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The Wholesale Manifesto Rateb “Rock” Shukoor 5200 Dallas Hwy, Suite 200-291, Powder Springs, GA. 30127 678-318-1888 Phone www.RockTheInvestor.com

The Wholesalemanifesto Rateb “Rock” Shukoor www.RockTheInvestor.com

Introduction Why now is the perfect time to invest Why I wrote this manifesto My story Why are you doing this? Why investors fail What business are you really in? The 4 major activities in real estate Start with the buyers Market research to find the buyers Don’t compete – partner instead! Get deals without spending a fortune How to get $1 million of real estate using only $100 Market your properties to 20,000 buyers for free Add offline marketing for even quicker results Selling quickly in any market The importance of systems Close quickly and get paid Not all buyers have to be in your backyard (or even in the US!) What you need to get started Time management Income generating activities Delegate, outsource and automate Growing your business by doing less Bonus: deal or no deal? Bonus: reducing your lead cost by 50% or more Bonus: your 30 day plan Bonus: success stories About the Author, Rateb (Rock) Shukoor

3 The Wholesalemanifesto Rateb “Rock” Shukoor www.RockTheInvestor.com

Introduction My name is Rateb Shukoor, my friends call me Rock, and you can too. I want to thank you for downloading this manifesto and joining me on this great journey of discovery and success. Success is the result of taking positive action in a series of steps, and downloading and reading this document is a key first step! The fact that you are reading this puts you ahead of 99% of the rest of the world, who is still busy whining about their situation and/or watching TV reruns. Regardless of whether you have been an investor for a while, or if you are just now considering getting started in real estate investing, I am confident that you will find many nuggets of actionable steps you can implement to quickly add thousands, even tens of thousands, to your business. The document you are holding in your hands contains strategies that are not normally covered in boot camps that cost thousands of dollars! I have spent 10 years and over $50,000 testing and refining the ideas that I am sharing in this document. I also use this approach daily in our investing. It is the foundation of what I share with our coaching clients, who pay us thousands of dollars to help them accelerate their success.

Why Now Is the Perfect Time To Invest The media is creating so much fear that most investors have thrown in the towel, but here’s a big secret for you: historically, more money is made in down markets than in up markets. For the last several years, real estate investing was closer to day-trading than true investing. Most investors were, in reality, speculators; they would buy a property, and a week later (on many occasions, hours later), these investors could flip the properties and make tens of thousands of dollars without even knowing anything! My, how times have changed. Many financial institutions have closed their doors (remember the venerable Bear Stearns Bank?). Capital is also drying up! The media is having a field day reporting increasingly bad news. The market has weeded out all the speculators who have bid up the prices and now is the perfect time to step in. As a billionaire once said, “I buy when there’s blood in the streets.”


The key is to have the right knowledge and knowing how to apply it because just buying properties and betting that it will quickly appreciate, isn’t working anymore. Sound investing principles is what’s required in today’s market. By taking action now when everybody’s panicking (investors and banks), you will make money than you ever dreamed possible!

Why I Wrote This Manifesto I can easily charge hundreds of dollars for this information but that would defeat why I wrote this manifesto. You see, I have noticed that a lot of the real estate educational materials are simply regurgitated crap that is hopelessly outdated, and I have had enough! I have seen so many good people get in trouble because they are using outdated strategies that simply don’t work in today’s market (if they ever worked at all)! Other strategies, such as major rehabbing, require so much time, and require the investor to borrow so much money, that most investors shouldn’t attempt them. So don’t dismiss the information in this document because it’s free. “Knowledge is power” is about the worst advice ever given. If that were true, all the librarians would be the richest people in the world! Applied knowledge is power and taking action creates success. All I ask after reading this manifesto is that you take action! If you don’t commit to taking action, you may as well watch TV or do something else. In fact, throughout this document, I will ask you to check off various commitments. Without the commitment to succeed, you won’t succeed. It’s that simple. So here’s what I want you to do. Read the statement below and then check off the box to commit to taking action.

