And Here's the Rules...

So What Does "20 Deals in 20 Weeks" Mean, Exactly?

Because one thing that I can GUARANTEE is that this won’t work out as neatly as 20 deals all begun and ended in 20 consecutive weeks.

Nor will it mean one deal each and every week…real estate just isn’t that predictable. Sure, it takes APPROXIMATELY 20 offers to get an acceptance, but sometimes (and for no reason other than the vagaries of chance) 20 offers will yield 3 acceptances, and sometimes none. Yes, it takes ABOUT 6 weeks to complete a rehab, but sometimes it takes 16 and sometimes (albeit more rarely) it takes 3.

So one of the things you’ll learn by following this blog is that cash flow management—in the sense of making sure you have enough money to pay the bills even when the house you’re trying to sell doesn’t close until WEEKS past the initial closing date—is crucial, because nothing EVER closes when its supposed to. If you don’t get into the habit of smoothing out those ups and downs by saving and budgeting (yeah, I know those are evil words you’ve never heard from a real estate guru before…deal with it), you’ll always be playing catch-up and never actually get rich in this business.

So, even though we’ll try to make a consistent effort to make offers each and every week, there will be weeks when nothing gets accepted, or when an accepted deal goes down, or when we’re too busy traveling or selling or vacationing to get anything else done.

And what’s more, there are deals that had their inceptions before this blog did, and deals that will still be “hanging out there” when the 20 weeks are over…so it won’t be as pat as, “see, 20 deals started and finished in exactly 140 days”.

So, rather than argue with you, the beloved reader, about whether 20 deals were in fact completed during this period, I am simply going to set up the rules to suit myself, thusly…

1. deals that started, but were not completed, prior to November 24th totally count.

2. Deals that start, but are not completed, before April 12th totally count.
So there it is. Don’t like it? Get your own blog!

Sooo...here's the set up

Yeah, OK, the real estate market has been in freefall for 2 full years now.

I get it—it’s scary out there. There’s no money to buy, no money to fix, no money to refi, and even if there were, there are no buyers to buy anyway.

That’s right, I watch the news, too. And don’t think I’m immune to the constant stream (or perhaps tidal wave would be a better water metaphor?) of bad economic and real estate news. Unquestionably, things have changed—and continue to change—drastically in the world of real estate investing.

But if You’re Here to Read About How Bad Things Are, Tough Luck…

I refuse to pay the, “Oh, woe is me” game.

I’m so sick of going to real estate investment meetings and feeling like I’m part of some huge therapy session where “The market’s just too SCAAAARY” has replaced “I don’t know enough to make any money” as the excuse du jour for not doing deals.

In fact, I think I’m just going to opt out of the whole recession thing altogether, and just make more money in the next 12 months in real estate than I ever have before—and I’d like to invite you to join me.

See, I’ve been buying and selling and renting real estate for NINETEEN years now (yes, if you accept my stated age of 29 and do the math, that means I started when I was 10), and I can tell you without exaggeration that this is the best market I have EVER seen for picking up just absolutely incredible deals. What you do with them next depends on your resources and goals, but, seriously, does it make sense to hang around waiting for “the market to recover” when you can get properties at 20-30% of their 2005 value (and, one assumes, their 2011 value) right now?

If you’ve bothered to follow my convoluted writing style to this point, I’m going to assume that you agree with me, at least intellectually, that you ought to be doing something about the grabbing up some of the opportunities in this market. And here’s how I’m going to try to help you:

There seem to be 2 big barriers between most of the people I know and the fortune they should be making in real estate right now. The first is one of faith—they just aren’t sure it can be done.

The second is one of knowledge—they might believe it can be done, but in a market that’s changing as fast as this one, they just aren’t sure what tools to use to make it happen.

So what I’m going to do over the next 20 weeks is to try to overcome both of these hurdles for you by documenting, in as much detail as I can manage, the 20 deals that I plan to complete between November 24, 2008, and April 12th, 2009. I’ll blog the properties, the closings, the financing, the buyers (yep, I’m gonna sell some houses, you just watch), and then you can tell me whether or not there’s money to be made in the real estate market today. If I can manage to overcome my own technophobia, I’ll even have videos of some of this to share with you, and if I can convince some smarter people than me to help me out with it, get you copies of the documents, too.

What You Probably Ought to Know
About Me and My Business

My name is Vena Jones-Cox, and I’ve been investing in real estate since 1989. I work exclusively (at the moment, anyway) with small residential properties—1 to 3 family homes, in other words.

I live and invest in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cincinnati is a city of about 332,000 people, but the 7 county metropolitan area in which I buy properties is closer to 2.1 million. It’s an area that’s losing jobs and population at a fairly quick clip—around 5% of the populace has fled the city since 2000. As a result of this trend (and some REALLY bad operators in the area, some of whom are now cooling their heels in the federal pen), Cincinnati was also hit with the foreclosure crises harder and earlier than much of the rest of the country.

The median home price here is, depending on which source you believe, either $179,000, $144,000, or $127,000. I tend to think that the middle number is probably the correct one for existing homes in the region, and the low number is probably a good one for existing homes in the city proper. Suffice it to say that it’s possible to buy an older, 1500 square foot 3 bedroom brick home with a garage in a decent school system for under $150,000.

So, if you live in L.A. or Phoenix or Boston or Miami or any of the dozens of other markets in the U.S. where you’d have to add another zero to the back end of the prices above to have them make sense to you, I guess you can blow this whole thing off. I mean, what I do here won’t work in your market, right?

WHATever.

If you’re gonna make that argument to me, you should know that I’ve also spent some of the last 12 or so years on the road, working with and coaching students in almost every state in the union (to learn more about my seminars and coaching services, click here). From this massive experience and the success of my students all over the country, I can tell you that most strategies work in most markets, even if you have to move the decimal points around to make the numbers make sense. But hey, if it makes you feel better about not doing anything to say, “it won’t work in my market”, go ahead…no skin off my nose.

And before you even say it, let me confess that I have certain advantages over the typical new investor. Yes, I have a real estate license—a broker’s license, in fact—which gives me direct access to the multiple listing service for comparable properties, new listings, and so on.

I also have a full-time acquisitions coordinator, Ray Ellis, who does a lot of the marketing, seller screenings, paperwork, due diligence coordination, and so on. I also have a partner, Mr. Drew, who handles much of the wholesale selling and rounds up the private lenders for keeper deals. And finally, Jim Shapiro, my property manager and general contractor, keeps the tenants in as happy as its possible for them to be, and coordinates the ballet of the contractors during our more and more frequent renovations.

And I have almost 2 decades worth of experience that you don’t have, and I’ve developed private lenders and buyers that you don’t have, and I’ve got probably a quarter million dollars invested in education that I just bet you don’t have.

So, yeah, if you want to ignore the fact that I started out just where you are, with no money and no experience and no team and no confidence that I could do any of this, go right ahead. If it makes you feel better about NOT doing what I’m doing to tell yourself you CAN’T do what I’m doing…that’s fine with me.

Or, you can choose to do the more productive thing. You can let me take your hand and show you how this whole real estate thing is done. You can learn from me and with me, and you can do what you need to do to make it happen for yourself. Here’s my hand: take it, and let’s go on an adventure together.