Page 2 The Property Tycoons Newsletter   What Can Paris Hilton Teach Us About Making Money In Property? (Continued from front page...)   That’s called a presence in your market. Ask anybody in that store if they’ve heard of Paris Hilton and I’ll bet you 70% or more have. If I went around your town asking estate agents and home sellers about you and your business, what percentage of them would say they have heard of you? 2.  She has a bunch of stuff to sell to her target market. Here’s a partial list of just some of the things Paris Hilton offers her target market: a raunchy video, paid for appearances at parties, music tracks, “The Simple Life” DVDs, various books, her own fashion label, her own perfume brand, a chain of nightclubs and even her own line of hair extensions - in other words, something for everyone. Thinking along those lines, it amazes me how many property investors generate leads or enquiries using expensive advertising and then, promptly waste 95% of them because for whatever reason, they cannot buy the property at significantly below market value. This is a mistake I continued to make for several years—completely oblivious to the immense profit potential of  the enquiries I used to waste. Would an example help? Ok, I’ll give you a good one. When I started spending the big bucks to advertise on a national level, we soon noticed how many of our enquiries came from people with very little and often, no equity at all in their properties. We could not purchase these properties at below market prices because the sellers needed to pay the lenders off with the proceeds from the sale. The sellers, however, were desperate to do something about their mounting debts and rapidly accumulating arrears. So here’s what we did… We struck up a relationship with a debt consolidation company who specialises in reorganising the debts of homeowners, negotiating with lenders, IVA’s and bankruptcies. This company allowed the homeowners to solve their problems (win for them) and we were paid a fee for every lead passed to us (win for us too). In fact, of the seven leads that we passed on to this company, SIX converted into business for which we were paid commissions of up to £2,200 per lead. This money went straight back into advertising for more properties. We’ve also put together deals with estate agents where we have passed on properties being offloaded by motivated sellers that we do not want usually because we cannot make the deal stack up with regards to rental income. The estate agents have then paid us a percentage of their commission if the property sells. On the last deal we did like this, we were paid 20% of the estate agent's commission. He kept the rest of the commission for himself. I also negotiate below market value prices on all the deals that are out of my area and pass them on to local investors – these are deals I used to waste before! It works like this - I find distressed sellers through my national advertising efforts. Once the seller has agreed a cheap price, I exchange contracts and then, assign my right to purchase to another investor who is local to the deal. I make a finder's fee and he or she makes a lot of profit for very little work. That’s called a win/win proposition. Check out my latest list of ‘ready made deals’ here: http://shmyl.com/zsjoson So, as you can see, you really shouldn’t be wasting any of your advertising generated enquiries. 3. Have concrete goals in place to guide you as you build your property business. Whether she knows it or not, Paris Hilton has a bunch of goals that drive her actions. One of them may be to raise her self-esteem by appearing in the public eye every so often – that may help her feel like a valid and worthwhile human being. I’m sure she has money-related goals too. Last year, her businesses earned her £3.5M so she must be doing something right. Do you have goals for your property business? If your goal is to “make lots of money and get rich,” then I guarantee you will never make lots of money or get rich. You need to be specific! Go forward by looking backward… My goals are all time and family- related. Few are focused on money. I want to have time to enjoy life and be with my family. Sure, this takes money but not much. In fact, it’s a lot less than I thought I would need when I started in business. With that in mind, I grew my businesses to the point where I could work from home and spend my time however I wanted to spend it. I then stopped worrying about taking over the world. Once you have your goals in mind, you need to work backwards to determine the things you need to be doing each year, each month, each week, each day and each hour to reach those goals. For me, the very best way of figuring out what I needed to do to reach my goals was simply asking people who had already reached them! Go to www.tycoons-forum.com and then, click on the “General Property Related Chat” section. Go in there and start a new thread on your goals and where you want to go in life – other Tycoons will chip in with their thoughts and soon you’ll have a roadmap you can use to reach the level of success in property that you deserve!     1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8