Warning: This is a very long blog post. Reading it may change your life. I dare you to read it all the way through. If you do, you will see what I mean. I have buried a little treasure in this post that will give you an incredible opportunity to attend my upcoming boot camp and save thousands of dollars on my training.

I purchased my first property in Los Angeles, California in 2001 with an FHA Loan with only 3% down. The seller credited me 3% so I only came out of pocket for the closing costs to buy my first house. That was the same year that I purchased my first real estate Home Study Course. That course got me motivated to start investing in real estate.

I made $100,000 when I sold that house 2 years later. I had never made so much money on one transaction before.  I used that money as an opportunity to become a full time real estate investor.  I decided that I need to move somewhere where real estate was more affordable (than California).

I moved with my family to Florida in July of 2003. That was the year I became a full time real estate investor (just 2 years after buying my first house). Since 2003, over the past 17 years I have personally purchased, fixed and flipped more than 1,000 single family homes.

Many people know that story or have read it online.

However many people do not know what I am about to share with you.

I never EVER intended to go into the real estate coaching and mentoring business.

That was never my intention.

I had attended two real estate seminars as a beginner before I purchased my first house. Those seminars and the Home Study Course was what motivated me to get into real estate.

So I know what it’s like to sit in the audience as a new real estate investor. I have been there.

Back then I would never have ever imagined that one day I would be the guy standing in a room full of people teaching new real estate investors how to invest in real estate.

It happened completely randomly (by chance) like most things in my life.

My intention was to be a landlord. I wanted to buy houses below market, fix them up, rent them out and then refinance into long term loans. That was my retirement plan. But after purchasing my first few rental properties, as prices moved up in 2003 and 2004 I realized that I needed to find many more houses than I was able to find by myself. In short, I needed someone to help me find more houses. I thought it would be a good idea to hire people to locate deals for me. My motivation was to find deal finders which we call bird dogs in the real estate business. My goal was to teach them how to locate deals for me. 

I placed an ad in the newspaper for real estate deal finders. It was a commission only job. I didn’t realize what a challenge it would turn out to be to find bird dogs that were willing to work on commission only.

I didn’t know then what I know now. That most people just want a JOB (which stands for JUST OVER BROKE). 95% of people just want a paycheck. And for the vast majority of the population as long as an employer is willing to pay $40,000 to $50,000 a year, there are a lot of people out there who will do almost anything to have that job. Case in point – we placed an ad for an admin position with a salary of $40,000 and we get over 100 resumes per DAY.

It seems that the majority of people have no idea how to pay their bills other than by having a job, a paycheck and a boss.

That is sad. To me It is something that I have a hard time understanding.

$40,000 isn’t very much money to live on. Ask any college graduate who is in the job market right now how hard it is to find a job. The average college graduate spends more than one year looking for a job!

So back to real estate bird dogs.

I posted a classified ad in the newspaper for a job for a property locator. In the ad I stated that I would  pay $1,000 for every deal that the bird dog located. And I would provide the training for FREE.

I had a few people respond to the ad and I interviewed them and picked one guy who seemed nice enough and intelligent enough for the job.

His name was Ed. He needed training because he didn’t know what to do. So in order to teach him how to locate deals, I had him drive with me in the car for a few weeks.

Ed sat in the passenger seat of my car and I drove around showing him houses, looking for properties, checking vacant and abandoned houses, and calling wholesalers looking for houses that they wanted to sell. We spent 8 hours a day driving around looking at properties. The training for him was free.

Ed drove around with me for a couple of weeks. When I think back, I can’t believe that I did that for free. You see here is the catch. Most people think they should be paid for their time. They think that if they are driving around learning then you should be paying them. And when they find out that they are not being paid by the hour and that they only get paid when and if they find and close a deal…… well then they start falling like dominoes.

Why?

A few reasons. The first reason I mentioned above. Most people are just looking for a job. They need to pay their bills and if you can give them a job, and they can pay their bills then they are happy. At least they think they are.

Most people are not looking for financial security. Which is why most people never find it. They don’t want to be rich or financially secure. They just want to go to work, pay the bills, get off work, make some dinner and watch the next Netflix Binge of “Game of Thrones” or “House of Cards” or whatever the next popular show is.

I see it all of the time on Facebook. People asking their friends for the next show to “binge watch”.

Most people go to a job every day that they don’t love.

They get a paycheck every two weeks which is not enough money or barely enough money to pay the bills.

They have credit card debt.

and little to no savings.

Let me ask you a question.

How much spare time do you really have for yourself when you spend 8 hours a day at work, an hour commuting to work, 8 hours sleeping, and an hour or two running errands like going to the store, cooking dinner etc.

How much time does that leave you for yourself per day or per week?

Now how many hours did you watch TV last week?

If you add it up, if you are like most people you will find that outside of work, sleep, errands and commuting you are spending most (or a lot) of your spare time WATCHING TV.

So am I wrong if I say that most or many people go to work to a job they are not crazy about and spend most of their free time watching TV?

Is this the american dream? Sounds more like a nightmare to me.

Nobody wants to be broke. Nobody plans for being broke.

But what most people don’t realize is that it is their daily actions that keep them broke.. Their daily habits (like watching too much TV).

Now if you are reading this and you think you ain’t broke because you have a job and you can pay your bills and you are comfortably in the upper middle class well then – how is this for a sobering statistic.

• Most Americans have $8,000 credit card debt and $3,000 or less in their bank account (that means most people have a negative net worth)
• 53% of the population could not come up with $400 in the event of an emergency (according to a USA Today Study)
• 85% of the population has zero retirement savings

Habits like spending way too much time watching TV do not create financial freedom, wealth or security.

If you have a job then you you need to understand that that job and that paycheck stands for being Just Over Broke (if you didn’t have the paycheck and you couldn’t pay your bills then you would be broke). 

If you need your next pay check to pay your bills then you are broke right now. Because the only thing standing between you and financial disaster is your boss deciding to keep paying you.

and if you think you could always get another job….

Speak to someone who is 55+ who has been looking for a job and has already depleted all of their savings and maxed out all of their credit cards.

If you would be in a real bind if you lost your job tomorrow then you are living paycheck to paycheck and you are already broke.

And you will never create financial freedom for yourself and your family living like that. You need to learn how to create a better future for yourself that does not rely on a boss and a paycheck.

But my first bird dog that I hired didn’t understand this.

He was looking for a job. As he drove around with me hearing stories about how I purchased all of these houses WITHOUT USING ANY OF MY OWN CASH (no money down) he was more interested in talking about the weather, the news, or talking about other topics (other than how the heck did you get someone to loan you the money to buy a house).

After a few weeks of training I turned him loose as a deal finder.

He found one house which was a For Sale By Owner deal. It wasn’t an amazing deal and I should have probably passed on it and not purchased it.  But I wanted Ed to make some money and gain confidence so I purchased the house. I paid him a $2,000 finder’s fee for finding that house and I kept the house as a rental property. Ed literally gave me the phone number for a “For Sale By Owner Sign” in the yard of a house. Hardly a lot of effort on his part.

A few weeks after I paid him that $2,000 he quit working as a bird dog. He got a job working for All State Insurance for a sum total of $2,000 per month (what I paid him on his first deal). A base pay of just $24,000 per year. He felt bad about quitting. He told me so. But he said “you know I get a check every two weeks it’s guaranteed and I have bills to pay”.

This is how the majority of people think.

If you lost your job next week what is the first thing you would do?

Put a resume together and start responding to job ads?

You see how that is the only option that you think of?

If it is then you are used to trading your time for a paycheck.

Your concept is I work for you and you give me money

You will never get rich trading your time for a paycheck.

Ed thought that looking for real estate deals was “hard and time consuming”.

But showing up 40 hours a week at a job is not?

Having a job is way more time consuming. You have to do it every day, every week and every month except for maybe a two week vacation once per year.

And you can NEVER MAKE REAL MONEY. The kind of money that you can make investing in real estate.

You already know this. You instinctively know it. But the problem is you DON’T KNOW HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN REAL ESTATE.

