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Karen and Don attended my bootcamp in January. One of the things they said in their testimonial video was that I have already heard couple of hundred times so far already is: "We tried getting into investing in Michigan real estate with a help from a coach / mentor in Florida or California and soon realized that they had no idea about how to make it work in Michigan real estate market."

Look you got to understand something here. I believe there is real value found in reading a book like Cashflow Quadrant or IRA Wealth. There are fundamentals in real estate investing that never change: buy low, sell high, take care of your private investors, manage your contractors with good agreements and open eyes, follow every legal and ethical dot that using OPM requires you to do so. These are the basic building blocks of flipping foreclosures anywhere in United States.

So Yes; If you are starting out in real estate investing even a book written by Al Lowry back in 1969 about investing in real estate without using your own money is suffice to fill your head with great ideas and solid strategies. The basics never change. There is lot of wisdom found in those white hair folks in their sixties. RESPECT that.

But there is another big part of real estate investing that is all about local, local and local since the house you are about to buy and flip does not reside on Amazon.com but in a real zip code in Michigan.

So questions like which city to buy and which to avoid in Michigan; the easy referrals to good people in Michigan that will help you buy good deals (property inspectors / contractors / buy agents) and the ones who will help you flip fast (loan officers); the networking to keep you on track and inspired to do your first, second and third flip; the homeowners in foreclosure who have upside down mortgages and want to sell their homes with a short sale; the sharp REO agent who has built great relationships with Asset Managers and likes to moves lots of houses fast in Michigan; all this is found locally and YES, a local mentor can help you get to these doors fast and without costly detours.

Where do you think you will find somebody to give you all the OPM you ever wanted in Michigan?

If you are an online marketing genius and have some serious money lying around then you can put together a killer website or a slick Facebook Page and run some heavy duty advertising campaigns on Google and Facebook paying couple of bucks for each click and then doing more heavy duty follow-up marketing to the people who might or may not buy your reasons for putting up their funds to buy deals in Michigan real estate with you. They might be interested in doing real estate investing but just not in Michigan.

On the other hand there are already tons of people around you in Michigan who will be easier to find and approach and would require very little reasoning to invest in deals with you because they are here already and they want to do local deal in Michigan.

No matter which way you swing it - real estate investing is local in its heart.

Need I remind you on how badly the love affair with Florida condos and Arizona homes ended for out-of-State investors who 'invested' (gambled might be a better term) in these out-of-State real estate without putting their feet on the ground? Not the first by the way. Florida has a habit of taking suckers money every 2 decades with a consistency that would make Madoff envious yet people line up every time they open the doors to sell swamp land to out of towners.

Flipping foreclosures is a local game and you need local Michigan know-how and knowledge.   A local mentor to help you avoid the costly detours that thousands of real estate investors put themselves through every year for no reason.An easy mistake to fix.

No other way around it. Imprint that lesson in your head. It is one of the most profitable lessons you will ever learned in real estate investing.

1. Form your LLC or S-Corp in Michigan:

These 2 are the most popular business structures that I have seen real estate investor's use over and over again in Michigan. I am not, repeat not, a fan of people putting (rentals or flips) houses in their personal names or writing checks from five different accounts for a rehabbing a flip.

If you are confused about where the line is between your personal and real estate investing business in Michigan....just think what IRS is going to think about your business when they get your tax return next year with six flips spread all over your life?

This is one of those fundamental basic lessons in starting your real estate investing business in Michigan that you might be thinking... come on everybody does that. Well you don't see or hear what I do on a regular basis which is a terrifying number of people owning rental properties in their personal name or many investors thinking that they will 'get around to it' after they have done couple of flips.

Bad idea. Do it right from Day 1 before you start flipping.

2. Open a business checking account:

And write all your rehabbing expense out of it. Get a VISA checking card from your bank preferably with rewards points attached to it. Make a habit to run all your business expenses out of your business account no matter how small they are. It is extremely important to do if you are doing your real estate deals with OPM.

3.Make a Facebook business page for your business:

Don't waste time trying to learn how to make a website or use one of the terrible templates that came with your domain name. They give your business a bad name. Instead go where every smart company in the world is right now - on Facebook 'cause that is where 600,000,000 people are almost every day. Read my guide on how to use Facebook Pages for your Michigan real estate investing business here.

