What a year it has been

Well 2006 is starting to wind down and i have picked up 62 deals and may still get another before the year is out. It has been a tremendous year and has really opened up my eyes to the real potential of this business. Next year i intend to pick up 120 deals and i believe i can keep doubling my real estate productivity each year for several years as i keep moving up to bigger and bigger deals.

One thing i have noticed is that the only real difference between the deals i do and ones a Donald Trump does is about three extra zeroes on the end of each deal. I think that every one of you could easily double your income in the next year if u sit down and plan out your goals and set a plan of action to accomplish those goals and seriously spend time daily planning and reviewing those goals.

I am amazed by the power of written goals. Every morning i get up and get on an excercise bike and review my goals and work on my daily plan and prioritize my daily plan. its really quite a simple process and planning saves you tremendous amounts of time and helps make sure you are working on your most important activities.

I certainly you are making plans to have a great 2007.

Buying Homes at Auction

Hi its David today. This week i went to local real estate auction put on by Hudson and Marshall auctions . it was an interesting experience and I went with the intent of networking with other investors in my market that might not attend either of our two local real estate investor groups.
My wife Misty pulled comps for me on every house that was in the auction and i drove around and looked at some of them pre-auction. when homes go to auction like this they are generally bank owned from foreclosures and have already spent at least 6 months being listed by an agent without selling. Well i won 3 auctions but it turns out this isnt an absolute auction so the sale was still subject to approval by the banks that owned the properties. So what do they do after the sale? They come back to me with counter offers well above my winning bid prices typically 7,000-12,000 above. An example was a brick duplex i bid $13,000 and was the winning bidder. It need quite a bit of work but i believe if i clean it up then i can wholesale it to another investor. Well the bank countered at $20,000 and i refused to go up. I think after cleaning it out i could wholesale it for $20k to another investor or i might keep it as it could rent for $900 per month with both sides rented but it is in a tough area.

What was really neat about the whole event though was i was interview by CNN about buying houses at a real estate auction and they will be showing a piece on foreclosures between Christmas and New Years.

Hi, Steven and Karen here...

We had a quiet couple of weeks, with the Thanksgiving holiday and then no BUY KWIK ads running last week. We used the time to study more about real estate investing, and to strategize.

Since the majority of the calls we were getting from the ads were 90 minutes or more from Nashville and in rural areas where you can't get comps or find many other investors to buy the houses, we changed our strategy.

We switched to a tv format where we are on the local Nashville cable channels. Because it costs more than the previous "buckshot" program, there will be fewer ads, but we anticipate them being better because they will be confined to the Metro Nashville area.

Today was the first day for the new program, and we got one call already. Not a deal, but that is OK. The house was in Old Hickory, which is a suburb of Nashville. Old Hickory is where the "oldtime" country stars like Johnny Cash, lived. The newer generation...the Judds, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, Amy Grant, Billy Ray Cyrus, prefer the gently rolling hills of Williamson County, just south of Nashville, which could be the reason why the property values are sky high there...up to 30k an acre in some spots.

Anyway...back to the house. It is a duplex built in the 30s, used as a rental. Needs about 5k worth of work (at least), and looks bad on the outside judging from the Davidson Co. property assessor's site. Although the seller assured us it looks much better on the inside!

If we bought the house to sell to a wholesaler/rehabber, we would need to offer about 67k, which is about 6k less than what they owe. If we wholesaled it to a landlord, we could come in at about 78k-80k, no more than 80k, in order to offer our buyer a great deal. So that is what we offered the seller but since they already have three other offers for as much as 90k, we were out of the ballpark.

This is typical of the investment climate in Nashville; there are plenty of investors out there who are willing to pay more than the deal is actually worth.

But we are hopeful that better opportunities will arise as the month goes on. In the meantime, we "hired" a friend's daughter to address envelopes for us to out of state property owners. The theme of our letter is, "Are you singing, 'All I want for the holidays is to get rid of that house?'" That and the brightly colored paper the letter is printed on should set us apart from other investors marketing to the same group. We figure, there will be at least one good deal in that bunch.