And you can’t quit your job because you have bills to pay.

Just like Ed.

Having a job is really a form of indentured servitude.

You work for someone and you do what they tell you to do from when you arrive until when you leave.

And you trade your time for a paycheck.

That is not a way to live. And it will certainly never create wealth for you or financial freedom. Your life will be no different than a hamster spinning around on a wheel.

Work > Paycheck > Pay Bills.

You need to learn how to stop trading your time for a paycheck!

So now that my bird dog Ed had quit working for me, I had to go back to doing what I always did, which is driving around looking for houses to buy. Houses that I could fix and flip or fix and rent.

As time went by I made more and more money and purchased more and more houses. Friends and associates saw that I was making more money and they starting asking me questions about how I was buying so much real estate without using any of my own money.

You see I was buying, fixing and flipping houses (without using any of my own money)

And I was flipping some of these houses for as much as some people’s annual salary.

People that I knew started asking me if they could join me when I went out to look at properties.

After my experience of having a bird dog sitting in the car with me for a few weeks my answer was always an emphatic no.

My car was like my mobile office. I had my laptop computer, my notepad and my calculator on the passenger seat. I made many calls to realtors throughout the day and I was on the phone a lot. I called For Sale By Owner Signs, wholesalers, bandit signs and real estate agent signs. I wrote down the address of every vacant and boarded up house that I could find and looked up the owners. I located opportunities to advertise for motivated sellers (like placing classified ads and ads in the Penny Saver and local papers).

It was work. Looking for properties is hard work. Calling 50 people a day is hard work. And you don’t come home every day with a pay check.

In fact, most days you come back with nothing. Driving around looking for houses that could be good deals to fix and flip or fix and rent is time consuming. There is no guarantee that when you come home you will have found a house.

On most days you will find nothing. You will come home empty handed.

But as you get better.

As you know what you are looking for, you will begin to identify opportunities.

And the more you do it, the more opportunities you will find.

And when you start fixing and flipping these houses and you see how much money you can make I guarantee you that you will want to quit your job. All it takes is one fix and flip that generates you $50,000 or $100,000 for you to seriously consider quitting your job.

And the better you get at it, the more houses you flip, the more money you make the more other people will want to lend you money.

Before long you will have more money from lenders than you have houses to buy.

And then at that point YOU will need to hire bird dogs to locate deals for you so you can find more houses (like I do). 

That is my work.

That is my paycheck. If I don’t find houses my children do not eat.

I don’t have a choice on whether or not I will find houses. I have to find houses. Every day, every week, every month.

Luckily, if you have a system in place finding houses is not that difficult. You See there are people in the U.S every day that are getting divorced, filing bankruptcy, going into foreclosure. Every day people die and their children inherit properties that they have no interest in keeping. They just want to sell the house fast for cash.

Every day people have fires, flood, and hurricane damage. They want to sell their house fast for cash too.

It’s your job to learn how to find them.

I don’t have a 9 to 5 job.

I get paid based on how many houses I find that I can buy, fix and flip or buy, fix and rent.

If I find zero deals. I make zero money. I don’t have a paycheck or a job. I rely on myself and my ability to find great deals that will make a lot of money. If I can do this then so can you. If I have trained thousands of people how to do this then I can train you too.

And making money this way is way more rewarding (financially) than having a job. Not to mention that you can start working when you feel like it instead of when your boss tells you to. You can work way less hours and make way more money if you learn how to invest in real estate and how to find houses at a discount.

In this business, you need to search through many houses to find the ones that make sense. And you must look at them individually which takes up a lot of time. Some of the properties I see are a few hours drive away. In some cases I have to stay overnight in hotels in cities where there are properties that I am working on.

After you factor in the drive it can sometimes be a long day of work. But it is very rewarding financially. I made $100,000 on one fix and flip last week. I don’t say that to brag, but simply to point out that the profit from that one deal is what people call a “Six Figure Income”. One deal is as much as what most people in the U.S define as a good income. One deal in one day!

And I purchased 4 houses last week! Each of the houses that I purchased has at least $30,000 in profits. You can do the math on that one.

If you build a system to find houses, then as you grow you can hire people to do that work for you. You can hire bird dogs, acquisitions managers, property managers and project managers. And you can just sit in your office or your home office like I do and supervise all of the work that is being done.

It is at that point that real estate begins to become extremely rewarding financially for you. This is when you start creating real wealth. And with more money comes more opportunities to invest in bigger things. More rental properties, commercial real estate, self storage, mobile home parks. And that is how you become a millionaire.

When you can wake up in the morning, go out to breakfast, and do absolutely nothing and houses are being purchased, repaired, and sold for a huge profit (without your effort) then you have arrived.

When you can make more money on one fix and flip than most people make in an entire year then that is when you start entering the financial freedom zone.

From that point on, your financial freedom and how wealthy you become is dependent on how you invest not how you work. Which is why you need to stop trading your time for a paycheck. You increase your net worth by investing and by buying more real estate. You do not increase your net worth by working hard at your job or having two jobs.

So instead of focusing on getting a job, focus on learning how to invest in real estate. Remember I purchased my first house with just 3% down and the seller gave me that 3%. Real estate is the perfect vehicle to grow your wealth because you can buy real estate with very little money down or even no money down. And there are many investors like me out there who will pay you to find deals for them. Your education is free. Your only commitment is time. and according to statistics the average american watches 5 hours of TV every single day. So time is not really a problem. You will have plenty of time if you just quit watching TV.

So after that experience with my first bird dog you would think that I would be done with bird dogs. But I wasn’t. I guess I didn’t learn my lesson the first time.  One day a friend of mine introduced me to a guy that had just sold his Vitamin Store Business. He was looking for new business idea and this friend mentioned that the two of us should meet.

When we met for lunch, he told me how he could be a good lender for me and how he was interested in contributing capital and partnering with me on deals. (this was back in 2004). He wanted to “feel out the business” so he drove around with me in the car for three days.

And at the end of the three days he told me he did not think the business of flipping houses was for him. He said it was too hard and too time consuming.

I guess he envisioned we would be visiting properties like he saw on the TV shows about flipping houses. Instead we were driving around looking at hurricane damaged houses with mold and water damage. Hurricane Frances hit Florida in 2004 and the majority of the houses that we purchased that year (and the next) were hurricane damaged houses. This was quite different to the glitzy reality TV shows that he was watching on TV.

I needed more deals. I needed more houses. I now had more lenders who were literally throwing money at me. It’s a funny thing. When you start out as a real estate investor it is so hard to find anyone to lend you any money. It took me two full years of working full time as an investor before I found my first private lender. But once those lenders start getting used to those 10% returns month after month they become addicted to it.

When they see that you know what you are doing.

When they see that they get their money back in less than a year…

They want to invest more!

And they tell their friends and relatives about you.

And suddenly THEY are taking YOU to lunch.

When you make other people money everyone wants to be your friend.

I needed more houses and I needed more bird dogs. But I knew that having someone in the car driving around with me was not a good use of my time.

I started to educate myself. I read a book that changed how I thought about business and Investing (and life). The book was called “The E myth Revisited by Michael Gerber”. You can check it out on Amazon Here

I decided I needed a system for finding houses like the book spoke about. I needed to systematize my real estate business.

I rented out a conference room at a hotel in Port St Lucie, Florida (which was where the hurricane damaged houses were). I placed a small classified ad in the newspaper advertising for property locators (bird dogs). I stated in the classified ad that I will pay $1,000 for any house that I buy from a lead that they find. When people called I gave them the time and location of the meeting at the hotel.

At the meeting, I gave everyone a Power Point presentation on how to find houses. I did this for free. I also provided a free lunch to everyone that attended. It’s hard to believe now that I did that for free and paid for their lunch!

I had 11 people show up. Two of them, a young couple listened to the information, ate the free sandwiches and left (without saying anything). They probably think they got one over on me. They would have been able to buy 10 subway franchises if they had just learned how to do what I do.

