Real Estate Investing and the Advantages of Private Money

With traditional mortgage and hard money lending getting tighter and tighter for most real estate investors - private lending is fast becoming the only option to finance your deals. 

What is private lending?  Private money is a type of creative financing that is usually provided by private individuals who have excess money that they are willing to lend at higher rates than they could get at banks or CD's.  Their investment is usually secured by the property you are buying and NOT by the borrower.  Unlike traditional mortgage lending, the terms and conditions will vary from one lender to another and they usually depend on the agreement between a you and the private lender.

Borrowing money from private money lenders is much easier compared to traditional banks and hard money lenders.  Because a borrower only needs the approval of a single person, he doesn’t have to deal with 4 inches of paper work and a 3 to 4 month approval process only to get reject after a long waiting period.  In addition, he doesn’t have to present lengthy documents and other credentials because private lenders are not interested with such things.  Private lenders first want to know the real estate investment makes economic sense first before they worry about other issues.

Because of such a scenario, real estate investors with poor credit scores can still borrow money from private lenders if they are prepared and the deal makes sense.  However, they must be able to show that their real estate investment makes sense and will generate enough rent to cover their interest payments and the property collateral is worth more than the loan amount.  Therefore, if an investor wants to borrow $125,000 from a private lender, he has to make sure that the collateralize property’s market value will hit the $175,000 with an appraisal once repaired and renovated.

One reason why many real estate investors prefer private money over looking for a business partner who will finance a project is that they can earn bigger profits.  Most private lenders ask for interest rates of 8% to 15% range while business partners are likely to demand a larger portion of the profits when you sell a property.

The key to getting private money is to be prepared and have a well thought out business plan and credibility kit.  Without these two items in place it is hard to image a successful business person giving you money if you do not impress the person with your well thought out business plan.  Take your time and be prepared to answer all the questions about the property such as what are the value of comps, what are rents in the area and what are the cost to fix up the property.  Also spend some time to develop your credibility kit to show your experience and knowledge as a real estate investor.

 

I invite you to learn more about Private Lending and get FREE instant access to a 60 minute audio and 20-page eBook titled "Discover the Secrets of How to Fund Your Real Estate Deals with Private Lenders!" by going to http://realestatewealthtoday.com/FREE-eBook.html.

Mike Lautensack is a full-time real estate entrepreneur in Philadelphia, PA and creator of the Private Lending Presentation Kit. This powerful done-for-you kit is loaded with tools and techniques to attract and develop a consistent stream of private investors into your real estate business. To learn more about this kit and receive your FREE Real Estate Wealth Newsletter go to Private Lender Money Kit .

50 Low or No Cost Marketing Ideas for Today’s Real Estate Investor Using Social Media!

Please join me Tuesday evening November 17, 2009 for a FREE teleconference at 8:00 PM EST and learn “50 Low or No Cost Marketing Ideas for Today’s Real Estate Investor Using Social Media!”

To sign up please go to Tuesday Night Teleconference Tips

Hope to see you there

Mike Lautensack
http://www.learnrealestateinvestingblog.com/

Real Estate Investors - How to Sell Your Property Before You Buy the Property - Build a Buyer List!

With your real estate investment business what is at the top of your "frustration" list?

Could it be trying to determine if a certain property is a good deal not? Trying to determine if your offer prices is "low" enough for you to make a profit in this market place.

For most real estate investors, this dilemma causes a lot of confusion and frustration. This is may be because your definition of a "good deal" may be skewed.

What makes a property a good deal? The answer is: one that has a ready buyer at a profit.

As long as you have a buyer ready and willing to buy that property and there is room for your profit, then you have a good deal on your hands. You can actual predict what your profit will be with the knowledge of the buy and sale price.

For example, if you know you have a property under contract for $120k and you can have a ready buyer lined up to buy from you at $130k you have a $10k profit locked in.

But the obvious question is how do you get a ready buyer?

You do this by building and maintaining a "buyer list". Building a list of ready buyers is the key. If there is a buyer from your list of buyers, who is in the market for the property you are looking at - then voila you have a good deal!

