Financing Your First Real Estate Deal: How to Pitch Your New Business to BanksWould you lend to two recent college graduates who formed a partnership to invest in real estate, with little starting capital, and no business or real estate background? Just a few short years ago I was one of those college grads, eager to get my real estate investing company off the ground, and as you can imagine, securing financing to purchase our first investment property was a major hurdle. The housing collapse … [Read more...]
Financing Your First Real Estate Deal: How to Pitch Your New Business to Banks
May 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment
2012 Rental Update: Increases are a Mixed Bag
May 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment
2012 Rental Update: Increases are a Mixed BagIf you’re thinking about raising the rent or building a business plan based on a rent increase this year, this might be a good time for a reality check on the rosy forecasts issued at the beginning of the year (see Rental Outlook 2012: The Good Times Roll on).Unfortunately for single family landlords, virtually all the rent price data out there is multifamily, which reflects poorly on real estate data providers since there are now more single family … [Read more...]
REO-to-Rental Goes Prime Time
May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
REO-to-Rental Goes Prime TimeThe business of buying up foreclosures and renting them out is no longer the exclusive, private domain of individuals and small companies. REO-to-Rentals is quickly becoming a business plan for multi-million dollar investment groups, a fundamental force in the nation’s real estate economy and a public policy strategy to soak up REOs and preserve property values.The combination of lower vacancies, increasing rental rates, and affordable REO properties has … [Read more...]
Why You’re Failing
January 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Why You’re FailingToday I have a dose of tough love for you. And I’m taking the medicine too, so we’re in this together. I had a training session for some of my students last night and when polled 74% of them did not have a business plan. No plan at all for success. It was shocking but not surprising. And as we went through the training to teach them to create their value statement, business plan and investment criteria it became clear from the questions asked that there was very little … [Read more...]
How Your Business Plan Can Help Keep You Motivated
January 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment
How Your Business Plan Can Help Keep You MotivatedEarlier this month, we discussed the why of having a business plan. But this is not about the why you need one. This is about why having a plan keeps you motivated. This week is considered the most depressing week of the year for a number of reasons including the credit card bills from the holidays, seasonal depression, loss of focus on resolutions and overall disdain with your position in life.I don’t know if you find this “science” to be … [Read more...]
Master REI Business Planning
January 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Master REI Business PlanningDo you have a master plan for your business? Can you articulate what you vision is for this year? The next five years? Tomorrow?If not, it’s time to block off a little time. You may want to block out a whole day, or if you can’t do that – at least an hour a day until you get it done. You need time to get your plan down on paper (or word processor) and really understand where you are going with your real estate investment business.Once you emerge from the cave, … [Read more...]
Business Plan Writing
January 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment
If you’ve even scratched the surface of business plan writing, you’ll notice that there are a few of different structures and purposes for a business plan. You can typically categorize them in three buckets – the master plan and getting the money plan (these are typically required for loan apps) and the plan you present to potential investors.So, how do you choose which structure to use? The simple answer is that you need all three. Start with the master plan and design a getting the money … [Read more...]
Business Planning for the Worst Case Scenario: What Happens if You Die?
January 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Business Planning for the Worst Case Scenario: What Happens if You Die?Today, we’re going to address a tough topic – what if something happens to you? What happens to your business? What happen to your family?This is a huge part of planning your business. You need to plan for the worst case scenario, so that you put the proper actions in place. This is especially important when you are soliciting private money partners. I actually got this question when I approached a relationship financing … [Read more...]
Building A Business Plan
January 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment
As we saw in my last article, building a business plan helps you focus, prioritize and measure your business. Consider it your roadmap to success. You start at point A and get to the next point. If you miss a turn, you can always refer back to it and readjust.Today, we’re going to talk about building the one page business plan for real estate investors. Most business plan templates are long – somewhere between 6 and 10 pages or more. And there is a time and a place for that, but the … [Read more...]
Business Planning
January 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment
It’s officially 2012 and it’s time to kick your business planning into high gear if you haven’t done so already. This month, we’ll be exploring the benefits of REI business planning. You’ll learn a lot about how to put your plan on paper and how to use this tool in sales, tracking and growth.Today, I want to give you the why of having a business plan. A business plan helps you build the framework for your real estate business. And that framework is simply Find, Fund, Manage and … [Read more...]
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