I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from my readers telling me that they love the case studies that I’ve been sending you. These are real stories from real people and I keep all of their emails on file in my office.
You can learn a lot from these folks. They have learned my methods and strategies and taken ACTION. They have my respect and admiration and my best wishes for the future.
If you have a story about a real estate deal that you’d like to share with my readers, please send it to me. Click Here to email me your story. I love these things!
A 76 Year Old Man Who “Gets It.”
Joe’s Notes: This next case study is from a 76 year old man who “gets it.” I think he knows what life is supposed to be about.
Hello Joe,
Your newsletter approach gave me the courage to believe that I can make money while saving my life. I’ve stopped the emphasis on making a living and started to live a little.
It helped when I bought three properties — two from an investor and one at auction. The auction was a steal, I think. Still have to re-sell or re-hab it.
The two I bought from an investor, I re-sold to another investor for a 50% profit. I’m 76–and I’ve stopped swinging a hammer.
Thanks for helping me find a new way to spend time with my wife, my children, my grandchildren and my community.
Howard Stevens
Nashville, TN
Joe’s Notes: This next letter is from Lisa Hedrick. She has a powerful story. What an extraordinary young woman.
“26 Year Old Former Drug Addict Becomes Millionaire In San Francisco”
Hello Joe,
My name is Lisa. I am a 26 year old property owner.
I now own 2 buildings, both duplexes, in San Francisco, C.A. – the HOTTEST real estate market in the country.
How did I do it? Let me start by telling you that I was a 22 year old drug addict who was burning a hole in my pocket with all of the money I had received from my mother’s estate.
I knew that I had to do something. I’d seen ‘get rich quick’ schemes on TV, and I was so desperate that I looked into everything.
That’s when I heard about Joe Crump. I pieced together info from your e-zine, as well as several other sources, and sank my teeth in!! I did everything I could, step-by-step, to try and buy my 1st property.
Yeah, people thought I was crazy. When I’d call up real estate agents & lenders, telling then that I was a single, 22 year old bartender with no real job stability, only $50,000 cash & virtually no credit, they all laughed.
I know that you can buy properties free & clear in many parts of the country for $50k, but here in SF, that isn’t even a small down payment! Plus, I wanted a multi-unit fixer, so that I could live in one unit & rent the other – essentially having my tenant pay the mortgage.
I also wanted a ‘fixer’, hoping that my sweat equity would pay off in ‘real’ equity. I learned all of the real estate terms, and looked at properties in the area that I’d never be able to buy, just so that when the property I really wanted showed up, I’d act & sound like an intelligent professional who really knew what she was doing.
I spent almost every day, for 3 months, looking at properties, meeting agents & scanning newspapers. I started to get discouraged. When I’d ask agents whether or not their clients would do a ‘lease option,’ they didn’t even know what I was even taking about.
Same thing with “wrap-around” mortgages or 80/20, 80/10 mortgages. I was told over and over that these techniques may work in other US cities, but in the San Francisco Bay Area, they just didn’t. I believed it.
Then one day I met an agent who had bought property here with $0 down and had leveraged it to the point of owning multiple properties in one of the best parts of the city. When he told me what he had done, the techniques mirrored Joe’s.
That’s when I really gained confidence. I looked and looked in the paper until I found an owner financed property. I couldn’t believe it. When I rushed out there, I found the biggest dump – it turns out that the house had been on the market for almost 1 year, due to the awful tenants, a strict rent-control law keeping them there, and some serious grime & dilapidation.
The owner/seller was an old woman who had inherited the property from her deceased husband, and she couldn’t care for it. The tenants had overrun the property, came just short of destroying it, and the poor woman didn’t live in town or even have a working key for the building!
My boyfriend and I knew it was perfect. The property needed somebody who would pull out all of the stops to get these squatter/tenants out (they hadn’t even paid rent in months!). Somebody who was young and had the energy to get on their hands & knees to clean up years of filth.
We had an inspector stop by and knew that the building was structurally sound – it just needed massive cosmetic work. This poor, old woman decided to finance the property at a very low interest rate because that would be the only way she’d sell it. People would come by & leave disgusted.
She would have to be willing to finance it, because a lender would never make a loan without an appraisal, and an appraiser would run from the house screaming!! Plus, San Francisco has some strict rent control laws protecting tenants, even awful tenants. With both of these units occupied, even if somebody bought the building, they couldn’t live there.
