This episode I discuss a few rehab tips. More to follow.

This episode I discuss one of the biggest lies in Detroit real estate, Section 8 is guaranteed money from the government. It’s not.

This episode I speak about some common questions that my international investors have.

This episode I speak about how excited I am about the 38 federal indictments against former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his stooges. Beautiful day for Detroit!

While I have never been to the original TED (I keep applying, some day I will get in) I was fortunate enough to have attended both TedxDetroit events. This years event was even better and bigger than last with some amazing speakers.

Why this is so exciting, besides the fact that it is TED for Detroit, is that it proves there are great minds in Detroit working hard to solve problems and share ideas. One of the big differences between TedxDetroit and the original TED is that TedxDetroit is heavily represented by entrepreneurs. Detroit is ground zero for some amazing new businesses in the tech arena as well as established businesses growing like crazy.

For Detroit to have successfully sponsored two Tedx events is an great sign for the city. The quality of the speakers were second to none and I met some great people while attending and volunteering. To see and meet so many people actively making Detroit a better place to live, start a business, and invest was something really special.

My favorite quote of the day was from Dan Gilbert (owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers as well as Quicken Loans, basically a serial entrepreneur),”If you like to buy low and sell high, I suggest you get on the bandwagon, soon!” Dan went on to say that he couldn’t believe how cheap real estate was here and he was actively buying as much as he could.

I highly recommend that next year you apply and attend TedxDetroit. You won’t regret it.

I must give a shout out to a few of the players that made TedxDetroit possible. Charlie Wolborg of Curve Detroit (follow @charliecurve), Wayne State University, Dan Gilbert and of course the TedxDetroit board. Thank you for working so hard to make this happen and thank you for making this years TedxDetroit bigger and better than last years! I’m really looking forward to 2011 TedxDetroit!

Make your life uncomfortable,
Jeremy Burgess
The Detroit Market Expert

P.S. Check out some pretty cool pics of TedxDetroit. http://www.flickr.com/groups/tedxdetroit/

While all of the above may be Wall Street’s attitude towards successful investing, there are more enlightened ways. The truth is that we are all agents of change and with a little thought towards others we can successfully invest in this world while creating all win and no lose opportunities. In fact I believe that we can change the face of this world and wrestle control from the evils of corporate and Wall Street greed that have placed our financial system in peril and hurt millions of people around this world.

In practice this is called socially responsible investing and it is simple to understand. Don’t invest in something in which someone stands lose when you profit. Also think about the impact of your investment on our environment. Not only can we all profit and create meaningful change with these two simple rules, we can create more profitable transactions than the “dog eat dog world” Wall Street would have us believe.

Urban Detroit Wholesalers is a great example of how you can actually be more profitable by creating “no lose” transactions. We buy houses from banks for cash quickly so they can lend money that money again and get a bad asset off their books.

We rehab our houses using a local nonprofit, Motor City Blight Busters. They hire formerly incarcerated individuals and teach them new skills and provide employment so the revolving door in our corrections system is significantly reduced. The profit from the rehab goes back to the nonprofit and is investing in communities that don’t necessarily make sense for an investor to invest in. Many of the materials from the rehab projects are recycled and reused on later projects, reducing the cost of future rehabs for us and our investors while reducing the need for new resources from our planet.

Through another nonprofit we work with, National Faith Home Buyers, we then provide the high quality housing we just rehabbed to disadvantaged economic classes who are trying to break the cycle of poverty. This means less money paid out from social welfare programs and less taxes out of all of our pockets. The city of Detroit and Wayne County benefit by having a house put back on the tax roll. And finally the investor (you) and Urban Detroit Wholesalers profits from the sale or rental of the newly rehabbed house.

There are many different companies who subscribe to the above principals and even right now socially responsible investing is a trillion dollar industry. After watching corporate and Wall Street greed destroy millions of retirements and jobs, it is up to us to break the cycle and start helping ourselves and others. We can vote with our money and the way we invest. We must start doing this NOW because I doubt that greedy Wall Street, which has a choke hold on our government, will see fit to change it. It is up to us.

Make Your Life Uncomfortable,
Jeremy Burgess
Detroit Market Expert

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Social networking is something that you will need to embrace in 2009 in order to get connected and stay connected with current / former / future clients and professionals. Terry Bean from Motor City Connect has opened my eyes to the possibilities of powerful tools like LinkedIn, ActiveRain, Facebook, and Twitter. Much of the information I’m sharing below was learned from Terry at his social networking presentations and is only a small subset of the vast information that he has to share. If you like this information, make sure to also visit Terry at Motor City Connect and Networked Inc.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a site that you definitely need to be on. It is like an online business card that shows your company details, links to your sites, and connections that you have. It’s good to build good links and content for Google to find and is also a great place to make new connections through Groups, Questions, and Invitations.

