Another PMBP Student Kicking Butt in Today’s Market – Target: 49 Unit Apartment Complex

If you’re one of “those” real estate investors who think you can’t buy property today unless you have your own cash or good credit, well, fortunately for you, you’re wrong.

Here’s another example of one of our students, Gene Kinzer, making things happen with private money.

He joined our Private Money Blueprint Team and just closed a 49 unit deal. And when the project is complete, he’s going to be netting around $6,000 positive cash flow … each and every month.

Check out his message to us below …

Congrats Gene!! Enjoy that new cash flow

Keep the momentum moving forward, and let us know how we can help ya.

Patrick & Trevor

The Private Money Blueprint Team

 

** These private money results are not typical. The “average” person doesn’t take any action, and therefore, gets no private money.

Credit Card Reform March 2010

by Tim Krulia – Private Money Blueprint CFO

As part of our quest here at PMBP to give you the single best resource on the financial aspects of growing your real estate investing business (aka, we help people find private money quickly, easily, and abundantly)… here’s an article I found that helps explain the recent credit card reform legislation…

Author Martha C. White does a great job of laying out some of the changes that new, “virtually guaranteed” (cough cough….BS…..cough cough) credit card reform legislation that Congress is working on at the present time.

I really hope that Congress can start passing more than just gas because it sounds like this Credit Card reform bill could be really great for the country! The existence of “universal default” practices, bombarding college campuses with credit card salesman, misleading teaser rates or anything that can make a credit card interest rate spike though the roof for one late payment is all pretty rotten if you ask me. It sounds like President Obama and Congress are trying to work toward righting a bundle of the wrongs in our credit card world with this new reform jazz they’ve got cookin’.

I suppose it isn’t material to Private Money Recruiters how all this credit card business shakes out because our business plans have a different focus when it comes to debt management. For example, if we’re late on a payment to one of our private money investors, more times than not it was just an oversight; so we quickly overnight them the money and we all go about our business like normal sophisticated humans.

The credit card companies seem to have got to a point where they are like sharks and as soon as they smell blood they want to rip their borrowers to shreds! Heck, even if Congress agrees to something for a change and the bill goes though, with private money as an abundantly available alternative, who in their right mind would want to go the credit card route anyway?

P-Rid’s Private Money Millions Series: How to Explode Your Private Money Lending Program with a Newsletter

Hola Amigos!

P-Rid here with Part 1, How to Explode Your Private Money Lending Program with a Newsletter, in the Private Money Millions Series.

What is a Private Money Newsletter?

A private money newsletter is an excellent way to build trust and rapport with your prospects and get mucho dinero faster and easier because of it.

And I’m not talking about an electronic newsletter (however email news letters are highly effective and cheap as well!); I’m talking about a physical snail mail newsletter.

Now, if you’re strapped for time and cash, an e-newsletter is better than nothing, but a physical newsletter is beneficial for many reasons which I’ll cover momentarily.

What To Include In Your Newsletter?

But first, here are a few ideas for what could be included in your private money newsletter:

• Sample Deals – Show your private money prospects the type of properties you purchase and what the
  

  

  potential returns would be.

• Real World Deals – This is even better than a sample deal because it’s shows what you’re doing, not what you intend to do. If you didn’t use a private lender in your “real world deals”, show what a private lender would have made.

• Articles – You could either write articles on the bene fits of private lending or cut and paste from articles you find online (make sure to give credit to the author if you cut and paste). Include any articles that build value in real estate investing and private lending.

• Testimonials – If you’ve never used private money before, get some testimonials from anyone you’ve done business with and use them to build your character and reputation. You could also use testimonials from any buyers and sellers you’ve worked with. Here’s a great tip for ya when getting testimonials: make them results based.

• Real Estate Market Statistics – People love statistics… and if you’re the one bringing them to them each month they’ll be more apt to open up and read your newsletter.  Also, another benefit of this is that you’re seen as the expert in your area and your credibility goes through the roof.  You can even get other investors and realtors on your newsletter when you give out quality content like this to them for free… and over time you’ll build a great relationship w/ them and convert a good percentage into private lenders (or at the very least buyers of your properties).A great free source for real estate market stats that you can regurgitate and put in your newsletter is John Burns Consulting.  Join their free monthly market stats reports and you’ll get a ton of value out of it.

