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When you decide that you truly want to be successful in real estate investing and get into it full time, or even if you want to be really good at it part time, then you have to build systems. Systems for everything.

Here are some of the systems that you need to have in place: 1. Lead generation (for buying houses and finding buyers for your deals); 2. Lead processing (a system to handle the leads once you get them); 3. Closing system. The system to handle your buyers is the most important of them all.

Set up a system that attracts to you the buyers looking for the kind of deals you have. Among all things, it must be able to whittle them down. Meaning, the system should separate tire kickers from true buyers, so that you don’t have to respond to everyone who shows just a little interest. If you don’t have this system, you will not be selling a lot of properties and you will be wasting a lot of time.

Take the trouble to build these systems. Take the time to do it. Most investors are too busy trying to do deals so they never bother to do it. The problem is they don’t understand that having this kind of systems will help them get to the point they want to be at as an investor.

Take the time to build the system and it will grow your business like no other. The time is worth it! I guarantee it.

Is everything working right in your real estate investing? Are you doing the amount of deals that you want to be doing? If not, then I know what your problem is.

Even without talking to you, I know that every problem that you have in your real estate business can be traced back to marketing. If you don’t have enough leads, it is a marketing problem. If you can’t sell your house, it is a marketing problem. If the leads you are getting are not panning out, then it is a marketing problem.

I could go on, but I don’t want to bore you. The bottom line is: Marketing is key to any business. The right marketing can grow your business so fast you will be astonished. So if you are having problems, go back to the basics of your marketing and find out what you have to change.

Eventually, all the time and money you spend on marketing is worth it. Even if the marketing strategy fails, it is still worth it because you found out what doesn’t work. So, keep trying and keep learning, but 50% of your effort in your business needs to be focusing on marketing.

If you are not marketing online, then you are missing out. In my opinion, 99% of your marketing should be online. You will not find a better ROI on your marketing than the marketing on the Internet.

Market or Die! It is essential. Learn from the right source to know what will work the best and do it!

Lets face it. Most business, some exclusively, is done online now. That is just the way the world is going. More houses are sold using the Internet than any other way nowadays, and realtors and investors are keeping up with it.

If you are an investor and have not learned online techniques, then you are missing out on some huge profit.

I know you want to stick with what you know will work, but you have to set aside at least a few hours a week learning online techniques to buy and sell your deals.

If you devote a few hours to this and get the right direction and education, I know that you will grow your business and make more money. It is totally worth all the time that you spend learning and building a presence on line.

To run with the big dawgs in real estate, also making your life easier, make sure to establish your business’s presence online. You won’t regret it.

If you decide that you want to get into real estate investing full time and be successful in it, or even if you want to be really good at it part time, then you have to build systems, effective systems for everything.

Some of the systems that you need to have are: 1. Lead generation (for buying houses and finding buyers for your deals) 2. Lead processing (a system to handle the leads once you get them) 3. Closing system. Most important of them all is the system to handle your buyers.

You have to have a system set up that attracts buyers to you looking for the kind of deals you have. It must be able to whittle them down. Meaning the system should separate tire kickers from true buyers, so that you don’t have to talk to everyone who shows a little interest. Without this system you will not sell a lot of properties and you will waste a huge amount of time.

Take time to build these systems. I know most investors are too busy trying to do deals. The problem is they never make an effort to build the systems and, as a result, they never seem to get to the point they want to be at as an investor.

Take the time to build the system and it will help expand your business like nothing else. This time is worth it, I guarantee it!

Let’s say you are interested in getting started wholesaling properties but not sure what the state laws are concerning this kind of real estate transactions and you don’t want to break any laws unknowingly.

Although every state is different, I assure you that wholesaling is legal everywhere. This is just business like any other and the free market system – buying low and selling high – nothing illegal about that.

Also if you are not a realtor, you don’t have to worry about many things because you are not considered a professional. Even though some realtors don’t know Jack: I have some friends who have taken Realtor test – in several different sates – and passed without studying. In most states you only have to score a 70 to pass the exam and get your license. When I was in school that was a D grade. So much for them being professional.

Anyway, here is my philosophy about the legal aspect. Do what is right and be brutally honest in everything you do – and you have nothing to worry about. If you are still concerned about the legality, talk to a real estate closing attorney (or a real estate specific attorney) and they can direct you.

Again, the only people that are or should be worried about legalities are people who are trying to cheat people, in my opinion. As long as the purchase is an “As Is” purchase, you are fine. A buyer will not be able to come back on you. Don’t be dishonest about anything and don’t try to trick anybody in any kind of way. So do right, tell the truth, and you should have nothing to worry about.

I just finished another course on how to find motivated buyers that I just bought for 97 bucks. Well, I am all about finding buyers for my real estate deals, and I have purchased thousands of dollars worth of courses over the past year or so. Anyway, I went through the whole thing. It was all nice and had a bunch of videos. And after going through it all, I have to say that it was all nice and had a bunch of videos. That’s it. Totally worthless when it comes to really selling houses in today’s market.

Like many other courses, the guys who are selling this information on the Internet are not making money doing Real Estate. They are making big money selling old information on selling houses in an up market. This particular guy did talk about selling houses in a down market, but everything in his course was actually about what used to work when the market was booming.

None of the techniques I have used to sell over 70 properties in the first 7 months of this year was covered in the course. I won’t mention the name of the course, but it had to do with finding all the motivated buyers for your real estate deals. So if you stumble upon a course for 97 bucks with that headline In my opinion, it definitely was not worth it.

Here is my point: be careful what you buy online, especially when it is dealing with real estate education. Most of it is just re-hashed basic concepts with no meat.

