Posted by Allan (SATX) on March 29, 2002 at 13:44:24:
I went to the convention for the first time.
Mobile homes are a small niche of the investing landscape.
Most of the lessons from the convention apply to many areas. Most of the lessons are learned talking with people at the bar who are actually doing deals. Some of these people have no place else to go where someone understands what they’re doing and are willing to share and cheer them on.
You’d never guess these dealmakers were dealmakers.
If they can do it, I can do it.
What J. Piper wrote in one of his articles, Show up, pay attention, be truthful, don’t be attached to the outcome.
You can never tell what a seller wants until you ask, sometimes it’s what you expected, other times it’s better than you ever dreamed. So what are you looking to get out of this? What would you settle for? How low can you go? Can you do better than that?
You gotta have balls, even ladies gotta have balls.
Don’t over analyse.
What Ed Garcia posted many times. The best teacher is the street. The set up your LLC to do this, the trust to do this and the C-Corp to do that crowd have their place but all of this activity is no substitute for getting out there and doing it. Do a couple of deals, make some money and then set those things up. Why build up a fortress to protect your assets when you don’t have any assets? Get a few assets and then let them pay to build the structure to protect them and minimise future taxes.
You will run out of money investing in MH’s and creating notes. Even at a 130% ROI you’ll run out of money. Finding people to sell the notes or cashflow to is an important part of expanding your business. MH notes have little value to most of the investing universe. You can sell large portfolio’s of them but the small amount you have are harder to market.
You can never tell, one guy has a buyer who’s paying full face value on his 18% notes, 50% on the dollar is more typical. The buyer wants the 18% from the notes instead of the 4% his CD is paying. (and he wasn’t about to tell who his notebuyer was, the deal was too sweet for him and his buyer didn’t have unlimited funds)
What I learned at Spring Camp?
I didn't learn anything specific to my MH business, but one speaker did mention a post card I think I'll try. It uses a permit obtained from the post office. He showed us a post card (5 X 8) he mails for about 12 cents each, postage and printing included. They're mailed by pre-sorted carrirer routes. In my rural area, I shouldn't even need to include addresses. Just a spot for "postal customer".
I figure I can put more detail about the repairs and conditions of my offerings than I can in a classified. I thought I'd include a part for sellers and buyers and a couple of paragraphs for note buyers. I'll let the group know my response.
The other thing I took back was something I knew all along. These conferences are not about the products for sale or for meeting Lonnie. These conferences and those meetings at your local investment club are for the breaks!
It's during the breaks that you turn to some new person and ask "What do specialize in?" It's during the breaks and the lunches and the all night rap sessions that you finally get to speak to people who know what you do isn't magic or snake oil. I told many people that the classes were to break up the networking and that is exactly what it is.
It was such a pleasure not to talk to someone who wasn't going to make next month's payment. It was great to renew friendships with peers and to know that someone really did want to hear what I was up to.
I try to build relationships with local contacts in my small town and Dallas has a big RE group, but it's wonderful to set aside a weekend to meet with my true peers. No tenants, no excuses, just a free flowing idea factory. The weekend was far too short.