A standard Lifestyles Unlimited® membership is comprised of several opportunities to learn about real estate investing and keep your knee knocking to a minimum. The primary components are:
Financial Freedom Program
Del Walmsley, founder and president of Lifestyles Unlimited, Inc.®, takes you through the Natural Progression of the Real Estate Investor. This intense 2-day class will give you an effective map to achieve financial independence through real estate. You will learn how to acquire your first single-family home, gradually leveraging your equity and cash flow into groups of single-family homes and then moving into large apartment complexes. This process, while it requires hard work, dedication and commitment, will enable most families to produce enough passive income to meet or exceed their monthly bills in about 5 years. Depending on personal resources, many members will complete the 2-day class and elect to begin with apartments, thereby reducing this timeline dramatically.
12 Case Study Nights:
This is the night to make investor and mentor contacts. At Case Study Nights, you will see presentations from members who have done their first deals to members who have purchased multiple apartment complexes over 240 units. They come as volunteers to teach you, step-by-step, how they found, negotiated, financed, and closed their real estate deals.
36 Guest Speaker Events
This is the night to make professional contacts. Meet CPA’s who teach how to invest using IRAs. Talk to attorneys who teach asset protection and how to start and use corporations and Limited Liability Companies. Meet insurance agents who teach how to insure both single-family and multi-family rental property, new construction, and rehabs. Build your network of credit specialists, management specialists, mortgage brokers and many others.
Unlimited ‘Question and Answer’ with our FFP Team
From 9am-5pm, Monday through Friday, our members have unlimited ‘question and answer’ with Houston real estate investors and mentors. This is designed to help people get past any fear or lack of knowledge that may be keeping them from financial success.
Property Evaluation and Principles of Prequalification
This class on property evaluation enables members to determine the value of any single-family property in minutes, and features Lifestyles Quest™, an immensely powerful tool. Also incluced is a presentation outlining the Single-Family Action Plan created to keep our newest members focused on achieving immediate results! After attending this course, our members have the ability to create a simple business plan that allows them to write offers on property with confidence within a half hour of encountering a new deal.
Mastering Basic Property Locating
“You should have 20 agents looking for real estate every day, all day long. These realtors should be looking for property while you are working on your job, spending time with your family or vacationing.” This class will show you how to do exactly that. We will teach you how to leverage your time to locate property more effectively, how to identify a qualified agent, and what to say when you call on them.
Member Discounts
Your membership will include discounts on services and supplies from companies like Sherwin Williams, Pittsburgh Paints, HD Supply, OfficeMax, and O’Connor and Associates. This works very much like group rate insurance you get through your employer in that as a group we can achieve more favorable treatment in pricing as well as other intangibles.
Enhanced Online Tools
Network with other members 24/7 through our community forum. Did you miss a class or just join and need to catch up? Hundreds of hours of video recorded classes are available in the member’s area of our website immediately upon enrollment.
This program is very comprehensive and all that most of our members every need and is a required prerequisite for anyone wishing to take advantage of our more advanced membership levels. However, if you learn more effectively from more frequent meetings, classes, hands on road trips, and one-on-one consultations, the advanced programs and consulting services offered by the PIG/Challenge group will work well for you. Additionally, because the program allows for representation by agents with Lifestyles Realty on your transactions, and because you will frequently receive leads from those agents by email, the pace by which you traverse the “Natural Progression of the Real Estate Investor” that you learned during the 2-day class from Del should increase dramatically.
As far as your limited resources go, you may be surprised how bankable you might be. My recommendation is to begin by contacting the mortgage brokers on our website at https://lifestylesunlimited.com and asking about current programs that may be available for you, or at least determine what the minimum reserve requirements are so that you know how much time you will need to use their products. Hard money loans can be appropriate in some circumstances. When an investor uses a hard money loan, it is usually because the property condition will prohibit conventional financing. In a situation like this, using a broker who can find both the rehab loan and set up the permanent loan to take over as soon as the property qualifies is oftentimes comforting.
Even if you are not currently bankable, buying properties with seller financing is available for anyone. The last time my real estate agent looked up listed properties on local mls where the seller indicated that they would consider owner financing, she found over 1000 listings. This was just a few weeks ago. Many more sellers than that haven’t even been asked by there agents if they would consider it, but might if you offered a reasonable interest rate. Some sellers who might not finance the entire price might finance a 20% second, and you could then surely find a lender who will finance at just 80% of the price, especially if that price is below market value.
Additionally, wholesaling your deals to other investors is a way to work with your situation and get some practice with property location, writing offers and negotiation. I know of some investors who even sell just leads with contact information. Another strategy that might be appropriate for you could be using a credit and/or down payment partner in a joint venture. Perhaps you could just buy an option to buy a property, sell that option, and repeat until you had enough money to use as a down payment on a keeper.
I personally know several successful real estate investors and entrepreneurs who have been through bankruptcy and foreclosures even – certainly more dramatic scenario either of us are facing – and they not only recovered but thrived.
