Importance of being involved with your local REIA

General Real Estate Investing
1

I notice that at most investor meetings there are between 10-100 people in attendance. Yet there are likely several thousand people locally who have rental properties. Why doesn’t everyone attend meetings? Do some people just read a few books, obtain a few rental properties, and then keep everything on auto-pilot until an issue comes up? I guess they can just Google for the answers…

Is being a member of a local REIA really that beneficial? Definately not all but some of the people at REIA’s are stand offish and greedy about sharing information. Its like they are hoarding some kind of money making secrets. Some of them are downright toxic to be anywhere near. Also not everybody is willing to mentor newbies like me. Some REIA’s go out of their way to be unwelcoming towards newbies.

Say you are a fully experienced flipper from Kansas and then move to Georgia. You have money saved and want to start flipping houses in Georgia full time. Do you really need to attend local REIA meetings? It seems like lots of these qualified people are successfully flipping houses and they are not involved with the local investor groups. I sense some people are not consuming as much information as myself.

The core of most REIA’s seems like a social club. A few times a year they have barbecues or holiday parties. Sure they have meetings to share valuable information and network and have lectures. But how valuable has the networking been for you? How long did it take for you to forge deeper connections with people? Do you eventually meet people you trust or does everyone remain impersonal and business like.

2

You have all kinds of people showing up a re club meetings. In my estimation it’s mostly curious, wannabees and posers. The attendance always goes up when they have a guest that teaches how to invest with no money.

There was roughly a thousand people show up, paying $25/ea to hear a well-known, local investor tell how he went from BK to being worth a net $5M in ten years investing in junker foreclosure houses. He also shared how he raised the money for these deals, which included focusing on banks that would lend him money to buy and fix their foreclosures. He was fascinating, but hardly duplicatable. He didn’t even have anything to sell.

Another investor/merchandiser came to speak, and he offered a course on management, but also went into the nitty-gritty details of how he found and flipped deals, and how he financed the deals he kept. It was exhausting to imagine trying to copy him. However, nobody left there with any doubts about how to copy him.

I remember when the first “no down payment” gurus would show up to hock their seminars and courses, the club meetings were overflowing with broke investor wannabees. They were selling these seminars for three and four thousand dollars a pop.

I think there’s several reasons that these re club attendees aren’t warm to newbies, and that includes that some just have nothing to offer, because they aren’t actually successful investors; others don’t want to encourage competition; others are cautious about spending time on newbies who represent bottomless pits of information gathering, but with no payoff; and others who don’t want to start from scratch with someone who won’t buy training, and asks all sorts of endless, rudimentary questions. Those people end up on forums like this.

Meantime, newbies have little to offer in return for all the help they want/need. Never mind the freebie seekers who again, absolutely will not invest in training, and want it all dished out to them for gratis …on a platter.

Frankly, I don’t see producers routinely attending re club meetings that that are not also speaking at, or just wanting to hear someone they know speak. Otherwise, they’re not there to network with newbies and broke wannabees. And never mind the newbies that want to second-guess and question what they’re being offered, and pull a “Redhand123” on them, as it were.

FWIW

3

I was doing real estate investing for a few years before I started to attend local club meetings. I’m in New York City. Here is a thread of mine from a RE site from over 10 years ago detailing my experiences:

http://www.creonline.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-71526.html

Unfortunately, attendees are either newbies who has no ideas what they want, and sponsors are interested in selling courses or products.

My interest is info for investing in my area, NYC, and the subject is rarely raised. I generally invest when the market crashes, buying bank foreclosures and sell at peaks, so road trips they organize to Baltimore MD doesn’t interest me.

The meetings generally runs over 2 hours, with guest speakers. There is little time to socialize with people that show up.

4

I sold my first deal at a REIA a few years ago. I signed up a house for too much, but was able to unload it to a guy that bought it for a rental. Made $1,000, this made investing real to me. Although it wasn’t much, I made actual money.

That guy is still a buyer and I made another $5K off him last week.

All that being said, I haven’t been to one since. I don’t see much value in it. Mostly newbies and people pimping their products.

5

I have attended the local REIA’s near me and found more unfriendly and unhelpful people then probably any other meetings of any kind. I even joined one for a year. It was expensive for me. It did not provide any benefits for me other then weekly meetings which are free for the public anyways, but the benefits must be hidden from members outside the winners circle. This is not about me having thin or thick skin. In my opinion it is not even business like.

My local REIA is just a tight knit group with specific requirements about who they “like”. There was a Christmas party that was the most unwelcoming party of my entire life. The secretary is extremely passive aggressive towards me and will not provide me with another sign up sheet to be part of the group again. I even volunteer myself to greet people at the door and it is still slower then molasses forging connections while everyone else is jumping in with smooth sailing.

I see huge benefits for other people to join these local real estate groups. Unsure what it is about me that does not fit in. Perhaps it is just the geographical location where I live is too much of a clash with my status. Certainly I talk with people every time but members give off this insecure type of disconnected vibe I do not understand where it comes from. For me making connections helps and I believe I am a great asset to a real estate club.

6

From my experience going back over 400+ transaction beginning in 1991, I have found little to little value in local REI Clubs. The sad truth is that most of the folks I met were tire kickers and were talkers and not doers. This is no different in any other industry…the old adage is 20% of the people do 80% of the work…everyone else just talks about it.

Then you have the likes of a leader of one of these fine organizations down in So.Fla. who gets up in front of a bunch of tire kickers as the president of that local REIC and introduces himself as a ‘full time real estate investor’ and yet his very next statement advertises that he is ‘also a mortgage and loan officer’ at a brokerage firm…how can one be full time investor and then next breath say he has a job?!!

Well, in any event, there surely will be advantages…after all, in 1991, the guest speaker for a local Atlanta Group was Jimmy Napier…after meeting and listening to him and buying his book Invest in Debt, I began a very successful investing career.

I think if you can separate the doers from the talkers in an REIC, it is worthy of your pursuit.

Hope this helps.

Rob

7

The only reason I would attend is to find cash buyers for my wholesaling campaign.

I’m not interested in battling egos with small time investors. (Owning 30 houses is small time compared to other people I’ve known), or getting personally involved in their life.

I would just collect their phone number and email and hope they stick to business as much as possible.

8

I heard a seasoned expert investor lecture once and if I remember correctly he only owns 300 houses. However every house is fine tuned very well for producing income. His tenants were meticulously selected. Its like a well oiled machine and he did not get lazy managing it. That is smart investing. Think about it, would you rather have 300 excellent investments or 600 that are too overwhelming to maintain?

Anyways, come to think of it, there are a lot of bogus investors at REI clubs. I did not fully realize that about half of them are phonies putting on an act for some crazy reason. Sometimes the clubs do have guest speakers that inspire.