In the presentation I showed everyone that attended how to locate vacant properties. Today I charge for this information. But back then I didn’t know that the only way to get people committed to learning is to charge them money. You see free is alluring, but free doesn’t require you to commit. I have friends that tell me they want to learn how to flip houses. I tell them hey come to my next boot camp you are my friend I wont’ charge you. Not one person has taken me up on that offer. Free is not what makes people commit.

My coaching program is so successful because paying a large amount of money up front makes the student way more serious about committing (or they wouldn’t pay all that money). It’s a great way to weed out the serious from the casually interested.

The bird dogs that I hired that day,  all they had to do was send me the information on the property and the address of the vacant house. If I purchased the house I would pay them a finders fee of $1,000. I showed them how to drive around looking for vacant, abandoned and boarded up properties. This was way before there were apps like Deal Machine or anyone else was even looking for vacant properties. There were a handful of guys like me driving around with a notepad and pen looking for vacant properties.

I taught the bird dogs that attended classic signs like looking for overgrown grass, code violation notices on the window, and boarded up windows. A great sign was blue tarps. If there was a blue tarp then it meant that there was water damage and the house was vacant.

Hurricane Frances in August of 2004 had created a lot of hurricane damaged houses. FEMA was giving out free blue tarps at the time, so it was an obvious telltale sign of vacant houses. This is one of the easiest periods as a real estate investor to locate houses. Hurricane damaged houses are an excellent opportunity for real estate investors. When you see a hurricane hit, if it is close to you and you can go to that area within a week or two and start marketing for properties that are damaged, many homeowners will want to sell. All they want is to get their insurance money and walk. You can clean up and make a millions dollars or more from one hurricane.

Of the 9 people that watched that bird dog presentation, 7 said they were interested in being property locators. All of them were unemployed. One was an insurance agent. One was a mechanic. Just random people who had answered my classified ad and shown up.

Two days later, 2 of the bird dogs had quit. We were down to five people. One of the guys that quit told me on the phone “I am not driving around all day without getting paid”. Clearly, he did not understand the concept of trading time for money and how to stop trading your time for a paycheck. You see the real question is how many hours would he need to drive around to earn that $1,000. Most people don’t look at it like that and quit before they can answer that question. If he got as far as finding a house and getting paid $1,000, then the logical next step would be for him to ask why I was willing to pay him $1,000 as a finders fee for that house.

And the answer was because the house in question had $50,000 in equity. Let’s say it took him 50 hours to find that house and he drove an entire week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. That equates to 50,000 of profit in one week (if he was buying the house instead of me). If it took him a month to find that house then that would be a profit of $50,000 for the month. When you start thinking in those terms, then you realize why you don’t want to be trading your time for a paycheck. You start realizing that you could make in a month what other people make in a year. And there is no cap, no limit to what you can make. You can put systems in place and hire people to find houses for you. Your earnings potential is virtually unlimited.

Today people pay me tens of thousands of dollars to teach them this system. Those original bird dogs were getting the training for free!

What the bird dogs should have been asking me is this:

How is this guy willing to pay me $1,000 for a vacant house address?

What is he doing with that information?

If he had dug a little deeper then he would have realized that I was buying these houses, fixing them up and creating $50,000 in equity from each house. Not one of them even asked why I was looking for houses.

And then he would have realized that he wasn’t driving around without getting paid. He was getting paid in education and training.

When I started out my mentor Ben told me that there are two ways to learn. You can learn with time or you can learn with money. Being a bird dog is learning with time. Writing a big check for coaching is learning with money. I don’t know of any other way for a new investor to learn this business.

If you spend hours trying to piece together bits and pieces of free information from the internet and from free webinars, Facebook Groups and online forums then you will NOT get good results or it will take you a very long time to get results (years). It’s also a good way to confuse yourself with information overload and a bunch of differing opinions. Worse is that you will have other beginners on these real estate forums and Facebook Groups giving you potentially wrong or bad advice.

If you want to learn how to do something then go and find someone who is already and expert and is doing it very well. Then offer to either work for them for free (or for very low wages) or pay them to teach you by writing a big check. Yes, it’s that simple. 

If you want to create wealth you will need to learn how to stop trading your time for a paycheck. I have a t-shirt that I give out at my boot camps with that quote on it (my quote). If you think that to make money you need to show up at a job and work from 9 to 5 then you have it all wrong. If you want to make real money, increase your net worth and create passive income and financial freedom then you will need to learn how to invest in real estate. There is no other path. You will never make a million dollars working hard at your job and saving for a rainy day (unless you are a dentist or doctor).

It is what you do with your savings and how you invest that will determine your future net worth and income. And if you don’t have any savings or very little money then real estate is the best vehicle since you can buy real estate with no money down or very little money down.

I know of no better investing vehicle than real estate. With real estate you can use borrowed money which gives you massive leverage. And just owning a rental property gives you huge tax advantages that will reduce the amount of taxes you pay on your paycheck immediately.

Let’s go back to the story of the bird dogs from that conference room.

By the end of the second week there was only one bird dog left. Her name was Patricia. She was an insurance agent and had most of her appointments with homeowners at night (which meant her days were free). She drove around during the day time looking for vacant houses and the thing about Patricia is that SHE DID NOT QUIT.

A few weeks later, I went on a trip to Spain. I remember being in a hotel in Madrid when I received an email from Patricia that she had found a house. The house was damaged from the hurricane. She had located the owner (she got the owner’s number from talking to the neighbor). The owner had already mentioned the price that they were willing to sell the house at.

In short, Patricia had found a deal! I drew up a purchase contract on my laptop computer at the hotel and had it printed and then faxed it to Patricia from the lobby of my hotel in Madrid. They charged me 7 euros per page. It cost me almost $100 to fax that contract to Patricia so she could have the seller sign. We did not have Docusign back then.

When I returned from Spain I closed on that house I was so happy that I paid Patricia a $2,000 finder’s fee (double what I had originally promised).

Now Patricia, the thing about her is that she did get it. She understood the value of the information that she was learning. She realized what I was buying and fixing up those vacant and abandoned houses.

She was smart. She thought way past the driving around and not getting paid attitude of all of the other bird dogs that had quit.

And she happened to have a brother who was a general contractor. And armed with the little information she learned from that experience with me she went on to find another house. But this one she kept for herself. She went on to buy, fix and flip many houses after that.

It wasn’t difficult for her to figure out. After I had purchased the first house, All she had to do is go by the house and watch the repairs that our crew were doing and then see what we listed and sold the house for. Since she knew what we paid for the house and her brother could estimate the repairs they figured out the profit potential really quickly.

What is interesting is that ANY bird dog can figure out that information.

Patricia quit her job and went into real estate investing full time with her brother.

I saw her name on many comparable sales reports when I was looking at properties. She did very well for herself. And I am happy for her.

For me, the part that was really life changing was that I had developed a system. It was a simple system but it was a system.

It was not very refined. But while I was out of the country on vacation I had managed to have someone else find a house for me to buy that would create around $50,000 in profit. I had made more money on that house than my entire vacation cost me. And that vacation cost me $23,000!.

It was one of the best vacations of my life. I went with my wife and two children all over Spain including Madrid, Seville, Marbella, Malaga, Nerja (my favorite beach town), Rhonda, and the white Andalusian villages.

We spent almost a month in Spain in 5 star hotels, laying out on the Mediterranean beaches and enjoying the amazing fish.

And while we were enjoying our vacation (and the blistering summer heat of Spain), Patricia was out there looking for houses for us!

I made note of that. I realized that a system of property locators was very important in order to grow and scale my business.

I decided that I needed to find more bird dogs. I needed to have huge rooms full of bird dogs. I needed ten times more people than I had on that first day in that conference room. So I could create 10 Patricia’s all locating houses that I could buy, fix and flip.

And that is how the idea of the Distressed Real Estate Boot Camp was born.

A couple of months later, after sharing this story with a few friends (it’s funny how making money attracts people) a friend of mine asked me if I would teach him. I said no, I am not interested in doing that.

He said I will pay you $5,000. I thought about it.

