I often tell people that becoming a millionaire in the real estate business is an easy thing to accomplish. They usually give me a look of bewilderment. I say that you don’t have to understand every aspect of real estate in order to begin investing. The best thing to do is start with a basic buy-and-hold strategy purchasing whatever type of property you are capable of buying with as little money down as possible. How you buy something with as little money down as possible depends on your financial situation and what types of mortgages you’re capable of qualifying for. Since guidelines for mortgages and government intervention changes daily, it’s impossible for me to tell you the best way to do that. I can tell you how I did it for years using the all-money-down technique I described earlier in the book. But I’ll give you a quick refresher course below.

If you bought $100,000 house through conventional means, you may have to put 20 percent down is $20,000 plus closing costs that will cost you approximately $3000. In this example, you put $23,000 down to buy $100,000 investment property. Using the all-money-down technique, you would buy a $100,000 property for cash putting all $100,000 down plus the closing costs of $3000. At this point, you have $103,000 down on the property and you begin to invest an additional $5000 to fix the property up. You now have a total of $108,000 of your money into the property. You put the property up for rent and you find a good tenant, so now you’re empty investment property is a business making money and shows a profit. Now you go to the bank and you get the property appraised with the intention of doing a cash-out refinance. Because you fixed up the property and it’s a money-making business, the property appraises for $114,000. The bank is willing to lend you an 80 percent mortgage on the $114,000 appraisal giving you a mortgage of $91,200. You originally put down $103,000 and received back a mortgage for $91,200 making your out-of-pocket costs $11,800.

When using the all-money-down technique as compared to buying a property through conventional methods, you save $11,200. Now of course, you’re going to have a higher mortgage and less cash flow coming from the property, but you’re also going to have $11,200 to buy the next property with.

Sometimes the homes you buy are going to cost you $10,000 to buy; other times you’re going to break even on the deal. You might even be lucky enough to actually get paid to buy a house, which has happened to me once or twice. The goal was simply to just keep buying as many properties as possible until you build up a portfolio worth millions of dollars. You will make a profit from the cash flow, but most likely that’s going to go back and do things like repairs and vacancies in all the other issues that come up with real estate. If you do end up banking $10,000 during the year from the cash flow of your buildings, there is your down money to buy an additional property and expand your portfolio further.

I have constantly repeated that you’re not going to find the cash flow to be something of tremendous value to you. The cash flow will help pay for the necessary things and give you down money for future deals, but in the end you will work hard for very little money. The real surprise will come when you’ve ridden the cycle from bottom to top and created a gap between your portfolio’s value and the amount of mortgages that you owe for the building. Accruing equity in your buildings, you will slowly begin to see your net worth increasing as the years go on.

For example let’s just say you bought one property a year for five years valued at $100,000 a property. Since the five years that you bought the properties, values have gone up somewhat and the mortgages have gone down, and your net worth is the equity in between. As you begin to see this throughout your investing career, especially when the market is on the rise, it can be an exciting time.

Your expectations should be to live off of the income from your job while the profit from the rental property business is used to fuel its needs. You’ll usually get to a point somewhere when a real conflict will develop between your current career and your real estate investments. It’s hard to be in two places at once, and ultimately it will begin to catch up with you. For me this conflict was easily resolved since I only wanted to be doing real estate anyway, but if you love your day job and you plan to continue it through your life, you’re going to have to make some tough decisions. You could keep your day job, but someone is going to have to run your portfolio.

I maintain that getting a seven-figure net worth in equity strictly in your real estate holdings is not that difficult to do. I recommend you join real estate investment clubs and read as many books as you possibly can. As you begin to make investments, you’ll find friends in the businesses that relate to your industry such as people in the mortgage business. I recommend that you associate with as many of these people as possible so that your knowledge of the industry expands tremendously.

