All Forum Posts by: Michael Hayworth

Two possibilities:

1. She thinks you're a fraud and that you're blatantly making **** up to improve your tax situation. She doesn't want to be complicit in fraud.
2. She thinks she's in charge.

if it's the first situation, then stop being that guy. None of us keep perfect records, and most of us sometimes just pull a number out of the air because we're always short on time, need to run the business, and don't have an army of bookkeepers to keep everything straight. But it needs to be 'Oh, I missed that, yeah, I'll pay it (plus a penalty)" territory, not "Uh, honey, I'm gonna be gone for 3-5 years" territory.

If it's the second situation, you need  new CPA. Some CPAs and attorneys are under the impression that they tell you what to do and you do it. They need to be fired as quickly as possible. They should be valued, trusted advisors, but they do not run your business, and that needs to be very clear.

Perhaps a conversation is in order - ask her for her reasons and see where the two of you stand - but it sounds like you're probably needing a new CPA.

I'm gonna disagree with some of the previous posters, but only slightly.

I'm very clear with my prospective tenants that I only care about two things:

• Will you pay the rent on time?
• Will you take good care of my property?

All the screening we do is really just an attempt to do the best job I can of predicting that in advance.

DFW is a very tight rental market. I only rent my homes at open houses - I'll hold one, almost always walk away from it with multiple applications, and can pick the best one, rather than just evaluating one by one and trying to find a legal reason to deny a prospect who meets criteria, but that I just have that bad feeling about.

I do not automatically reject tenants for felonies, but I have to see evidence that you've turned your life around. (Which implies that it's been a while since that conviction, of course.) 

One of my very best tenants had a felony 10+ years ago when he was a teenager. Now he's 30 with a wife and kids, holding down a good job, but still runs into lots of landlords who will auto-reject him because of the felony on his background check. A tenant like that is going to be sure to pay on time and take good care of the property, because he doesn't want to go looking for another house again. Other prospects with felonies, I've rejected because their "life turnaround" seems to be one of convenience.

There's a great, well-researched book out there called Three Felonies a Day. We are so over-lawed now that the average American commits three felonies a day, while doing nothing most people would consider actually "bad." (Hell, as a landlord and business owner, I probably commit four or five.) I actually care a lot more about bankruptcies, evictions and other things that indicate you don't mind leaving other people holding the bag for your bad financial decisions than I do an old felony.

Some people get useful motivation from going to the free initial seminar. But DON'T SIGN UP FOR THE EXPENSIVE STUFF!

I'm a GC who gets calls often from first-time investors who've been enticed by one of these seminars. They've almost always been promised the world and been given very few tools that equip them for the reality of how much work is really involved. And the "gurus" typically are from out of town and have little feel for the local market. Real estate is a very local business - conditions in your market are dramatically different from conditions in mine. And conditions in my DFW market are amazingly different from conditions in Muncie, IN, where I bought my first out of state property. Traveling around on a bus pretending one size fits all doesn't really make you a valuable resource.

Read these two threads before you go to the first one:

Taking a stand after a $50,000 lie

Please help $41,000 paid to a guru company to be refunded !

Then find a good local real estate investors group, get active here on BiggerPockets, and save your money for investing, not paying gurus. Their main skill isn't actually real estate investing - it's extracting money from your wallet and putting it in theirs.

It's definitely harder to find good deals. I've not found most wholesalers in the area to have much worthwhile. The exception has been Steve Glassgow, and even with his properties, stuff gets bid up beyond what I want to pay if he does a group tour. (Plus, he's mostly Dallas area and I stay west of 360.)

• I've been doing my own direct mail, using Money Mailer instead of the typical Yellow Letters, etc. Just managed to buy my first house in the Fairmount Historic District after getting outbid on house after house there. I'll hold it for a year to get into LT cap gains, then do a room addition to up the square footage 50%, and cash out big on that one.
• I'm at the Trustee Auction nearly every month. It's a lot of work to find deals there, too, but they're out there. My last two have been one solid deal and one killer deal.
• I've extended my search area. I have two houses in Alvarado, where houses are cheap, but rental inventory is almost nonexistent, so rents still bring great cash flow.
• And since my main business is remodeling, any time someone says, "I need to fix it up so I can sell it," I offer to buy it right then. Usually, they don't bite, but occasionally they do. Just bought two in North Richland Hills that way. You could offer to partner with contractors in your desired areas.

It's definitely harder than it used to be, but I'm still finding things I can make money on. More importantly, I'm also saving cash - there's going to be a correction eventually, which'll drive a lot of less-committed investors out of the market, and will drop prices 10% or so. I'm planning to be in position to buy 10-20 properties at that time.

