When I first started real estate investing back in the early 1990’s, it was a struggle to find good training for beginners. So I eventually got my real estate license and through marketing, I found a few local and successful investors who took me under their wings and that is where I got most of my training, but it was still very limited, because those investors only did one thing, but they were good at it. However, for me to get out on my own and do things their way would require me to have a rich uncle who died and left me a fortune to invest with. But I didn’t have a rich uncle so I had to learn something different.
That is when I started looking for alternative training sources, and in my state, there was no local resource. That is when I started seeing a rise in infomercials and I started buying their training courses, and I got upsold to their seminar, and then their coaching programs. And slowly, I started to do a few deals that I never even knew could be done before I bought those courses. I started creating seller carry back notes, selling those notes to raise the down payments. We did substitutions of collateral, wrap around mortgages and then I learned how to buy pre-foreclosures. I was doing short sales for years before the term short sale was first used outside of the loss mitigation departments. I was rehabbing and then I learned how to Wholesale, which I said couldn’t be done, until I bought a course on wholesaling and I made it work J
I learned all that because of infomercials. However, these days, our inbox is loaded with infomercials. And finding resources to learn real estate investing is easier than ever before, thanks to the internet, emails and webinars. It seems like no matter where you turn, there is another infomercial in your inbox, on your smart phone, on the TV and everywhere you look.
I even started a local REIA (Real Estate Investors Association) here in Minnesota called www.MnREIA.com. At our local REIA, we try to bring in as many local experts as we can, but we also have to bring in some national speakers for a couple of reasons. One reason is because many of the members want to see them. The second main reason is because many of the topics that they teach are way more advanced than most local experts are able to.
That brings me to the point of this blog post… When we first get new members or guests to MnREIA, they often ask me after only one or two meetings, “Are all your meetings just an infomercial, where I am going to get upsold something?” That is a hard one for me to answer because I don’t want to lie to them and say no, and I don’t want to turn them away by saying that is just the way it is.
Then I got an email today from someone who has been to only two of our www.MnREIA.com meetings in response to an email that I sent out promoting a webinar training that is not part of our regular trainings, but a topic that I know our members need to at least hear about, and I thought I would share her question, and my response.
Question:
Thank you, Mike.
I have attended my two free meetings of yours and am happy to have done so, but also, both topics ended in sales pitches to buy more (the wholesaling guest speaker, and your presentation that you could upgrade membership on to get the app and etc. for rehab estimates).
So, my question is, is this free information or is this webinar an infomercial to then pay more money to get more details?
Thank you for your time in answering this.
My best,
My Answer/Response:
Yes there will be an upsell at the end of this webinar.
With all national speakers, you will get a basic training for the topic they are talking about, and then an offer to get a course or seminar to learn even more. That is how they cover their costs and make a profit.
Your goal is to learn as much as you can from their free training, even if it is an infomercial. You will either learn something new and/or, like myself, get motivated and remember old strategies that you had forgotten about or didn’t fully understand until the speaker said something that finally made sense to you. That happens to me all the time… lol
With local speakers, such as myself, you will get the same level or even more detailed training, and if the speakers can’t offer their services, then what is their incentive to share with all of us their knowledge which cost them tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of their time learning?
So with that in mind, the wholesaling speaker gave you some great training/ideas and then offered us the opportunity to take that training to the next level with his system. Only a small percentage of people are/were ready for that, but the rest of the people at least learned more than they could have anywhere else basically for free.
As far as when I talked about Estimating repairs, I gave you everything you needed to go out and estimate repairs, including the Estimating Repair worksheet which took me a few years to develop and over $10k in training to learn, and I gave that to you for nothing. There is nothing more that you need to learn or that I or anyone else can teach you on that subject, if you paid attention and took good notes, and if you are a member, you can go back and listen to the audio as many times as you want so that you fully understand that. As far as an upsell for an app goes, you don’t need it, but if you want to use it, just pay a small fee for it. Otherwise, copy the sheets that I gave you and use them. That will give you the exact same outcome.
Forewarning… August will be a few national speakers who will all try and upsell, I recommend being there, learning as much as you can and just be prepared for the upsell. If you are ready for what they are offering, then you have the OPTION to buy, if not, then do as I usually do, keep your wallet at home.
After August, we will have only local speakers until Next February. The local speakers will give you some of the best training you can hope for and they will also tell you about the services that they offer, but they won’t be infomercials.
I am sharing this with you because I get this question once in a while from newbies and I hope you read this before you get upset with all the infomercials out there and stop learning. Are there a lot of infomercials, sales pitches in the real estate investing business? Yes of course there is, But if you go into it with the right mind set, you will be able to get the most out of it in the long run.
Real Estate Investing is a different kind of business and there is no college course to get a degree in it. If there was, you would need a master’s degree in Business Management, Business Finance, Marketing, Psychology, Construction, Law, Chemistry, Entrepreneurship and did I mention Psychology… An education like that would probably take you 15+ years and cost a couple hundred thousand dollars at least.
So since there is no college program like that, everyone has to go out and learn the business on their own, and there are several different components to the business. Eventually, someone who has the ability and passion to teach will prefect a certain niche and develop a training program, a software program, a service or an app to help improve their own business and then package that program for sale. If you want to learn what they have to offer, you will need to pay for their knowledge/expertise, and the way they get the opportunity in front of you is to offer free training for 60-90 minutes. Why only 60-90 minutes? Because that is all the longer the average human’s attention span can stay focused on any one thing at a time. After that they will lose your attention and the time spent together will have been a waste of time for both the presenter and you.
So in that 60-90 minutes, they will first have to demonstrate their qualifications by giving you some training, then they will need to take about 10 minutes to share with you what opportunity they have for you to take your training/business to the next level, but only when/if you are ready to go there. If you opt to take advantage of their knowledge/training, then it will cost you, but not nearly as much as if you tried to go out and learn/develop it yourself.
How to learn from infomercials? They best way is to watch as many webinars and attend as many local REIA meetings, workshops and seminars as you can. Most of them are free or very inexpensive. If you go there with the understanding that most of the time, you are going to see an upsell, then you will be in the right frame of mind to learn from them without having to buy their product, service. When you are ready, you will know it is right for you to take it to the next level. Until then, just get out there and learn as much as you can.