• Fotos (aka pictures … still working on my Spanish … had to “google” that one) – Remember the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Well, kee p that in mind here. Use pictures of any properties you’ve purchased, people you’ve done business with (buyers, sellers, lenders), or if you’re a newbie, pictures of the type of properties you’ll be purchasing.

Why a Private Money Newsletter Leads to More Money Faster and Easier

1. More “Touches” Builds Greater Trust and Credibility – In marketing, a “touch” is anytime you put your marketing message in front of your prospect. It coul d be through a TV commercial, newspaper ad, a newsletter, etc. And giving them something tangible, say a physical newsletter that’s mailed out monthly or quarterly, is a powerful “touch”.Also, just the act of continually getting in front of your prospects eyeballs shows that your business is active, you’re doing deals… and you’re making things happen.  This builds massive credibility as they see each and every month the progress you’re taking… and they feel they want in on the action.
2. Online Biz Makes Owners Lazy – Many busines ses are abandoning direct mail and are doing all their marketing online. BUT, direct mail is still a killer strategy to get your message in front of prospects … use it to set yourself apart from the competition.
3. People Still LOVE Getting Things in the Mail – There’s something about getting “stuff” in the mail that people just love. Having your newsletter in hand makes it much more likely that it will get read AND it …
4. Gives Prospects an Easy Way to Spread the Word about Your Private Lending Program – It gives your prospects “something” to show people and ask their opinion about, it gives them something tangible, something re al. This brings your private lending program from the intangible, from just an idea, to something they can look at, touch and feel.

So, Action Steps…

1. Try out the resources below (yes, we do make money off of some of them if you use them… but, they are resources we personally use and like. If you enjoy our free info we’d appreciate it if you use the links below if you’re going to try out those services … and sign up for a service to deliver your email newsletter.
2. Set a monthly date for when you’re going to send your newsletter out.  I like the first week of the month.  Once you pick a date stick to that date so your prospects/newsletter subscribers expect it each month.
3. Start gathering people into your newsletter. Now, you need to start getting people into your newsletter. Start with your family, friends, and people you know. Ask them if they’d like to be updated on what you’re doing in your biz and on the real estate market.  A great way to get them on the newsletter without “selling” is to ask the m for “advice”.  Like… “Hey, I’m starting up a once a month newsletter on our local real estate market and what we’re doing in our business… would you mind if I put you on the list so you can give me feedback on what you like and dislike?”.   That way they’ll get on and give you feedback… but also they’ll see the action you’re taking and will likely become interested.Also, put a newsletter signup box on your website (Aweber will create one for you)… that advertises real estate market statistics for your local area and real estate news and advice.  And/or… advertise a free report.
4. Ask for referrals. Make sure in your newsletter at the bottom of each issue you add a phrase that says…”Like what you see in our monthly newsletters?  Excellent! Forward this email to people who you know will benefit from it. They’ll appreciate you a ton!”

   That way your current newsletter subscribers are advertising your newsletter for you.

5. Give them great content like we mentioned above. But, DON’T sell people into your program or offer any specific investments.  What you’ll want to do is chart deals you’re doing, give content, build credibility and trust… and in each issue put a blurb in it saying something like…”Want to learn how to work with our investment company to make passive profits?  Click here“.

   Then, that can take them to a video on using IRA’s to invest in real estate… or to a page that briefly explains that you work with people every day in your community who want to get the benefits of real estate but who don’t want to actively invest in it themselves.  Then, pass them through your Private Lender Questionnaire which qualifies them so you know whether or not they’re an accredited investor that you can talk to.

   Chat w/ your attorney about the specifics… not everyones state laws are the same.

