Peter Vekselman Real Estate Trainer and Coach

The Importance of Knowing Your Local Real Estate Investing Market

How well do you know your local real estate market? The answer to that question will have a lot to do with whether real estate investing provides a lucrative future for you and your family or rueful memories of what might have been.

By knowing your local real estate investing market, you're able to keep your finger on the pulse of your local community and to stay abreast of changes in trends, sales prices and rental rates. Knowing immediately about these changes is critical to your investing future. Here's how each of these three areas will affect your future:

•· Trends - National media outlets report gloom & doom outlooks for real estate, but even in the most depressed real estate market there are isolated pockets and neighborhoods with property values that are increasing. If you don't know your local real estate market, you're simply taking a wild guess as to value. When negotiating with a homeowner, it's imperative that you know what the property is worth. Otherwise, you run the risk of overpaying or offering too little, which could offend the property owner and get you kicked to the curb with your hat in your hand.

Another reason you want to know your local real estate market is because certain areas within a given community make better investments than others. If you invest your hard-earned dollars in an area that is declining, property values could fall and some or all of your investment could be at risk. By keeping an eye on trends within your local real estate market, you can more readily take advantage of opportunities to get in on the ground floor of an investment and ride the wave of property appreciation, which will have a positive impact on your bank account.

•· Sales prices -- How much is property worth in your local real estate market? Do you have a clue? You need to be cognizant of local sales prices -- especially now -- because property values can change very rapidly. In today's volatile investing environment, it's not unusual for the value of a property to fluctuate by $10,000-$15,000 in a given month. If you have a property that you're considering selling, you can gain or lose a tremendous amount of money in no time.

•· Rental rates -- Current knowledge of your local investing climate is imperative when determining what rental rates are in a particular neighborhood. If you do a cash flow analysis on a property and you assume that it will rent for $1,500 per month and in reality it will only generate $1,100, you could have a problem, especially if you were anticipating a positive monthly cash flow of $200. If the rent a property can command is $400 less than you anticipated, you would have a monthly loss of $200. Negative cash flow sets the stage for a constant drain on your financial resources, and could eventually cause you to rethink your commitment to real estate investing.

Today's real estate investing climate makes accurate and timely information critical to your success. If you don't know your local real estate market, you could be in serious trouble. An excellent way of developing a proper and accurate knowledge of your local market is by trailing an experienced mentor who knows what he or she is doing. In addition to teaching you how to analyze current market conditions, you'll also be able to better understand what to look for in your local real estate market.

Real estate investing is a great way to expand your financial opportunity, but a failure to know and understand all of the variables within your local market can very quickly erode opportunity. Learn your local real estate market and make this your best year ever!

Peter Vekselman has been successfully investing in real estate since 1996. He has completed over 1000 real estate deals, owned a construction company, been a private lender, and owned a property management company. Peter currently works with clients all over the US www.CoachingByPeter.com .

Online and Offline Real Estate Investing Marketing Strategies

You may have jumped into real estate investing with one eye on your dreams and the other on your potential to become fabulously wealthy in a very short time. While it's true that it's possible to become the richest person you know, the reality is that it will probably take time to happen. Another reality you may not have considered is that as a real estate investor, you also wear another hat: professional marketer. If you can't devise a winning online and offline marketing effort, your dreams will be largely unrealized and your destiny will be held hostage by unfulfilled potential.

There are a number of offline marketing strategies you can employ to encourage possible buyers and sellers of residential real estate to contact you. Some of the most common ones are:

•· Bandit signs

•· Radio & television ads

•· Brochures, flyers, and billboard signs

However, to turn the corner with your marketing, you can really ramp up your offline marketing strategies by establishing yourself as a noted real estate expert within your local community. There are three great strategies for doing this:

•· Local media interviews - The best way of getting your name in front of News Directors and Program Directors is by issuing pertinent press releases. They need to be well-written and they need to discuss newsworthy issues of importance to their viewers. Once you've begun to establish yourself as an expert in your field your phone will ring more regularly. These media appearances can increase your exposure and improve your name recognition which can result in increased investing deals because of your perceived status as an expert. Many people with whom you'll be trying to buy properties from or sell properties to will know your name - and be more willing to trust you - as a result of your prominence within your local community.

•· Seminars - Giving free seminars in a real estate-related niche can increase the size of your portfolio. As a residential real estate investor, you could give a free seminar about topics as wide-ranging as "How to Sell Your House for Your Price in a Down Market" to "How to Buy a House with Bad Credit." The key here isn't to directly market yourself. Your goal is to come across much like a financial planner. Show your clients what you know - and how you can help them - and they'll gladly show you their money later on.

