REAL ESTATE SCAM ALERT! We have all heard the commercials about how someone who started off in a dead end job making no money found a trick to making millions in real estate and wants to teach you how to do the same. Is this the truth or is it a complicated scam to actually make money in doing a seminar or selling their DVDs? Most of the time the latter is exactly what you get, I just heard a story from an associate in my office that a lady just spent $42,000 on a seminar in Las Vegas where she received no more information that she could have received from reading this article. I have been a Real Estate Broker in California for 24 years and have been in the business for 30 years and if there was a legal way to make that kind of money in Real Estate don’t you think I would have found it. Mind you, I have made a great living for my family in the business over the years, but that has all been hard work and patience .
Here is how the scam works, and I call it a scam because in California most of things these Seminar folks tell you do not comply with California law and you pay a lot of money for this. It starts with hearing a person on the TV or Radio that proclaim to have made millions in Real Estate with their special techniques. They can make their “special technique” sound real convincing. The human mind will only hear what you want it to hear, and if you are not “in the business” you don’t know what is true. So you pick up the phone and call the seminar folks they tell you they are meeting in your home town or close by and to sign up. The trick is to expose people to his system through a 90-minute free seminar. Then funnel them into a second (cost: $1,497 per couple or more) and, finally, a third: a three-day extravaganza that runs $40,000 for two. The only people making money here are the Seminar folks and they are making big money preying on the ignorance of people about buying and selling Real Estate.
In the seminar they actually teach you Real Estate related tricks that most of the time are not legal or ethical. The one I am hearing now is where the seminar folks try to teach you how to profit from Real Estate with no money out of your pocket. They are teaching a technique we call in the business a “double escrow” which is not legal in California. This is where you would go into contract to purchase a piece or Real Estate at a lower than market price and find another buyer to buy the property from you at a higher price at the same time. For example: you found a property that you could buy for $100,000 and then found a buyer that would buy it for say $150,000 and you make a quick $50,000. Sounds like easy money, but in California you would need to buy the property first with your own funds and put a down payment of usually 20% or more and once you owned the property then you could sell it for $150,000 and that buyer would have to put their own funds into it, and then you could make a profit. The Seminar folks try to teach you that you can do a double escrow with no cash out of your pocket; this is simply not true in California. This sounds sexy and exciting and they will charge you big dollars to teach you how to do it, and sometimes they will even tell you that they will finance your down payment for a slice of your profit. It is still not legal and the sole purpose of teaching you this is for them to make money from charging you for materials, or for the seminar itself or both. BEWARE of the REAL ESTATE SCAM!
At MAE Capital Real Estate and Loan we can teach you the right way to make money in Real Estate. There are no tricks in Real Estate, it is finding a good deal and capitalizing on it. Generally, in life, not just Real Estate “if it is too good to be true it is”. Real Estate investment requires patience, luck and good guidance and is not for the get rich quick crowd, we tried that between 2005-2008 and most folks lost a lot of money when the market gave way. So if you have been contemplating going to one of these Real Estate seminars call us first as there are actually some “Investment Groups” out there that can be really beneficial to not only the novice investor but the seasoned Real Estate Investor. What an investment group is; is a group of like mined Real Estate investors or aspiring investors that meet on a regular basis to discuss Real Estate deals, financing, using trusts, using self-directed IRA’s and many other ways to acquire and profit legally from Real Estate investing. Thank you, I have provided some links to other sites that might help you see the truth as I have. Click here to see a link to one the scams.Article reviewing Real Estate Seminar tricks.Click here Bay Area's Latest Real Estate ScamerBetter Business Bureau WarningArmondo Montelong Cllick to watch the videoArmondo Montelongo Ripoff Report