Greetings...Karen and Steven here. What a beautiful evening! After an unseasonably cool start to the day, the temperature climbed into the 70s by late afternoon and the sun came out. This morning I had a doctor's appt. in Nashville so I seized the opportunity to have lunch at a favorite restaurant and do some shopping. When I got home around 2, I caught up on some housework. Saturday I (Karen) will be in a lease-purchase workshop all day so there will be little time over the weekend to take care of household things.

I am looking forward to the workshop, which is presented by Wendy Patton (www.wendypatton.com). Steven and I first heard of her through a telecall with David a few months ago. We were so impressed we bought her book about lease purchases and subject to's. We heard her again Monday evening at our Real Estate Investment Nashville (REIN) meeting, where she spoke for about 30 minutes.

During Saturday's workshop she is going to do live calls with sellers. She asked a real estate agent to bring some listings that are over 90 days old, and she also will pick some FSBOs from the newspaper. I think this will be very helpful.

Steven put a car up for sale on eBay while I was gone, talked w/ David about real estate deals, sandwich leases, and internet leads, and took care of some emails and phone calls. When I got home, we talked about wholesaling as an exit strategy and how challenging it has been to find motivated sellers with equity on a minimal marketing budget. The equity issue is key, and we realize now that given Nashville's tremendous growth over the past 5 years, that there are a lot of people her w/out equity. We are starting to learn which neighborhoods and zip codes are more settled, and eventually plan to purchase mailing lists targeting people in those zips who have owned their homes for more than 10 years.

We agreed that we would have benefitted from David's coaching early on, because we would have learned how to present the deal to the seller without pressuring or persuading, just showing the facts in an honest, straightforward way as he did when he bought my mother's house. We have fumbled around and made some mistakes but fortunately have not lost any money. We have learned a lot from our experiences, and are looking forward to taking our fledgling business to the next level.

Tomorrow we are going to look at a couple of houses for sale "as is". Hopefully there will be a potential deal!