Great Starting Ideas for the New Real Estate Investor
In his interview with me, John Paul Moses, who is the founder of
our Local Memphis Investors Group, was willing to give us some
tips about how to start as a real estate investor. After reading
"Rich Dad, Poor Dead" by Robert Kiyosaki he decided to start as
a real estate investor. The book says to do this you need some
preparation, so he went to the Internet and stocked every bit of
information from the articles, news groups and discussion
forums. By that time he started a long term friendship with Matt
Scott who runs a great website called dealmakerscafe.com. That's
how he learned the meaning of the word "escrow" and what the
difference was between a mortgage and a trust and real estate
basic terminology. The Internet might be one learning ground. If
you buy a real estate course you have to be very careful. The
first course John Paul bought was in his opinion the worst real
estate course and never did a deal from knowledge gained in that
course. But at least he learned real estate terminology and
spending $400 on that course proved to him that he was willing
to invest in his education. John Paul started by making an
announcement in a Sunday paper just saying "real estate
investors group starting, for information give me a call" and he
put a cell phone number there for people to contact him. At
their first meeting they were about 16 people. He stood in front
of those people telling them that he never done a real estate
deal but he was there to learn and make sure that they had those
meetings. They needed a leader and he took the initiative of
being their 1st president. Since then the organization grew to
over 500 members. Now they are a full fledged non profit real
estate investors association with over 150 members in the
Memphis area and since 2002 John Paul has been a real estate
investing guy. He stepped down as the president and he is now
serving as the executive director of the group. Most of the
deals he has done in some way involve somebody from the real
estate investors association, whether they were a buyer or a
seller, money partner or whatever the case might be. Start
working with people in your club because they are real people.
You need to think who the buyers are if they have real cash or
if they have access to the hard money. So, what you have to do
is to pick only those motivated persons and build yourself a
great network of successful people to work with and the investor
groups are great places to find those people. His advice for
somebody who's looking for the structure of an investment group
in another city is that you need to join the national real
estate investment association; you need to get small groups of
people together and join the National REIA (www.nationalreia.com
). They serve as an umbrella organization that supports the
local REIA group. Another benefit of these groups is the
availability of hard money lenders or private lenders within the
group itself. You need to know what your resources are and just
capitalize the costs or hard or private money in that part of
the deal. For example they visited the National Group and
invited some of their board members to have dinner together.
That's the second thing John Paul recommends for everybody who
wants to start a group: model yourself, don't try to figure out
on your own! Another thing a person should do is get those
magnetic We Buy Houses signs for their vehicle. For John Paul
they were worth the $87 investment as they brought him $12,000
profit from transactions altogether on wholesale deals. Nobody
should be embarrassed of using them on their cars because the
one who's embarrassed is letting money pass by. John Paul's
piece of advice for the new real estate investor is to not to be
afraid to act, do not let yourself become paralyzed by fear and
over-analysis. You need to take some time so don't panic. Give
yourself six months and just consume information. A good way is
to listen to tele-seminars or find information on the Internet
or pick some books from the library.