4. Get Google Voice:

If your job requires you to 'vanish' into your cubicle for extended hours and there is no way that you can pickup your cellphone; use Google Voice that gives you a local phone number (I am not a fan of 800 toll free numbers) which works like a regular phone number and you can make it ring to your cellphone or any other phone number but you can also use it for only getting voice mails with a twist: when somebody leaves you a text message, Google Voice transcribes it and emails it to you. And yes it is free for all USA calls.

5. Do you need a mailing address? Why?

REO agents (meet them at their office); Mortgage brokers (their office); private investors (Starbucks); families buying your flips (at your loan officer or title company conference room). So don't waste any time in figuring out what address to put on your business card. The new rich in America are the ones who own their time and are not tied to any thing. The office address is necessary if you are planning to hire 40 employees soon. You and me don't need it.

6. Get business cards.

VistaPrint.com or Overnight Prints are great companies who can get your business cards to you for couple of bucks very fast. Once you have them - exchange them. That is what business cards are for. But please don't go to a networking meeting at a REIA or at my events and put a business card at every table. It is so rude and spammy to do so.

The idea is to exchange business cards with people who are interested in talking to you more about some part of your flipping business and not throw it from the second floor balcony of the 12 Oaks Mall. Put your Google Voice and Facebook Page address on your business cards so people know how to reach you back and not just your email address.

1. Most important: How to rehab houses because majority of the deals were available in Detroit, Pontiac, Saginaw and Flint and we are talking hard core junkers. There were no foreclosures in suburb where banks were discounting unless they had major problems. As a new real estate investor who wanted to fix homes; you would have to learn how to handle mold, fire damage, foundation issues, water soaked basements and everything in the middle.

2. How to find foreclosures: Seriously there were not just too many foreclosures in Metro Detroit. And if you were doing foreclosures in Detroit - you had to figure out which areas were homeowners-heavy (West Side, U of D) and which areas were more rent heavy (East Side). The REO broker industry had probably 20% of the players that it has right now.

3. Selling: Conforming, non-conforming, FHA, all kind of portfolio loans, 5% down, no money down - the mortgage industry was throwing programs out everyday at anybody with a pulse who wanted to buy a home.

4. Money: All kind available: hard money, business credit, mortgages and some private money but it was tough back then to get private money because the stock market was booming.You could stumble around and find some money lying around for you to buy flips. Seriously I used to spend may be one hour talking about money when I was teaching a bootcamp instead of almost an entire day that I do now.

Fast forward to 2011 and here is my list of the most important skills you would need to put in your bag to become good at flipping foreclosures in Michigan:

1. Other People's Money

2. Other People's Money

3. Other People's Money: You have to become good at understand how to attract private money toward you in 2011. It is the only game in town as mortgages; business credit and hard money are still hiding and not coming out anytime soon. It is the difference maker right now - whether you will be buying foreclosures or not.

I know a lot of capable investors who got spoiled in the last couple of years on a steady diet of buying flips on hard money and mortgages and refusing to learn how to attract private money to them. They are hurting right now big time as the ones who built up the skills to attract private money are making a killing in this market. I am going to write a whole lot of stuff on private money in February so stick around.

4. How to evaluate great deals from just good deals: There are lots of foreclosures available in every city in Michigan. But you need to know how to sift and sort and go for the best possible deals and not leave them for more experienced investors.

5. Selling: Need an absolutely kick ass FHA loan officer on your team who will go to bat for you everyday and preferably is table funding the deals so they have in-house underwriters that will give you fast response for your flips. I got some good guys. If you need names, email me here. They do loans all over Michigan.

6. Rehabbing: Cleanup, carpet, paint, new kitchen cabinets, reglaze the tub, put new tiles in kitchen and bathrooms... it is not exactly rocket science anymore. Couple of trips to Home Depot and decent contractors can get most jobs done for you now in 2011. If you want learn how to do mold homes or how to fix foundations - learn those skills more for entertainment or curiosity but really hard core rehabbing houses where you are gutting them upside down and fixing them up is a choice you make when you are buying junkers in 2011. Not needed any more.

Here is how you put yourself at complete ease when you are going to a seminar or real estate networking meeting. Forget about what you will get out of this meeting tonight and just focus on making new friends.

Your entire goal is to find some people that you will have fun talking to, exchange business cards and do the most important thing that very few will do at the event: Setup a time and date right then and there to have a cup of coffee in the coming week. Don't think too much about it. Don't worry about if you have a deal right now in the pipeline or not.

