Commercial Real Estate Investment Articles

In less than three years, we have gone from nothing to owning 26 mobile homes that are owner financed and a mobile home park with another 25 units. We have done all of this using less than $2500 of our own money. The rest was OPM–other people’s money. We also did this part time because I am a full-time paramedic, and my wife works full time for the state of Alabama.

January 31, 1999 – I called a manager of a local mobile home park to see if a certain mobile home could stay in the park. I had talked to the owner and he said, “Sure, it can stay.” I asked him if he knew of any others that might be for sale. He said the park had one for sale for $500.

On Christmas Eve, I did my first lease option deal on a beautiful single family that I will be living in myself. I gave them contract, and they signed it, no problem. They were actually happy that I saved them the attorneys’ fees! The deal worked out like this:

I read JP Vaughan’s How-To Article, several times to really understand what she was saying.

I went to a local real estate auction where about 30 mobile homes were being auctioned off. Before the auction, I previewed 27 of the 30 mobiles. Some were dogs, but many were very nice. This was an absolute auction.

It all started about a year and a half ago when I decided it was time to own my own home. I did not want to pay a lot. I am a painter by trade and know many people in the other trades.

One year ago, my wife and I were living paycheck to paycheck. I was working a job I didn’t want to be at while she was attending college. On January 10, 1998 I quit my job (family business) out of frustration. Having no job and no income gave me the motivation I needed to dive into real estate investing.

Several months ago, I was talking to an owner facing a foreclosure on his home that had considerable equity. He was hoping to refinance and get cash out. However, he was self-employed and could not substantiate any income, so refinance was just not possible.

I called on an ad in the “for rent” section and believed to have a on the other end. I went to see the house, which was located in a nice area. The home was a three-bedroom/one-bathroom that need some updating. The owner had another home and was paying two mortgages because this home used to be his grandmother’s, but she was moving in with one of her sons.

I have completed my first creative real estate investment, and I am very grateful to all of you as I have learned so much from the site. Here is the outline of the deal…

My partner Mark and I (I call him legs, he’s the young one and does all the running around) have been very active this past year. On January 1st, 1998 we had one three-unit apartment house and two tenants.

I wanted to let you know about my first deal. It started when I spotted an ad in the Sunday paper with the words “Land Contract.” I called the owner and asked if he would do a lease option rather than the land contract, and he said: “Yes.” So I made an appointment to look at the property.

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?

I set up all of my single family home rentals on a lease option to purchase basis. Columbus, Ohio is a great market, so typically, a three-day ad is all I need to rent a place. I’ll receive an average of 35 to 40 calls per day while the ad is running. I make it a point to call back each and every person responding to an ad, even if I’ve already rented the advertised home.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks to Lonnie Scruggs, Ernest Tew, Bill Bronchick, Terry Vaughan, and lots of others for an education I couldn’t have bought in school. I’ve been using ideas from all of you for several deals.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.