A friend of mine who’s an intelligent guy took some of this advice and began moving quickly. In his first year, I think he bought two properties, but by his second year he was already doing $300,000 flips and buying multiunit investment properties with a partner that he has. First of all, I’m not a big fan of partnership for the deal size he was doing, and second, I think he was growing a little too fast. If he didn’t have a job, I wouldn’t have a problem with the speed of his growth, but because he had a well-paying job, I cautioned him not to move too fast. The second half of 2009 was a rough year for him as his $300,000 flip was not selling, and he’s already had to do two evictions. Carrying the mortgage and his $300,000 flip was expensive and was already causing some tension in his partnership. It’s not going to be all fun and games; as your portfolio grows, your problems grow with it and the workload grows.

Another thing I can say about the issues in the real estate business is that they seem to come in waves. Even when I owned dozens of homes, I would go six months where I wouldn’t need to change a doorknob and then all of a sudden all hell would break loose. I’d be dealing with an eviction, two vacancies, and apartments that were destroyed. When it rains it pours in the real estate business; at least that’s the way it worked out for me. I remember on two separate occasions during the summertime one year followed by the next summer a year later I was bombarded with all kinds of issues. In this business, you can’t let a vacant property sit and wait because you’re losing money every day it’s not rented. The process of getting it renovated and re-rented is the highest importance.

As bad as I make it sound, I think you’ll find it all to be worth it in the end. It seems that no matter how much money I made, I have learned in my career I never really save. As you earn more money, your lifestyle increases and you begin to upgrade your homes and cars to the point where your bills go right along with your salary. The real estate business is almost like a bank account you really can’t touch easily without selling a building, so it continues to grow and feed off of itself. It’s a terrific feeling when you realize that your $550,000 portfolio experienced a 10 percent increase in values in the last year and you’re up an additional $55,000.

I’m using the same principles today in the commercial arena buying larger buildings with similar strategies. I can’t buy a $3 million building with the technique, but there are many other things that can be worked out in the commercial world. Nowadays I use strategies that involve complex negotiations with the sellers where I convince them to carry paper or lease option the building. I can also borrow money from banks for commercial investments giving the bank that piece of real estate I am buying as collateral as well as existing pieces of real estate as collateral. I call it redundant collateralization and am seeing more and more of it every day from banks.

If you can go from broke to seven figures in one real estate cycle as I’ve suggested easily making yourself $1 million during your first real estate cycle, then just imagine what you can do in your second real estate cycle. I plan to be carrying a real estate portfolio with the value north of $10 million and have that portfolio under my control before the real estate market begins to show any gains. I expect the gains will begin to show sometime around 2013 or later. Can you imagine if you’re holding a $10 million portfolio and the real estate market goes up a meager five percentage points? It doesn’t matter how much money I made that year in income because as long as I can keep my business afloat I am up half a million dollars in equity in one year. If I’m ever lucky enough to see the crazy increases that we saw in 2005, can you imagine what it will feel like to see a 20 percent increase in values in one year when you’re holding a portfolio worth eight figures?

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt

Let’s dream about holding a portfolio worth $12 million when the market goes up 20 percent giving me a one-year tax free gain of $2,400,000. I believe that this is a realistic expectation for my second cycle of the real estate business. In the year 2025, I will be sixty years old. I feel certain that if I continue to just do what I’ve been doing my whole life, I surely should have a net worth of many millions of dollars strictly for my real estate holdings. I know of no other way to make money in these types of numbers as easily as I do in the real estate business. I don’t deny that other people have the means to make this kind of money or even more, but I am not familiar with those methods. I consider myself an expert on real estate, and I certainly feel as some of the things I’m talking about here will happen to me as long as I’m lucky enough to still be breathing when 2025 rolls around.

This is why I love the real estate business, and this is why I’m pumped every day to get out and keep it going because I can see my future is filled with bright and sunny days. I feel terrific about getting up in the morning and going to work, and when you have that kind of attitude, there’s no way you can fail. This morning I woke up at 5:30 a.m. and went to my office building to reorganize some equipment in our communication room. I’m spending some afternoon hours on a Sunday working on my book and feeling great about my possibilities. If you love what you do, you will be much happier and much more successful at whatever you try.