COMMITMENT TO TAKE ACTION

__ I commit to taking action on a consistent basis and implement the information in this manifesto. If I don’t have results after reading this

manifesto, I understand that it’s because I didn’t take action. Beginning today, I take total responsibility for my outcomes.


My Story Like many of you, I got hooked on real estate investing after attending a live seminar. At the very first event, I plunked down thousands (actually, tens of thousands) of dollars so I could get started as quickly as possible (I still invest tens of thousands each and every year because I believe in continual education). In the first few years, I did over 150 deals and I was told over and over: “You make money when you buy.” Unfortunately, I took that advice literally and I didn’t focus enough on selling. To make a long story short, I ended up with way too many empty houses and the holding costs kept mounting up. At one point, I had over $25,000 of holding costs and I borrowed from everybody I could think of to stay afloat. A lot of our difficulties originated from us not realizing quickly enough that the strategies I was taught simply didn’t work when the market shifted. To be successful in real estate investing, you have to be adaptable or you will fail. I only knew one strategy (how to succeed in rapidly appreciating markets) and that strategy failed miserably when the market changed. Our lowest point was when a girl scout stopped at our door selling boxes of cookies and I couldn’t even afford the $5 to pay for the boxes! So much for being real estate millionaires! After that, I knew I had hit rock bottom and I had to change our investing approach. I analyzed our situation and realized that I hadn’t focused enough on selling and I took on too many house payments. I spent the better part of 2 years offloading the crap deals I was stuck in, and I started researching the approach that will be discussed later in this manifesto. This document you are holding in your hand is the culmination of the system I have created that allows you to quickly have $1 million of real estate and use only $100 and never have to make a single house payment. Better yet, it also allows you to put that same real estate in front of tens of thousands of potential buyers for [almost] free! I believe that too many investing approaches focus on buying and not enough on selling. You make money when you buy but you can’t cash the check until you sell. Remember, I have already lived through “high equity and no cash flow” lifestyle – to be blunt, it sucks, and believe us, you don’t want to personally experience it! Not to be overly harsh, but once you understand some basic concepts, a child can buy a house from a motivated seller (unless the market is super hot,


which is not going to happen again anytime soon). The hard part is converting that equity into cash, which is what I will be focusing on.

Why Are You Doing This? Before I continue, I’d like you to do a quick exercise that I ask all of our coaching clients to do. Take a deep breath, take a step back, and ask yourself this question: Why are you interested in real estate investing? The natural answer is, of course, to make more money. However, having made and lost more than one fortune, I can tell you that money is a means to an end. By itself, money is pretty useless. It is what having money enables you to do, that is important. So, again, take a moment and write down 3 reasons why you are interested in real estate investing. Believe us, there will be times when life throws a curve ball at you, and having these reasons can help you overcome those speed bumps. Here’s a short formula that changed how I looked at our lives:

Money + Time = Lifestyle Money without the time to enjoy it (by yourself or with your loved ones) is pretty meaningless (for example, I know a multi-millionaire who is so busy that he has to buy a home aerobics machine because he doesn’t have time to go to the gym to stay healthy. He is overweight and his doctor has told him that he may not live long if he does not exercise regularly). So take a minute and list 3 reasons right now!

3 reasons why you are interested in real estate investing

1.

2.

3.

Feel free to print this out and carry it with you (at the very least, make sure it’s easily visible to you).

Why Investors Fail Having worked with hundreds of investors and speaking with thousands of them, I have seen many reasons why investors fail. In fact, these are the same reasons that businesses in general fail, period. Make no mistake, you’re running a business, not as a hobby: if you treat this as a hobby, then stop reading now because dabbling in real estate can be


hazardous to your financial health. You have to commit to treating real estate investing as a business or you will fail! You can invest part-time (later, you will learn that real estate investing, when done right, is not a full-time business), but you must treat it as a business. So before continuing, please take a moment and make that commitment right now.

COMMITMENT TO TREAT REAL ESTATE INVESTING AS A BUSINESS __ I commit to treating real estate investing as a business. As such, I commit to continuing to invest in my education (such as finishing this document) and

use systems to accelerate my success.

