Do Real Estate Gurus Really Want You to Succeed?

Do real estate gurus really want you to succeed may sound like a very peculiar question but let’s look at the logic behind this question. As a perspective real estate investor you are constantly bombarded with very different ideas from real estate gurus. Some have years of experience, but many more have just a couple of years experience and have only operated in a frenzied environment.

I remember a guru selling a program that was touted as going further than any other program in the industry. The difference was his specific strategy of having various vendors paying for the advertising and actually making money on the home sale even if the property wasn’t sold. I admit it sounds good and it may have worked in a white-hot seller’s market, but it had no chance of working in the flat markets we have had for the past few years.

The guru still kept pounding on the success of his program – which may have occurred five years ago. After the presentation, one person who bought the course because he was having a sale in a few weekends asked what I thought. I said that the idea was old and the new wrinkle on “selling vendors” to participate was a twist but I didn’t think it would work in this market.

Three weeks later the student called me after his open house event and explained that he could not get any vendors to participate and not a single vendor who would pay to advertise. So he paid for the advertising himself and it was a total bust with only three people coming for the full two days.

I suggested he try the round-robin auction method we have used for 15+ years. He did just that two weekends later and had 53 people visit and sold the property the following week. I can guarantee that if you simply put a sign in the yard (FSBO or Realtor’s), run the usual newspaper ads, put it on Craigslist, etc. you are hoping for a lightning strike called a qualified and motivated buyer. Using a systemized marketing program that also accumulates a hungry buyers list is much more effective.

The enormous value of this investor finally selling his property was not just getting rid of it after being on the market for 7 months, rather it was the buyers list he developed. Maybe 95+% were neighbors and investors, but the others were real perspective buyers and a few of them actually had loan approvals.

The investor called the guru marketing the course and complained about the result of what had happened using the instructions from his course, and the guru offered the explanation that, “It’s a bad market”. He did offer to personally do the sale for the investor for a nominal fee of $3,000 saying that it was a small price to pay to get his property sold and how many leads he would get!

If you have been to a national training or “boot camp” you will agree that you are often besieged by additional speakers with different specialties, all with the intent of selling you additional courses. It’s not impossible to spend $20,000 – $30,000 at a single event and in some cases $50,000+. With all this money trading hands, why would the gurus want to see you fail? Frankly, if you succeed in doing deals, you will take more of their time than if you do nothing. They already have your money – it is purely economics and good business in their minds.

Just buying courses over an over again only gets you closer to broke, not closer to doing deals. Doing deals takes the courage to get started and to not be afraid of what happens. Gurus know that having you rush to the back of the room now makes money for them but not just from this initial purchase. Once you are in the system, you will now need more and more information and finally a personal mentoring course to really get you started.

This article has been republished from Stock Markets Review.