My Story – Trent Rogers
I have had an interest in real estate investing for several years. I’m a builder so I have worked with and around other investors for most of my career. I’ve watched as many of the investors I’ve worked with have created a great deal of wealth and I’ve wanted to find a way for me to get into the game as well. One of my struggles has been not knowing the best way to invest and how to find the right opportunities.
After watching others develop land, condos, commercial buildings, and build spec homes, I finally decided to build my first spec home. Although I didn’t really know it, my timing was perfect and I was able to make a significant profit which gave me enough money to put down as a down payment to build my own home. As soon as I completed my own home, I decided that I should build another spec home with the intention of helping to reduce my mortgage. This time my timing wasn’t so good. I finished this home just as the market was starting to slow down.
I tried to sell the home for several months with very little interest. My realtor kept advising me to reduce my price because the market was only going to get worse. Finally I had a family come along who wanted to purchase my home but they couldn’t afford my asking price and they had to sell their home first. We spent about a month negotiating prices and trying to find a way to make things work. Finally, I decided that I couldn’t afford to let the buyer wait or lose interest so I decided that I’d have to offer to purchase their home from them because their home was half as expensive as mine and I believed it would be much easier to afford and sell than mine. We agreed that we’d buy each other’s homes, each paying the appraised value of the other persons home. I ended up selling my home to them at just barely above my cost but I felt fortunate to at least have my initial down payment back that I could apply to the purchase of their home.
By this time the market had slowed down significantly and I tried for about 10 months to sell the home that I had purchased from my buyers. In the mean time, I bumped in to my friend Steve Earl and asked him how things were going for him. He told me that things were going very well and that he was now working as a real estate broker in a different kind of brokerage. They worked primarily with investors and were buying inexpensive homes with significant equity in them and then marketing them as a rent-2-own opportunity. This had proven to be a very conservative yet profitable strategy and if a person would apply it repeatedly, they could own a minimum of 4 homes, paid for free and clear, in a matter of 8 to 12 years. This peaked my interest and when Steve invited me a few weeks later to a presentation that would explain it in more detail, I felt that it would be worth learning more about.
Although, the home that I had purchased was more expensive than the homes that REIC recommends purchasing for their rent-2-own program, I thought I would see if it might help me to get out of my situation with my home. I tried for a few months to market it on my own with the little bit of information that I had learned from the REIC seminar but didn’t have much success. Finally I realized that I had to do something more so I decided to pay the membership fee for REIC and see if by learning about the details of their rent-2-own program, I could achieve better results. After attending the Lease Option Live course, I was able to get a lease option tenant into my home within 4 or 5 weeks.
The REIC rent-2-own program is simple and straight forward. It works! I was able to apply it with a home that doesn’t fit within their recommended guidelines (I paid $80,000 more than the recommended maximum purchase price and paid full appraised value) and still cash flow about $125/month. The thing that is even more exciting to me is that I have been able to help a family who recently moved from Colorado and couldn’t sell their home to get into a home here that they love and want to stay in. Now they have time to work on selling their home in Colorado and when they do, they can purchase this home from me and won’t have to move again when they transition from renting to owning. They are very thankful for the opportunity to be in a long term home instead of a short term rental while they are working on selling their other home.
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