In his interview with me, John Paul Moses, who is the founder of our Local Memphis Investors Group, was willing to give us some tips about how to start as a real estate investor. After reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dead” by Robert Kiyosaki he decided to start as a real estate investor. The book says to do this you need some preparation, so he went to the Internet and stocked every bit of information from the articles, news groups and discussion forums. By that time he started a long term friendship with Matt Scott who runs a great website called dealmakerscafe.com. That’s how he learned the meaning of the word “escrow” and what the difference was between a mortgage and a trust and real estate basic terminology. The Internet might be one learning ground. If you buy a real estate course you have to be very careful. The first course John Paul bought was in his opinion the worst real estate course and never did a deal from knowledge gained in that course. But at least he learned real estate terminology and spending $400 on that course proved to him that he was willing to invest in his education.
John Paul started by making an announcement in a Sunday paper just saying “real estate investors group starting, for information give me a call” and he put a cell phone number there for people to contact him. At their first meeting they were about 16 people. He stood in front of those people telling them that he never done a real estate deal but he was there to learn and make sure that they had those meetings. They needed a leader and he took the initiative of being their 1st president. Since then the organization grew to over 500 members. Now they are a full fledged non profit real estate investors association with over 150 members in the Memphis area and since 2002 John Paul has been a real estate investing guy. He stepped down as the president and he is now serving as the executive director of the group. Most of the deals he has done in some way involve somebody from the real estate investors association, whether they were a buyer or a seller, money partner or whatever the case might be. Start working with people in your club because they are real people. You need to think who the buyers are if they have real cash or if they have access to the hard money. So, what you have to do is to pick only those motivated persons and build yourself a great network of successful people to work with and the investor groups are great places to find those people.
His advice for somebody who’s looking for the structure of an investment group in another city is that you need to join the national real estate investment association; you need to get small groups of people together and join the National REIA (www.nationalreia.com ). They serve as an umbrella organization that supports the local REIA group. Another benefit of these groups is the availability of hard money lenders or private lenders within the group itself. You need to know what your resources are and just capitalize the costs or hard or private money in that part of the deal. For example they visited the National Group and invited some of their board members to have dinner together. That’s the second thing John Paul recommends for everybody who wants to start a group: model yourself, don’t try to figure out on your own!
Another thing a person should do is get those magnetic We Buy Houses signs for their vehicle. For John Paul they were worth the $87 investment as they brought him $12,000 profit from transactions altogether on wholesale deals. Nobody should be embarrassed of using them on their cars because the one who’s embarrassed is letting money pass by.
John Paul’s piece of advice for the new real estate investor is to not to be afraid to act, do not let yourself become paralyzed by fear and over-analysis. You need to take some time so don’t panic. Give yourself six months and just consume information. A good way is to listen to tele-seminars or find information on the Internet or pick some books from the library.