•· Public speaking - This may not seem like a natural offline marketing strategy, but it has potential you may not have considered. Most people aren't natural public speakers; if this identifies you, don't despair. Join your local Toastmasters club and learn the fine art of public speaking. While you're learning, you'll be exposed to business and community leaders (many with cash) who would be prime candidates as potential investing partners or sources of private cash for long term investments or down payment and rehab funds.

Online marketing strategies are like gifts that keep on giving because the overall costs are reduced. This allows you to cast a wider net and increase the area in which you invest. In addition, you'll be able to build buyers lists and prequalify prospects without an investment of time, which is one of your most precious commodities.

Effectively reaching potential clients with online strategies increasingly demands that you have a website of your own, in order to prescreen prospects, build buyers lists, and to gather other vital information. None of these efforts mean a thing if you can't figure out how to drive Internet traffic to your website. Your online efforts will generally revolve around two basic strategies:

•· PPC - Pay Per Click campaigns are a good way of getting visitors to your real estate investing website. However, if you don't carefully analyze your target demographic and get crystal clear about which words and phrases you wish to bid on, your expenses could explode and you'll have nothing to show for it. Google and Yahoo have helpful analytic tools that can help you determine what words and phrases make the most sense for driving paid traffic to your website. In addition, they also offer the ability to target traffic based upon geographic location of potential clients, so your ads would only be seen by those most likely to be good targets.

•· Organic placement - This form of marketing won't cost you a penny, but the competition for top ranking can be fierce. The key to achieving top ranking is by having content on your website that is relevant to the needs of your site's visitors. While SEO can play a role in your search engine rankings, you'll have greater success by ensuring that your website has great content. Resources related to real estate investing - articles and ebooks about wholesaling, short sales, rent to own, or whatever areas in which you concentrate, can gain you improved ranking by the search engines. Concentrate on relevant, high quality written content and you'll be rewarded with traffic. The increased volume of traffic will mean you'll gain more prospects, which will generally translate into more buyers and sellers for your residential properties.

While your online and offline marketing efforts will differ, in many cases you can tie them together for maximum effect. For instance, any offline marketing materials will have physical contact information. If you can include a catchy and memorable web address, you'll increase your exposure to potential clients while reducing the legwork necessary to pre-sell them on doing business with you.

Marketing your real estate investing business may seem like a waste of time and effort, but by paying close attention to these efforts you can win over potential clients, increase the size of your portfolio, and move yourself closer to realizing your dreams. If you're not familiar with the marketing strategies you want to employ or you're at all uncomfortable with your knowledge of specific real estate investing techniques, you should consider finding a good mentor that specializes in the type of investing in which you're most interested. Their experience and guidance can set your mind at ease and their wise counsel can help get you on your way.

Peter Vekselman has been successfully investing in real estate since 1996. He has completed over 1000 real estate deals, owned a construction company, been a private lender, and owned a property management company. Peter currently works with clients all over the US www.CoachingByPeter.com .

A Coach For All Seasons

If you interview just about any successful real estate investor you'll typically find they have drive, determination, and stamina, but every good investor also has a strong advocate in their corner, watching and encouraging them every step of the way. The most prolific investors have a coach - or mentor - giving them solid advice and helping them to avoid some of the roadblocks, detours, and traffic jams that can delay or prevent their coronation as successful investors.

There are four stages of investing where coaching makes sense:

•1. Before You Get Started - At this stage of your career you have more questions than answers. You're invigorated and excited about the future, but you're also afraid of making costly mistakes. A lot of investors fear failure so much they delay investing - spending thousands on one real estate investing course after another - trying to convince themselves that they're investing in their futures, when in reality they're hiding from it. A coach can help you adequately assess your preparation and see if you need more education or a gentle nudge towards the playing field.

•2. After you get started and you're doing well - You may have left the gate with the zeal of an Olympic sprinter, but you need to realize that real estate investing is like a marathon. If you don't pace yourself you can get winded, slow down, and drop out. A coach can help you to find opportunities you may have overlooked - and to avoid mistakes that could throw you off track. Starting strong can generate income, but good coaching can help you build sustainable wealth, instead of a quick infusion of cash followed by extended periods of inactivity. What's the best way to segue from one stage to the next? How do you evaluate the current market and accurately decide what the future holds? A good coach can tell you that - and more.