Well, when I buy a course I didn’t find useful, I don’t ask for my money back, ever. I just move on and try something else, and always try to get something out of it. What I got out of this course was confidence. Yes, confidence that what I am doing online with my new Web site www.howtofindthebuyers.com is something totally different. What I provide is blunt and straightforward, techniques that can help you in your real estate investing in the market in 2008.

When someone saw the offer on my site and didn’t buy, I used to feel like, maybe, my stuff is not worth it. But having spent a lot of money on a bunch of courses, I know that people who didn’t join my on-line seminar are truly missing out. I am confident that my system and my teaching will help people change their lives.

I talk to many investors who started in Real Estate with the goal of buying and selling houses, but they ended up being landlords – and they hated it. I personally love rental houses and own a lot of them, but these sad stories led me nevertheless to focus on finding buyers.

This same experience happened to me where I ended up having to get a loan to buy a house I put under contract and was not able to sell.

Fortunately, I had a mentor who told me to forget everything I have learned about real estate and who taught me a new way of investing – finding out what investors wanted and not what I thought they should have.

Real Estate investing, if you do it full time, is not a simple fun hobby that you do on the side like you see on TV where people flip houses and make a bunch of money. Yes, it can be done, but in my opinion the TV shows are dramatized crap that does more harm than good. They make people think one can get a junker property, invest a lot of money in it, and sell it really fast making a killing.

Wake up and get real! Most of the time it does not work like that in the real world, and you will find it out really fast. Really know what is going to sell before you put time and money in the deal.

For that you will have to find the buyers and ask them what they want. It can be an easy process if you set up a system that does it automatically. Learn the secret that most the gurus don’t tell you – how to find out what will sell before you buy.

Unfortunately, most of the time you cannot use assignments on foreclosures. In case of REOs, most banks will have it in their contract that it is not assignable.

I had the same problem on a foreclosure I put under contract. The buyer wanted me to assign the contract to him and I nearly lost the deal. Eventually he decided to go ahead and buy the property from me even though I could not assign it to him and let him close on my contract.

I actually have done a few assignments on foreclosures, so it is not completely impossible – but very unlikely. Just ask, and every now and then you will deal with a bank rep who doesn’t care, but Extremely Rarely! I would go ahead thinking that you will not be able to assign the contract.

One way to go when buying REO’s is to put REO’s under contract in an LLC then sell the LLC to an end buyer to avoid the non-assignment clause. It takes a little work but it can be an excellent strategy.

Another way to go if assigning the contract is out of the question is to find an attorney that will do a double closing. You can also have a hard money lender set up so that you would be able to fund the deal for the flip. I do this all the time now. I have a lot of guys who will lend me hard money, even though I hate paying the price for borrowing. Sometimes it is a grand just to borrow the money for an hour, but if I can pay 1k to make 5-10k or higher I will do that all day long.

When you are sure the house will sell fast, do what I do and put your earnest money down. Get thirty days to close (I have never had a problem with that except in rare cases where they offered me a super deal if I would close sooner) and start marketing it. The bottom line is if you think you have buyers for the property, don’t let anything stop you from making an offer.

Bird dogging and beginning wholesaling are not the same, although there are a lot of similarities between them. The control over who has the buyers is the largest difference.

To explain it simply, a bird dog basically finds houses (or, sometimes, buyers) for an investor who buys and then sells or keeps the house. It is like finding a deal and assigning it to another buyer – what beginning wholesalers do a lot. But usually the bird dog is not making nearly as much money as the wholesaler.

I also started with bird dogging houses for investors. It allowed me to become really good at one part of the business – finding deals – but I had no idea how to sell properties. Knowing how to find buyers is where the wholesaling begins. A wholesaler is good at all aspects of the business: finding deals and finding buyers.

When I was bird dogging I was making great money (I thought). I was making 500 to 1000 bucks a house and I was finding 5-10 deals a month for the other investors. When I decided to go at it alone and find my own buyers, my income increased dramatically – I was then getting 3-5k on every deal doing the same amount of deals as before.

Once I got to wholesaling houses strong, I am using hard money and I close on all my contracts, only occasionally assigning a contract. As your business grows and you become a true wholesaler, you really begin to see how different it is from bird dogging.

With all apparent similarities, once you take a closer look you see that the main difference is control. I don’t depend on anybody but myself, I have a group of buyers I sell to on a monthly basis, and I have people that bird dog for me. I may pay them 500 or 1000 for their work while I make up to 5k just seeing through the deal they found. You see the difference?

Bird dogging is the way to start. You may never want to go further than that, but if you are planning on being full time and being able to do it when the market is up or when the market is down, you need to push to become a wholesaler as fast as you can.

In my area one will find quite a few investors who make a lot of money, but if you ask them what their secret is to finding their properties they will tell you that they don’t know how.

What these investors will tell you is they let the local wholesaler find them. There are several investors in my area that buy from me (I am the wholesaler) over and over again. Sometimes I think I am missing out when I hear about all the money they are making on the deals that I sell them; but that is just the way it is.

These successful investors decided that I didn’t feel comfortable selling properties to home owners, and they figured out that I had no desire to make a huge profit on a deal. I just wanted to make a few thousand and do that a bunch of times every month.

Most of these investors realized that I had to move properties fast so I could make a living. Unlike them, buying and selling houses is my full time job. They already have jobs, so they would not find the time to look for the deals that I brought to them.

In short, if you want to make a lot of money in real estate yet you don’t have the time to find the deals, buy from the guy who is selling 5-10 properties a month and doing volume business. If you don’t, you will soon find out that the most you will save is a few thousand bucks, and the time it will take you to do so will not be worth it.