Find Us:
- Jeremy Burgess – LinkedIn
- Jared Pomranky – LinkedIn
- Metro-Detroit Real Estate – Renegade Detroit Investors Group

ActiveRain

This is a real estate related social networking site that provides great avenues for blogging, getting real estate information, and making great connections regionally. It’s another avenue that someone can find you as a real estate professional in your area.

Find Us:
First Sign-up for ActiveRain Here
- Jeremy Burgess – ActiveRain
- Jared Pomranky – ActiveRain

FaceBook

FaceBook is a more social site than the previous two. You will notice that people are much more relaxed and will post photos of friends and family. It’s a good place to connect on a much deeper level and to also catch up with old friends and schoolmates.

Find Us:
- Jeremy Burgess – FaceBook
- Jared Pomranky – FaceBook

Twitter

Twitter is for the early adopters. Not everyone will “get it” but Twitter is an excellent tool. Think of Twitter as a public text message that’s limited to 140 characters. You can choose to “follow” someone to see what they’re “twittering” about and others can choose to follow you. It’s a good place to get news information, let people know what you’re doing and what you’re thinking, and find out what other people are doing. My advice, if you’re going to sign-up, is to completely fill out your profile, follow a couple of people you know (like Jeremy and Me), and tweet (write) some interesting posts that are non-marketing (i.e. informative). The best way to build a network on twitter is to grow it slowly and not use it solely as a marketing platform. It’s social.

Find Us:
- Jeremy Burgess – @JeremyBurgess
- Jared Pomranky – @JaredDetroit

You don’t need to join all of these to be successful but starting Social Networking sooner rather than later will make a huge impact on your Internet Marketing and your business. I look forward to getting connected!

Successfully Yours,
Jared Pomranky
Detroit Market Expert

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The question is, if someone is searching for you, are they finding you? What do you do? What’s your business? Are you finding buyers for Detroit Real Estate or are you just a Detroit Cash Flowinvestor that wants to make more contacts? Well, I’m here to tell you how you can do both. Social networking is nothing new to college students and younger people but it is fairly new (within the last couple of years) for business people and real estate investors. Not only does it provide a great place to meet other people and network but it also provides a great place to build your presence on the Internet. By utilizing social network sites you can post information on your website, your business, and blog with great content to get people to find you on search engines like Google. Does it work? Well, how did you find us?

There are many places for social networking like MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, ActiveRain, and many others. I’m not here to tell you to sign-up for everything, I’m here to tell you where to concentrate your efforts for the maximum return on your time invested. I’m sure you can tell which ones I recommend. Out of every social networking site I have seen, the best ones are ActiveRain and LinkedIn for relevance to business. LinkedIn is specifically business focused and ActiveRain is real estate specific, which is even better! Start out by signing up for ActiveRain – Detroit Real Estate and work on getting your profile setup. Select a picture, write a description of your business and what you’re trying to accomplish, and follow the online guide to complete your profile. As you see, when you complete parts of your profile, you get more points. You also get points for commenting on blogs and blogging yourself. As you get more points, your ranking rises within your community.

Why do this? First off you will network with great people and get great information on real estate. Second, and maybe most important, is that Google loves ActiveRain.

As you blog about content, put your profile out with links to your website, and comment on other people’s blogs, Google will index that information and increase the rank of your site whether that’s your profile on ActiveRain or another outside website. Now, if you’re still waiting, go to ActiveRain – Detroit Real Estate and sign-up for an account to get started. Once you sign-up, send me a message on ActiveRain or reply to this e-mail and I will send you great tips for increasing your Search Engine Optimization via ActiveRain and how to get the most points out of your time on ActiveRain. It will supercharge your business and your real estate investing! Also, make sure you check out LinkedIn for a different take on social networking but I would definitely suggest ActiveRain first.

Get excited to build your web presence and make great connections on ActiveRain!

