Beginning investors have a tendency to get stressed out by the very thought of “negotiation”. They put off calling sellers (or calling them BACK) for days and days. They worry about what the seller might say and what they should say back to the seller. It’s as if they believe that something they could say…

Mr. Landlord is probably the country’s most beloved speaker, period. It’s probably because he’s super-experienced (over 40 years in the business), super-successful (collects over a million a year in rent!), super-sharing (he teaches how to increase your rents and decrease vacancies by providing more services to your residents!) and, well, super-entertaining. If you’re in the…

Let’s face it: making deals complicates our lives.   When we first become involved in real estate, buying a property can be very anxiety-provoking: I mean, really, even though we’ve done all of our due diligence and run the numbers 15 different ways and talked to our favorite mentor about it and it STILL looks like…

When are we just going to admit that EVERY TIME the government gets involved in the housing, it distorts the market and makes it harder for Americans to get the housing they want?  Go ahead, deny it: talk about how FHA and Section 8 are actually good for housing. Then look at the reality: FHA allows…

By now, everyone on the planet is familiar with the software engineer’s term GIGO, or “garbage in, garbage out”. It’s a way of saying that you can’t get good results with programming. And, unfortunately, our business is VERY susceptible to GIGO. Let’s look, for instance, at a “wholesale” deal I was recently sent: “Great rental…

Jon Hanson was a successful real estate investor from the Columbus, Ohio area when a 7-year battle with the IRS nearly ruined his life, his health, and his finances. It was from this experience that he learned some hard lessons about credit and debt—lessons that he shares in his book Good Debt, Bad Debt, available  at the Amazon.com link on…