•3. After you get started and you're struggling - An immediate stumble out of the gate can cause some investors to question the wisdom of their decision. This problem can be compounded by listening to family and friends who are married to the idea of earning just enough to get by. Accustomed to failure - or at least mediocrity - they assume that you are, too. The worst thing you can do is elevate all the Doubting Thomases in your midst to positions of influence. A real estate investing coach doesn't have the mindset of finding you a graceful exit strategy from real estate investing. They'll show yow new ways to face your fears, assess your strengths, and turn things around. It won't happen overnight, but a coach can give you the guidance you need to turn around and get headed in the right direction.

•4. Any time you're ready to move to the next level - Regardless of where you're at in your investing career, you'll face moments of self-doubt and confusion about the best move for your career. You're traveling in what is to you uncharted territory. An investing coach knows the lay of the land and how to reach your financial destination. Are you taking advantage of every opportunity to advance your career? What could you be doing better? Whether it's learning advanced investing techniques or better utilization of your credit, an investing coach can show you multiple options for getting where you want to go. You may have considered some and discarded them due to misunderstanding their significance. A coach will help you see the light without shoving you into the path of an oncoming train.

As you can see, a coach is needed no matter where you find yourself on the real estate investing success track. You can easily falter or stumble, but with an investing coach there to guide you, you can plan on reaching your financial, personal, and investing goals more quickly. A coach can't guarantee that you'll never falter or stumble. What they can do, however, is help to ensure that a stumble doesn't precede a painful fall to the rear of the pack. Hire a good coach to catch you if you fall, to direct you when you stray, and to celebrate you when you succeed.

Peter Vekselman has been successfully investing in real estate since 1996. He has completed over 1000 real estate deals, owned a construction company, been a private lender, and owned a property management company. Peter currently works with clients all over the US www.CoachingByPeter.com .

What if...John Was a No Matter What Investor?

In the three examples I told you about, including the example of John, "What if..." investors formed a real estate investing strategy, but I would almost bet every dollar I have that they let emotional considerations enter into the equation. Let's take a close look at John's ill-fated investment property just down the street from his house.

What do you think his primary reason for buying so close to home was? It was familiarity with the area closest to his home and the fact that he could point his investment property out to his friends. That's an emotional consideration.

He could have bought something that would have made a better investment if he had taken the time to really analyze the investment, but instead, he fell in love with the property. He liked the property so much that he set aside logic and bought a property that would only be profitable under tightly controlled circumstances.

In other words, he let emotion take over. By letting emotions take over he abandoned logic and ultimately lost his shirt by making a bad investment.

There is a better way of thinking about real estate that can help you to avoid the mistakes and pitfalls facing real estate investors of all experience levels. This strategy will work every time you even consider an investment property.

The reason it will work is because it strictly limits the access that emotion has in the way you go about the process of deciding the relative merits of any investment you're considering making.

We've already established that excess emotions can suck the life - and the profits - out of your investments. Do you know what one component will help you make an unemotional decision?

Good Numbers Tell No Lies

This one word answer has huge implications for the future success of your real estate investing career. Numbers. That's it; nothing more.

By taking emotions out of the investing property equation and inserting numbers in their place you can eliminate many of the mistakes that imperil your future. You can use specific mathematic equations that can tell you in very simple language whether or not an investment makes sense. If the numbers are there, you proceed - if they're not you simply walk away.

Effectively limiting your exposure to mistakes begins when you're considering making a purchase. Numbers don't lie. They tell a story about whether or not you'll make money with a particular property. The ingenious thing about this strategy is that you don't have to pull the trigger and put your financial security on the line in order to decipher whether or not you'll make money.

There are 24 hours available to you today. There are thousands of properties out there that you could conceivably invest in and possibly make money. You have several options you can utilize in deciding whether a property is possibly worth pursuing.

With the first model, you go look at each property to ensure that it meets quality standards, you do your due diligence, and you meet with each property owner before making a decision. That's a daunting, time-consuming process that can fill your days with unproductive activity that won't get you any closer to buying a single property.

This method involves doing a cash flow analysis and working up a sample budget and determining whether you'll have positive cash flow if you buy the property at a specific price. While you always need to know if a property will make money, you only need to know if certain properties will make money. The only property you care about is one you will buy. None of the other properties matter.

A better way is for you to find out in advance what the numbers are and quickly make a decision. By putting my strategies to work with mathematical formulas you can analyze a property within minutes. You'll know right away whether you can make money with a property. Instead of wasting time on senseless activity that bleeds all of your energy out of you, you could be doing things that will build real sustainable wealth.

