Obviously you have no interest in Grand Rapids so why not you are making it easier for the people who come to your website to discover that?

7. Take pride in your website. I don’t why most of them seem to be pleading “Oh God why do I have to do this?” look to them.

Hire a high school kid at your local Craigs List Gigs section or ask anybody in your life who is going to High School to find you a resident geek. Every High School in America has at least 1. Pay them well. Treat them good. They will do whole website thing for you in couple of hours and then you are done for a very long time.

Don’t spend too much time thinking about the design about the website. Instead think about who is going to come to your website and how can you help them.

That is what a business website is all about – helping people with something that they are looking for. Whether it is looking for people who can become money partners for you, buy houses from you, are in foreclosure and looking for somebody to solve that headache for them via a quick short sale – they have a challenge and they want some help.

And that is what your website should be all about – helping your website visitors.

Don't think clicks.

Think people.

Posted by Mark Ijlal at 02:05 PM | Permalink