Group Q & A 725080

Lou Brown:

Hello everyone.  Welcome to another installment of our Group Q&A where you become Street Smart on all the ways to buy, sell, and hold properties, and also how to protect your assets.  We have been excited over the last few weeks about how the market is going.  I know a lot of people are afraid of how the market has been and all the negative news that the newspapers are doing right now.  I want everyone to keep in mind that the newspapers are trend setters not trend followers.  In many cases, they create the trends in order to have something to report.  By that I mean, they often say things that are not quite the way things really are.  They make it seem like everything is dropping like a rock and that things are absolutely horrible.  Taken as a whole, our country’s economy is not doing all that bad.  We do have to consider gas and we do have to consider inflation.  Those are two issues that face us.

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Group Q & A 426080

Lou Brown:

Hello everyone and welcome back to another installment of our Street Smart Group Q and A.  You’ve sent in the questions over the last couple of weeks and I’ve got the answers for you.  I’m very excited about it.

Hey, if you’re not buying property in today’s market, you’re really missing an opportunity.  We’ve seen some great deals come across our desk in the last couple of weeks.  Imagine this, 24,000, 27,000, $30,000 deals.  We bought a couple of subject-tos as well.

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Group Q & A 315080

Bruce Beasley:

I’d like to welcome all of the Street Smart licensees to our group Q and A session for May 13^th, 2008.  And you can tell already that this isn’t Lou Brown.  This is Bruce Beasley.  I’m sitting in for him while he vacations in Mexico.  I thought I would start out by giving you a little bit about my background.  I’ve been working with Lou since 1992, so that makes this our 16^th year together and helped Lou develop the entire Whole Enchilada Series and am a real estate investor in my own right.  I’ve bought as many as 82 properties in a single day and I currently hold 34 properties, most of which are…well, they’re all single-family houses.  About two-thirds of them are out on Lease Option and 11 of them are out on Agreement for Deed.  I am co-author with Lou on the Lease Option course and on the Agreement for Deed course and I’m a contributing editor.  And that gives you a little bit of a background.  I spent 20 years as an airline pilot and so checklists are a way of life with airline pilots and that’s where a lot of our checklists philosophy comes from.

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Group Q & A 016080

Lou Brown:

Hi everyone and welcome back to another installment of our group Q and A where you get more street smart every time we meet.  I always get excited about our group Q and A because I am think that you have sent in these questions for a reason because you did not have this information and I always know that knowledge is power.  You have probably heard that term before and there certainly could not be truer words said then that.  So, we are giving you more knowledge and these questions are going to be answered by the end of our call and it will be a wonderful thing that you will have new power and new gained knowledge because of this.

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Group Q & A 807080

Lou:

Hello everyone and welcome back to another installment of our Street Smart Group Q and A.  This is Lou Brown, and I’m here to give you my words of wisdom on what’s happening in real estate over the last couple of weeks and what’s going to be happening in my crystal ball over the next few months.  Also, to answer all your questions that you’ve submitted to us over the last couple of weeks.

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Group Q & A 227080

Lou:

Hello everyone and welcome back to another installment of your Street Smart Q and A.  We’ve had a ton of questions over the last couple of weeks which I hope is indicative of your activity.  In today’s market we are seeing so much excitement, so much generation.  In fact, we have bought properties at auction over the last few weeks.  We have bought properties from people coming in off our signs.  We’ve had people coming in off the sign in front of our building.  We’ve got signs out all over the county and people are calling.  We’ve gotten over 40 leads in the last week just from signs.  We’ve gotten a ton of calls from our marketing, the Done for You marketing, where we’re approaching absentee owners, and also, probates, and several different things.  We’ve got a lot of excitement going on in our office.  A lot of things happening and houses being bought.  That’s exactly what needs to be happening in your business, too.

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Group Q & A 628080

Lou Brown:

Hello everyone and welcome back to another Street Smart installment of our Group Q and A, and I’m very excited to report to you as we do a bimonthly basis what the market is doing and right now the market is tumbling.  According to the Associated Press, Standard and Poor has reported that home prices tumbled by record amount.  Yeah baby.  This is good news.  A wildly watched housing index released Tuesday showed home prices dropping by the sharpest rate ever in the second quarter.  Standard and Poor’s Case US National Home Price Index tumbled a record 15.4% during the quarter from the same period a year ago.  The monthly indexes also clocked in record declines.  The 20 City Index fell by 15.9% in June compared with a year ago, the largest drop since its inception in 2000.  The 10 City Index plunged 17%, its biggest decline in its 21 year history.  No city in the Case 20 City Index saw year over year price gains in June, the third straight month that happened.  However, the rate of single family home price declines slowed from May to June, a possible silver lining.  The index creators said, “While this is no national turn around in residential real estate prices, it is possible that we are seeing some regions struggling to come back which has resulted in some moderation in price declines at the national level”, said David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard and Poor’s.

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Group Q & A 909080

Lou Brown:

Good day everyone and welcome back to another installment of our Street Smart Group Q and A where you have the questions and hopefully I have the answers. With 30 years experience I can guarantee you I have a good shot at it. To update you on the current market as I usually do on these Group Q and A calls let me just say hooray, hooray, the government has taken over fanny may and Freddy Mack. These were already ___(27) governmental agencies and over the years the government who had originated these corporations passed them on to private enterprise and remained in some limited amount of control over those two institutions. The government created these two institutions in order to have a free flow of money from the financial markets to back up people giving mortgages. So, it was the thing that created a tremendous housing boon in this country where it was difficult to get mortgages but when they created a back up buying unit to take those mortgages off the originators hands it created a tremendous growth in housing in this country. Now the government has taken them back and the government says wait a minute these private enterprise folks did the wrong thing. Which we all know they did. They bought mortgages they should not have bought. They allowed lenders to do all kinds of strange and exotic lending that they should not have done.

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Group Q & A 329080

Lou:

Hi everyone.  Welcome back to another installment of our group Q and A.  Where you have the questions and I’ve got the answers.  We’re going to have a great time today.  We’ve got a lot of great questions.  I want to start with _____.14.  He’s got a question that I was going to cover in preview and I’m going to go ahead and read his question and give you the answers based on current market conditions.  We got a lot of questions.  This particular time about market conditions, so let’s do spend some time on this.

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Group Q & A 410180

Lou Brown:

Hello everybody and welcome back to another installment of the Street Smart group Q and A.  Where you have sent me some really interesting questions over the last couple weeks and I’m including those in today’s recording.  I’d like to take this opportunity to always update you on my thoughts on today’s economy and how we fit into it.  It’s been very interesting over the last few days that the government gets it as far as I’m concerned.  They understand that today’s economy is so critical based on people’s psychologies.  If you think about it psychology is really such a big part of the fear factor.  What was the psychology of the big growth in real estate that oh I’ll go ahead and invest in real estate now and I’ll get some of this huge appreciation that’s going on.  If you recognize how I teach you, we do not buy on appreciation; we do not sell on appreciation.  Our whole game is based on a long term strategy and either making money today on a quick turn flip or long term on a hold.  So we don’t look so much at future appreciation and big swings in the market.  We just say slow and steady at the helm.  Because the helm is really where the risk is and it’s also where the rewards are long term.

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