I told him that I would spend one week with him – Monday to Friday. And all questions would be via email. No phone calls. No texts. He agreed to those terms. I had him sign an agreement. I told him there would be no refunds under any circumstances. He thought $5,000 for 5 days was a lot. I told him that if he applied what I showed him he could make $500,000. And if he didn’t… well then that was not my problem since I was showing him the same information that I used.

It was up to him to apply that information.

Six months later a friend of his asked me to teach him.

I told him it was too time consuming and that I didn’t have the time (it was too time consuming and I didn’t).

I also told him it was not worth $5,000 for me to train him.

He offered me $10,000.

I made the same agreement as the first guy.

Five days only.

That guy quit his job and became a full time real estate investor (and made a few million dollars).

I often wonder why some people that attend real estate seminars do so well with this information and why others do not.

After training over 4,000 students I can share with you some interesting  observations.

Most people who take the information and make a lot of money with the information are very positive people who are not cynical (not negative).

They are fun to be around. That makes it easier to work with them and easier to help them. They are also the ones that are most willing to show up at the boot camps, give testimonials and help in any way.

Students who do well with the information I give them are NOT STUBBORN and are NOT set in their ways. They are willing to listen, are coach able and are willing to explore doing things different ways. They do not have pre-conceived notions about real estate or investing or money or anything else.

Hands down the hardest group to train are realtors. They have a pre- conceived notion that they understand real estate investing but unfortunately everything they have learned about real estate (as a realtor) hurts their understanding of investing instead of helping it.

The easiest people to train are the ones that know nothing. I trained a 20 year old kid who worked at Wendy’s making $6.75 an hour how to flip houses. He flipped 17 houses. It was easy because he listened. He did exactly what I told him to do.

I can train anyone on one condition. They have to be willing to empty their cup. They have to empty their head of every pre-conceived notion that they know about money and investing. And when they are willing to follow instructions and listen then they will begin to understand.

There is an old zen saying. “The teacher appears when the student is ready”.

If the student is not ready then the teacher cannot help them. EVER.

Paying $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 (or more) for real estate coaching is a lot of money. It is a significant investment. I compare it to investing in a 4 year college education. However it can be way more lucrative. Because you can make millions of dollars learning how to do this. And college will not teach you how to make millions of dollars. College can’t even teach you how to make six figures (unless you are a doctor or dentist).

If you are going to compare an investment in your real estate education to a college degree then you should be asking yourself this equation. If I could learn how to make millions of dollars in real estate over the next 10 years, what is that knowledge worth today?

That’s a pretty big number you would come up with. A lot more than a college education. You would realize that our coaching is actually cheap when you consider the benefits. When you consider that we have created multiple millionaires with our coaching program where would they be if they had never shown up at our training?

If you are willing to commit and spend big money like they did then you better be willing to commit yourself 100% to this endeavor. You owe it to yourself and ironically the more it costs you, the more likely you are to tackle it very seriously.

You better be willing to burn your ships. Like Cortes did in his conquest of Mexico in 1519. He burned his ships so that there was no option of retreat for his soldiers. They had to fight and win or they would die right there on that beach. And when faced with no other option guess what happened. They won! You see when failure is not an option you cannot lose.

Cortes and his soldiers had to make it work. They had no other options after they had burned their ships.

It’s time for you to burn yours!

When I started as a real estate investor I had to make it work. I had to make it work because I had NO OTHER OPTIONS.

In March of 2000, after being a stockbroker and financial advisor for 12 years, I lost everything including my business, my life savings, and my dignity when my stock brokerage business collapsed as a result of the March 2000 Nasdaq Tech Bubble Collapse.

I had to make real estate work. I had no other options. When I started working for Ben as a bird dog, I told myself that I was willing to anything including make him coffee if he asked me to do so. I was willing to do anything to learn. I would do anything he told me to do. And I would listen to everything he told me. After my business collapsed I felt like a complete failure. I felt humiliated. And I was going to make this real estate thing work. I had no other options.

And you know what? Because I had no other options, I made it work. You learn way more from failure than you do from success. Failure will humble you.

If you were to ask me Lex what is the one thing that you think contributed to your success (other than persistence and hard work) I would say it was without a doubt being willing and able to LISTEN to instruction from Ben my mentor. And I would not have been able to do that if I had not gone through that failure.

You see the humility of losing my business had forced me to empty my cup, to consider that maybe I was not as smart as I thought I was. And that maybe I needed to listen to someone who was obviously very successful.

The minute that I started asking questions and learning and listening is when I started growing.

Along the way, I improved the system that I was given. But I was always learning. And I am still learning today. That is why I attend real estate masterminds religiously all over the country. That is why I read so many real estate books. I pay an obscene amount of money to attend these masterminds. I pay more per year than what many of my coaching students pay me. And I pay my mastermind EVERY YEAR whereas my students only pay one time.

Joining masterminds elevated my learning.

You always need to be learning. Always be sharpening your sword.

When I started out working for Ben we were door knocking foreclosure leads. We would take stacks of Lis Pendens leads and I would drive up to the property and knock on the door. It took me 5 months of doing that to question if there was an easier way.

I decided to try out one of the tactics I had read about in one of the real estate Home Study Courses I had purchased. It mentioned placing a “we buy houses for cash” classified ad. So I did that.

My first deal came three weeks later from that classified ad in the newspaper. And that call that came in from that ad was from a wholesaler with 3 houses under contract. Ben purchased all three houses and I got paid $17,000.

Along the way, I refined what I had learned. I enhanced upon it. And my knowledge continued to grow. I learned about assumptions of mortgages, wholesaling, buying and holding, fixing and flipping, lease options and seller financing. Always be learning.

If you want to be successful as a real estate investor, the first thing I think you need to have is you need to be really desperate to succeed. You need to be almost at a situation where you have no other options available to you. That is the one common thread that I see with successful students. I don’t have too many wealthy doctors and dentists signing up for my program.

I have people who WANT TO MAKE MORE MONEY signing up.

Over the years, I have come to realize that the more I charged for coaching, the more serious the student would be.

But Swiping your credit card will not make you a million dollar real estate investor. Hanging out with me will not make you an investor either. If you are not willing to listen, put in the hard work and invest your time to learn how this business works. There are a lot of moving parts.

Since 2004 I have coached thousands of students through my boot camps Advanced Inner Circle Training’s and Private Coaching Program. Along the way, the price for my coaching has consistently increased every single year. In fact, after each boot camp we increase our prices.

As I trained more people, I began to realize the true value of teaching someone how to quit their job and create financial freedom. 

I began to see how this was more valuable than a college degree to many of them. And they were willing to pay $100,000 (or more) for a college degree. I also realized that I was the only guy in the country who was coaching his students (who didn’t hire coaches). My prices for coaching went up. And the demand for my coaching went up. I became more selective about who I would work with. I began turning more students away than I accepted. I began limiting the size of my Inner Circles to just 30 students.

And every single boot camp we have had over the past 12 years has been sold out down to the last seat!

Clearly we were on to something. We had a real estate system that worked.

I knew I was on to something big when the big national real estate gurus starting using my name in their “pay per click” campaigns on Google. When I noticed that my website traffic was outranking some of the biggest names in the business it finally dawned on me that I was getting national attention and exposure. That exposure turned into articles in magazines, interviews on Fox News Radio, being quoted on ABC, NBC, CBS and even a picture of me on the front page of the Miami Herald, and the Sun Sentinel on stories about flipping houses.

So that is how my boot camps and coaching programs came about. Like I said, I never intended to start a coaching program.

So how did my Home Study Course come about?

When the market peaked in 2006 I figured I would kick back for a year or two, and wait for real estate prices to come down. It made no sense to keep on buying if prices were going to go down. I sold the fix and flips that I had on my books (barely), saved up some cash and waited for the storm to hit. I kept some of my high cash flowing rentals.

I decided I would wait at least two years until I purchased another house.

After I had made that decision, I had a lot of free time on my hands.

I had always wanted to write a book.