People got to these events, make good first contact and then completely screw it up by waiting two weeks (I mean come on are you really that busy?) before even emailing the people they met at the seminar.

It is one of the best ways to self sabotage your own efforts. Before you leave that night, setup the next point in turning this handshake into a deal.

Nobody is good at doing everything. Simply not possible.

At your day job you have certain things that your employer pays you to do everyday. You are not required to run the whole company all by yourself. Do you work on the assembly line, sell the products, provide the support and fix the computers and answer the phones in your company? Why not? Because you are good at certain things that you have skills for and your employer put you in a job position to utilize your best skills whether there are numbers or people or computers.

Yet new investors in Michigan make this mistake all the time. They try to do everything themselves. From finding, rehabbing to even selling their house. Everything has their fingerprints on it.

I understand however why people do this. For a very long time I could not bring myself to trust anybody to do as good of a job as I could for doing anything in my business.

But there is a price to pay for all this perfection; you waste time, a lot of it. When you are fixing and painting the house - you are skipping on going to seminars and networking events where you can learn valuable knowledge and make good contacts that will help you in doing five more deals later.

When you are sitting in an Open House for four hours instead of looking for deal #2 on coming Saturday - you are delaying the start of your next deal.

Are you saving some money by doing it?

Absolutely.

Are you going to end up doing probably 25% of what you targeted this year to get done?

Absolutely.

In my company, all the rewards and my love and affection is reserved for those people who help me get things out the door and stop me from wasting time in trying to do everything myself.

The people I work with are not considered an 'expense' at year end. They are actually the reason why the rest of the profits came in so fast and furious.

Don't do everything yourself. Fight yourself. This is a bad business habit to build in your self. You will leave a lot of money and opportunity on the table because of this.

PS: A very good book to read that will 'cure' you out of this disease is E-Myth Revisited.

I was talking to Ken Yamamoto, Mike Simmons and Doug Benson at our mastermind recently and all three of them did an incredible job at December 11 seminar. Ken and Doug have never talked about their business in front of a big room of this size. My advice to all three of them was: all of you did a great job but you need to do more of it in 2011 because that is the fastest ways of becoming very good at networking.

One of the goals that you might want to add to your real estate investing list is to go to at least two networking events every month. Not when you find a deal and are looking to either finance or flip it wholesale. Every month whether you are planning to buy a house right now or not. Even if your schedule is crazy right now and you know that you won't be able to buy your first REO in Michigan before March; you should drag yourself out of the car and still go to every networking meeting in January, February and March.

Two things will happen:

1. The most successful people at these events are 'regulars', meaning they show up month after month. They take their business and their networking seriously. When you go there on a regular basis, they will notice you and will make an effort to know you. 80% of the population never shows up. You will.  We notice when people show up. And I will make sure and my friends will make sure that we come and say HI to you.

2. You will become better at talking to people about your real estate investing business in Michigan. I know that you are probably terrific in talking to your co-workers and friends about everything in the sun but investing in real estate is not something you talk about everyday neither is your business. Everybody is rusty in the beginning and the easiest way to get rid of the rustiness is to talk more about your business and not less. Twice a month, 2-3 hours in the zone talking flipping, short sales, private money, finding deals, REO's or rehabbing will get your head working and your mouth saying all the right things all the time.

Go to 2 events. Every month. Don't try to find the time because you will never find the time. Find out the dates and block them off. Nothing is happening on these dates except you are going to leave work and drive to the networking event with bunch of your business cards with a good mood and a much focused desire to meet new friends. The right kind of friends who are going to take you with them on their own flight to success in Michigan.

Eagles learn to fly with other eagles. Hangout with chickens and you will learn is how to make a lot of noise with them. Hangout with eagles and they will teach you to fly and hunt. Think about this choice when you hustling to block time for these events.

Here is a small gift: a PDF of my one month, one page action plan for January 2011.

I made this for my own use recently. The filled one stays on my desk and one copy goes in my car. It is one of the many ways I chase the days to make sure that months don't finish without moving my business forward.

A month, a full one month is too important for me to be left on chance. I procrastinate as much as the next person. I just realized how screwed up I am a while ago and hence all the bear traps in my life to catch laziness and get things moving.

Here is the link to download the PDF