Having covered that, let us share with you some key reasons why investors fail and why you need to avoid these common mistakes: Take on something that has too steep a learning curve Trying to do everything yourself Buying properties without having a clear exit strategy Not enough buyer and seller leads Excessive holding costs Runaway rehab costs Lack of systems Taking on deals that take too long to get paid All of these, leads to a lack of cash flow; the #1 reason why all businesses ultimately fail, regardless of whether the business is a one person operation or a multi-operational corporation such as Delta Airlines or General Motors. Think about it, these major corporations are laying tens of thousands of people off because of one reason: lack of cash flow! So the #1 problem, as real estate investors, to solve, is generating consistent cash flow.

The 4 Major Activities in Real Estate (Also Known as the 4 F's In Real Estate) While real estate investing may seem like a complex business, it can be boiled down to 4 major activities:


Finding the deal - implementing marketing to get the deals. The marketing activities usually include signs, flyers, newspaper ads, Google AdWords, Craigslist, etc. Funding the deal – using your own cash or credit (not recommended), hard money lenders (OK, in a tough situation, but the money is expensive) private lenders (great solution!), or business credit (another great solution!) to fund and buy the deal. Fixing the deal – hiring a crew to rehab the properties (even if you are a professional contractor, I recommend that you hire a crew to do this because doing your own rehabbing simply doesn’t pay enough). Flipping the deal – this is the single most important activity, and where most investors are the weakest (presumably because there’s the least amount of training on this area). If you don’t master selling, you have no business acquiring any properties or continuing in the real estate business, period! Throughout this document, I will share strategies I am using to sell quickly in any market. The single biggest drain on your cash is the holding cost of your properties (a single house payment is at least $800 in most parts of the US and in many parts, as high as $4,000 or more per month).

As you can see, each of these individual activities is daunting, and to be good at all four, is nearly impossible! To understand why, let us share with you a story. Michael Jordan is arguably the best basketball player that has ever lived. For personal reasons, he then decided to play baseball and he bombed. As soon as he returned to basketball, he immediately came out on top again. What’s the lesson? That it’s very hard to be excellent at more than one activity. To put yourself in a situation that requires you to be good at multiple things at the same time, is hazardous to your financial health. It’s better to figure out a way to redefine the situation, so that you don’t have to be excellent at more than one thing at a time. Throughout school, the emphasis was to focus on your weaknesses and improve them. In real life, focusing on your weaknesses is a recipe for disaster! It’s far better to improve your strengths to be world class, and then delegate or outsource the rest. So what does this mean? It means that to succeed in real estate (or any business), you want to be able to simplify the business to the point that you are required to be good in as few activities as possible and then delegate and or outsource the rest. In business, you don’t get any extra rewards for working harder: you get paid for results. Here’s a short story shared by one of my mentors that illustrates this point. When you deposit your $10,000 check at the bank, the bank teller doesn’t give you an extra 10% because you slaved away for months, or if you only spent 10 minutes to earn that money! Fortunately, the approach I will be sharing, requires for you to be good at one, or at the most, two of the


activities listed above and doesn’t require you to slave away for months before seeing results.

Why Wholesaling Is Critical To Your Real Estate Success Before I continue, let’s quickly define what wholesaling is. Wholesaling is buying deeply discounted properties at massive discounts and selling them quickly to investors to create lump sums of cash. Wholesaling is a strategy for quickly generating cash and is the opposite of land-lording (also referred to as buy and hold), which is a longer term strategy. It is beyond the scope of this document to explain land-lording in detail, but suffice it is to say, many, many investors get in trouble because they become landlords mistakenly thinking the cash flow from their tenants is enough to keep the investors afloat. Wholesaling quickly creates cash and as Warren Buffett says: “Cash is king.” Wholesaling enables you to solve the #1 reason why businesses fail, which, as you may recall from an earlier section, is lack of cash flow. Having steady cash flow eases a lot of stress, and greatly increases your chance for success. Wholesaling is a great way to do real estate business because it doesn’t require you to purchase the property. Instead, you “put a property under contract” using $10 and you then attempt to sell it for a higher price than you put it under contract for. The difference is your profit. When done properly, wholesaling can generate thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars, for very little work! Throughout this document are deals that I have done and our clients have done so you can see what is possible with wholesaling. Wholesaling doesn’t require credit or cash. It also requires very little time to master (since you’re not doing that much, to be quite honest). Wholesaling has been around for decades, and in this document, are some additional strategies I employ to improve the classic approach to wholesaling. Each bullet will be elaborated in further details: I don’t do our own marketing to get deals because doing your own marketing can take time and significant capital (especially when you’re first starting out) I focus on getting the buyers first I also market our properties to buyers on a local and global level