I wanted to write a book about my first few years investing in real estate. I wanted to share with people the incredible wealth building potential of real estate and how it had changed my life. I wanted to show people how I had received the down payment money for my beautiful home in Boca Raton from just one hurricane damaged house (which made me $88,000).

And mostly I wanted to show people how I did this with someone else’s money. How you can invest in real estate with no money down.

Writing a book seemed like the best way to share that story.

I asked a friend of mine who had authored a book what the best way to go about doing it was.

His answer was to try and write just one page a day.

In 2006, I sat down and began to write.

I never realized it would take me 2 years to finish writing that book. I finished the book in July 2008. My father was the first person to read the manuscript.

It was way bigger than I anticipated. It became an 800-page word document which would be the equivalent to the content of almost 4 books. I realized it was more like a course than a book.

If you have ever purchased a real estate “Guru” Home Study Course before then you are familiar with what they look like. With few exceptions, most of them use a large font and double or triple space between lines. Many of the courses have lines for notes on alternating pages. The lines for notes is a way to fill up the number of pages of the book. They want to make their book (or course) look bigger than it really is.

Along the way I learned that most real estate gurus did not even write their own material. They paid “ghost writers” to write their books. They admitted this openly to me. In fact one of the biggest Real Estate Gurus on the planet introduced me to his writer when she joined us at dinner (she was his employee).

My Home Study Course was not like that. I actually wrote it myself.

Yes I am the idiot that actually sat down and spent two years writing it.

And I don’t have an infomercial on TV. I am just a real estate investor who has been buying, fixing, renting and flipping over 1,000 houses over the past 17 years.

That book became the blue print for my Home Study Course.

After it was complete I realized that it was basically a How to Study Guide on How to Buy, Fix and Flip Real Estate without using any of your own money.

I spent two years writing that Home Study Course.

Do you have any idea how time consuming that is?

To wake up every morning and spend a few hours writing?

Every single day!

I wrote for 2 years.

And then I edited it for another six months.

I gave the first manuscript to my dad to read. We went on a cruise together and it was the last trip that we had together before he passed a few years after that. I am glad and honored that my father was the first person to read my Home Study Course.

I called it “Millions in Real Estate with No Cash and No Credit”.

Now that I had a course I had to figure out how to sell it.

I already knew that this could be a valuable study guide for potential bird dogs. Patricia had become successful even without a study guide. I figured that anyone that had this Home Study Course had the potential to do what I did – to replicate my success.

But I also knew based on my experience with bird dogs in the past that I was not going to train anyone for free. My time was valuable. I estimated that if I focused on finding deals my time could be worth as much as $1,000 an hour (or more). If I was going to train someone I would have to get paid at least that amount or it would not be a good use of my time.

Having a Home Study Course and a seminar seemed like the best, easiest and cheapest way to teach as many bird dogs as possible at the same time.

I decided that I needed to hold a boot camp for bird dogs. That was actually the original name “Bird Dog Boot Camp”. We later changed the name to Distressed Real Estate Boot Camp and then Wholesaling Real Estate Boot Camp.

I knew that many of the students that I trained at these boot camps would go on to become full time real estate investors, wholesalers and flippers (and they have). I estimate that 30% to 40% of the wholesalers in my local South Florida market had never flipped a house before attending my boot camp. I was literally training my competition. And I knew that I would be adding value to other peoples lives. I would also be making lots of money in the process. It seemed like a win win to me and to them (it was and it is). I was concerned a bit about the competition in my local market, But I don’t believe in scarcity. I have an abundance mindset. You should too.

A few years later, one large well known wholesaler in South Florida called me to yell at me that I was ruining it for all of the other wholesalers by teaching so many people how to wholesale and bid on properties online. I laughed at him. I said to him literally “Why only you deserve to make money flipping houses?”

You see before I started my training, no one was teaching students how to bid on Hubzu, HUD, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Auction.Com. I trained on these topics 5 years before anyone else did. No one wanted to give up the “secret sauce”. I unleashed an army of hundreds of students on these sites and collectively those students wholesaled more than 500 houses on those online platforms.

Many of those students are full time real estate investors now. And they make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from real estate. Quite a few of my students are now multi millionaires from investing in real estate.  Some wholesalers make more than seven figures per year! investing in real estate can be VERY lucrative if you know what you are doing.

I decided that attendees at my boot camp would get three days of training and the Home Study Course as a guide book. At the end of the boot camp they would have a basic understanding of wholesale real estate and locating deals. It was basically a bird dog training boot camp. This evolved into “how to be a wholesaler” training over the years which is why we now call it the “Wholesaling Real Estate Boot Camp”.

I have always contended that being a bird dog and being a wholesaler are one and the same thing. Most wholesalers disagree with me. Bird dog is really just an entry level wholesaler. If you can locate deals, people will pay you money for those deals. You can call it an assignment fee or you can call it a finders’ fee but you will get paid.

Whether the person paying you is one investor or multiple investors, either way you are locating deals and getting paid a fee for finding those deals. That is what a bird dog does. And that is what a wholesaler does. It’s really the same thing. If you get good at finding deals at some point you are going to want to make more money than the finders fee. You will want to keep the house as a rental or fix and flip the house. You will also build up your own  cash buyers list and then at that point you are no longer a bird dog and can call yourself a wholesaler.

That is what I teach people to do at the Wholesaling Real Estate Boot Camp.

But never ever forget this one important point.

The essence of this business boils down to one simple thing.

Your ability to consistently find good deals at wholesale prices.

I knew I wanted to do a boot camp and teach as many people as possible. But how do I let people know about this event? I needed an audience.

After attending a local Real Estate Investment Club meeting and watching a speaker do a presentation about real estate I noticed that he sold a program at the end for $997. As i watched this, an idea began to take shape in my mind. I signed up for his course and I went to his boot camp. And I observed and paid attention and took notes. While all of the attendees were thinking about the material I was thinking “How am I going to do a boot camp like this?” How easy is this to do? How do I get people to come to the boot camp?

I realized that I could start a real estate investment club. And I could have monthly real estate meetings. I could teach other investors how to invest in real estate. I was certain that some of those investors would want to be bird dogs. And I loved teaching. I already knew that I loved teaching. And I am good at it. I am also really good at motivating people to get off their ass and start doing something.

And the Home Study Course would be a perfect study guide for them. And from that I could transition to the Boot Camp. I figured I would start small with a few bird dogs at a time.

Maybe 5 or 10 people.

In October of 2008 I opened my real estate investor’s club. I called it the Distressed Real Estate Investor’s Association. At my first meeting I had only one attendee (I am not kidding). I had $500 worth of pizza and salad and only one guy showed up.

I decided to scale it down a notch, and skip the food. I found a coffee shop that would let me host my meetings for free. I charged $5 to anyone who wanted to attend. I advertised my meeting on meetup.com.

12 years later we are the largest real estate meetup group in the U.S (we have 12 Meetups with almost 10,000 members).

Persistence pays off. 12 years of hosting a monthly meeting pays off. Showing up is 90% of the battle. Remember that. Trust me when I tell you that it wasn’t always easy to show up. I had the flu, a cold, you name it. But I always hosted my meeting. I never ever cancelled. I have held 148 meetings. Next week will be my 149th monthly meeting.

Consistency, Honesty, Integrity and Persistence. I call it the “CHIP” principle. You would be amazed what you can do if you are consistent and persistent. Even water flowing over a rock can change the rock. The key is to be persistent.

When we started our meetings, $5 covered your door fee at the meeting and got you a drink and admittance to the event. I sold nothing at my meetings. All I did was teach. If someone wanted to be a bird dog then I sold them my Home Study Course. I did that for 2 years. Pure education. I built a loyal following of people that would come to my meetings. My meeting grew from 3 people to 5 people to 15 people to 30 people to 65 people. I relied on word of mouth advertising, meetup and social media to promote our meetings.

When our meeting grew to 65 people, the coffee shop that was hosting us told us that we were exceeding their capacity and needed to move locations. That is when we committed to hosting our meetings at a hotel which is where we have been ever since. The door fee went up to $15. And our meetings were packed. We had some meetings with more than 100 attendees. Our typical meeting has 60 to 70 people.

