All Forum Posts by: Max Drizin

Hi Alex!

Kevin seems like a great guy for sure, and I'm sure that will be reaffirmed when I meet up with him tomorrow when I'm back in the Indianapolis area.

Small world, isn't it?

I start with my spreadsheet document that can take rent rolls and expenses, along with any other information, and give me the offer I want to make. Given a list of rents, or even just an NOI and hopefully number of units, I can tell you exactly how much I'll pay at any given point. 3 minutes per property, maximum.

After that, my agent has an offer agreement that has all the blanks right at the top, and they are filled out with my information and the current date before we ever touch them. After that, it's an address, a seller, price, and earnest money. There's a spot for contingencies, too, but I can't remember the last time I went into a deal with any sort of contingency.

By the time the document reaches my email (or Faxburner fax number), all I have to do is open up SIGNificant (my android signing app of choice) and Faxburner/email it back out. Less than a minute per offer.

Considering I'm in the midst of opening a new brokerage that's almost completely paperless (we have a budget that includes a grand total of one file cabinet), I'm working on integrating all of our systems in this manner.

People are still renting in Detroit? News to me. I know you can get incredibly cheap and abandoned for all time kinds of properties, but I'm surprised to hear that there are places that are rented.

Watch out though, you are still in Detroit, of all places. Make sure you are staying out of the warzones, make sure you would be willing to actually collect rent at night, unarmed, and make sure it will stay rented.

A good friend of mine is the owner of DiscountCigars.org, and I recently got a great box of some Romeo y Julieta cigars. Wonderful gifts for investors, buyers, and sellers.

Bought it a month ago, won't ever see it again. I've got a contractor I know and work with on everything I do, and he does a good job. Barring catastrophe, I'll never see the finished product.

It's because I just don't have the time, but most of the time it's about trust.

Just have your contractor send you some pictures of progress if you are worried and you really don't have the time. If you aren't doing any of the work, you definitely don't need to see it daily.

I've never understood the concept of gold. It's essentially worthless. There is no point to it.

I get nothing out of having gold. It isn't a form of value, since it has no cash flow nor worth.

We invest in real estate because it has worth. There is a service provided by real estate (living quarters) that can make you money. Money that you can pay for things with. You can't take gold to the grocery store and use it to buy your food.

You can't buy a house with gold. None of that is at all possible. See, currency has worth for a few reasons. One, it is a unit of accounting. In this sense, a dollar is a dollar, and that allows me to compare the worth of two objects, let's say guns and butter for the sake of days in econ classes.

Gold could be used in this way, saying an ounce is worth half of a gun and a pound of butter. You now have a unit of accounting, equating half a gun and a pound of butter. This was the first step in monetary economies, shortly after barter systems. People used shells, gold, salt, small rocks, anything.

Where gold fails is that it is not a store of value. It used to be a store of value, because governments used to back their money on gold, so gold was the real store of value behind money. Cash was merely a way in which we could easily transfer gold, since it's kind of an inconvenience to weigh out little lumps of gold to pay for a candy bar.

However, there is not a major currency today that gold backing. US Dollars are backed simply by your faith in the currency, as are Canadian Dollars, the Euro, the Lira, and everything else.

Gold is inflating because there are people that speculate that it will become worthwhile if people like Ron Paul get elected to every major position in the US government and decide to go back to the gold standard.

This won't happen. The gold standard is simply and unequivocally dead. It worked when people had no faith in the concept of fiat money. The US has been on a completely fiat currency since the Nixon Shock, and that isn't going to change.

You see, gold is actually worthless moreso than other commodities since it has no real use. It's price is purely speculative. I guess it has uses in jewelry, some electronics, and a few other specific purposes, but not much else. Gold is skyrocketing today not because Monster cables are flying off the shelves with their gold-plated copper or whatever, and not because everyone decided to be in love with gold rings, but because there are people who are conned into believing the commercials on the radio about investing in gold.

Besides doing everything but outright lying to people, these gold sellers are making a killing on selling someone a commodity with no real value. It's amazing to me that people believe the hype of it all.

Congratulations! I hope I never have to go through that, but seriously, it's great that everything is going to work out.

In your case, it's definitely possible to have her qualify for loans and everything else, and if she is willing to get into the business with you, that's great.

However, there are times when it's better to keep separate. I know that there are people that would be hesitant to get into real estate, especially today.

If she puts all of her money back into her business, and it works for her, then it works for you. I mean, if jewelry pays better than real estate, then that's that :P

At the same time, if she likes the idea of doing it, and you are okay with all of it, then go full-steam ahead on the loans like Bryan says.

Great to have you on the boards. Yes, double taxation is a reality, depending on how you "pay yourself" in the end. There are plenty of ways to never actually pay yourself, and I know some very successful people who have 3 Porsches in the garage and only pay themselves $1 a year.

Also, as for reinvesting, you are talking about 1031 exchanges. There's a lot more discussion about that in the appropriate forum, but the idea is that you can move money from flipping one property into another, and never pay the tax. Saves you a lot of money, and it's usually the way flippers keep up their properties and profits.

I'm not one to give legal or financial advice as I'm neither a lawyer nor an accountant, but there are plenty of ways to account for money to your benefit.

Propertybase. It's built on top of Force.com. TopProducer is just actually bad, plain and simple. There are a ton of crap CRMs, and they don't work.

I mean, Salesforce is just great in and of itself. Then, there's plain old Google Contacts, along with the use of cJournal on the iPhone.

Technology investments. My start and continued focus is within technology and information systems.

Look at companies that aren't the foremost in the industry, the ones you don't hear about every day. Crack open an Apple product and look at the vendors.

Qualcomm makes tons of technology for phones. They make the phone radios, as well as the tower equipment. Alcatel-Lucent makes cell tower equipment. Texas Instruments makes ARM processors.

Companies that do technology incubation, like SproutBox, are venture capital firms that incubate good ideas and invest in them. These companies make it easier for you to get into this sort of early-stage technology investment.

Nokia, which is possibly on its death-bed, has basically hit rock-bottom with failures like Maemo and everything else they did. Recently, they hedged everything they have on WP7 and just yesterday into graphene product research.

RIM, the maker of Blackberry, is dead. There's no reason to touch them today. They won't recover without a miracle, and there won't be a miracle as long as they have 2 CEOs.

Companies like AMD, which are innovating in the APU (GPU/CPU integration), have good poential if they can do well. Intel really stole the show during the recession by working hard on their R&D while other companies cut back, but what do you do if x86 dies in favor of ARM and x64?

How does Microsoft's buyout of Skype affect their earnings? That was cash they paid with, plain and simple. Are the dividends they pay out a bad sign? Dividends are basically stating that they can't spend your money as well as you can.

Will Windows Phone 7 really take off? There is hesitance in the market, and yearly or bi-yearly release roadmapping does nothing to help their stance against an entrenched Apple and innovating Google.

Do you want to invest in Google? Their stock is already powerful, but browsers like Chrome, the introduction of Chrome OS and the continued adoption of Google services for enterprise-level applications all lend to their success. Will Google Wallet take off, is NFC something viable for consumers, or will it never get used?

Android is well on its way to taking market-share from RIM and from feature phone companies, but how much more can it take from Apple? Companies like HTC are making a killing building some of the best phones on the market, but can they keep it up?

Will HP be able to make a place for itself with the acquisition of Palm and its WebOS property?

As in the bigger picture, is the tablet really the future? Adoption isn't whole for these products, with most sales being about "Apple products" and less about the viability of a tablet as a user device. As phones become more powerful and in some cases physically larger, will tablets fade away like netbooks did, after the craze started by the Asus eeePC?