There are a whole host of mistakes you can make as a novice real estate investor that will take the wind out of your sails and will cause you to doubt your commitment to pursue real estate investing as a wealth-building mechanism for your future. Numbers - good numbers - are the only mistake-neutralizing tonic that will save your time, your sanity, and your investing future.

You can choose to follow the low road and still reach real estate investing success. It will require that you make a series of mistakes and commit some costly blunders. You'll take longer to get where you're going, but you can still get there.

The other solution is to look at real estate investing without blinders, to take the high road that leads directly to success. To avoid arriving at your destination financially devastated, you need to learn how to use numbers and formulas to your advantage.

These and dozens of other strategies are available to help shorten your learning curve. Put them to work for you today by learning all of the most profitable tips and techniques at www.coachingbypeter.com

No Matter What

I call this the "No matter what" strategy. It truly is a comprehensive strategy because if you buy a property with the intention of renting it out and you find that you can't make money despite your best intentions, you move on to "Plan B". If your alternative falls apart, you go to "Plan C".

The "No matter what" concept doesn't say that you don't have a preferred strategy or method of attack. What it does say, however, is that no matter what you do, there are a dozen different ways you can make money on a real estate investment. If each plan falls apart despite your best efforts, you don't miss a step because you always have another move you can make.

Because you have so many effective strategies available to you, you're never going to get caught in public with your pants around your ankles looking for a graceful way of exiting stage left. If every single strategy turns out being a loser, you can smile, shrug your shoulders, and sell your property. Even then, you'll make money because it is a contingency for which you have planned - even if the specific situation is a surprise.

That's the raw real estate power of being a "No matter what" investor.

Because you go into every investment with a solid game plan and an exit strategy you'll never have to worry about where your blood pressure pills are. You'll have the flexibility of knowing that sleep will come easily to you each night because the question of what you'll do if a specific strategy fails will have already been answered.

The No Matter What Strategy Defined

If you want to avoid making mistakes you need to have more than one option available to you. One specific strategy will help you make money no matter what you do. The way you make it happen is by redefining what you think of as a good deal.

If you pay retail or near-retail prices for property you limit your options. For instance, if you pay 90%-95% of retail for a property you intend to rent out, you limit your options. You may have every intention of putting a renter in the property and holding it for 5-10 years. "What if..." real estate investing strategies say that it will work if all the trains are running on schedule.

There's no room for error, deviation, or any of the other life situations that can derail your ideal investment opportunity. But, when you buy property with the "No matter what" mindset, you'll make money regardless of what happens. You can still make money when every possible investing strategy fails. While highly unlikely, you should plan for every possible contingency to cover your assets and guarantee that making money is still in the cards.

If you recall the example I gave you of John, the novice investor who bought a property near his home, he was able to turn a small profit by doing his own property management and handling all of his own maintenance. While he made more than one mistake along the way, the biggest mistake he made was in the price he paid for the property.

If he had been able to pay less for the property he would have opened up a world of opportunity for himself. When he made the initial discovery that he couldn't turn a profit on his investment without doing his own maintenance and management, he could have implemented another strategy that would have allowed him to make money.

Then, later on, when he was notified by his employer that he would have to pull up his roots and relocate to Portland, Oregon, he wouldn't have been left with the terrible choice between staying with a property that was just barely profitable or transferring out of state. He could have just switched gears and moved on to another strategy that would still keep him in the black.

Finally, when the mother of all financial insults took place and he discovered that his too-good-to-be-true tenant had badly damaged the property, he had no good alternatives available to him. All he could do at that point was try to scrape together a monthly payment and tread water financially on a month-to-month basis with a property that was generating no income.

Had he had more options he could have done something about it.

The "No matter what" strategy would have covered his backside. He could have quickly sold the property for what he could on the open market, put the property behind him, and still put money in his pocket when it sold.

The way he could have done that is by controlling how much he paid for the property when he bought it. If you can buy a property cheap enough, you'll make money regardless of what happens. You have the peace of mind of knowing that a hundred different things can simultaneously go wrong with your property, your tenant, or your strategy, and there will always be another weapon in your arsenal that will make it possible for you to make money.

The real estate market has fallen apart in many parts of the country. Strategies that worked well when values were rapidly rising are no longer possible. Instead of lamenting what might have been, you could simply move on to something that will work given the current market conditions.

Buy your property cheaply enough to make money and you can use whatever strategy that will work in order to make money instead of playing "What if..." and hoping for the best. It's a huge mistake to do otherwise.

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Peter Vekselman-Your Real Estate Coach for Life

www.coachingbypeter.com