I add systems so I can delegate the work and I then automate wherever possible for even more efficiency By adding these key improvements, I can consistently buy and sell 5-6 houses a month, while running 2 other businesses, and travel throughout the country to teach our approach! At this point, you are probably thinking that real estate investing is a great business to be in. However, that would be a little misleading because you’re really NOT in the real estate business actually.

What Business Are You Really In? Here’s another insight that revolutionized our business. When speaking with other business owners, they shared they made a similar jump in their success when they made this realization. Contrary to what you may think, you’re not in the real estate business. You’re in the business of marketing your real estate business. This is a very subtle distinction but if you think about it, all the leverage in real estate boils down to the marketing. To get a deal, you need to attract motivated sellers. How does that happen? Through marketing! When you need to sell quickly, you need to do marketing! When you need lenders, you need to do marketing! Even if you have the perfect deal at the perfect price, if nobody knows about it, you will still fail. Likewise, if you have the funds necessary to purchase all the deals, but you can’t attract sellers, you will likewise fail. Thus, it makes sense to get as good as possible at marketing, since it’s the highest leveraged activity possible. In fact, you and I both know the only thing very successful investors don’t hand off, is the marketing of their business. Once I began understanding that marketing is the deciding factor where I would succeed or not, I focused my energies to be world-class, and our real estate business (and the other businesses that I own) began taking off! You will see similar results as soon you adopt this approach. So that’s the first big shift I want you to make in your mindset: you’re in the marketing business. Usually, it takes years to get good at marketing and for many of you, that’s not practical. Fortunately, you can get almost instant


results by copying the marketing techniques of someone else, such as ours (more on this later).

How Do You Ride A Dead Horse? If you have done any investing at all, you quickly realize that real estate investing is a low volume and high transaction business (as opposed to the restaurant business, which is a high volume and low transaction business). Getting a lead on a single good deal can cost you hundreds of dollars (or more) in marketing dollars (this cost can be significantly reduced if you know multiple investing approaches; this will be discussed in future reports). As an active investor, I am a strong believer in investing in marketing to constantly generate a steady stream of leads. In fact, not having enough leads is a common problem among the majority of investors, and you may have experienced this yourself. Without sufficient leads, you will be reluctant to discard the lead because you have nothing else in your hand. Here’s a story from our corporate days that you may find amusing. One of the biggest challenges that corporations have is the inability to let go of something they have done for years, even though it clearly no longer works in today’s market. To illustrate this point, I would ask our client this question (anyone who’s been in management consulting, has seen this exercise):

“How do you ride a dead horse?” I would then ask the management teams to list all the ways to ride a dead horse. Believe it or not, here are some answers I have received: You put a saddle on the horse You prop the horse up You pull the horse You push the horse I hope you realize, it’s a trick question! You don’t ride a dead horse! You find a live horse that you can ride! Likewise, you don’t work with dead leads. You do marketing to generate good leads that you can convert to cash.

Getting Deals Without Spending A Fortune


When you are first starting out, it can be a little nerve wracking to spend money on marketing. Here’s an alternative approach that has worked very well for us. I borrowed this after observing people who make their income primarily online. These online marketers, come up with some very innovative marketing strategies—remember, it’s all about the marketing. Instead of generating your own leads, why not leverage the marketing that has already been done by other investors? In today’s market, there is an abundance of properties, and what investors need is a steady stream of buyers. By focusing on building a list of buyers, you can then approach investors who need help marketing their properties and offer to match the buyers to the properties. You get paid the difference between what the seller is asking for and what the buyer is willing to pay (your profit is also known as “the spread”). At this point, many of you are already screaming: “That’s acting as a realtor without a license!” But with our paperwork, you can be a principal (as opposed to an agent) in the deal for only $10 (yes, ten dollars)! And here’s the best part, you don’t have to make a single house payment, and you have the ability to make thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars, with a single deal! This approach works on houses from $100,000 all the way to $1 million or higher (it stands to reason that you make more on higher priced properties). To see what’s possible, see the case studies sprinkled throughout this manifesto. Once you understand this approach, it’s like having your cake and eating it too, but letting someone else pick up the tab!

