In today’s tough market, my strategy is to buy properties well below market value. These deals are almost never on the MLS, real estate brokerage sites, or even Loopnet. Often, the best deals are found OFF-MARKET, and that's where I excel. Why Focus on OFF-MARKET Deals? No Competition: Off-market deals mean zero competition. Higher Profit: They are often more profitable than agent-listed properties. Save on Commissions: Buying directly from sellers means no agent commissions. How to Find Off-Market Deals One effective method is acquiring properties through probate sales. For example, one property we bought was part of a portfolio from sellers who didn’t care about maintaining apartment buildings in C areas. Rents and occupancy were low. My partners and I stepped in, cleaned up, put our own management in place, renovated some units, and increased the rents. One of my strengths is finding these off-market deals. Not all distressed or foreclosed property owners will sell for a huge discount, but you will often get significant savings. This is just one way to find off-market properties. While probate sales are effective, they don’t provide RECURRING deals. Want to learn more strategies? Comment below and I''ll give you the link to a video where I talked about all the strategies I use to find deals.

The overall number of car repossessions has increased by 23 percent over last year. Not only that, but the current repossession rate has even eclipsed pre-pandemic levels, with 2024 sitting about 14 percent higher than 2019 repossession numbers. In May the average American new car buyer was paying $760 per month for an auto loan, with 17 percent of car owners committing to a monthly payment over $1,000.Those are crazy numbers. Is a recession next? This is why I love investing in CASHFLOW-producing assets like real estate. I use the cashflow from them to pay my living expenses. "But Mike, I am too busy to be a landlord." You can invest in a totally PASSIVE way by investing in a real estate syndication.

This Bad News, Good News! Back in mid-2020 up to 2022, multifamily cap rates compressed and I saw a lot of syndicators overpaid for apartments. What's worse, a third of them got FLOATING RATE debt. That's debt where the interest rate changes. The Fed increased the interest rate at a rate so fast it was crazy and nobody expected them to do that. And the worst part? Some of those floating-rate debt loans are maturing THIS YEAR (see the gray bar in the chart below). The result? In the 2nd half of this year, a lot of the apartment syndicators who borrowed loans like these will be in FINANCIAL TROUBLE. The lenders will try to work something out with them and one of them is for the borrowers to BRING MORE cash to the table and refinance them to fixed-rate debt. This is what is meant by CASH IN REFI. This is BAD NEWS for those syndicators and their passive investors. We will see a lot more CAPITAL CALLS. And syndicators who can't raise the money to do these cash-in refi's? They will get FORECLOSED on by the lenders. This is GOOD NEWS for someone like me who did not buy a lot of apartments between 2020 to 2022 because I didn't want to overpay for them. It's a BUYING OPPORTUNITY. We will see prices drop by as much as 30% vs 2020 to 2022 levels. Are you ready to buy?

Today marks the end of our $20M in 20 Days Challenge which we started October 10. The goal was to raise $20M in private capital in just 20 business days. This was a group effort of myself and 20+ of my Mastermind members. We did NOT raise $20,000,000. We raised a total of $127,700,000! $7,700,000 of the capital lined up was from high-networth individuals. However, $120,000,000 was lined up from Institutional capital. Kudos to my Mastermind members for making this happen (Okenno RehabKing Johnson, Schmoll Reaves-Bey, Jessica Collins, Laura Hoff, Adrian Frederick, Monique Bryan, Marc Prestwood, Floyd Mcguirk, DuWayne Gregory, Marsha Ogletree, and Hannah Seoh)

There are 3 stages of foreclosure: 1. Preforeclosure - this is when the borrower becomes 90 days late on the mortgage and the bank will file a Lis Pendens (or Notice of Foreclosure) in court 2. Foreclosure Auction - if the borrower does not take action to stop the lender from foreclosing, the property goes to auction. 3. REO (real estate owned) - the bank will usually BID at the auction to push the price up to the price they want. When they don't get it, they end up owning the property. How do you make money at each foreclosure stage? During the PREFORECLOSURE STAGE... 1. Joint venture/ Take over the Mortgage/ Mortgage Assumption - you can help the seller by making the back payments, taking over the operations, and working with the lender so you can assume the mortgage. You can even buy the property for NO MONEY DOWN. I've done this for 3 hotels. 2. Buy the NOTE - here, you work with the lender directly and see if you can buy the mortgage note at a discount. Then you become the bank and you can foreclose on the borrower/seller or you can restructure the note. I've bought hundreds of nonperforming mortgages. Some of them I flipped for a quick $5K-20K per note. Some I've restructured the note, became the bank, and generated truly passive income (I don't have to deal with tenant issues). 3. Do a SHORTSALE - here, you buy the property from the seller for a price BELOW or short of the loan balance. Then you can turn around and wholesale the property, rehab it and flip it or rehab it and rent it out. During the AUCTION...there's one way and that is to BID on the property and be the winning bidder. The downside is COMPETITION of course and you need to be a cash buyer. The last stage is REO - here, you buy the property either directly from the bank or through a broker. Then you can turn around and just resell it "as is" or fix and flip it or BRRRR it. There are a lot more details of course but I can't cover them here for this post will be too long. Instead...