The same day that I opened my Investment Club (in 2008) I also set up a new company called the Distressed Real Estate Institute. The goal of this company was to teach new investors how to make money investing in distressed real estate. The focus was foreclosures, short sales and bank owned properties.

It was the middle of the financial crisis of 2008. Banks were failing left and right. People were panicking. There were runs on banks. This was when Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failed. This is when the government stepped in to bail out the banks.

And all I could think was what an incredible opportunity to buy real estate. And I had a how-to manual that was ready to go. I was ready to do my first boot camp. I guess circumstance and chance met at the right time for me. Here we were, in the bottom of the market in 2009 and I was thinking about doing my first boot camp and I already had the study guide.

Or maybe fortune favors the bold. Either way, whether it was luck or instinct, I would rather be lucky than smart. And I had gotten very lucky with real estate. And I was certain that it was an amazing opportunity to buy. Everyone around me was pessimistic about real estate. But all I saw was opportunity. Think for yourself. Be original. Make up your own mind about what you believe.

I coined a phrase that I used at every real estate meeting. I started every meeting with this quote: “This is the best time in your life time to be buying real estate”.

And it was. I didn’t believe what the media was saying about real estate. I believed in the American dream. I believed that people from all over the world are literally dying to come to the U.S. And I believe that the population will keep growing. I still believe that. I always will. Real estate will keep going up long term. We will have bubbles. And we will have crashes. But long term real estate will keep going up. And buying and holding real estate long term will make you very wealthy.

In March of 2009 I  decided to put my money (or actually other peoples money) where my mouth is. I stepped in and purchased 7 houses in one month directly from the bank. They were all REO’s (bank owned properties). All the houses were 3-bedroom 2-bathroom houses in a city called Port St Lucie. At the time Port St Lucie was the 7th fastest growing city in the U.S. The price for those houses was just $35,000. At the prior peak these houses sold for $200,000. That is not a typo. This literally was the best time in anyone’s lifetime to be buying real estate.

I remember discussing with friends about what an incredible opportunity to invest in real estate this was. I was eager and enthusiastic. I had a Home Study Course and I was preparing for my first boot camp. I wanted to put my money where my mouth was. I purchased these houses just two months before the boot camp so I could show students HUD’s (closing statements) and pictures of the houses so that they could see that this was really happening. This was before Hubzu.com and Auction.com even existed. I was finding these houses on realtor.com.

I was not a licensed real estate agent. Yes, these houses were sitting on realtor.com. Every day the banks were literally dumping more inventory of bank owned properties on the market. and I was literally begging my friends to buy these houses.

That is why I coined the phrase “this is the best time in your life time to be buying real estate”. I also had a crasser way of saying the same quote which I often mentioned right after the first one. The quote was, “From now until the day you die, you will never get another opportunity to buy real estate at these prices. I believed that then, and I believe it now. We will never see $35,000 houses in Port St Lucie again. It was an opportunity that needed to be grabbed. And like I said, fortune favors the bold. It took courage for me to borrow money from investors (that had to be paid back) to buy 7 bank owned houses in one month when everyone around me was telling me I was wrong. What if I was wrong? But I analyzed the data and I knew I was right.

I set up my first boot camp for May of 2009. I tried to hustle to get people to pay $997 to attend the boot camp and get the Home Study Course. I thought it would be smart to start with people I knew and business associates (it wasn’t).

The response I got from people that I personally knew was very tepid.

I heard things like I understand you can buy a house for $35,000. But what if house decreases in value to $25,000?” I never understood that question. Why would you care if the house was rented out for $950 a month? That is crazy sick returns. If you don’t understand that then you have no business investing in anything. Keep your money in a CD and wait for a rainy day.

I was shocked that I was getting such an unenthusiastic response. I realized that these friends of mine that were doctors and lawyers and PHD’s were as scared about real estate as the media and the articles in the newspapers. After all this was the height of the financial crisis.

My response to their question was that if those houses went down to $25,000 then Wall Street would start buying real estate. They laughed at me.

Not quietly.

But loud bellicose laughs. Like I was an idiot. I remember at one lunch in particular everyone looking at me and laughing.

And that is when I knew that I was right. When no one else believed it.

Warren Buffet has a saying. He says be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful. And it seemed that everyone was fearful. So it looked like it was time to buy.

There was “blood in the streets” to use an expression coined by Barron Rothschild. The Financial Crisis had scared everyone including the biggest banks and the Federal Reserve. It seemed that my earlier years of trading stocks and going through the crash of the Stock Market in March of 2000  had prepared me well for this very moment. It was a do or die moment. I recognized the fear and the panic and I knew it was the time to buy real estate. And I was right. I somehow luckily purchased the bottom of the market. I don’t know if I will ever be that lucky again. But I hope to spot the signs like I did then.

So my friends laughed at me when I said that Wall Street would buy real estate if it got any cheaper. Loud mocking bellicose laughs. I will never forget that. Like I was an idiot.

In February of 2012, Warren Buffet the world’s most famous investor appearing live on CNBC’s Squawk Box, said “He would buy up a couple hundred thousand single family homes if it were practical to do so. He also said on that same interview, “If held for a long period of time and purchased at low rates, houses are even better than stocks”.

Keep in mind that Buffet said this 3 years AFTER the market had bottomed. He said this 3 years AFTER I had purchased those houses. The market had already moved up a lot. The market bottomed in 2009. He said this in 2012. The houses that I had purchased for $35,000 were already worth $60,000.

That same year Black Stone Capital, one of the largest Private Equity Firms in the world entered the residential real estate market. It was the first time in U.S. history that Wall Street and Private Equity would enter the single family residential market. Prior to that Wall Street had only invested in commercial real estate (buildings). Wall Street had never entered the single family market. This was a huge shift which would change the real estate market forever. 

Blackstone spent billions to buy nearly 50,000 homes nationwide, building the largest private portfolio of single family homes in the country. They were not alone. Soon, other major players like Colony American Homes, Starwood Capital (Waypoint), American Homes 4 Rent, Invitation Homes and American Residential Properties were buying billions of dollars’ worth of single family homes.

An interesting side note is that those same firms are now effectively selling by going public. The smart money has made its move. I learned a lot by watching how major players operate. You don’t have to be early you just have to be right. Don’t be afraid to overpay when you want to scale and buy massive amounts of properties. My mentor Ben told me “if it is a deal at $35,000 then it is a deal at $40,000 too”. Don’t nickel and dime the bottom of a market. Just get inventory. Just buy. Buy everything that you can. Buy and Borrow until your eye balls bleed (another one of my quotes).

I learned the value of cost of capital. A term I had barely thought about since graduating with my major in Finance. If you can borrow enough money at really low interest rates and if you are right you can make billions of dollars. That is essentially what hedge funds and private equity do. I watched Black Stone Capital do it. And it was an amazing lesson. A brilliant move. A ballsy move but not as courageous as buying the bottom. But a lot smarter. Momentum at your back is better than a falling knife.

When markets collapse people always rush in too quickly. It takes time for things to settle. Be patient. Watch, read, learn and wait. like waiting for the whites of their eyeballs in one of those old cowboy and Indian movies. You have to pull the trigger just right. If you do your life will be changed forever. And you can make yourself a multi millionaire.

Another real estate bust will come eventually. And when it does I will be patient. And when I think it is the right time to buy I will buy massively in scale with borrowed bank money. I already own the domain name that I will use. It will be called the Distressed Real Estate Fund. The minimum investment will be $10 million dollars. My goal will be to make 100 million in profit. I haven’t even set up the fund and I already have my first two investors. I like to have big goals. As Nelson Mandela says, “There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living”.

But the next time around I am not relying on mom and pop money. I am going private equity all the way. Rather have 5% of something huge than 100% of something small.