I don’t even consider the things that I did this morning or writing this book as work in the regular way people think of it. Obviously, it is work that I’m doing, but I don’t have a negative feeling about the word work or what it entails. I get a terrific sense of accomplishment from getting up in the morning and making things that happen furthering along my career each day in baby steps toward the ultimate goal of massive wealth accumulation. I hope that some of you reading this book will really grasp the things I’m talking about above. I feel that may be the most important message in the entire book.

Here’s an idea you should think about after you buy your first property. Make sure that you take some time after you bought it to really analyze what’s going to be involved in being a real estate landlord. If you like it or even love it, let’s get the party started, and if you don’t get out right now. If you’re going to proceed in the business just for the money but despise dealing with tenants and working on buildings, you really have to be careful and reconsider what you’re about to do. This business is not for wimps, and it takes a heck of a lot of guts to be a real estate investor. To get to the level that I have achieved, you may have to take half of your net worth and roll the dice on some large commercial building risking the twenty years of hard work on one deal. Until you go through that process, I can never truly explain to you what that will feel like. My name is Phil, and I’m addicted to real estate.

As a real estate investor and advisor, I often see novice investors make the same exact mistakes. As a result, I decided to create the following list to help novices understand what these common mistakes are and how to avoid them. The good news is that all of these mistakes can be easily corrected. The bad news is that any one of these mistakes will seriously limit your potential for success. In my experience, these are the 9 most common mistakes I see novice real estate investors make:

1) Not getting an education

Getting an education is a critical part of becoming a successful real estate investor. It’s much easier and less costly to educate yourself than to make mistakes in the real world. We are lucky to live in a country full of educational opportunities for whichever endeavor we want to pursue. Surprisingly though, not everyone takes the initiative to learn before they take action. This exposes these people to costly (and sometimes career-ending) mistakes that could have easily been avoided. Some misguided people even complain that the books, courses, or seminars promoted by real estate experts are too expensive. I guess that depends on where you stand. To me, they seem cheap compared to what I know can be earned in this business. Perhaps to a novice though, they may seem expensive. But as the saying goes, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” Think about it. Is a $500 course worth it if what you learn only makes you $5,000 on a single wholesale deal? What if it could save you a mere $5,000 on a single rehab? Or what if it helped you create an extra $200 per month cash flow on a single property for just one year? Would it be worth it to you? The value of an education often doesn’t reveal itself until you’ve stepped up to the plate and put yourself in the game.

2) Not getting an education from the right people

The internet is a great tool. But it’s also saturated with too much information – good and bad. Oftentimes, from less than credible sources. So don’t confuse the information you find on the internet as necessarily being quality information. For example, there are a number of real estate investing newsgroups and blogs that have proliferated the internet. Many so called experts on these sites are more than willing to share enough information to get you into trouble. Do you really want to get your information from “rei-man-TX” or “investor-guy75?” Carefully consider whether these are truly reputable sources to be obtaining information from. I can’t believe some of the misinformation I’ve seen posted on these sites. Remember, anyone can post on a newsgroup and anyone can create a blog. But just because someone has a blog, doesn’t mean they necessarily know what they’re talking about. The misinformation you get may be costly…in either lost profits or reputation.

Novice investors may also get misinformation from friends or family members. Perhaps they dabbled in real estate at one point. Now they feel entitled to tell you what little they may know about real estate investing. Be extremely wary of people who have “dabbled” in anything. Dabblers are rarely experts in anything. As the saying goes, “Jack of all trades, master of nothing.”

3) Not taking action

If you’ve managed to get a good education from a good source, the next step is to take some action. Knowledge is only power once you begin to apply it properly. Merely buying a wide array of real estate investing products or attending bootcamps isn’t going to make you any money. Some novices neglect to take action because they’re still searching for that magical secret that is going to make it start raining deals. The real secret is hard work! Others are paralyzed by fear of what might happen if they get one of their offers accepted. Or, they may give up making offers if they don’t experience instant success. Whatever the reason, not taking consistent action is a sure way to fail at anything. Personally, I believe that initial failure is the universe’s way of forcing us to make sure we truly want what we’re pursuing. In the end, persistence is what leads to success. And the more we persist, the closer we get to success.

