Monday, April 27, 2015

Are All Real Estate Investors Clueless?


I look at about 20 – 40 properties a day that Students send me by email. At least 5 – 8 of these properties are from listing agents who want to justify a higher price using what I call “Realtor® Speak” – such as room for a pool (add $30,000 to the price of the property), walk to the beach (4 miles), nice neighborhood (all you need is one bad neighbor next door), needs TLC ($100,000 in repairs for a $40,000 property), won’t last (267 DOMs so far and counting), etc. Ask yourself, if it was such a good buy “Why hasn’t it sold?”


In these perspective deals I also get to see the Realtor® email comments back to the Students. They are sometimes derogatory and very un-professional. These are not what a client would expect of a licensed professional but there are people like this in every occupation and we all have encountered them at some time.


One comment that I found interesting recently was from an agent who didn’t have a string of three or four letter “pedigrees” after his name, so I suspect he hadn’t been an agent for very long. His comment to my Student was that the Student was “clueless” and not to waste his time with ridiculous offers. This is not the first time I have heard “clueless” and, “You must have bought a worthless course on real estate investing” so don’t waste my time.


We will call this anonymous agent Lou for lack of a better name. I am sure Lou works very hard for the meager commissions he receives on the deals he completes. If Lou was a very successful agent the likelihood is he wouldn’t have replied at all – an assistant would have been working his emails. I am going out on a limb and assuming that Lou is what the National Association of Realtors® (NAR) calls an average income earner – about $40,000 a year.


No doubt Lou has found out that earning a living as an agent is tough but I don’t believe he fully understands that he is working for peanuts compared to what the clueless investors are making who buy his deals. Lou has to be aware the properties he is selling are being resold for huge profits by these clueless investors. Many of these clueless investors’ profits are likely more than a year’s hard-earned commissions for Lou.


But Lou is a professional who works many hours a day in his office likely while the clueless investors are running around working from home and doing as they please with their time. These clueless investors have taken the big step of faith that they can make money as investors – not knowing that they will be doing clueless things to infuriate Lou by making offers on his listings in a manner that insures they will make a profit larger than Lou will make in commissions.


Life is not fair! One of these clueless Students just came back from his vacation in Venezuela and he quit his day job when he earned 10 times more in his first year in real estate investing than he had been earning annually from his college-degree required job.


To your limitless success!




Are All Real Estate Investors Clueless?

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