News

There’s a new REI Club in Town!

The brand new Real Estate Club In Action (RE-CIA), www.clubinaction.com officially launched in May 2013, as a collaborative venture by 3 active Southern California investors, Crystal Guzman, Matt Skinner and Julie Falen, who wanted to offer a different style of Real Estate Investment Club (REIC) in the Los Angeles Metro area. More particularly, they saw there was a real need for a club that could serve investors in the San Fernando Valley, and along the corridors from Burbank to Downtown LA, from Los Feliz to Atwater Village, from Glendale and Eagle Rock to Sun Valley and beyond. The primary mission of the Real Estate CLUB IN ACTION is to offer “an active collaboration of real estate entrepreneurs & investors for the acceleration of financial independence”.

The RE Club In Action mission has 3 main components: Fun, Education, and ACTION!

The first component is a monthly MEETUP gathering called “The Not Just Another Robert Kiyosaki CashFlow Game Night” which is held the 2nd Wednesday of every month on the Penthouse Floor of the Burbank Media Center Holiday Inn. This game night is like no other since it is a number of players playing the popular CA$HFLOW™ board game, facilitated by a Rich Grad™ who walks players through the game, provides life lessons throughout, and teaches various techniques throughout the game.

Second, on the 3^rd Wednesday of each month, the Club In Action holds its regular educational and networking meetings in the Burbank Media Center Holiday Inn Ballroom from 6:30 to 9:30, with networking as a primary element before, during and after the meetings. Various successful local and nationally-known investors and teachers of investment techniques will present valuable and actionable information and offer additional trainings. We intend the investment club to be a place where investors with different levels of experience come together to network, to learn from guest speakers and from each other, and to connect with resources necessary for their investing success.

And as for ACTION…. On several Saturdays immediately following the Regular Wednesday RE-CIA Club meetings, we will be offering Investor “Mini-camps”…Blocks of time where serious investors can develop and hone the skills necessary to be a successful investor! In these 3-5 hour mini-camp trainings, the founders (and occasional guest trainers) will be teaching, pushing, prodding and assisting new and experienced investors in actually being in ACTION to create marketing, find sellers, analyze potential deals; in team-building, making offers, learning key financial functions on a calculator, and other tasks – often using or learning in more detail a technique or 3 that were taught in the Club meeting that week.

Annual Memberships are available that allow admittance into all regular club meetings, at $197/yr. Regular admission is $20 at the door.

Annual Platinum memberships, which allow members to attend all monthly club meetings and ALL Saturday mini-camp trainings, are only $497/yr.

Mini –Camp trainings are $47 each if paid for at the meeting or in advance, or $247 per camp at the door.

Sponsorships are available.

For more information, check us out on Meetup.com, at our website www.clubinaction.com, or call Crystal Guzman at 818-748-5213, or

Julie Falen at 323-874-5854

by Eddie Speed, Founder of NoteSchool

Real estate investors today are facing a changing market place. New regulations, historical lawsuits and settlements, along with a still sluggish economy have affected the supply and demand of real property in a significant way. These profound effects will set the course of real estate investing for the next several years. Real estate investors will have to adjust their approach to real estate as yesterday’s strategies and techniques will not yield the same result in the future.

The good news is that real estate investors have always had to change their tactics as market conditions change. Back in the early 2000’s real estate investors jumped into the rehab market buying up foreclosed fixer uppers. Still others jumped into buying preconstruction property which they would flip to another buyer for a quick profit. Shortly after real estate prices plummeted in the 2007 financing crisis, investors switched gears and starting buying short sales approved by lenders and REO’s owned by lenders. Enter the robo-signing lawsuits, new legislation and a broken economy and again real estate investors have to adjust and adapt.

Where are the deep discounted REO’s? Why have short sales all but dried up? Where is the foreclosure inventory? Why are cap rates on rental property so low? The answers to those questions ultimately come down to the issue of supply and demand. Housing inventory in general is down, while the foreclosure and REO inventory is down significantly yet cash investors, stung by the memory of stock losses, are hungry for safer returns and are buying properties at increasing prices driving yields down.

Nationwide, foreclosures are selling at an anemic 13% discount while rental properties are providing a paltry 8% cap rate. These numbers, as well as inventory numbers, can be easily found with a quick Google search. If you have been an active real estate investor, you don’t even need to look those numbers up as you have already experienced there impact.

So, is this simply the new market you have to live with? It may be for you unless you examine the financial side of the business. Let’s face it; financing has always been the defining factor when it comes to real estate. The government’s involvement in financing has always been a defining factor. Not sure about that? Do some research on the history of FHA. You will find that before FHA this was a nation of renters. You couldn’t get a mortgage unless you put 50% down and that mortgage would not 30 but 5 years.

The government created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and as a result we had a significant growth as more people were able to buy homes (and of course more homes being built meant many more jobs in numerous industries).

Today’s legislation is pushing banks to refinance existing loans while also putting restrictions on new loans. Other laws are making it more expensive for banks to foreclose and to hold foreclosed properties. In another huge move, new Fannie and Freddie actions have incentivized banks to sell more troubled loans rather than foreclose. These changes have led to a massive supply of troubled, non-performing notes.

How massive? Estimates show that there is 4 times the amount of non-performing notes available right now then the total number of foreclosures sold since 2006. Please re-read that. You can look that up at Realty Trac. With that much of a supply, what do you think has happened to the prices?

Industry numbers show that the average price for a non-performing note is about $9000. That note is secured by a property with a value of $60,000. I would re-read that sentence as well. Where else can you get discounts like that today? You can probably see why non-performing notes is the hottest topic in real estate today.