Real estate investment fluff

If you want to make money investing in real estate, you have to do it the old-fashioned way, you have to earn it. There really are no shortcuts. Unfortunately not.

Now, if you sit down and listen to late-night TV where fake real estate experts hawk their half-baked theories and believe that they are the answer, think again. These people can be very convincing, and persistent, too, but is there anything concrete behind what they are saying? Let's examine the story a little bit.

John T. Reed is a long-time investor and a newsletter writer who has followed the industry for many years, including watching the gurus who make a living peddling real estate seminars, books and tapes. He is totally dismayed at the practice. These operators aggressively market their products, yet the content you are supposed to get isn’t there. Time and again. And they claim that it’s really easy to become rich using their programs when in reality it’s nothing but. Reed nowadays calls them con men. He adds that the gurus of the ‘60s and ’70s were for real, admittedly some were better than others, but they were genuine.

For more on Reed and real estate, visit his website JohnTReed.

The latest scheme on late-night TV appears to be note buying. How it works is that a home seller takes back a note, in other words holds a second, to make the sale possible since the buyer couldn't finance the entire transaction with a first mortgage. In a soft market like today’s it’s being used quite a bit. The gurus are now pushing seminars, books and tapes on that and make it all look easy, again, with huge returns. And when you struggle to make one penny using their simple formulas, they try to sell you additional mentoring services because that’s what you are still missing in order to become wealthy. Yeah, right.

The bottom line is that when one of these smooth-talkers tells you from inside the box that you can get rich in a jiffy with no money and little effort, yawn and go to bed.

photo by sonjapollon