Real Estate Investing

On Wed, Dec 5, I completed what I considered to be the inaugural meeting of “The Investors Roundtable” of Colorado Springs. It was an all-new endeavor working with new acquaintances. But everyone was willing to “give it a shot” and I certainly did my best to “deliver the goods”.

The main purpose was to kick off The Investors Roundtable group with an enticing but relevant seminar which was entitled “Building a Real Estate Investment Portfolio in a Down Market” that was focused on Colorado Springs.

The “promise”that was going to be delivered was the following:

• The Art & Science of Portfolio-Building
• 5 Strategies for building a real estate portfolio if you have limited time, expertise, cash, or credit
• Why the best time to build a real estate portfolio is in a slower market and economic cycle
• What happens to assets, wealth, and equity created and lost during up-markets and up-cycles
• The types of people who should absolutely avoid and should never invest in real estate
• The types of people who can never stop doing real estate deals and the types of people who can stop within 5 years.
• The single crucial x-factor every investor must decide BEFORE they buy their first investment
• The 5 Deadly Sins of Real Estate Investing that destroy portfolios and investment careers
• The 3 Investment Criteria professional investors use that amateurs do not
• The “true returns on investment” professional investors rarely reveal to the general public
• The 4 Rules on the Mindset of Money amateur investors never learn until it’s too late
• The 3 Unavoidable Events that will occur in the real estate market between now and 2010
• The 6 opportunities and differences between 1st-tier and 2nd-tier cities
• The Current Market Velocity of Colorado Springs
• 5 Reasons Why Colorado Springs is a better market to invest in than Denver
• The 4 Factors “outside investors” see in Colorado Springs that “native investors” routinely ignore
• The pros and cons of investing with Investment Teams vs. investing alone

As you can see, it was quite ambitious for a 3-hour evening seminar on a cold December night. Not only that, it was only $25 per ticket. What a steal.

Typically, my small seminars are fairly organic. In other words, I have a loose outline of what I will cover, but I rely on flip-charts and have the students take notes. After all, what could one expect for $25?

However, I changed my mind and prepared a PowerPoint presentation instead. The room I was presenting in had a ceiling projector to a projection screen. I figured I would simply take advantage of it by connecting my PC Notebook to the system and present off of a pre-prepared PowerPoint Presentation.

What I thought would be an easy task turned out to be incredibly time-consuming one. It has been a few years since I have prepared a PowerPoint presentation. And it was my first time to create one that would require 3+ hours to cover.

Constructing, writing, and organizing that PowerPoint presentation was a multi-day project with several hours per day. Holy smokes, I thought it would not come to an end with the endless ideas, revisions, and reorganizations. It felt as challenging as writing a booklet.

In any case, I did finish writing the presentation and I did present it in my typically unconventional and hard-hitting style. Being in a new environment, I did exercise a bit more restraint than I normally do in Columbus. 🙂 However, I did not want to “sanitize” it to the point I felt robotic or that my audience did not know where I stood on issues.

I am setting all of you up because what came out AFTER the seminar was very enlightening to me as a speaker and presenter. Bottom line, my “core audience” liked the presentation and there were other parts that left a less than desirable impression.

I will be writing a few “insight articles” to clarify my positions on certain subjects. It might make for some juicy reading. Stay tuned.