Commercial Real Estate Investment Articles

A few weeks ago, I orderedWilliam Bronchick’s Big Profits with Lease Options that JP Vaughan had recommended. Well, here is the story:

I have completed my first creative real estate investment, and I am very grateful to all of you as I have learned so much from the site. Here is the outline of the deal…

I promised JP Vaughan I would share my first deal, so here it is. I started visiting this website about three weeks ago and learned everything about doing this deal from the people on this site. I didn’t have any money to buy a course, so I just lived on this site and learned all that I could.

Our story starts five years ago when we started a bowling publishing business. At first, the business grew, and did quite well for the first 3-1/2 years. Then the bottom started dropping out. As the industry slowed down, we lost advertisers and, of course, revenue.

I enjoy reading the Success Stories on CRE Online, and I would like to share this one with the other readers. I track all the bank foreclosures in my area (Baltimore City) of which there are about 350-500 filed every month. Of these, only about 5-7% have enough equity to make them worth considering, which means about 18-35 per month. I wait until a day or two before the auction to make sure it is still on because most of these are canceled.

To everyone who asked me about bank REOs (real estate owned), this is an answer to all. How do I get REOs? Three ways:

I found a nice 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath, 2 car garage ranch house in a nice neighborhood that was going into bank foreclosure. For the last four or five months I had been sending the owner postcards and letters. I called him and even knocked on his door a couple of times, but was unable to catch him at home.

Several months ago, I was talking to an owner facing a foreclosure on his home that had considerable equity. He was hoping to refinance and get cash out. However, he was self-employed and could not substantiate any income, so refinance was just not possible.

My father was surfing on the net around the first part of 1997, and he ran across this website. He thought Lonnie Scruggs had some good ideas and bought Deals On Wheels.

In less than three years, we have gone from nothing to owning 26 mobile homes that are owner financed and a mobile home park with another 25 units. We have done all of this using less than $2500 of our own money. The rest was OPM–other people’s money. We also did this part time because I am a full-time paramedic, and my wife works full time for the state of Alabama.

One year ago, my wife and I were living paycheck to paycheck. I was working a job I didn’t want to be at while she was attending college. On January 10, 1998 I quit my job (family business) out of frustration. Having no job and no income gave me the motivation I needed to dive into real estate investing.

This is a deal that many of you here on Creative Real Estate Online helped me with, so I wanted to submit it as a success story. This deal actually took about two weeks to put together. It started when I called an ad for a house for rent in our local paper.

It all started about a year and a half ago when I decided it was time to own my own home. I did not want to pay a lot. I am a painter by trade and know many people in the other trades.

I went to a local real estate auction where about 30 mobile homes were being auctioned off. Before the auction, I previewed 27 of the 30 mobiles. Some were dogs, but many were very nice. This was an absolute auction.

After getting engaged two months ago, I realized that I would like to buy a house some time in the future for my new family. I have had terrible credit for a few years now due to poor money management and reacting poorly to situations that life has given me despite being an intelligent person.

I would like to take the opportunity to share my first success story with my fellow investors. It is a story of how I did a lease option with a military transfer. Having been in the military myself for the last fourteen years, It didn’t take long for me to believe the transfers would be motivated, once I learned about lease options from Joe Kaiser.

While flipping through a real estate ad a few years ago, I noticed a repo for sale in just the neighborhood I wanted. I immediately called my broker and we set off to see it. We couldn’t get in. His key wouldn’t work. Apparently the locks were not modified yet, and the bank hadn’t made all the arrangements yet. It was a 3-bedroom, single-family, with basement and garage listed at $35,000. Ugliest house on the block.

On Christmas Eve, I did my first lease option deal on a beautiful single family that I will be living in myself. I gave them contract, and they signed it, no problem. They were actually happy that I saved them the attorneys’ fees! The deal worked out like this:

I have been lurking on this site for five or six weeks. I executed a couple of mobile home deals as per the numerous postings here, with good results. Then I read Ben Innes-Ker’s $5 Option/$30,000 Profit Success Story last week and decided to run an ad in our local paper saying: “I Buy Houses.” I did not expect to get any responses as this is a mostly rural area with a few towns of under 20,000 people scattered widely apart.

I decided it was time to submit my success story. In my first few months, I made some costly newbie errors that I feel I should share with other newbies, so they don’t make the same mistakes.

January 31, 1999 – I called a manager of a local mobile home park to see if a certain mobile home could stay in the park. I had talked to the owner and he said, “Sure, it can stay.” I asked him if he knew of any others that might be for sale. He said the park had one for sale for $500.

My partner Mark and I (I call him legs, he’s the young one and does all the running around) have been very active this past year. On January 1st, 1998 we had one three-unit apartment house and two tenants.

I was a cop for almost a decade. I had become burned out, and most days dreaded going to work. I knew there had to be something else for me, but did not have a clue as to what. All I knew my whole adult life was law enforcement.

One day while playing with my computer, My wife and I stumbled on to the CRE Online website. We read everything we could on the website and chose to order the book, Deals on Wheels by Lonnie Scruggs. We figured this was a good place to start and couldn’t believe how simple the whole theory seemed to be.

In January 1997, I found myself on the streets without a job and very disillusioned with the prospect of going back to work in corporate America.