Many novices regularly attend their local real estate clubs. Clubs and associations are excellent way to network with other like-mided people, learn techniques and strategies, and have fun. Unfortunately, I’ve met countless club goers who have never done a deal before. Instead of using the club as a spring board into taking action, they tend to use the club as a warm blanket because they fear being out on their own. When I meet these people, my advice to them is to stop sitting around with the other novices talking about all the deals they would like to be doing. My advice is simple, go out there and get some deals done. We all need a good education. But that is only one step in the process. There is no substitute for hard work.

4) Not having realistic expectations

Most novice real estate investors have unrealistic expectations. It may be about the amount of repairs a property needs, the time it takes to complete a project, or the profit they should get from a deal. They’re expectations are either too high or too low. If they’re wholesaling properties, they may get too greedy and try to charge the rehabber too much. If they’re rehabbing properties, they may underestimate the repairs required. If they’re landlording, they may underestimate the amount of maintenance a property will require or forget to factor in vacancies. While getting an education plays a large role in these mistakes, another reason is that they did not leave enough room for error. They assumed everything would go as planned. Real estate deals rarely go exactly as planned. Experienced investors understand the importance of planning for the unexpected. This way, when things don’t go as planned it’s not the end of the world.

5) Not treating real estate investing as a business

Contrary to popular belief, real estate investing is not like the stock market. It is not a passive investment. It is an active investment. Whether a novice investor’s intentions are to flip or to own rentals, they sometimes think owning real estate is going to be a lot easier than it is. While the profit potential in real estate is usually much greater than owning a stock, it inherently requires more effort than most passive types of investments. Whether you’re wholesaling, rehabbing, or landlording, real estate requires your time and constant attention. In this way, it’s more like a business than an investment. For example, you must be disciplined about your business. You need to set a schedule for yourself and stick to it. You need to set policies and procedures and adhere to them. You need to set goals and do whatever you can to achieve them. Not everyone has that level of discipline without a boss telling them what to do. When you run your own business, you are the boss. You must be willing to make sacrifices to succeed. For you this might mean that you need to turn off the television and read your home-study courses. It might mean that instead of spending money on new clothes, you invest that money in your business. Or it might mean that instead of going to the park on Saturday you search the MLS, look at properties, and familiarize yourself with your target neighborhoods.

6) Not being patient

It can take awhile for novice investors to see positive results when starting out. You can’t expect to immediately find deals and make money. It may take several months to get your first deal. As a comparison, new real estate agents are often told by their brokers that it may take up to six months to close their first transaction. Similarly, real estate investors should expect to wait a few months to close their first transaction. Furthermore, it can take years for your real estate investing business to become a thriving venture. There aren’t too many businesses that become profitable immediately – no matter the type of business. It often takes several years for most businesses to get to a point where they make steady and reliable profits. Running your own business can be fun and extremely rewarding. But rest assured, the early years can be unpredictable. As a result, you need to have a lot of patience for things to take off.

7) Not concentrating on quality deals

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see novice investors make, especially after they have done a few deals. After they have some success, they begin to focus too much on quantity instead of doing quality deals. This mindset leads them to do less profitable deals. And once an investor begins to do thinner deals for the sake of doing more deals and outdoing their competition, they eventually find themselves in trouble. For example, I know many wholesalers and rehabbers who became too confident before the housing downturn of 2006 and loaded up on properties. When the market went south, these investors were left holding a lot of worthless inventory. Most of these investors went bankrupt and lost all of their properties. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that most investors learn the hard way. For some reason, avoiding the temptation to focus on quantity is a principle that most investors have a hard time accepting. Their natural inclination is to do more. They might feel the pressure to tell their friends what new project they’re working on. They might feel bored unless they’re working on something new. Or they might feel guilty about not “staying busy.” Whatever the reason, novices must learn that investing is an activity in which “staying busy” is not always smart. Sometimes, the best deals are the ones you don’t do. When an investor learns to concentrate on a small number of quality deals, they enjoy not only better profits, but also a better lifestyle since they’re not running around managing a huge portfolio of properties. For most people, the whole point of getting into real estate investing in the first place is to live a better quality of life, not to work longer and harder.