Plus, they were paying such low rents (when they did pay!), that the building would be a liability, not even close to profitable. This lady was so desperate that by the time I showed up, telling her that I’d give her 10% down, she was thrilled.
That was $26,000, and the thought of buying a $260,000 wreck scared the heck out of me! I talked this woman down to $260,000 from $300,000 – since she inherited the property free and clear, she was able to accept and then finance it at that price. I made a contingency that we wouldn’t buy until at least 1 of the tenants left.
Then we offered them $600 to move. That was 1month’s rent. Since they hadn’t paid rent in several months and were going to get evicted, they gladly accepted. Shortly after, the 2nd tenants left on their own – once they knew that the building was finally getting sold and that they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of us like they did to this older woman.
People always ask how I pulled this deal off.
I was just a child – I had NO credit. I used verifications from utility companies and old landlords to show that I had a history of paying my bills. And it wasn’t easy – it took my boyfriend and I, two years to clean up & remodel the property. We got on our hands and knees cleaning up roaches, mice & other horrors. We shopped all of the local salvage yards and building scrappers to find used & usable construction materials at a HEFTY discount.
After making a few mortgage payments, I was able to get a card for Home Depot & Sears, which enabled us to buy the things we couldn’t find, like appliances. We ate spaghetti for awhile and made sacrifices, but it paid off. Within 6 months the real estate market exploded here. Between that factor & our improvements to the property, our building went from $260k to $550k in 3yrs!
We decided to continue to rent a small one bedroom apartment while renting out both of the building’s units. The rents on that building jumped from $900 and $600 per month to $2,600 & $1,900 per month! With the payment on our 7%, owner financed mortgage being $1,500 a month, you can see that we made a hefty $3,000 a month income off of that building!
That was enough for us to quit our dead-end jobs (as a mover and a bartender), working for people who treated us like we were idiots. We became not just property owners, but self-employed property owners. We were even able to get clean from drugs for the first time in years. Now that we had a hobby, a job we loved to occupy our thoughts and time, it was easier. For the first time in a while I felt that I had real self worth – I had accomplished the impossible dream in San Francisco.
This was unbelievable – and we decided to do it again. This was around the time of the Sept.11th tragedy. While the country was in mourning and the economy crumbled here in the Bay Area (due to the crash of the computer sector), our rents kept coming in every month. While people moved out of the area in droves, we were able to pick and choose from hundreds of properties for sale.
While the Feds kept lowering the interest rates in the hopes of driving the economy, we were able to refinance our owner financed loan. This enabled me to help build my credit up even more, because now my loan was serviced by a bonified lender who reported all of my timely payments to the credit agencies.
I was able to take out $130,000 cash from the equity on the 1st property to buy the 2nd. It was scary, but leveraging the property to buy another was the smartest thing I could have done. Now we own 2 duplexes, and are doing great! I can’t tell you how many people are jealous…… when we show our apartments for rent, the people who show up to look at them are older than us, and boy are they surprised! Even real estate agents marvel at us.
When people ask me how I did it, and I tell them to check out Joe Crump and his no money down program, they balk. They think that it’s a scam, a get rich quick scheme. That it’s not going to work in our area, or that it wouldn’t work for them. I tell them that we aren’t rocket scientists. We’re just two average, young people who had the ambition and energy to succeed – with a little help from our friend!
If WE could do it, ANYONE can do it. If we could make these techniques work in San Francisco, they’ll work anywhere in the country (& probably abroad!). It takes work, yes, and it’s not a get rich quick plan. It’s taken us a little over 3 years to get where we are. But considering that we are still in our 20′s and have already planned our retirement, I’d say that we are on a fast track to success.
We want to acquire one more property before we “retire.” We’ve even considered hiring someone to manage our properties while we move to Thailand! We now own $1.2 million worth of real estate, and $570,000 of that belongs to us! We still live off of only $2,500 a month and we still rent a small apartment – nothing fancy.
We’re still “normal” people – but now we have real stability. Now we have CHOICES. We’re even thinking about taking the next year “off” while I write a real estate book and Dan goes back to school…… this time without student loans.
Again, I have to say……. buy the program, devour every piece of information, give it some time & try out the techniques over & over again. Don’t get discouraged & don’t second guess yourselves. After all, how much is your future worth?
Lisa Hedrick
Berkeley, California
Joe’s Notes: I don’t think I can add anything to that. Thank you, Lisa.