Those houses that I purchased in 2009 for $35,000 are now worth $200,000. We have made in my estimation around 80% of the up move in real estate in those markets. We are probably in the seventh or 8th inning. In any bull market, the final innings are where the biggest moves are made. In some markets like the Miami Condo market I believe we have already peaked. But most markets are at around 75% with notable exceptions like San Francisco, Manhattan etc. The market that I play in, which is middle America single family homes is about 20% below the prior highs. And I anticipate that barring any major market shocks like a currency crisis or bond market crash (which can and will eventually happen) or an exogenous event that is unanticipated like war or a huge pandemic, that the market can keep humming along. Inventory is tight. Interest Rates are low. Very low. The lowest in history. And if rates don’t go up dramatically the market might just keep humming along for a few more years. A lot will depend on the next election.

Since 2009 I have trained over 4,000 students in my Partnership Program. We now hold 8 live training events per year. We have the Wholesaling Real Estate Boot Camp (which teaches wholesaling) twice a year and we also have the Fixing and Flipping Boot Camp (which teaches fixing and flipping) twice a year. We also have 4 Inner Circle Training Events per year (two for Wholesaling and two for Fixing and Flipping) for coaching students who want to learn how to wholesale and fix and flip. I personally teach all the events myself. I have no other speakers at my events.

From working with so many students, I have learned how to teach others how to do what I do. I have done it well basing it on their progress and their results (not mine). I now have a handful of students that are multi-millionaires from investing in real estate. Meaning their net worth has increased by more than two million dollars. And I have many students that have made hundreds of thousands of dollars investing in real estate. My program has been a huge success. It has been far more successful than I ever imagined.

Over the years I have refined my training program.

I added to the Home Study Course a 6 Disc Audio CD Set and forms disc and Partnership Program forms. I added an online training site (Lex Real Estate Training) with more than 1,000 hours of training videos.

Over the past 12 years, we have listened to our students and our staff and we have refined our teaching methods at the boot camps to make them better and better for our students. We created custom proof of funds letter web sites so that our students could create their own proof of funds letters to make offers on properties. We created custom purchase contract sites for creating purchase contracts. We created offer generating sites so that our students could have Virtual Assistants make offers for them. We created sites for submitting Partnership Program deals and sites for partnering with us and other wholesalers on JV deals. We added transactional funding and hard money to our programs.

We have trained thousands of students and many wholesalers. I get all the local wholesaler’s emails and I keep them in a separate gmail folder. One day, I went through the emails in this folder. I was shocked when I realized that 40% of the local wholesalers sending out those emails had never been wholesalers until they attended my boot camp. I was creating my own competition. And I turned some of them into partners. I funded their deals and I found them buyers for their deals. And I marketed their deals for them and they marketed my deals to their buyers. Wholesaling is synergy at its finest. One of the best local wholesalers that I know who is a good friend of mine has synergy with every wholesaler. Do that. You will make a lot of money like he does.

So, after that entire story of how I got into teaching other people how to invest in real estate, if you are a new real estate investor. I would like you to read this.

Before you get started. Before you whip out your credit card – I want you to read this.

If you are thinking about signing up for my real estate coaching program please read this first before you do.

I want you to understand that I wrote a Home Study Course that took me 2 years to write. Humor me and read it. All of it. That might take you ten hours to do.

I wrote a book about wholesaling REO”s and Short Sales called “Wholesaling Bank Owned Properties”. It teaches you wholesaling, bank owned properties, double closings and many other things you need to know. You could probably read that book in 2 hours. Please read it.

I also co-wrote a book with the owner of the title company we do many of our closings with called “Title Insurance Tips and Secrets”. We cover transactional funding, land trusts, double closings, lien searches and more in that book. You could read that book in 2 hours as well.

Your total time invested at this point would be only 14 hours.

Listen to the six audio CD’s. I will give you the benefit of the doubt and say that will take you 6 hours. You could listen to these in the car on your way to work. Or you could listen to them when you are at the gym or taking a walk or run.

Total time invested is now 20 hours. Listen to my podcast and watch my You Tube Channel whenever you can instead of listening to music or chatting with friends on the phone.

Attend BOTH the Wholesaling boot camp and the Fixing and Flipping Boot Camp in person or if you cannot attend the live event then commit to watch the entire boot camp videos (for both boot camps) on our training site.

I highly recommend you attend the live event if you can. The energy that you get from being in the room, the ability to ask questions and learn from other questions is worth the cost of the plane ticket and hotel.

That is 3 days at 8 hours per day for a total of 24 hours. Add that to the time spent and you are now at 44 hours total.

Watch the 6 “Getting started” Training videos. That will take you another 6 hours.

Total time invested 50 hours.

Then watch the following videos in this order:

• Target Markets
• Realtor.com
• Hubzu.com
• Hud Homestore
• Auction.com

That will be another 20 hours or so.

At this point your total investment of time would be 70 hours.

Assuming you spent one hour a day you could do this in two months. If you spent a few hours a day you could be done in as little as one month.

After you have completed those 70 hours is when your real estate training will begin (not end). 

You will need to begin looking for properties online and offline based on the training that you learned. You will need to begin making offers. You will need to market to motivated sellers. And that is when the questions will begin. You will learn by DOING.

You will have lots of questions and you will want to contact our support desk very often. That is fine. We are there to help you. Our support desk email is supportdesk at lexrealestategroup.com (insert the @ symbol)

You will need to learn about after repair value, repair estimates and what a house would be worth once it is repaired. You will need to learn how to calculate how much to offer. And you will need to do it fast. You will need to speak to realtor’s, listing agents, sellers and wholesalers. You will need to constantly make offers online and offline every single day.

You will have to register on online auction sites and bid on properties daily. You will need to mail out postcards and yellow letters. You will need to put out bandit signs. You will need to post deals on your website or blog and on social media.

You will think about quitting.

You will think about quitting often.

The people that are dearest to you will tell you to quit.

And unfortunately, there is a very good chance that you will quit.

My friends told me to quit. Even my spouse told me to quit. I wanted to quit many times. But I didn’t. I kept moving forward. I never listened to them.

Remember that the people who try and give you advice and who try and discourage you didn’t attend the boot camp. They didn’t read the training materials. They don’t understand the endeavor you are undertaking.

Only you understand it.

Only you know what it is that you are trying to achieve.

The enemy is within you.

Your own fear is what is stopping you.

Fear of failure.

Fear of ridicule.

Fear of loss of money.

Fear of poverty.

Many beginners quit.

How many? I would wager to guess that north of 90% of new investors quit.

Are you in the other 10% that doesn’t quit?

You may not be.

You may not have what it takes.

And that is okay.

This business is not for everyone. If you don’t really hate your job. If you are comfortable. If you make enough money to get by and pay your bills. And if you don’t really have a burning passion and desire to make way more money and to create wealth and become a millionaire then it will be way too easy for you to just quit.

The students who have the most success are the ones who have their backs against the wall. The ones who have no choice but to make this work. They are hungry. And they will out hustle everyone around them. Is this you? Or are you too passive?

If you are content making $30,000, $40,000 or $50,000 a year then this is not for you.

I will save you the money and the time and the aggravation.

If you dream about a secure financial future, one that has zero stress and no worries then this is for you. If you dream about a life where your passive investments pay all of your bills and you can be happy and secure then maybe this is for you.

If you wonder what it would be like to take a vacation to Europe twice a year for ever with your significant other. Or to eat at any restaurant you want whenever you want then maybe this is for you. If you wonder what it would be like to have zero debt and 7 figures in the bank then this may be for you.

If you are set in your ways and stubborn and have given up on your childhood dreams then this is probably not for you.

If you want to live a life of financial independence with more financial security for yourself, your children and your grandchildren then maybe this is a fit for you.

But don’t expect it to be easy. It won’t be easy. I promise you that.

You will need to want that life so badly that you are willing to do something to make it happen.

You will need to want it bad enough that you don’t ever even consider quitting. Quitting is not an option because quitting is easy.

Sticking it out and having persistence is hard.

Like I said before 90% of it is just hanging in there and never ever quitting.