We’ve had students who have emailed us saying that they’ve had people on their newsletter list for months… sometimes well over a year before they decided they wanted to invest with them.  So, for all of the prospects who aren’t 100% serious about private lending quite yet… get them on your newsletter and provide them a ton of value and build credibility with them over time by showing that you’re taking action and running a real business.

It’ll be much more powerful than you think!

Recommended Resources to Get Your Private Money Newsletter Up and Running

Alrighty… now that you realize the importance of a newsletter (gives you an excuse to get in front of your prospect and it builds credibility over time)… here’s a few resources we think you’ll enjoy

Direct Mail Newsletter Resources:

• No Hassle Newsletters – This service gives you “done for you” physical newsletter templates and ideas so you just have to plug in your content and run.  It isn’t the cheapest in the world… but their templates and instruction are awesome. Check them out if you want… well worth the monthly cost if you implement it.

• 1-800-Postcards – A good print shop for good quality and economical printing. They can print up your newsletters for you… or just head down to your local Kinkos or Staples and have them do it for you.

Email Newsletter Resources:

• Aweber - The email service that we personally use to send our newsletters out. They have very high deliverability, have a ton of really great email templates to choose from, and are affordable… very affordable.  I’ve tried 4 different email services… and Aweber is by far the one I liked the best.  Sign up for a Free Trial

• Constant Contact – This is another email service… a lot of my friends use them… and like them. I personally prefer Aweber… but, this is another service to try out to see if you like it. They also have great email newsletter templates for you to choose from so you can be up and running your email newsletter within minutes.

• Online Slideshow Service – I never did this… but one of our Platinum Students has been sending people from his email newsletter to an online slideshow that documents the property rehab and sale they just completed… from start to finish so the newsletter subscriber (prospect) can see right there that the project is real… and that you as the investor are active and doing deals. This builds huge credibility and is professional.

Well, that does it for Part 1, How to Explode Your Private Money Lending Program with a Newsletter.

Buenas Noches

~ P-Rid

Best Affordable Suburbs in America 2010

by Tim Krulia – Private Money Blueprint CFO

As part of our quest here at PMBP to give you the single best resource on the financial aspects of growing your real estate investing business (aka, we help people find private money quickly, easily, and abundantly)… here’s an article I found about the suburbs across the country where families can afford to live while still enjoying a good quality of life, good schools, and low crime rates…

What a great article! The study takes into consideration the largest populated city in each state and then evaluates that city’s suburbs for the “most affordable.” Suburbs of smaller cities in a state don’t quality for this study. That’s the only caveat about this article I don’t like. Well, that and the fact I can’t see how all the factors where weighted exactly when making the calculations.

Anyway, it’s still a very cool article. The author looks at each of the 50 states and picks the “best” suburb for affordability by summing up great statistical information like population, median family income, median home price, crime rate and local amenities.

Check this article out and see which suburb they picked in your state.

Best Affordable Suburbs State by State

Just click the image below to check out the article and to see what suburb they deem the “best affordable” suburb.

My Brief Analysis

As an Atlanta resident, I’m paying a little more attention to what the word “affordability” means for families. I don’t have any kids yet, but hopefully within a handful of years I will. We were talking to a woman at our Church about the school that’s associated to the Church. I was a bit blown away that high school costs $15,000 per year to send a child to the local Catholic school! I may be living in an area that’s great for someone that doesn’t have a family yet, but may need to relocate to a less ritzy suburb of the city when I do.

I guess that’s just one reason of probably hundreds that people would prefer to live in the more affordable suburbs. The “best” suburbs in the article are basically the top combination of quality of life and affordability. That combo has got to carry some pretty solid demand from the general public.

If you have the ability to invest in the suburb that ranked #1 in your state; you may want to consider focusing either your investing and/ or private money recruiting in that exact area! The dividends of this research my pay off big time!

And, as a real estate investor… it’s always a good idea to know your local market inside and out so you can act fast on real estate deals… and so you know the true value of every single property you put an offer on… which too many investors don’t do.