Successfully Yours,
Jared Pomranky
Detroit Market Expert

Well, I thought so as well until I realized that all this person does is work. 80 years old and they’re still out there working every day. I’m not talking supervising or sales but down-right hard work with a shovel digging out trenches and moving dirt around. I have to say, hard work is an admirable trait and many entrepreneurs wouldn’t be where they are without it. What we have here is the classic old school business owner. Start a business, work hard in the business your whole life, and you will have enough funds to take care of yourself and your family. Don’t worry about vacations or money for another house because you probably won’t have time to enjoy them.

Instead of paying someone $10/hr. to shovel dirt or $14/hr. to drive truck, do it yourself because hiring people costs money and you can just do it yourself anyway. Does this sound like any so called “entrepreneur” that you know of? I’m not trying to knock these people down because they’ve done more than the “work 40 hours for 40 years for a 401k” (direct quote from entrepreneur Ken Brown) have done or will ever dream of doing. Can I suggest a better way though?

Where did valuing our time and making good business decisions take a back stage to plain old hard work? Why do we as investors and entrepreneurs feel like we have to do it ourselves because we’re the only ones that can do it and we have all this free time anyway? It starts out this way because our education growing up never teaches us the entrepreneurial way. We learn that if you want to get ahead you should work hard and save, which will give you enough money with social security to retire. We never learn about leveraging Other People’s Time (OPT) and Other People’s Resources (OPR).

To be successful and to grow a business whether it’s investing in Detroit Real Estate or running a factory that creates and distributes widgets, you have to master these techniques. Let’s use our construction company owner as an example. We know that his time is better served going other tasks like sales or marketing for his company rather than digging ditches but how do we measure this?

What we have to do for the construction owner and what you need to do for yourself is to figure out how much your time is worth? Let’s place a dollar value on your time. So what do you think? What’s your time worth? What should it be worth? Is it $50 an hour (~$100,000/year), $250 an hour (~$500,000/year), $1,000 an hour (~$2,000,000/year) or more? You have to decide how valuable your time is to you.

Let’s be very conservative and say our Construction Owner is only worth $50 an hour. What he has to do is to decide each task during the day and put an hourly rate on it. The tasks that fall below $50/hr. like digging trenches, driving truck, and going to the City Building to apply for permits, MUST be completed by someone else. The tasks like sales that can produce far greater than $50/hr. the business owner can do. Now what this does is it makes the business owner focus on the areas of his business that he can really add a tremendous value. The areas where he is adding almost no value (compared to the price that it can be completed by an employee for) no longer will get in the way of these higher priority tasks.

Because he is able to focus on areas in his business where he is adding a tremendous value, he not only can leverage his time more but he’s going to see his business grow. As his business grows, you will see his hourly rate increase to where he may have sales people and a company-wide manager. His time may become so valuable that he can only review reports from the company manager and tell the manager corrective actions to make. Now isn’t this really the goal of most entrepreneurs? I can hear someone saying right now, “What if this guy really likes to be working in his business and digging trenches?”. Well, that’s the beauty of leveraging other people’s time and growing your business. As you work on your business and not in your business, it frees up much of your time to do whatever you want (sitting on the beach in Maui, traveling around Europe, digging ditches), whatever that may be.

What does this mean to you as a real estate investor (full time or part time)? Well, it means that you need to figure out what your hourly rate is and make sure you have other people doing this activities that are below your hourly rate. Now don’t just take your annual salary at your J.O.B. and divide it by 2,000 hours. No, I need you to figure out what you should be making or what you will be making as an entrepreneur and do this calculation. If you’re making $5/hr. at a fast food restaurant, I don’t want you doing every task that is $5/hr. or more. If you’re going to be an investor and an entrepreneur, you have to think like one.

Once you figure out this hourly rate, you then need to start looking at the activities and tasks that you complete for your investments and assigning hourly rates to them. Anything that’s not at your hourly rate or above, needs to be outsourced to someone else. Do you think it’s too difficult to do or that there’s not anyone that can do these tasks? I’m here to tell you that it’s much easier than what you think. I know many people that offer outsourcing arrangements to investors and entrepreneurs and specialty companies that offer very specific outsourcing arrangement for real estate investors (Our company being one of them).

If you have a job and are investing part time, you MUST leverage other people’s time so you can grow your investments and leave your job. If you’re a full time investor, you MUST leverage other people’s time so you can continue to grow your business and do the activities that you want to do. I’m not here to judge your activities so if you’re the 80 year old construction company owner that just likes to dig trenches and drive truck, I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t be doing it. I just want to make sure you have the free time to do it.

Successfully Yours,
Jared Pomranky
Detroit Market Expert

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Successfully Yours,
Jared Pomranky
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