Note From Bryan Ellis:  This is a guest article by your fellow reader of http://realestate.BryanEllis.com, Catherine Coy.  Catherine is one of the most opinionated people I know, and frankly, I disagree with her as much as I agree with her.  Take the article below, for example:  She makes some good points about how to judge the legitimacy of real estate “gurus”, but some of her criteria are, in my opinion, quite unrealistic.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed this article she wrote and thought you might enjoy it too.  Thanks, Catherine!

In any creative endeavor, including real estate investing, one must carry into the task the essential element of hope.  But where only hope resides, sometimes common sense flies out the window.  Therefore, we must be discerning in our evaluations and confident in our decision-making so that hope can flourish.  The following commentary is not meant to be harsh but realistic.  If we believe anything anyone tells us, we’ll resist nothing and soon we’ll have no hope (or money) left with which to build a real estate portfolio.  How, then, do we separate the profitable wheat from the inevitable chaff?

Dan Kennedy is a self-appointed World’s Foremost Infopreneur Guru.  Like Sears Roebuck & Co. in a previous era, many infopreneurs make more money selling picks and shovels to gold miners than the majority of miners make actually mining for gold.  It seems there isn’t an infopreneur worth his or her salt who hasn’t graduated from The Dan Kennedy School of Wild Hyperbole, Gross Exaggeration and Outright Lies.  I heard Kennedy say at one of his famous bootcamps, “Once your target is on your mailing list, the only way he gets off is to die.”  When you’re confronted with “an offer you can’t refuse,” you’d do well to remember who’s behind the offer.

The Kennedy methodology is always the same…

• Hurry–offer won’t last long!
• Only two spots left!
• My information is the best in the world!
• Use lots of exclamation points!!!
• Use long, emotion-laden paragraphs of bold text with lots of highlighting!
• Deliver your message over…and over…and over…!!!

When you familiarize yourself with the Kennedy style, you’ll see it everywhere—online and in your mailbox.  There’s hardly an infopreneur alive who doesn’t use the “magnetic marketing” methods espoused by Kennedy for the last 25 years.  I heard Ron LeGrand say, when pitching his Internet Marketing Bootcamp, “The truth is I’ve made more money teaching people how to make money in real estate than I ever made investing in real estate myself.” I nearly fell off my chair!  Perhaps LeGrand has decided, in his declining years, to live in integrity and tell the truth.

My point is, just because someone’s effective at marketing doesn’t mean s/he is or was effective at making money through the genre s/he’s marketing.

Do people make money from marketing on the Internet and direct mail?  Sure, they do! Having accepted that premise, it then becomes the responsibility of the student (you) to identify which guru has the integrity, skill, experience and motivation to actually help you meet your financial goals through investing in real estate.  From years of being on the receiving end of all types of guru offers, I have determined three basic and easy-to-implement criteria, as a starting point, for evaluating a real estate investing guru’s offer so that I don’t spend my hard-earned money on wild hyperbole, gross exaggeration and outright lies.

1. When a guru makes an offer via email, can you hit the “reply” button and ask a follow-up question?   If not, move along.
2. When a guru makes an offer via direct mail, can you call his or her office where a live person will answer the phone?  Does the guru’s offer even include a phone number?  If not, move along.
3. If you’re able to reach a live person to ask a question, will you receive a response from the guru within a reasonable period of time?  If not, move along.

You’ll be amazed by how many useless gurus you can weed out with these three simple criteria.

All infopreneurs are selling something.  The less credible infopreneurs are typically more interested in selling their product than whether their product is what you need.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with selling; after all, commerce revolves around selling.  Gurus, like all humans, are driven by the very basic motive of enlightened self-interest.  If you’re interested in a particular guru’s materials, try applying the three criteria above and see how far you get.  If you get nowhere, it means the guru is more interested in selling you his product than if his product is helpful, fact-based, tested and proven.  We all have the same 24 hours in a day.  The hopeful real estate investing student must be as mindful of his time, energy and money as the infopreneur trying to convince you to purchase as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort expended by the guru.

Note from Bryan Ellis:  Thanks for you article, Catherine!  I heartily agree and disagree with various parts of your ideas, and I’ll post my reply in the comments area below in a day or two after other readers have had had a chance to sound off about this.

Thank you to my valued readers for visiting RealEstate.BryanEllis.com!

This past week I had the pleasure of featuring Jeff Kaller on a truly excellent webinar presentation about his short sale system.  That replay of that webinar is downloadable and free but only available for a limited time (see the end of this post).

Why should you watch Jeff’s Short Sale System webinar presentation?

Sure, he teaches how to do short sales, along with all of the in’s and out’s he’s discovered from being involved in that method for more than 10 (!) years.  Jeff knows the business like nobody else.  And sure, he teaches you how you can duplicate his success.

But more importantly, under Jeff’s system you’re taught about the EASIEST source for finding great short sale deals, and then Jeff’s team takes over and handles the bank negotiation, funding and resale of your properties so that your short sale business is on AUTO-PILOT!

Yes, you read that correctly: Under Jeff’s system, you don’t even have to negotiate with the lender! There are many things his system takes care of for you, but I’d say that the complete elimination of the need to do lender negotiation or to ever worry about funding your deals are big enough reasons all by themselves to give his strategy some serious attention.

It’s really amazing what he shared with us.  I strongly recommend you watch this replay right away.  It’s pretty big, so I probably won’t be able to keep it posted for very long.  Download it now by clicking the button, then go ahead and watch it right away:

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it has specific meaning to me.  I haven’t always done everything right or well along the way, but I think the one thing that has always served me well is to live with an attitude of thankfulness to God and others.

That’s why I’m writing this to you today.  I want to thank you for reading my blog, and for all of the support you’ve shown me over the last several months.  It’s tempting to to make a list of all of the extraordinary things that have happened here in RealEstate.BryanEllis.com in recent months, but rather than that I’ll simply state:

Thank you.  Thank you for being such a good subscriber, and thank you for all of the wonderful comments you leave here, and thank you for the extraordinary responsiveness you’ve shown.  I realize that many of you despise every word I write when it comes to government policy for investors and other such issues.  Yet you return over and over to make your points and in so doing you have made this website one of the most prestigious and reputable real estate blogs on the internet.

Thank you.  I truly appreciate you.

Ever heard of the concept of “delegated authority” in the context of short sale investing?  Me either.  But Jeff Kaller tells us this notion is the key to creating short sale offers that lenders simply can not refuse.  As soon as you’ve registered for tonight’s free webinar (register now by clicking here - it will open in a new window) then go ahead and watch this great video to prepare you for tonight’s free webinar:

Click Here To Register Now

I’ve learned quite a bit of useful and intriguing information already just from watching part 1 of Jeff Kaller’s free video training which leads up to our special free webinar on Tuesday night.

A short sale is a transaction in which a lender agrees to take less money than they are actually owed on a property in order to avoid the foreclosure process.  Frankly, some seriously botched government policy has made it significantly more like that even more foreclosures will happen soon (rather than less), which means there will be more opportunities for you to make a huge income on your preforeclosure deals by performing a short sale.

One of the keys to making this happen is to make sure that when you do a short sale, the lender should gross more but should net less.  Here’s Jeff Kaller to explain it for us…(but before you watch the video, click here to register now for Tuesday evening’s free live webinar)

Click Here To Register Now