Not moving on from bad deals fast enough

Since novice real investors usually don’t have a steady stream of leads coming in and don’t know what a truly profitable deal looks like, they tend to overanalyze bad deals far too long. They get anxious and want to get deals done. And even when they put the numbers of the deal into their spreadsheet and see the deal clearly doesn’t work, they still find a reason to justify it. They logically know that a deal should be avoided, but they try to justify it anyway. While I believe everyone needs to start somewhere, the ideal place for a novice real estate investor to start is in a good deal not a bad one. What novices eventually learn is that not too long after taking on a marginal deal, a greatdeal is not far behind. But because they’ve tied up their resources with the marginal deal, they can’t pursue the great deal.

9) Not writing down goals

Don’t try to run your business without a clear plan. Clarify your goals by committing them to writing. Then, revisit them once a week until they become reality. Something magical happens when you write down your goals on paper. They begin to take root. When you focus on them repeatedly, you nurture them and they begin to grow. It’s important to write down your purpose, strategies, and goals. Begin by asking yourself the following questions:

What strategy am I pursuing?
What will I do with the properties I will buy?
How many deals per year will I do?
How much profit will I earn per deal?
How many offers do I make to make this happen?
What kind of life do I want to live outside of the office?
When you’re clear about your goals, you have a much easier time accomplishing them. And if your goals are unrealistic you should change them as necessary. Don’t get stuck in an unrealistic set of goals that will only produce frustration. At the same time, you shouldn’t change your goals too often either. It’s hard to hit a moving target. You want to strike a good balance between having reasonable, achieveable goals and also setting goals that will force you to get outside your comfort zone.

Alex Everest, Founder and President of Deal Maker Library ( [http://www.dealmakerlibrary.com] ), is a nationally known real estate investor, author, speaker, and advisor from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He specializes in the areas of wholesaling, rehabbing, owner financing, and land trusts for residential real estate.

Since 2004, Alex has been involved in over 300 real estate transactions totaling more than $45,000,000 i

One creative way to get started investing in real estate is to use a lease option. The biggest advantage of using lease options to invest in real estate is –control. This method of investing, basically gives the investor the right to possess — be in control of — and profit from a property without owning it.

A real estate lease option contract is a combination of two documents.

The lease part of the contract is where the owner agrees to let you lease their property, while you pay them rent for a stated period of time. During the lease period, the owner can not raise the rent, rent it to anyone else, or sell the property to anyone else.

The option part of the contract represents the right you purchased to buy the property in the future, for a specific price. If you decide to exercise your option to buy, the owner has to sell it to you at the negotiated price. The option part of the contract obligates the seller to sell to you during the option period — but it does not obligate you to buy. You are only obligated to make rental payments as agreed during the lease period.

When the lease option contract is written and structured properly, it can provide tremendous benefits and advantages to the investor. If the lease option includes the “right to sub-lease”, the investor can generate a positive cash flow by renting the property to a tenant for the duration of his lease, or lease option the property to a tenant-buyer for positive cash flow and future profits. If the lease option includes a “right of assignment” the investor could assign the contract to another buyer for a quick profit.

Lease option real estate investing, is a flexible, low risk, highly leveraged method of investing that can be implemented with little to no money.

High Leverage

It is highly leveraged because you are able to gain control of a property and profit from it now–even though you don’t own it yet. The fact that you don’t own it, also limits your personal liability and personal responsibility. Only if you decide to purchase the property by exercising your “option to buy”, would you take title to the property.

Little to no money

The real estate investor’s cost to implement a lease option contract with the owner requires little to no money out of pocket, because it is entirely negotiable between investor and owner. Also, there are a variety of ways the option fee can be structured. It can be structured on an installment plan, balloon payment or other agreeable arrangement between both parties. The option fee can even be as little as $1.00.