Enjoy

Great Video To Help You Push Your Limits – A Must Watch This Week

We’re constantly pushing ourselves to do better… to stretch our “comfort zone” muscles… and to continually push our limits to living better lives.

Well… I came across this video this week that is one of the best videos I’ve watched this year… serious.

Do you remember the last time you said, “thats all I can do… I can’t do anymore!”… or “thats as far as I can go”… after you watch this video you’ll learn how to unlock hidden potential inside of you that you maybe didn’t even know was there.

This is truly what separates the “average” folks… from those who do great things with their lives.

Enjoy    Let us know what you think about the video… leave a comment below after you watch the video. Thanks!

 http://s3.amazonaws.com/trvideos/video1d_small.flv

February 2010 Unemployment Rate Holds

by Tim Krulia – Private Money Blueprint CFO

As part of our quest here at PMBP to give you the single best resource on the financial aspects of growing your real estate investing business (aka, we help people find private money quickly, easily, and abundantly)… here’s an article I found titled, “Jobs report shows unemployment unchanged,” by David Goldman…

This article is great. It has a chart that shows the number of jobs lost monthly since January 2009 to present. I’m not sure why the author is attributing the better than expected jobs numbers to the big snow storms last month. I would think that something like a blizzard would be a negative on businesses and prompt more lay offs. Whatever though.

The important part to take away from this article is really that unemployment stayed unchanged from last month at 9.7%.

I love it! If you’ve been following my articles you know my theory on how the economy is going to start taking strides forward if the unemployment rate holds and improves a little in the next few months! By the unemployment rate not getting worse, I think it’s still supporting my hypothesis that the unemployment rate has peaked in this recession. Check this out… I gathered this info from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to create a chart I can update each month to better illustrate the historical trends of this recession’s unemployment rate.

I started this chart at the beginning of 2007 because that’s when we as real estate investors started seeing our own recession start to get ramped up. I guess the recession by definition didn’t get going until about the beginning of 2008. As you can see the unemployment rate consistently increased for two years (2008 – 2010).

Now we’re creating a nice peak right at the 10% area. The “9 per. Mov. Avg.” is just a 270 day moving average I tossed in there because it’s pretty cool to see that our unemployment rate just crossed under it. So it’s awesome to see that we broke through that floor.

Anyway, here’s my silly little hypothesis:

Get about 3 to 5 more months of the unemployment rate holding or dropping and the recovery will be 100% full force back on! Why? The media & the Government will start to make a big deal out of it’s kinda good news (only kinda good because the unemployment rate will still be over 9% most likely at that time). We’ll see everyone start to believe that the recessionary times are over, and businesses will start rocking again.

My guess is that the unemployment rate will drop from the then maybe 9.4%ish to about 7.5% by the end of 2011. The basis for the 7.5% rate guess-timation is that in our last recession it took about 24 months to gain about 50% back of the recession’s unemployment rate original run up. History has a tendency to repeat itself.

This recession’s unemployment rate curve’s slope is similar to that of the prior recession when it was increasing rapidly. This recession was just over a longer period of time so the unemployment rate increased at a similar velocity but over a longer period of time (making this a much worse recession for unemployment than back in 2001).

About half of the original run-up in unemployment rate is roughly 2.5%…..so it makes sense to think that we could be looking at a 10% – 2.5% = 7.5% unemployment rate in December 2011 and then of course possibly we’d go all the way down to 5% in December 2013. No – it’s not very scientific, and Yes – it’s a blind guess, but here’s for taking a stab at it anyway.

What are you’re guess-timations?

Do you think that an improving economy over the next 4 years will be good for private money recruiting or bad?

Let’s hear it!!

Obama $1.5 Billion Housing Plan Needs More Explanation

by Tim Krulia – Private Money Blueprint CFO

As part of our quest here at PMBP to give you the single best resource on the financial aspects of growing your real estate investing business (aka, we help people find private money quickly, easily, and abundantly)… here’s an article I found with a video that announces President Obama’s plan to spend $1.5 billion on a new housing aid program…

The MSNBC article has a video of President Obama’s Feb. 19 speech at a town hall in Henderson, Nevada. The event was really a campaign push for Dem. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who is behind in the polls for the pivotal Nevada 2010 senator race. Obama’s speech paid Reid lots of compliments for his work in Congress, talks at length about the economy, touches on health care, education, green energy and announces a $1.5 billion housing aid program.