The way to build your buyers list is through aggressive marketing and here are 5 simple ways to start your list:

1. Post an ad on Craig's List, Backpage.com and other local internet bulletin boards with ads like "I sell ugly houses" or"Fixer Homes Avaialble". Do this once per week and be sure to capture everyones email address for future follow up.
2. Write down the phone number when you see "I Buy Houses" signs, ads, and websites. Call these investors and get their info, and let them know you're an investor and would like to bring them properties that are available. Add them to your list, and don't forget to get their e-mail address for when you automate!
3. Hand out at least 24 business cards at REIA meetings and be sure to go to as many REIA meetings as possible. If you not sure about where meeting are go to Meetup.com and search your local area for real estate investors.
4. Talk to everyone and tell them what you do and ask them to spread the words to their friends, family and coworkers.
5. Advertise in small local newspapers that you have "Fixer" homes available for sale and provided a phone number and email address.

I invite you to learn more about Real Estate Investing and become a member of our FREE weekly tele-seminar class where we teach tips and strategy on how to grow your real estate investing business and how to raise Private Money by going to http://www.realestatewealthtoday.com/TuesdayTipsSignUp.html.

Mike Lautensack is a full-time real estate entrepreneur, coach and mentor in Philadelphia, PA and creator of the Private Lending Presentation Kit. This powerful done-for-you kit is loaded with tools and techniques to attract and develop a consistent stream of private investors into your real estate business. To learn more about this kit and receive your FREE eBook go to Real Estate Investing Blog .

Real Estate Investing - Learn How to Make Money in Real Estate Without Cash

It is a widely held belief that if someone wants to invest in real estate market, he must be loaded with cash. The idea is not entirely true. If you don't have enough money you can still invest in real estate. The notion seems unbelievable at first glance but it's true. Real estate investing with no money to put down is a viable option.

In order to invest in real state without down money, you must be creative in your approach and devise various methods for utilizing other people's money to finance your transactions. Some of those innovative methods are listed below:

Use Double escrow

If you have a finance background, you must have heard of the escrow account. There is such a term as double escrow. Double escrow means buying and selling property at almost the same time. The money received from sale is utilized to pay the purchase price of the property. The sale price is a bit higher then the purchase price which is your profit. In a double escrow, profit is realizable only after both part of the transaction are simultaneously completed. Before going into this kind of transaction you must first secure both ends of the deal or you might end up in a jam.

Use seller's financing

Usually a property owner already has one or other lending facility. What you have to do is convince him that you are going to take over his mortgage for a specified period of time until you can find a suitable buyer for the property. When the property is sold, the sale proceeds of the property can be used to pay off the mortgage. The difference amount is your profit.

Mortgage Take Over

There is a paragraph in virtually all loan agreements which is called "due-on-sale" clause. This clause stipulates that when the title of a property is transferred, the lender has the right to demand full settlement of his loan. According to this clause it is the lender's prerogative whether or not to demand full settlement of loan. If you take over a mortgaged property and make timely payments there is every chance that the lender will not exercise his right of "due-on sale". This way you can buy properties without having to go through a credit check. The properties can later be sold to prospective buyers.

You might be discouraged in the beginning when you go and try out any of the above mentioned options. But there are great opportunities of making money in the real estate market without down money. The key is to build a workable real estate investing strategy and not get discouraged by early failures.

I invite you to learn more about Real Estate Investing and become a member of our FREE weekly tele-seminar class where we teach tips and strategy on how to grow your real estate investing business and how to raise Private Money by going to http://www.realestatewealthtoday.com/TuesdayTipsSignUp.html.

Mike Lautensack is a full-time real estate entrepreneur, coach and mentor in Philadelphia, PA and creator of the Private Lending Presentation Kit. This powerful done-for-you kit is loaded with tools and techniques to attract and develop a consistent stream of private investors into your real estate business. To learn more about this kit and receive your FREE eBook go to
Real Estate Investing Blog.

