The Most In-Depth Real Estate Case Study-Part Cinco

In this article

One of my New Year’s goals was to continue to read multiple newspapers every day. I read the Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily. Recently, Investor’s Business Daily has become my favorite paper. On page two or three of the paper, they profile a successful person every day and also cover a key trait to success.

Lessons Learned from Failure

A few weeks ago I read the fascinating profile about the guy who invented the Zippo lighter. He invented the lighter during the 1930’s. And, important to note is that before he started the Zippo Company he had multiple business failures (there’s an important lesson there, that your past does not predict your future. Just because you messed up on one of your first deals doesn’t mean you’re doomed to failure. On one of my first deals I lost $20,000).

Anyway, the Zippo Company took about 10 years to become profitable and that wasn’t until the company started selling the lighters to the military. The whole lesson in the article was that persistence is one of the major keys to success and that entrepreneurs have multiple business ideas and of course not all of them are going to work out.

On to My Search for a New Home (From an Investor’s Perspective)

Now, let me tell you where I’m at in the search for my new house. I was supposed to meet the seller last Wednesday, but then I found out that the owner’s wife would not be able to make the meeting. I told him we’d need to reschedule, because every smart real estate investor knows that you don’t go to a house and try and close a deal unless all of the decision makers are present. So, we rescheduled the meeting for Friday, however the owner thought I meant the next Friday, not the upcoming one. Long story short, we are meeting this Friday and I plan to negotiate and close the deal. If the owner is not motivated enough and I can’t close the deal, then I’m moving on. I’ve got a lot of other deals in the works right now and being that this is more for the “fun of it” I don’t have the time or patience to play games. Actually, truth be told, I never have time or patience to play games with anyone, whether its real estate related or not.

Okay. Next week, I’ll hopefully have closed the deal on my new house and I will give you the exact details about the numbers, paperwork, negotiating tactics I used, etc. Ohh yeah. Now I remember why I brought up the whole Investor’s Business Daily thing. Besides the article about the Zippo Company there was another article about how the market is only going to get worse in 2009 (the sky is falling, the sky is falling). This put a huge smile on my face because it’s so easy to buy houses right now. Brand new investors have no idea how easy it is to buy houses in this market. When I started out about six years ago and the market was hot, hot, hot, it was much tougher to talk people into creative deals. So, please take advantage of buying as much as you can now, making sure it cash flows and making ridiculous amounts of money when the market picks up and you sell (buy low, sell high, become wealthy).

Photo Credit: Taras Kalapun

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.