Of course, the housing aid program is what I’m interested in researching.

$1.5 Billion In Housing Aid… What Does That Mean To Investors?

The MSNBC article doesn’t do a very good of a job detailing the $1.5 billion housing aid program so that’s why I also am highlighting the Business Week article (it does a little bit better anyway). It’s probably best to understand the A-Z for this news story by watching the MSNBC video and then reading the Business Week article.

The problem for me is that even after I did, I think I only understood about the A-K of what this program is doing, unfortunately. The news applies most directly to those who live or invest in real estate in California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Michigan (the leading indicator states).  These are the states that are said to have been hit hardest by the housing bubble bursting. The idea is to target the worst of the worst areas and help them out first and foremost.

Okay, so after reading these couple of articles and watching the video a few times………umm, I’m still a little in the dark about exactly what they are going to do with the $1.5 billion. The best I can find in the info I’ve researched are two comments that stick out a bit, but they are mostly just clues… I think.

1. In Obama’s speech he said, “…and that’s why we’re buying up vacant homes and converting then into affordable housing.”
2. In the Business Week article Diana Farrell, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, says “The aid is intended, in part, to test programs that reduce principal or extinguish second mortgages where borrowers owe more than their homes are worth.”

Is the government really going to start buying vacant homes?

Did Congress get together and decide, Ah Ha!!! Here’s how we make some $!! Let’s become real estate investors and start buying the cheapest houses out there! Yeah, yeah yeah! We can get the public’s buy in because we’ll say that we’re creating jobs for contractors to fix them up and boost realtors and loan officer’s production! Then we can sell the houses and earn BIG PROFITS!! Yippie!! LOL!

I doubt that’s what President Obama meant but what if that’s part of their plan a little bit? Could the US Government be your competition buying the short sale deal you’ve been working on right out from underneath ya? Again, I don’t think that’s the case, but dang if it doesn’t sound like it from the speech. I’m not serious exactly; just a little humor.

Diana Farrell, on the other hand, notes that the program will help folks that are upside down on their mortgages. Reading in between the lines I guess that by eliminating second mortgages or lowing mortgage balances in general will thus lower monthly payments. Lower payments on a mortgage will help some people avoid foreclosure.

That’s great if you have a job with an income that allows a borrower to make regular payments. Hello? The unemployment rate is still about 10%!! I guess I’m a bit skeptical about where this money is going right now because I can’t seem to understand exactly how the relief is getting handed out.

Housing Plan Questions…

Let’s start by asking the questions…. so who qualifies for this one and exactly what should one expect if they get approved?

Wouldn’t it would be great if there was one central location that anyone could contact, tell a specialist on the recovery act, stimulus stuff, tax incentives & credits, etc. what their situations are and then let the specialist look though all the cool recovery & stimulus stuff out there and in an instant, “poof” it’s in place for ya?

I guess if I had it my way, I’d just make the $1.5 billion available as private money that real estate investors could grab up at a really low interest rate (i.e. 1%)!

We’d be out there pulling down the funds and rejuvenating whole neighborhoods left and right! Then again, it’s kind of small potatoes. Why pay so much attention to this anyway I guess? There was something like 2.3 million houses that entered into some stage of foreclosure in 2008.

$1.5 billion is only the equivalent of 10,000 $150K homes anyway.

In Summary

To sum it up… as real estate investors we should all have our pulse on not only the real estate market… but other factors that can affect our businesses such as new goverment regulations or bills like this one.  I only see more and more of this type of action happening as elections in 2010 draw closer to sway public opinion that the voters are being “helped out” by the government… and this “help” could mean competition for real estate investors in the short sale market (short term competition), but it could also open up a whole new market for savvy investors that we don’t even know about yet.

 

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