I’ve been investing for about thirty-five years.
How did I learn how to invest using the internet and technology?
The computer I had thirty-five years ago didn’t even have a hard drive.
The internet was still in its infancy and I didn’t even know what it was.
I didn’t get online until the mid-nineties and I didn’t write my first real estate
book until 1998.
And I wrote it specifically to sell on the internet.
I didn’t learn these automation techniques until I started to sell my book on real estate
investing on the internet.
Selling stuff online really opened my eyes to the potential of technology and the internet
as a marketing tool.
And remember, real estate investing all comes down to marketing.
People say it’s about buy low and sell high.
It’s not.
It’s about financial structures and marketing.
If you don’t understand marketing you can’t have a successful real estate business.
You can’t have a successful business period, if you don’t understand marketing.
If you understand marketing and technology you can be successful at any business you
take on.
Selling books and audios and videos and courses like I do is called the Information Business.
If you’re in the info business, the first thing you learn is to build a list.
So I started building a list of real estate investors, or people who wanted to be real
estate investors.
But eventually I discovered that I could also sell my actual real estate to this list.
That’s when everything changed for me.
I discovered that I could flip my real estate deals to other investors very quickly.
When I say “flip” – if you don’t know what that means – the way that’s done
is, you get a property under contract and you sell that contract to another investor
or an end user who wants it so that you get in and get out real quickly without having
to use your own money and you end up walking away with cash in your pocket.
It’s just a way to get some money in your pocket when you need it most.
Some people call it wholesaling.
I call it assignable cash deals.
And it’s one of my zero down structures in my hierarchy of no money down financing
structures.
Now, let me give you an example of the power of what I’m talking about.
I got an email from a seller that came in yesterday from my webpage that I have set
up.
By they way, this system works nationwide and it doesn’t matter if you’re in an
appreciating market or a declining market.
It doesn’t matter if you’re out of the country.
You could be on the moon, for that matter.
I’ve had students do this system in Minnesota from Dubai.
Or in Australia.
Canada.
The UK.
Mainland Europe.
I’ve had people in Asia, Israel and even Kazakhstan.
So, this email lead came in.
And I sent them back a reply by email.
It may work a little better if you call them, but I get so many of these leads that it’s
easier for me just to hit “Reply” and drop them a quick email to see if it’s a
real deal.
These days I don’t even have to send the email.
My automated system actually reads their email, or text message, or voice mail, and the artificial
intelligence we built into the system tries to figure out how to respond and then sends
them an email or text message from me without me even seeing it happen.
When I got that lead, I got the person’s name, the telephone number, the address of
the property, some pictures of the house, I knew what the property was worth, how much
it would rent for.
I knew everything about it from what I got from that lead.
That’s one of the things the Automarketer will do for you.
So, in the end, when I knew they were pretty much ready to go, I called this person up
and I ended up emailing them a contract to purchase their property, a contract that was
completely risk free, by the way.
I could change my mind at any time.
That’s that way I write all my contracts.
That’s part of what I call my “safety net method.”
I never saw the house.
Never did an inspection.
Never checked the comps or did a title search.
Didn’t know the area, had never been to this town in my life.
I wrote up a quick email and text message to my investor list and I told them about
the property, what I knew about it, how much we thought it was worth and how much I wanted
for it.
I just wanted a quick $5,000 to assign the contract.
There was a decent amount of equity in the property and I didn’t feel particularly
greedy.
I just wanted in and out, and I didn’t want to screw around with it or spend too much
time on it.
I sent the email out at 8:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning.
By 12:00 noon I had twenty-four email responses about the property.
Some of them asked me if I would hold the deal for them so they could go look at it.
I told them, no, that wouldn’t be fair to everyone else.
I’ll only assign the deal to the first person who wires the earnest money into my bank account.
Most of these investors weren’t in the town where the property was located.
They were from all over the country.
Now, I’ve got a big list and that didn’t happen overnight.
I had to get things set up properly so my list would respond when I had something to
sell.
It turned out that six investors were hot for the property and wanted to check it out.
But they didn’t get a chance.
Apparently, one of the investors, who lived in a different state 1,500 miles away, decided
the numbers worked even if they were a few other issues with the property.
The risk was worth it and he knew he’d have to act fast or he’d miss out on the deal
like the other six missed out.
It’s also important to know that he did this because he trusted me.
I don’t know him personally, but he trusted me because of the way I market.
I don’t usually meet these buyers unless they’re my mentor students.
So the trust came from my marketing messages.
So.
He signed my Assignment Form and wired me the money.
Before close of business day I checked my account online and found that $5,000 had been
deposited into my account.
I signed the Assignment Form and faxed it over to my investor.
He closed the deal in two weeks, got a chunk of the equity, found a good lease option tenant
and now has a great investment property that is being professionally managed for him.
The original seller was thrilled that it closed so fast.
I was happy about making $5,000 for fifteen minutes of work.
And the investor keeps calling me trying to get more deals from me like this.
I had to tell him to stop calling, that I’d send over something the next time I got one.
Anyway.
It was a win-win-win deal.
Everyone was happy and it only used one tiny component of my automated system.