The next email is from Tim Kilmartin from Pennsylvania. He had been in the coaching program for 2 weeks when he sent this letter.
I tell everyone that it will take 3-4 months to have successes like this.
Way to go, Tim. Not everyone has success this early in the program.
First Deal In 2 Weeks
“… was really easy.”
Hello Joe,
My first deal was really easy.
I found a single-family house in my hometown that has been vacant for 3 years. I checked with a Realtor for details and apparently, the owner moved. They hadn’t been able to find a buyer because the house needed some big repairs, like the roof.
I put in a bid at 50% of the appraised value and to my surprise it was accepted!
I got bids from contractors on the repairs and the total costs between purchase price and rehab costs will be right at $32,000 (I live in a very inexpensive community in Central PA).
The best part is that a very comparable house down the street just sold for nearly $70k. I got a preliminary appraisal done, taking into account the rehab work, and my house appraised at $60k. Wow!
My next step was to find a buyer. When I got your second weeks material on ads and signs and so forth, I grabbed my local paper to see how many similar ads were there. To my surprise, I found an ad with some people who were looking to rent a 2 or 3 bedroom house near my town.
Excitedly, I called the number. That person wasn’t looking to travel quite so far, but they knew of another person looking for the same thing in the area where my new house is located.
I called this person and he was extremely excited about my rental. I collected this guy’s personal info (job, previous landlord, etc. like you showed me how to do) and made some calls.
After feeling comfortable with the prospective tenant, I made an appointment to show them the house the next day. He is very excited about the house and its location. Based on the costs I have into the house right now, I will be able to charge monthly rent that will provide me positive cash flow of about $250/month.
Then based on the info you sent me about the things that add the most value to a house, I could be looking at profits over $30k or more when I sell it.
Amazing! I look forward to getting your weekly manual on rehabs. Thanks for all your help already.
Tim Kilmartin
Tyrone, Pennsylvania
Joe,
Right now, this program is almost perfect for me.
Almost all questions are answered either by the manuals or the audios. For those that want to start a business, but can’t afford one-on-one training, this is the best program I’ve come across. I feel that as one of your students, I could have access through email, fax, or phone if I really ran into a problem. But, I wouldn’t want to take advantage of your time unless I really needed it.
Dave Tabern
Urbana, Ohio
Joe’s Notes: I got this next email the day after this Chiropractor joined the Coaching Program. His name is Mareechi Duvvuri, DC and he is goes back and forth between the Bay Area of San Francisco and Hillsboro, Oregon.
“This is intense stuff!”
Joe!
You weren’t kidding. This is intense stuff!
For me the big hurdle was the mental ‘can I do it?’ hurdle. I still have to get through that as it keeps on popping up. With my chiropractic business I had the same problem. I know that I’ve got to just follow the recipe and keep to the program and all will be well. I know this is not a Lotto, thanks to you :~)
It’s a business for life and it needs to grow properly with the right care and nurture…then the fruits will indeed be sweet!
Talk soon, Joe! I’ll be calling soon to set up a one-on-one consultation call.
Mareechi Duvvuri,
DC Hillsboro, OR
Joe,
I have been involved in several training programs that teach how to become a professional real estate investor. I must say that your program has been the most affordable and complete that I have ever used.
I have taken advantage of your www.wewillbuy.com website to market to investors and sellers alike. Each ad I run provides me with the motivated people I need.
I have purchased my first home using these techniques after running my first ad. While I did it with my own money, I was able to purchase it in a way that will make a nice profit once it is sold. I wouldn’t have had this success if not for the lessons I learned from taking your course.
David Leach
Frisco, Colorado
“I’m Just Loving It!”
Hi Joe,
We’ve signed the deal and we have been working right up until dark most nights and by the time I get home, shower, spend some quality time with my cat I’m off to bed.
We are doing great…today I learned how to nail on vinyl siding! Who would have guessed that I would be doing that.
I’m just loving it! I’m hoping to get on the next call as I have a couple of questions, but nothing earth shattering.
Thanks again for your advice…it really helped us in finalizing this deal.
We’ve had 3 people stop and ask if the unit we are working on is for sale and it isn’t even 25% completed!
Two people left me their names and phones numbers so I can call them when it is ready to show! I hope they all go like this! Well, I’m going to finish my emails and then off to bed…I have muscles that ache that I didn’t even know I had.
Ruth Townsend
St. Cloud, Florida
