Commercial Real Estate Investment Articles

Four years ago I, like so many others, FINALLY broke down and bought the Carleton Sheets course. After being exposed to the numbers involved in real estate investing, I knew that if there was one field to make big money working for yourself, real estate was it.

I have been in the restaurant business for 20 years. One night, after a 14-hour day, in a motel away from my family AGAIN, I was still up at 2 am. For what seemed like the 1000th time in the past few years, I was watching the Carleton Sheets infomercial on the television. Once again I was thinking, “If those guys can do that, so can I.” But this time was different, this time I picked up the phone and ordered the course.

On a Thursday, I looked in the paper under “investment property.” The ad read: “Great income potential, 3-4 family apartment $18,500, needs work.” So I called the number and went to look at it. The apartment did need some work. I went home, punched some numbers, and saw that I could make a lot of money on the rentals (two 2 bedrooms and one 1 bedroom).

I’m a part-time real estate investor. I frequently read the success stories on CRE Online to gain knowledge and for the motivation it provides to me.

Today, I walked out of the title company with a check for 12,081.50. I have done several deals, including, but this is my biggest deal yet. (I am still a newbie.) I still can’t believe it. I simply put this property under contract for $50k and sold it to an investor for $63.5k. At closing, I netted about $12,000!

This is a real estate investing success story form a part-time “oldie” who finally found that little diamond in the rough. The opportunity came from my involvement in tax lien certificates.

We purchased a 5-bedroom/2.5-bath house for $87,000. We spent $6,000 in rehab (interior paint, all new floor coverings, misc cleaning and yard work), and put the house on the market for $119,900. Similar houses in this plat are selling in the $130,000 – $150,000 range, and we put this one on the market at a price to sell quickly. In three days, we had a full price offer, and the deal with the buyer closed today.

I had bought Bill Bronchick’s Big Profits with Lease Options and had been procrastinating about getting started. One day in Home Depot this person I had not seen in quite a while asked me how I was and if I was still in the contracting (fence and deck) business. I responded that I was, but I had also started investing in real estate. She says that I should buy her house.

While attending the Creative Real Estate Online Convention in Las Vegas this past March, I had the luck of running into a friend I hadn’t seen in many years. Ben Moye and I were introduced approximately ten years ago in middle Georgia. Ben is in the commercial sign business. I contacted his firm to build a sign for one of my business locations.

This story is not just about a great deal, but rather an attempt to help you realize one of many ways by which your dream of may be achieved. To those of you who are acquainted with what I have been doing since 1995 let me say this: Thank You. You’ve been a great support system. To those I haven’t met yet or who are just beginning down the road to financial freedom and do not know what I’ve been doing, this story is for you.

Please accept a heartfelt “thank you” for this awesome site. I sincerely believe it is the extra encouraging push I sorely needed to do my first deal. I first became interested in creative real estate investing a little over a year ago when I ordered the Carleton Sheets course.

seemed to be the hot topic on the Creative Real Estate Online, so I thought I would order Lonnie Scruggs’ book Deals On Wheels and check out mobile home investing. For just $35, what did I have to lose?

After reading Lonnie’s two books three times [Deals on Wheels and Making Money with Mobile Homes], I was really anxious to try my first “Lonnie Deal.” I traveled around a couple of mobile home parks in May, and finally spotted a run down, overgrown 1968 12 X 56 Liberty mobile home in the third park.This is a nice park in a small town about 10 minutes from a good size city.

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.

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.

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.

This isn’t a rags to riches story. This isn’t to sell books or courses I’ve written. This isn’t to impress you. It isn’t even to feel better about myself or what we’ve accomplished. This is fact, nothing more. JP has requested my story a couple times already, and I’ve promised I’d get it done. So here it is.

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

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.

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.

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.

Although I have been employed in real estate maintenance management for many years, I again began investing in my own properties in 1995, having lost my prior investments to divorce. From January 1995 to August 1998, I acquired 11 condominium units and reached a point where I believed that further financing just was not possible or at least that’s what the brokers wanted me to believe.