How To Get $1 Million Of Real Estate Using Only $100 Once you get the hang of this approach, you can then build a portfolio with $1 million of real estate using only $100. How? Let’s do the quick math. In the Southeast, a modestly priced house is $100,000. Thus, I can use $10 to put a property under contract and with $100, I can put 10 properties (10 x $100K = $1 million) under contract. In the more expensive parts of the country, that number can easily be $2 million or more!


Let that sink in for a second…you can have over $1 million of real estate using only $100, and you never have to make a single house payment. Talk about leverage! I repeat, you don’t have to ever worry about making a single house payment using this approach; you don’t even need private lenders! Here’s a question that every investor asks before he/she buys a property. “Can I afford to have this house to be empty?” If the answer is no, then the investor will pass on that property, regardless of how much potential profit there is in the deal. Consequently, most investors rarely have more than 2-3 properties at a time because of the holding costs. To put it in another way, the bottleneck in every real estate business is how much the investor can afford in holding costs. This puts a ceiling on how much an investor can make, and can also keep him/her up at night when a property is empty (I’ve had as many as 25 empty properties so I can relate). Using this approach, where there are no holding costs, you can quickly build a portfolio of properties (5, 10 or more), and not lose any sleep at night wondering if the properties are empty. This approach works best on properties that don’t need significant repairs. It can be used on single family homes, multi-family homes, apartment buildings, and land. At its core, the idea of controlling properties without owning them has been around for thousands of years. The reason you probably have not heard about it until now, is because it is not commonly known to most investors! This approach is so simple, that most investors try to complicate it, and then usually end up failing because they add too many unnecessary steps! Once you have your portfolio of properties, what’s next? Marketing it to prospective buyers, of course!

Market Your Properties to 20,000 Buyers For Free

How would you like to be able to market your properties to 20,000 buyers for free? This is now possible because of the increasingly popularity of the Internet, or more specifically, community sites on the Internet. A community site is a Web site that has a well-defined common interest, in our case, real estate investing. Here’s a short list of community sites that accept advertisements for real estate properties:


oodle.com kijiji.com craigslist.org vflyer.com Facebook groups Yahoo groups MySpace groups The best thing about these sites is that, like most things on the Internet, they are free to advertise on! Yes, free! I have gotten a steady stream of buyer prospects from these sites, and here’s the best part, I outsource all the manual work to our assistant, so the work happens even without our involvement! When an inquiry is made (via phone or the Internet), that information is captured by our salesperson or through our Website. On many of our properties, I get many leads, if not most of them, from these community sites than I do from our offline advertising. The other benefit of using online advertising is that you can add photos and videos. Videos allow you to make a quick emotional bond with the viewer, and are especially important if the potential buyer is not in the same city. By using videos, I have had inquiries from as far away as Iraq, Great Britain and other remote countries! Also, you can track which sites are generating the most inquiries, so you can focus your efforts on those sites (more on tracking your results later). Additionally, you can even track how many times your ads have been viewed, something that is impossible to do with newspaper advertising or signs. Another great advantage with online advertising is that you can quickly change the ad if something changes. Try that with a newspaper ad or a Yellow Page ad! For those of you that dismiss this as a fad, let us share with you an interesting fact. There have been studies that have tracked the (rapid) decline of classified ad revenues of local newspapers when Craigslist entered that local market. Craigslist consistently ranks as one of the top 25 busiest Web sites in the world, attracting close to 100 million visitors a month! To put that in perspective, that is more viewership than several of the major TV networks combined! After you get up and running with the sites listed above, you may consider using more advanced strategies, including eBay, podcasting, video distribution, article writing, Squidoo lens, Hubpages, teleseminars, webinars and authority sites to broaden your reach even further (I do all of these).