Residential Property Management: Tips on How to Find Renters Using Newspaper Advertising

Importance of Headlines

Particularly with newspapers you don’t have a lot of space and it’s expensive, so you’re going to have maybe a headline, one or two bullet points, and then a phone number or website. You don’t have a lot of space so you’ve got to make sure that you do it the right way. Your headline has to be appealing.

Let’s use Louisville as an example. You don’t need to put Louisville in your headline. Everybody knows it’s a Louisville newspaper. You’ve wasted your space. We see that mistake a lot.

Putting irrelevant words in your headlines doesn’t mean too much. Make sure your headlines have relevant words. If it’s a particular neighborhood or section of town, if it’s a well-known area, make sure you put that in there, but not the town.

Be Concise

Be very concise. If you can drive them to your voice mail system or your website, that’s the best way to do it. They would go there and find out if they have some interest. They would see some photos or the video and would kind of screen themselves out and save you a lot of time.

Be Careful of Fair Housing

One thing you’ve got to be careful of is violation of Fair Housing when you advertise. Remember people are going to look at your ad and claim somehow that you’re being in violation of Fair Housing rules. This is a whole subject by itself. We can spend a whole night talking about this. You have to be careful about the words you use.

You can’t use words like church – even if it’s right next to the biggest church in town, or directly across from the biggest church in town. You can’t mention that church. That is a violation.

You can’t mention any sort of family – “It’s a family neighborhood.” If you say the words “family neighborhood” in theory you might be implying that single people aren’t welcome so you’ve got to be careful.
Or vice versa, if you use “apartment designed for singles,” it might be construed as excluding families. Be careful about the words you use. Think about them a little bit.

One of the things I’m going to do on the checklist you’re going to get from me is there are a lot of things in there in terms of words to use and then alternative words to use, particularly if you want to write an ad and you want to use the word fantastic three times.

It will give you fantastic and then give you two or three alternative words to use to try and mix up your words. My template ads are on that checklist. You’re going to get those as part of this program.

Be careful of Fair Housing. If you want HUD offers, in most areas a one day course doesn’t cost much, say $25, where you can take a Fair Housing course. You can learn all about the rules and regulations of Fair Housing. If you’re a serious property management I would do that. Go and spend a Saturday or whatever day they offer that course, take it and learn those rules and regulations and keep yourself out of hot water.

I invite you to learn more about Property Management and get a free 60 minute audio titled “Learn the 10 Success Secrets of Property Management Every Real Estate Investor Must Know to Maximum Profit and Avoiding Tenant Headaches” by going to http://www.realestatewealthtoday.com/PMS.html.
 
Mike Lautensack is the owner of Del Val Property Management LLC, a FULL service residential property management company located in Philadelphia, PA.

Learn How to Collect Rent and Deal With the Eviction Process Without Attorneys

Collecting rent is one of those situations where I have to use some rules of thumb, some feeling, some gut to try to figure out whether it's time to go and do the eviction or do we try to work with the tenant and see if they can get caught up. Maybe it's a temporary problem. We can do a weekly or monthly payment plan and maybe we can get them back on paying again.

In the same token, if I don't feel it's going to happen, we have to go to eviction quickly. There's no point in waiting and spending two or three months waiting around for something that's not going to happen. That takes some gut feel and experience.

Know the Rules for Eviction

We'll talk about the eviction process. There again, just like the rules and regulations, you've got to be smarter than your tenants. You've got to know the rules better than they do, because if you don't, I guarantee you they will take advantage of you. They will tell you things that are not accurate and if you buy into it you're going to end up being their whipping post.

Now every state might be slightly different and I recommend you go to Google and search for your sate and landlord regulations and study them front to back. Knowing the rules and then enforcing them is the single most important thing in terms of collecting rent.

Should you use an attorney for evictions? You guys can do it better than an attorney can. They will do almost nothing for you except the fact that they're attorneys and they'll charge you $250-300 an hour.

I can probably out perform any attorney in this area and I can do it for $50 an hour for my clients, probably one sixth of what they'll pay an attorney.

How to Retain Tenants

How to work with tenants and try to encourage them to stay tenants, making sure that you're resolving issues with them in a friendly and professional way so they say, "Hey, yeah, I want to stay another year, two years, three years whatever."

