I have to admit I was scared.

I took a deep breath as I signed the check request for $75,000.  If we didn’t get the $3,075,000 we needed to purchase this 77-unit building plus the $500,000 to renovate it, we would lose the $75,000 earnest money.  

We had never bought an apartment building before.  Up to this date, the largest thing we’d ever managed was a duplex.  I looked at my husband.  He seemed a little pale.  I’m sure I did too.  I took his hand in mine.  “Let’s do this,”  I said.

A week later we put in an offer for another building – 51 units, selling for $1,800,000.

Three months later, we sat toasting at an elegant restaurant in Albuquerque on the day we closed escrow and became the owners. That week we bought two buildings in Albuquerque – 128 units total.  We raised over $2.2 million dollars from private investors and got bank loans totaling...

Since last year when Amazon announced it was searching for a second city to house its new headquarters, investors have been anxiously waiting to hear where they would choose.

Check out my previous post >>> Amazon Announced its 20 Finalists for HQ2 and Why You Should Care

 This week Amazon announced its final decision and there was not one, but two winners: Long Island City in Queens, New York City and Crystal City, Virginia (Northern Virginia city in the Washington, DC suburbs). 

As I discussed in January on the blog, Amazon is a game changing prize.  It's bringing 25,000 new jobs to each city (at an average salary of $100K per position - that's $2.5 Billion injection per year per city) PLUS a combined total of $5 Billion in new capital expenditures to these areas.  

And it’s not just what Amazon itself will do… there will be all sorts of secondary and tertiary businesses that will blossom to support this gigantic new...

Real estate investing can be very lucrative, but it's not always glamorous.

Last week highlighted that fact for me with an interesting series of contrasts. On Wednesday and Thursday I went to Albuquerque to check on our apartment buildings there and to meet with our property managers.  My hubby and I checked out every vacant apartment we have - many of which are in serious need of rehab.  We were setting a priority list for getting the work done (starting with the units least in need of work and working our way down).  

Click on this picture below to check out a little video I made showing off some of the units... good, bad and ugly.

That was the not-so-glamourous part of my week.  And then on Friday I got to enjoy something very glamourous... I was interviewed on TV!  I appeared on NBC Channel 24 Central Valley Today, in Fresno, California and got to speak about Real Estate Investor Goddesses and my upcoming event, Wealth Through Real...

Do you ever think "I'd love to invest in real estate, but I just don't have the money yet?" Well, it's possible you are actually sitting on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars available for investing and you don't even know it!

That's how I was - I was pretty blown away when I found this out.

When my husband and I went to a real estate conference - the Real Estate Guys' Secrets of Successful Syndication seminar, we first learned that we had way more access to cash than we thought about - via our retirement accounts. 

Most people have IRAs or 401k's in plans offered through their employers or through one of the bigger financial institutions - Fidelity, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, etc.  In these accounts is a set of options of what you can invest in - generally a somewhat limited menu of mutual funds and bonds.

I remember being very annoyed at one point because I wanted to put the bulk of my money in a low-fee...

For better or for worse, your success in real estate will be determined by who you know.  Real Estate is a relationship business.  Who you know and who you are working with can make all the difference in what deals you get and how much money you have access to.  

You need relationships with great service providers (agents/brokers, lenders, property managers, CPAs, contractors, attorneys, etc.) and with great potential partners (deal and investment partners).  Without these right relationships you either:
(a) can’t get a good cash flowing property deal at all (especially in a competitive market), or
(b) you can’t run it well if/when you do acquire it.

A lot of people think that’s not fair.  It’s true, it’s not fair.  Fair or not, that’s the way it is.

There is something you can do about it though…

You absolutely can get yourself some of those right relationships!

So how do you do that?...

I received such terrible news yesterday - a friend passed away from cancer just 5 months after giving birth to her son.  In fact, she was diagnosed with a stage 4 cancer the day after she gave birth.  It's devastating.  

Between the time of her diagnosis and her passing, she shared a lot on Facebook about what she was going through and what she was feeling.  One of her worries was the legacy she would leave for her son.

Are you thinking about what kind of legacy you want to leave future generations? The sooner you start building your legacy the better. 

Have you considered the question, how long you want your legacy to endure?  

One generation? Two generations? In perpetuity? 

As we age, our legacy becomes more significant to many of us. If your goal is to leave a legacy which will last generations, consider building two types: 

1) Financial Legacy
2) Knowledge Legacy

One without the other will handicap the chances of your legacy lasting...

Today, I wanted to share about how I got started in real estate investment.

I have a real estate investing goddess friend named Nicole.  Her parents were very successful real estate investors.  She grew up knowing all about real estate.  Her parents are much older and have since retired, and now she runs their impressive real estate portfolio.  She's been an investor since birth.  

I, on the other hand, didn’t grow up knowing any of this.  I fell into real estate investment almost by accident. 

I didn’t know anything about real estate investing.  I didn’t know why someone would want to do it, or that it was even an option for me. 

I was taught that you work hard in school, go to the best college (and in my case law school) you can, and then get the best job you can. 

I was taught to trade time for money, but get the best job you can so that you’re making the most amount of money per hour....

We get on the phone every week with building property managers.  We are never quite sure what we are going to hear.

There was the call about a drive-by shooting that thankfully didn’t hit anybody, the call about the fire in one of our townhouses that was a result of a love spat gone very, very bad, the call about the 10 units (out of 51) that we were going to have to evict in one month because they hadn’t been paying rent,  the call about the ex-con who threatened our property manager with a gun because he wasn’t happy about said eviction, the call about our elderly tenant who can’t pay rent because he thought a Nigerian Prince was really going to send him $10,000,000 and he sent a bank check equaling more than 2 months of his rent, and so much more.

This is what it’s like dealing with a Class C building.  [If you don’t know what that is yet, keep reading].

Lately though the calls have been different....

Even though I live in Los Angeles, I no longer invest here due to one of the most important property market considerations that I will share in a sec.

I am nonetheless always interested in knowing what's going on in real estate, especially in my own backyard, so on Saturday I went to a real estate symposium  about the Revitalization of Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA). 

DTLA has really flourished and changed over the past 18 years from when I first moved to LA and worked Downtown to today.  

Back in 2000 when I first moved to this city, Downtown was a no man's land.  People would drive in to work and there would be activity in DTLA from 8 am to 6 pm or so.  As soon as 6 pm hit the city would completely empty out (well except for lawyers like me working insane hours and the homeless who called those streets home).  

Due in large part to the opening of the Staples Center, which hosts 4 sports teams and 300 events per year...

If you’ve been paying attention to the news, you’ve probably heard that Amazon is shopping for HQ2 - the home of their second headquarters.

In September they put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) to North American Cities searching for:

• A metro with more than 1 million people
• A stable and business-friendly environment
• Urban or suburban locations attractive to technical talent
• An international airport within 45 minutes with direct flights to key cities
• Close to freeways
• High capacity connectivity (fiber optic and cellular)
• Access to large, educated labor force
• Attractive community and quality of life for employees
• Access to mass transit to the new site
• "Scale and creativity" in real estate options.

They received 238 proposals from cities vying to become Amazon’s second corporate home.  The phenomenal interest was not surprising.

It’s a HUGE prize - Amazon is projecting 50,000 jobs with an average annual salary of $100,000.  To...