Add Offline Marketing for Even Quicker Results One of our mentors is fond of saying: “Don’t try to find the cheapest source of leads. Cost average the leads across multiple channels and don’t depend on any one thing.” Even though the leads from the Internet are near free, I also encourage our clients to incorporate offline advertising to get maximum exposure. The biggest downside to offline marketing is the cost of materials and the cost of labor (I don’t recommend you do these activities yourself). Offline marketing includes the following activities: Signs Flyers Newspaper ads (in some markets, advertising in the print edition allows you to advertise in the online edition without additional charges) Business cards Networking (These are the best and cheapest leads and very targeted)

Here are some quick tips: 1. Pay $1.50 to have a sign planted and $1 to have it removed. Put them up on Friday and take them down on Sunday to avoid dealing with the sign police. For selling, use professionally printed signs. For buying, use handwritten signs 2. For flyers, print on both sides (one with your buying message and one with your selling message). Use a bright, bright, bright color (did I forget to mention bright?! This is not the time to be subtle. Expect to pay around 5 to 7 cents for each flyer to be distributed 3. For newspaper ads, bold your headline even though it costs a little extra (I have seen significantly better results by placing the headline in bold). 4. For business cards, print multiple versions, one for with your buying message and one with your selling message Your objective is to get your properties in front of as many potential buyers as possible. By combining offline and online advertising, you are everywhere and buyers will see your message. Remember, you’re in the business of marketing; real estate is your product. One final thing: outsource this work! You’re not going to get rich hammering signs at the street corner. Start thinking like an executive!


Close Quickly and Get Paid This is the final step to getting paid and unfortunately, this is also where most investors completely botch the job and watch all of the profits evaporate (as the old saying goes, “’Almost’ only counts in horseshoes and atomic bombs”). Here are some things you can do to ensure you get paid and get paid quickly:

Pre-qualify your buyers early in the process: don’t take their word that they can buy—have your mortgage broker actually pull their credit. Use your own mortgage broker: this way, you can know what’s really happening. There’s nothing more frustrating than being told that a buyer is able to afford a house when that is not the case. Use your own closing attorney! Again, if there are any complications, you will be notified immediately. Use your own paperwork! This way, you know exactly what terms are in the paperwork. I have seen many investors leave a lot money on the table because they didn’t want to invest in the legal fees and time-required to review the other party’s paperwork. As soon as you put the property under contract, order a title search to ensure you have a clean title (i.e., free and clear of all liens and judgments). If your buyer is using an agent, insist that he/she use your agent and get another agent to represent you.

It’s your money on the line so make sure you do everything necessary to ensure that the deal closes smoothly. Afterwards, celebrate and program yourself to enjoy the feeling of victory! That will make it easier to repeat this process and you will remember the elation from closing a deal!

Not All Buyers Have To Be In Your Backyard, or Even In the US! Here’s an interesting movement happening and it’s increasing in momentum. Most investors advertise only locally using signs and newspaper ads. However, according to the National Association of Realtors, 85% of home buyers start their search first on the Internet. It then stands to reason that you should be posting your properties online. By using many of the online tools listed earlier (Craigslist, eBay, etc.), I have managed to get inquiries from buyers from other countries (as far away as Iraq, England and Australia). As clichéd as it sounds, the Internet has made the world a lot smaller, and if you don’t incorporate the Internet as part of your marketing efforts, you will be left behind as your competitors go online.