In order to secure the property for purchase at a later date, tenant-buyers typically pay a non-refundable option fee of approximately 2%-5% of the negotiated future purchase price to the seller. Depending on how the lease option agreement is written and structured, the investor could possibly use the tenant-buyer’s option fee money to pay any option fee owed to the owner.

Flexible

Lease option real estate investing is a flexible method of investing because the terms of the agreement, like payment amounts, payment dates, installments, interest rate, interest only payment, balloon payments, purchase price and other terms are all negotiated between seller and buyer. Responsibilities of both parties are also negotiable. For instance, if the investor doesn’t want to act in the capacity of a landlord, he could specify in the lease option agreement that tenant-buyer will be responsible for all minor maintenance and repairs and the original seller will remain responsible for any major repairs.

Financially Low Risk

It is low risk financially, because if the property fails to go up enough in value to make a profit, you have the purchased the right to change your mind and let the “option to buy” expire. Even if your tenant-buyer decides not to buy the property, you have profited by a positive monthly cash flow from the tenant-buyer’s rent payments, and upfront non-refundable option fee.

Let’s look at an example of a lease with option to buy structured in a way that the investor profits in 3 separate phases of the investment.

Profit #1: non-refundable option fee

Future sales price negotiated with the current owner is $125,000 with an option fee of 2% of the sales price. Option Fee you owe the owner is $2,500. The future sales price you set for your tenant-buyer is $155,000 and the option fee is 4% of the sales price. Option fee the tenant-buyer owes you is $6,200. You collect $6,200 from tenant-buyer and pay $2,500 to the owner and your profit = $3,700

Profit #2: monthly cash flow from rental payments

The Monthly rental payment you negotiated with the owner is $1,000. You set the monthly payment at $1,250 per month for your tenant-buyer. Each month you collect $1,250 from your tenant-buyer and pay the owner $1,000 each month. Your profit is $250 monthly positive cash flow during the lease period.

Profit #3: is set up when the lease option contract is initially written

The third profit is the difference in the negotiated future purchase price with the owner, and the future purchase price set for your tenant-buyer. Let’s say the property goes up in value to appraise for at least $155,000. Your tenant-buyer decides to exercise their option to buy. You buy the property from the owner at $125,000 and then sell it to your tenant-buyer for $155,000. $155,000 – the $125,000 you pay to the owner = $30,000 profit.

Of course the key to making lease option real estate investing work, is finding motivated sellers and buyers. Finding these motivated sellers and buyers shouldn’t be difficult. The continuing down turn in the real estate market, has created a large number of sellers who can’t sell their property and buyers who can’t get financing to buy. The seller could possibly get a fair offer to be paid in the future, by selling their property to a real estate investor on a lease option basis. A potential tenant-buyer could obtain home ownership, without having to qualify through traditional home loan guidelines.

One disadvantage of lease option real estate investing, involves the tenant or tenant-buyer possibly defaulting on monthly rental payments. This would make it necessary for the investor to come up with money out of pocket to pay the owner, and possibly have to proceed with eviction process. However, there are certain provisions that can made, and also various “contract clauses”, that can be included in the lease option agreement, to deter buyers from defaulting on payments.

If the investor fails to do “due diligence” before entering into a lease option agreement, he could end up with a property that is unmarketable. There could be a number of liens on it, issues involving ownership of the property or it might be in foreclosure. By diligently performing research before entering into a lease option agreement, the investor can avoid these mistakes. A few things the investor could do is– perform background and credit checks on both the seller and buyer, search public records in reference to ownership and property status, or do a title search.

Despite the few disadvantages, lease option real estate investing continues to be an excellent way to invest in real estate with little to no money and low financial risks. It also remains to be an excellent way to gain control of a property you don’t own, to generate cash flow now, and possible future profits on flexible terms.

Bottom line– you don’t have to miss out on the lucrative profits being made by investors in today’s real estate market

The more you understand creative real estate investing strategies, and apply them now, the more profits you will make in today’s real estate market. Don’t put off getting the real estate investing education you need — to succeed in today’s real estate market.

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