Good luck!

You're getting good advice here from Mark and others.

I do understand your concern. I had bought 20 or so properties, always through MLS, when I found my first private sale opportunity. Just like you, I thought about paying my RE agent to shepherd the paperwork through. But I looked at the contract forms from all my previous sales, found the Texas Real Estate Commission form, and looked at how previous ones had been filled out. Took me 10 minutes. Looks like this is the equivalent form for Michigan.

I called the title company and said, "Hey, I've closed a few with you guys through Agent XYZ, and been real happy with your work. I'm doing a private sale now and want to use you. Any advice for me?" They said, "Thanks for the business. We'll assign Meagan to handhold you through this first one." And they did. And it was a piece of cake.

The most important part of that process wasn't that I saved the $500 I was thinking of offering my agent to do paperwork - it's that I learned how simple the process is and felt more confident in it. Because the real deals in this business come through private sales, not through MLS. So the more confident you feel in the process, the better off you are.

I bought three houses last week, all on private sales, no agent, and it was simple as can be. But I had to do the first one to gain that confidence.

What Steve said.

Also wholesale failure = marketing a "deal" that's not really a deal to an eager newbie investor. Listing too high an ARV and too low a reno budget either because you really don't know what you're doing or because you just want to get a deal done. Thus leaving eager new investor holding the bag with a loss on their first project, soured on the whole experience because they trusted you.

I'm really sick of this idea that wholesaling should be your entry point into REI. Seminar gurus push that BS because they can get people to plunk down money on their already overloaded credit cards, and there are way more suckers with no money who want to hear that they can get rich than there are suckers with money.

Wholesaling - done right - is hard. It requires lots of work, and really good knowledge. It is NOT a beginner exercise. Have no money but want to become  a real estate investor? Great. Then get better at your job, get promotions and save until you've scraped together enough money for a decent deal. Lather, rinse, repeat. Or find an experienced investor you can apprentice under, trading work for education. Don't go be another crappy wholesaler.

And to the (very few, IMO) good wholesalers out there, props to you. Doing it right is a hell of a lot of work.

The DFW market is very hot. It's hard to find deals on MLS, but there are a few out there.

There's a Fort Worth area Biggerpockets group that may be of help.

I've found my best deals through private sales, but it takes a while to get established in that. Before that, I found good deals through a couple of wholesalers, or through buying at the Trustee Auction on the courthouse steps. Both those have their downsides, too - there are some fairly shady wholesalers in this area (and some good ones, too), and the trustee auction can be something of a crapshoot.

The best thing is to consider all possible avenues, so get a realtor to set up daily email updates for you, and also get on wholesalers' mailing lists, go to the trustee auction (go as an observer the first couple of times and figure out what it's about).

Hope this helps. If you want to PM me, I can recommend a couple of good, investor-friendly realtors for that side of things.

You want to put in offers below list in Frisco? Possibly the hottest market in the entire U.S.? Why waste your time? You won't get an offer accepted, and if you keep doing it, you'll end up burning out a real estate agent who works with you.

You're absolutely not going to find a deal in that area on MLS in Frisco/McKinney/Plano. The market is crazy hot right now, and it isn't likely to slow down as long as job growth stays strong here - people will keep moving here for jobs. Hell, the market is crazy right now, and Toyota hasn't even started moving its headquarters to Plano yet!

If you want to buy off MLS, you'll need to pay market rates and just hold long-term for appreciation.

If you want something where you can buy it at an advantageous price, you're going to need to:

1. Find a good wholesaler (not one of the two "NW" companies - in your area, try stevenbuyshomes .com - he's very good), or 
2. Learn to buy properties at the monthly trustee auction (check out Roddy Foreclosure Listings and their online webinars and monthly educational seminars) or
3. Look into other areas. Either buy rentals in upcoming areas and hold them till gentrification hits, or spread out further - up into Denton, east into Murphy/Sachse/Terrell, south down into Ellis County.

 Good luck!

 I've got a liberal arts degree and make a fantastic six-figure salary.

Of course, I had to go through several career changes and retraining myself multiple times to get there.

Greys are very hot right now.

Sherwin Williams has a great pocket size sample book called Designer Expressions. It's designed in sections with various base colors and various accent colors. It's kinda like Garanimals - as long as you pick colors from the same section, you know they'll coordinate. I use it on my houses and love it.  At home, my girlfriend doesn't let me pick anything, and neither did my ex-wife. But when I'm in "contractor mode", soccer moms hang on my every word and ask me to suggest all kinds of design selections. For paint colors, that book helps me keep 'em happy. (And who doesn't want to keep the hot soccer moms happy?)