I Made $30,000 On A Deal Without Spending Any Of My Own Money

I Made $30,000 On A Deal Without Spending Any Of My Own Money

Paul: I’m Paul Clark from Greenwood, Indiana. I think an email, I was actually looking for information on investing and stuff like that. It’s been several years ago. Gosh, it’s probably been, I’ve been involved in real estate since 1978. So, I’ve been involved a long time but I think I ran into Joe’s information probably seven or eight years ago. I started, actually started using the lease option technique pretty quickly and I remember the first deal I did, well, we actually bought a property that I wasn’t able to use lease option method to purchase it, but I purchased it myself and I sold it several times that way, so, that was pretty quick. I mean, and that was, I found out that I could do a lot better selling properties that way than I could, and I didn’t like renters, so, it made sense for me.

Paul: Actually, it doesn’t take very long to do the deal. It’s getting the leads is the most difficult part of the process. Fortunately I’ve developed a pretty good lead base today so I’ve got, kind of got leads rolling in every day. And opportunities, but not everything fits, so, you know, as far as the time I spend on it per deal, probably three, four, five hours, total.

Paul: Well, I like to do rehabs, so my best deal has probably been in that end of it. And what happened was, I actually had a property I was looking at. It was a prospective property I wanted to buy. I knew I could probably get negotiated to a value that I could make money on it, but I actually happened to run into a buyer that was looking for exactly that kind of property. So I actually was able to sell the property before I ever bought it. And I don’t mean legally sell it on paper, because I didn’t have possession, or own it, but I was actually able to negotiate with that purchaser and I established a value and once I had the value, once I took possession of the property I just immediately assigned it over to them. We did a rehab and we made about $30,000 on that deal without every using any of our own money. So, that was probably the best deal.

Paul: It’s probably $25,000. Yeah, pretty consistently, because I’m fully engaged in it. I mean, that’s my livelihood. So I just, I’m, everyday I’m looking for deals and talking to people.

Paul: Well, my personal goal is number one, I want to build retirement, you know, I spent a lot of y ears in corporate. A lot of the companies didn’t offer any kind of retirement and that sort of thing, so, I’m just in it to build retirement. My goal, I’m sixty-three, so, full disclosure, my goal is by the time I’m sixty-five is to have over a million dollars in real estate assets and I’ve really been just doing this full time for about a year.

Paul: Had the opportunity to retire and, you know, the company that I worked for was a good company and I enjoyed that, but it was international business development, so required a lot of time and this gave me an opportunity just to take control of my own time, my own destiny, and really work for myself. And that’s really what was attractive to me.

Paul: Oh, I think it’s had a tremendous impact because it’s allowed my wife and I actually to work together. You know, she does her thing and I do my thing, but we do real estate. And that makes it a lot of fun. We can both, we talk about deals, you know, we go out to dinner and talk about deals. So everything we do is kind of centers around the real estate even though we own, we each have other things that we do do, and we enjoy doing, hobbies, or whatever, but, yeah, I think having that control, being able to go see family whenever we want, you know, that sort of stuff.

Paul: Yes, I have, and I recently, actually resubscribed to Joe’s program, to the Automarketer system. I’d signed up several years ago for it, but I’m not a techy, and it was just, I couldn’t grasp it. I couldn’t see, I could see the value of it, I just couldn’t figure out how to use it. So, I signed up again about thirty days ago and I’m slowly learning the system. I see a lot of value in the product. I really do. I see a product that could do a lot of things for my business, specifically. But, learning all the ins and outs of that system is going to take some time, you know, but, I am automating and that’s, I see that, that’s the only way to go in the future. Got to be able to automate.

Paul: I talk to a lot of people. A lot of people are brand new. And you know, the biggest mistake I see are people that don’t educate themselves. They just, you know, they think that they can just jump into real estate and make a lot of money and in fact I’m working with a client right now that owns fifteen properties and I’ve pretty much got control of all those properties and I’m reselling and marketing those properties. But, the point is, he got in over his head within the, and two, within a two-year period go in way over his head and didn’t understand the game and what he needed to look at. He paid too much, he didn’t have cash flow, I mean, there’s a whole bunch of reasons for, so my recommendation is to new people, do your due diligence. At least hook up. And I tell everybody this, at least find a mentor, I mean, I took, I considered Joe a mentor of mine early on in the game. And I listened and tried to apply a lot of stuff he told me, which saved me. I mean, it saved me a lot of headaches and I suggest don’t just go out there and say, oh, I’ve got $100,000 I want to get involved in real estate and make a lot of money. Or I’ve got no money and want to get into real estate.

Paul: Because there are ways of doing it. But, it’s dangerous if they don’t know what they’re doing. And I suggest you get a mentor and have somebody that you can trust and talk to, that will lead you and work with you.

Paul: Yeah, I think that real estate’s always changing. The market’s always changing, you know, obviously the pricing goes up, the pricing goes down. But the market is always changing and the attitudes of the buyers and the sellers is always changing. And you’ve got to be at least cognizant of that. You’ve got to recognize that what worked maybe six months ago doesn’t work today as well. And may not work at all six months or a year from now. And so you’ve got to kind of keep up with the changes going on in the market place and learn how to do, learn how to structure deals differently. Because every, the way you structure deals can be very applicable depending on the market conditions. And today, you know, the For Rent Method has always seemed to work but there’s times it works better and in today’s market when prices tend to be higher, it seems like it works better today than it did when the price in the marketplace was very depressed.