Commercial Real Estate Investment Articles

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 found a nice 3 bedroom, 1.5 bath, 2 car garage ranch house in a nice neighborhood that was going into bank foreclosure. For the last four or five months I had been sending the owner postcards and letters. I called him and even knocked on his door a couple of times, but was unable to catch him at home.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

My father was surfing on the net around the first part of 1997, and he ran across this website. He thought Lonnie Scruggs had some good ideas and bought Deals On Wheels.

I was a cop for almost a decade. I had become burned out, and most days dreaded going to work. I knew there had to be something else for me, but did not have a clue as to what. All I knew my whole adult life was law enforcement.

In January 1997, I found myself on the streets without a job and very disillusioned with the prospect of going back to work in corporate America.

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.

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.

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 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…

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.

It’s been a while since I have visited the site, and it looks great…I have been busy working my full-time (and then some) job while always hunting for good real estate investments here in the Houston area.

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.

While fellow CRE Onliner, John Holt, and I have graduated from college, we thought this title was appropriate since we both went to the same college, graduated at the same time, and even roamed the halls of the same science building. However, we never met until CRE Online and a mobile home brought us together.