The other 10% is working hard, being consistent, not being lazy and being willing to learn and then apply what you have learned by being consistent and being persistent. You need to DO. You learn by doing.

If you are willing to commit your time and energy. If you are willing to put in the time to learn and educate yourself. If you are willing to make offers every single day.

If you are willing to hustle like you have never ever hustled before in your life.

If you have an awesome work ethic and you are willing to work hard and not be lazy. If you are willing to listen to my advice and not be set in your ways.

If you can do all of these things then sign up for my boot camp by clicking here.

If you are not willing to commit your time and energy. If you are lazy or if you think that swiping your credit card will somehow by osmosis teach you real estate investing then save your money. If you are an existing student and you are not getting the results that you want then you should read the training material again. Read all of it. Don’t skip parts of it. Don’t skim through it and think to yourself that “you already know that”. If you are not doing deals, if you have yet to flip a house then read the material again. Watch the training videos again. Attend the boot camp again.

Log in to the training site often. Watch all the training videos. We add new material every week to our training site. When was the last time you logged in?

We know the answer.

We see the stats. And we are shocked at what we see.

If you come up to me at a boot camp and you tell me that you are really trying, you know what I do?

I ask my assistant for your stats. How many times you logged into the training site. How many training videos you watched. How many offers you made. How many proof of funds letters you have pulled. How many questions you have emailed to our support desk.

And based on that information, I know how hard you are trying.

Let me tell you this. I don’t care if you have lots of money or very little money. If I see that you are trying I will bend over backwards to help you.

But if I see that you are not, then I will move on to another student who is trying.

That’s fair right?

It’s up to you and how badly you want to succeed.

Swiping your credit cards won’t get you results. Studying, learning and going through the training will. Then you need to act on what you have learned and you need to start doing something (like making offers).

Start making offers every day. Call listing agents. Bid on properties online. Engage with our support desk for all your questions. We are there to help you.

I want students that are willing to learn.

But If you are thinking about signing up I also want you to know what you are getting yourself into.

You think you are going to come into a market with experienced wholesalers and take money out of their pocket without putting any time and effort in?

Never going to happen.

Check your ego at the door.

You think you know about real estate because you are a real estate agent? or a mortgage broker? That’s retail. This isn’t retail. This is wholesale. It has nothing to do with retail.

You need to empty your cup and be willing to learn.

Imagine your brain is empty and you know nothing and start learning.

Be humble.

If you attack this endeavor halfheartedly you will lose.

I want you to attack this task like a beast.

As if your life depended on it.

If you decide to spend your good hard-earned money to get into my program then understand that I have spent thousands of hours refining it just for students like you.

This article you are reading right now has taken me more than a few hours to write. It has gone through many edits.

I wrote it for you.

To have an impact on you.

So that you will have the greatest chance of success.

My purpose in life is to effectuate change in other people.

If I can change just one life then I have achieved my objective.

So far I have changed hundreds of lives. And I will continue to do for as long as I can.

I understand and appreciate the money you are contemplating spending.

I know you worked hard for it. I know you have bills to pay and mouths to feed.

And I want to give you 1000 times your money worth.

Twenty years from now I want you to look but at your decision to enter my real estate training program and say to yourself that it was the best decision you have ever made.

Many of my students say that. Read some of their testimonials here.

I want my program to be the best real estate training program in the country. I strive every day to get closer to that goal.

I belong to the biggest baddest real estate mastermind on the planet(which isn’t cheap) in order to make sure that I have the best information from the sharpest minds in the real estate business. So that I can share it with YOU.

I read every single real estate book that comes out on the Amazon Book store (yes every single one).

I read three books a week on real estate.

I want to make sure that there is not one single thing that I miss.

I do that so I can teach you to the best of my ability.

So that I can teach you everything that I know.

But here’s the deal….

You Need To Be Willing To Give Me YOUR BEST EFFORT.

I don’t care how smart you are.

All I care is that you give this your best effort.

Because before you sign up

I want you to know that what you want (that life of financial freedom, security and wealth)

WILL NOT COME EASILY

You will need to be a warrior.

You will need to be a winner.

You will need to be a fighter.

And you will need to have a “quitting is not in my vocabulary kind of attitude”.

You will also need to watch how you spend your personal time.

Cut your TV time in half (I don’t even have TV in my house).

Spend your spare time reading books about self help, motivation, overcoming fear, and real estate investing.

You want a good place to start?

DON’T WATCH THE NEWS

Instead read:

• Think and Grow Rich
• The Laws of Success
• Unlimited Power
• Awaken The Giant Within
• The Magic of Believing (Tony Robbins got his start from this book)

Watch out who you spend your spare time with. You will probably need to make some changes. And that won’t be easy.

Any endeavor worth pursuing requires sacrifice.

This is no different. This endeavor will require sacrifice.

Anyone who moves you closer to your goals stick with that person. Anyone who moves you further away from your goals or who makes you feel bad about yourself or that you are wasting your time you should distance yourself from.

I don’t care how close of a relative or family member they are.

Toxic is toxic.

It’s not hard to know if someone makes you feel good or bad. You already know the answer.

I divide people into two groups.

Those who make me feel good and those who make me feel bad.

Good people pump you up. They lift you up.

Like my brothers and sisters in my mastermind.

They are powerful.

They make me want to be better.

They make me imagine the possibilities.

They make me push myself harder.

They educate me.

They empower me.

They are positive.

Find people like that.

Emulate them.

Be like them to others around you.

Pump other people up.

Make people feel good about themselves.

And they will feel good about you.

Read some Dale Carnegie while you are at it. His writings are amazing at that (read “How To Win Friends and Influence People”).

If you think you can just jump into this game of  real estate investing, wholesaling and flipping and make tons of money with little effort then you are very much mistaken.

And you will be disappointed. And you will quit.

Because you have not prepared yourself for the battle that is ahead of you.

That is why I have a sword on the wall in front of my desk.

To remind myself every day of the battle that is ahead of me.

If I get weak, If I get slow, If I don’t strive to learn, my competition will destroy me. If I want to win then I need to sharpen my sword every day. That is why there is a sword on the wall in front of my desk.

You must understand that it will take time.

First you need to learn. That is the hardest part.

There is a training curve (around 6 months).

You need to understand wholesale real estate, After Repair Value, how much to offer, repair estimates, comparable sales, how to find deals, how to talk to sellers, how to generate leads. This all will take time and effort (and money).

It will take approximately 6 months for all of the dots to start connecting.

Then armed with this knowledge you need to act on it (by making offers, bidding properties, mailing postcards, talking to sellers etc.).

you need to do. You learn by doing.

And in the doing it will start making sense – if you don’t quit before it begins to work for you.

Which is exactly what most beginners unfortunately do (quit).

If you are willing to put in the time and the effort.

If you are willing to learn.

If you are willing to attend the boot camp and then attend it again.

If you have a no defeat no give up attitude.

If you are willing to watch all of the training videos.

If you are ready to empty your cup and listen and learn.

If you have a good work ethic, a burning desire and passion.

If you are not lazy.

Then I am going to give you an amazing opportunity that you would only know about if you read all the way down to this page. I am going to give you the opportunity to sign up at a very discounted price because you took the time to read all of this which indicates to me that you are serious.

If you want this badly then sign up at the link below before I take the page down (and we increase prices).

sign up here.

I am ready for the challenge. I welcome it. Just bring me your best. Because that is what I do. Every single day. I bring you my best. And both you and me, are worth that – your time, my time, your best effort and my best effort.

But don’t be weak. Don’t be passive. Don’t be timid. You have greatness within you. If you are willing to just go for it you will see that greatness come out.

And when (and if) it does it will come out with such intensity you will want to roar like a lion.

Be a warrior.

Think like a warrior.

Live with passion.

I hope to see you at the next boot camp.

So are you ready to get started?

Start your first action step by watching my training webinar about flipping houses by clicking on the button below.

Do you want to learn how to wholesale real estate and flip houses?

“Let Me Show You How my students are wholesaling real estate and flipping houses without using any of their own cash”

CLICK BELOW TO REGISTER.