All Forum Posts by: Jeff Rabinowitz

Oh, connecting investors to projects is fairly straight forward. I am currently building a spec home. i knocked down the previous home. That deal was brought to me by an investor who sent out the classic yellow letters. He put the deal under contract with the home seller. I paid him a referral fee of several thousand dollars (he was paid at closing) to take his place as buyer on his contract. He did have a small earnest money deposit placed down on the deal but he got paid without ever having to take possession of the property.

My landlord at U of M was a postman. He did very well with his rental home. It was a duplex and I recall he had ~8 students that he rented rooms to.

There was a guy in my class who paid for most of his tuition with a rental. His father bought it when he was a freshman. He rented it to 3 or 4 roommates and 5 years later they sold the house at a very nice profit. This was a few decades ago but I would bet it is still a good strategy on many campuses. (I would have liked to do this for my daughter but she was not inclined to be a rental manager).

It is easy to check to see if rentals are a good idea near your campus. Check the prices and see how many are for sale. If they are profitable prices will jump dramatically as you get close to walking distance of campus and you will not see many for sale except at very high prices...or if you find a special situation, a distressed seller.

Find a REIA and start going to meetings.

Learn your market, start going to your local Real Estate Investor Association meetings and meet some local investors. Want to learn with little risk? Perhaps you should look for possible investments, get them under contract and flip them to other investors for an assignment fee. If you are successful doing this a few times you will know you are finding good deals. It won't be too long before you will want to keep them for yourself. It shouldn't be too hard to find a private investor to partner with or to fund a large chunk of your deal if it is a great deal. If you have any desire to transfer to the University of Michigan and find a great deal in Ann Arbor look me up.

One of the partners on an apartment building deal I am involved in was ~25 years old when he invested. It was his first real estate investment. 4 years later he also owns approximately 10 single family houses that he rents. Age (either young or old) is only a factor if you let it be.

I enjoyed the meeting. You attracted another good group of active, experienced investors. I was able to sit in on a couple discussions of promising, possible deals and meet a couple more people whom I hadn't known before. @Aaron Yates you lasted much later than you anticipated. I look forward to the next event.

There is also a Champps on Big Beaver. I have no preference (I have never been to a Bahama Breeze). I noticed the Bahama Breeze is open until midnight on Friday and Champps is open until 1 am. Tom and I used to go to Champps after MREI meetings and were generally well taken care of by the bartender but I do not know how they handle groups.

I will be happy to attend if my schedule allows.

It's nice being able to put a few more names and faces together. This event has helped me make contact with several of those who have been posting in the threads since the announcement of the meeting. I look forward to finding opportunities to help each other and further each others' businesses. Thanks to my old friend @Tom A. and my new friend @Aaron Yates for arranging the meet.

Dawn, I can't answer directly since I am not familiar with LendingClub and only invest in notes secured by real estate. It can never hurt to ask a potential lender if they are interested in your deal, especially if it is a well thought out deal and you plan on compensating the lender well. A private individual is free to fund whatever they would like. They are free to make their own risk/reward decisions. When there is less equity in a deal I ask for higher interest rates and will only deal with very experienced investors. When there is more equity I may ask for lower interest rates or, perhaps, do a deal with a less experienced investor which I would not usually consider. If the securing property is in an area where I am currently operating rental properties I may be willing to lower my standards a little bit. In that case I would expect a foreclosure to be more profitable, in the long run, than a note with on time payments. (None of my rental properties was actually acquired this way. You should be more than a bit cautious dealing with a lender who seems eager that you fail.)

They meet the first Tuesday of every month. I usually post meetings on my facebook page but they do have their own:

https://www.facebook.com/DetroitInvestmentClub . I rarely miss this meeting. At the last meeting I was introducing a first time attendee (whom I met on BP) and I knew most of what everyone in attendance invested in or did. I was struck by how many people in the room I had done business with.

@Jay Wright , My wife gave me the benefit of the doubt when I started building my rental portfolio, though she was not exactly a true believer at first. It definitely affected my decisions on which properties to buy. I never bought a home that I would not be at least comfortable living in myself as I always knew that might some day be an option I might have to exercise.