If you are late with doing maintenance, you drag your feet, you try to find excuses why not to do it every time they call you, you don't return their calls, they got a little drip here and there, you don't fix it, do you think they're going to stay that second year after that lease runs out? I don't think so.

Again, you want to keep at it. You want to work within trying to keep the tenants as long as possible. Also, we have little things in our lease that encourage tenants to sign a new one-year lease. They can go month-to-month but there are some penalties - I wouldn't call it that - but just some things in that lease that make it more onerous on them as opposed to coming back to me and saying, "I'd rather have a new one-year lease than go month-to-month."

We probably have 75 to 80% of our tenants come back to us for a new one-year lease as opposed to remaining month-to-month. It's hard for you as landlords and owners to manage if you don't know beyond 30 days whether your tenant's staying or going. It's much nicer to have a one-year lease and you know that for the next 12 months at least you're going to get rent, so we'll talk about that.

I invite you to learn more about Property Management and get a free audio titled "Learn the 10 Success Secrets of Property Management Every Real Estate Investor Must Know to Manage Your Own Investments Properties for Maximum Profit and Avoiding Tenant Headaches" by going to http://www.realestatewealthtoday.com/PMS.html

Mike Lautensack is the owner of Del Val Property Management LLC, a FULL service residential property management company located in Philadelphia, PA.

The Advantages of Professional Property Management Vs “Mom and Pop Management”

One of the things we’re going to focus on is what is professional management versus mom and pop management. Now many of you may have a couple properties. Maybe you’ve read a book on property management, I don’t know, but if you ultimately want to make a business and to grow wealth and to be a serious real estate investor, you need to become a professional property manager.

That is you’re better at it than most people. You’re better at it than nine out of 10 investors. You take it seriously because you’re investing a lot of your own money in these properties, a lot of your time and a lot of your energy, and you want to get the most you can out of it.

That’s where the money is, because if you don’t manage it properly, the value of that asset declines rapidly. I guarantee you, if you’ve bought a property, put a bad tenant in there and they destroyed your property, you’re looking at $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 of damage. Not that property management can totally eliminate that possibility, but certainly professional management versus mom and pop management makes a huge difference.

Advantages of Property Management

We’re going to go through that and understand that process. We’re going to go through the advantages of property management. Why is it worth you getting on this call for two hours for a series of four calls? What are the monetary advantages of doing it? Are there monetary advantages to it? Why not just read a $12 book?

Sure, you can do that, but everybody knows reading a book is a hard way to learn. It’s not interactive. You won’t have the ability to fire questions at me. Maybe you’re pretty good at property management and you have a couple areas you’re weak at. You won’t have the ability to fire questions at me.

Again, filling a rental. Let’s say we had a $900 a month rental. Filling it 30 days earlier than you would otherwise puts $900 in your pocket. So the monetary issues here are tremendous. Keeping a tenant a second year as opposed to losing them because you didn’t treat them right or you didn’t fix the property right or whatever, reselling a vacancy is tremendously expensive.

You could be looking at two months vacancy, $900 per month, and costs you have to pay to maybe carpet in between tenants, so maintaining a tenant is again a huge monetary issue. So there are clearly some monetary issues here that can be quite overwhelming in terms of cost savings.

We’re going to talk about the importance of education, these kinds of calls tonight, the importance of doing it on a continuous basis, meaning joining your real estate clubs, looking for other resources, maybe join my coaching program at some point down the road, but continue to educate yourself further and more completely as time goes by.

Again, a professional real estate investor continues the education process and never stops. A mom and pop learns a couple things and then stops. We’re going to talk about the difference between the two. How to do things like develop contacts and network, how to work with contractors.

I invite you to learn more about Property Management and get a free audio titled “Learn the 10 Success Secrets of Property Management Every Real Estate Investor Must Know to Manage Your Own Investments Properties for Maximum Profit and Avoiding Tenant Headaches” by going to http://www.realestatewealthtoday.com/PMS.html

Mike Lautensack is the owner of Del Val Property Management LLC, a FULL service residential property management company located in Philadelphia, PA.