Great first time...time to do it again!

[JJ Neerman]

Good morning, BP Community!

I'm JJ, and I'm from & live in the Tulsa, OK, area. My family & I returned to the Tulsa area after a 16-year stint in east Tennessee, near Knoxville. My experience in real estate has been short-lived, but like Lombard Street in San Francisco, it's covered a lot of ground and had its twists & turns in a short period of time. 

Before moving back to OK, I took my first risk as a real estate investor. I negotiated to pay 40% of the asking price on a 70,000-sq. ft. shopping center in a rural community. I made the deal, and then went and found a couple of partners to start a property management company. We prepared a 3-phase, 3-year plan to rehab the shopping center and fill it with new businesses. We saw immediate success when my marketing paid off contracting 6-new businesses in our first 3-months! When we decided we were moving back to OK, my partners and I agreed to buy me out of the company. When the ink dried, my investment made me an ROI of 500%!!! To me that was the equivalent of walking up to the plate off the bench and hitting a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth of the World Series.

On the downside, my wife inherited a rental property and her parents' home when they both passed away suddenly within weeks of each other. The rental was awesome and we eventually owner financed the sale of the rental house, and then I sold the note to a mortgage investor. The inherited house on the other hand, was an abysmal catastrophe to say the least. I took bad advice trying to salvage the mortgage on the house and keep it in the family, because it was after all a very nice home. Long story short, after trying to sell it for 5-years, and spending more than $150K trying to maintain and improve it for sale, we lost the house to foreclosure because i spent all my money trying to maintain it. Lesson Learned: if it doesn't serve a purpose in your life, let it go early, move forward, and gain ground on purpose.

Now, I find myself wanting to get serious and work a wealth-building model that will create wealth through passive income and long term asset growth by solving problems and meeting needs.

My high level business model consists of flipping properties (wholesale & rehab) to generate cash down to purchase commercial and MFR properties with reduced financing balances to generate long-term positive cash flows. I'm an engineer by trade, and Project Manager by career, and a problem solver by design.

While they've been few thus far, I've enjoyed every real estate experience I've had - including the foreclosure. Why? Because I was able to step back and evaluate the process to see the critical moments where the mistakes were made that ultimately lead to the foreclosure. Failure is never permanent when a Lesson Learned empowers you to start again pursuing success. I'm ready to start again...on purpose.

So as briefly as an engineering PM, free-spirited nerd, entrepreneur can be, that's me in a nutshell. Thanks for taking the time to get a glimpse, and I look forward to diving into BiggerPockets and filling mine up! See you in the forums!

Best Wishes & Good Success!

JJ