It Had Nothing To Do With Me Or My Hard Work
For many years I searched up and down the East Coast – from Pennsylvania to Georgia – looking for hot markets to invest in.
I built a big in-house team of sales people, acquisition specialists and support staff. We had lots of mouths to feed so we had to keep the deal pipeline filled.
In the beginning, I focused on Transactional Income because
I didn’t know there WAS anything else.
I was only looking for good DEALS, tying up undervalued property and either improving it, or flipping it. (FYI – looking for good deals is the exact opposite of what you need to do. I’ll show you the proof HERE)
We’d go from county to county and state to state casting a very big acquisition net, send out thousands of mailers and tying up or buying only the cream-of-the-cream real estate DEALS. Then we’d spend a ton of money advertising in hundreds of places, we’d have a full time sales floor setting appointments, even a secretary whose main job was simply to attend closings… you get the idea, it was a well-oiled machine.
You know those big checks you see on ALL the late night real estate infomercials, where someone gives a testimonial and shows a copy of the check they walked away from the closing table with, sorta’ like this….
Well, we were bringing home those big fat checks all the time, sometimes two or three a day… There were even plenty of times we’d walk out of closing with BOTH a deed AND a big fat check.
Well… there’s a missing piece to those late night infomercials….
They never talk about the bills you’ve got to pay out of that big fat check.
Churning money isn’t
the same as MAKING money.
It’s a lesson we all learn sooner or later. There were plenty of times we were making money hand-over-fist, then paying most of it out in expenses. That’s the dirty little secret about transactional income – you’ve got major expenses and big demands on your time. My wake-up call happened when I stumbled into some red hot markets, purely by accident.
In hot markets… everything we
touched seemed to turn to gold.
We’d sell out faster than we could acquire.
Our marketing cost-per-call or per sale would drop to almost nothing.
Our sales-to-showings ratio went through the roof.
Our holding period was measured in days, not months.
Our profit margins soared.
We made money and we kept it.
The moral of that story is… after many years of hard-learned lessons,
I finally stopped targeting DEALS
and started targeting MARKETS.
That life lesson is why I think it’s a disservice to yourself and your family to limit your activities to one market simply because that’s where you happen to live. Talk about random, haphazard investing, especially in this age of virtual investing and extreme disparities between one market and the next… it’s NEVER been this volatile.
What used to take my staff weeks to accomplish – physically going to courthouses 500 miles away to get property records and other due diligence, you can now do in a few minutes on the internet.
There’s an incredible diversity of markets and opportunity… some bursting with opportunity, others mired in hopelessness.
Your only truly limited resource is your time… your opportunity cost… what you give your attention to.
If you invest in mediocre or flat markets, time just keeps passing by. You’ll eventually reach the same conclusion… but will you reach it in time?
You won’t create Generational
Wealth in crummy markets.
You’ll just grow older and more frustrated trying to generate Transactional Income and covering your bills.
It doesn’t take more time to invest in hot markets. Over the long term, it’s probably much easier because your days and years aren’t spent scrambling, trying to save a deal, find a tenant or a buyer… or getting your butt out of the hot seat.
Weak real estate markets produce lots of problems, lots of work and stress but no return. They’re a grind.The hard part – learning how to locate the wealth markets – is already done and tested. I’ve been blazing that trail for you for the last 30 years.
See The Proof in my latest Real Estate Market Report (It Will Blow You Away!)