Here’s also another interesting piece of information: online buyers tend to be more affluent, which means they can more easily afford to buy your properties. So fire up that computer and start posting your properties online using the sites mentioned earlier, and watch the calls come in! Better yet, delegate all the work to your assistant. The Importance of Systems Quick question: What can you learn from McDonald’s and Pizza Hut when building your business? These are multi-billion dollar companies, and they have mastered the use of systems. Think about what’s going on. Their stores are so systematized that they can generate millions of dollars per store location and teenagers operate the day-to-day operations predominantly! The definition of a system is a series of steps that you follow to create a predictable and repeatable outcome. It can be manual or it can be automated. Automated systems are better because they are more scalable (that is, they can grow when your business grows) and there’s less room for errors. In our business, I have a system for purchasing properties, one for selling properties, and one for raising capital. These systems enable us to run our real estate business without being involved in most of the day to day operations. I can also run the business from anywhere in the world, as long as I have an Internet connection (I have ran our business from Panama, London, Holland, and other exotic locations)!


Starting today, start documenting your systems. If you can’t document each of your systems, it’s probably because you don’t have a system and you’re doing everything ad hoc! Here are some tools you can use (these tools have 30 day evaluation versions):

Smart Draw Mindjet Mind Manager Visio X-mind; http://www.xmind.net/downloads/


What You Need To Get Started and Run Your Business One of the best things about real estate investing, as a business, is the minimal amount of equipment required. Unlike, say, a restaurant, which requires zoning, expensive equipment, perishable inventory and a large staff, a real estate business, requires very minimal overhead and equipment! At minimum, you would want the following:

A cell phone A computer with Internet access A digital camera A fax machine or scanner (yes, you can use the ones at Kinko’s but I recommend you invest in one for $49 to $99) Access to the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) or better, a commercial comps service to determine the value of the properties

If you want to make your business much easier to run, you would also want the following: A part-time assistant (pay the assistant $8 to $12 per hour and expect to have the assistant for 5-20 hours per week) A virtual assistant would be even better and they cost a whole lot less (read the book The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss) An answering service to answer your calls 24/7 [the firm we are using charges $49 per hour for 60 minutes and then approximately 50 cents per minute: this is a small price to pay to have 24/7 support for your business] (Optional but highly recommended) A Web site to capture your entire buyer leads (you can invest in a site that captures seller leads later). Expect to pay $1,000 or more for a professional level investing site. The site could cost less by the time you are reading this manifesto!

You then need a marketing budget of approximately $200 or more to generate the leads from sellers. Or, you can use our approach and partner with local partners to get their properties to market, and get the properties for free. For much less than $1,000, you can be in business and start down the path of making serious money with real estate investing!

You Are Working For A Madman! If you are like most investors, you got into real estate investing because you got fed up with working for somebody else. You had dreams of being your own boss, and having all the time off that you wanted. Probably hasn’t worked out that way, has it?


You’re probably asking yourself, “What happened to all my dreams of financial freedom?” Real estate investing is a great way to achieve your dreams, but it must be done properly. This is an old joke but it does illustrate this point well. A government official drops by a small business and demands to see the owner.

Government official demands: “I’ve heard that there are people here working 7 days a week with no pay and no vacation.”

Owner responds: “Yes and you’re looking at him.”

While comical, it does illustrate a grim truth. When you work for somebody else, you can quit if you hate your boss. When you work for yourself, you can’t quit, and because most of you probably haven’t had experience being a boss, you’re probably your own worst enemy! In short, you’re working for a madman! Most investors fail because they are working in the business instead of on the business! Simply stated, you are running the business as a technician instead of as a business owner. To illustrate this point, look at the following organization chart, commonly found in any major organization.


Now, compare that to your organization chart. Is it any wonder you are exhausted and frustrated?


How do you overcome this?! You have to be able to identify activities that directly generate income vs. ones that are necessary, but don’t directly generate income. NOTE: For more information on this key concept, I recommend you read this book, The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. If you haven’t read it, it will be one of the most eye opening books you will ever read!

Income Generating Activities A common reason that many investors struggle, especially when they are starting out, is that they don’t realize that real estate investing is a 100% commission sales job. This statement may come as a shock to many of you readers, but you are selling! You are either doing it well or poorly (your opinion here doesn’t count; your bank account is the final arbiter of your skill level)! If you have mixed feelings about selling, you have to get additional training to resolve those mixed feelings, or you need to get out of real estate investing. I know that sounds harsh, but if you consider selling sleazy or manipulative, you will not succeed, period! Many investors fail, not because of their technical abilities (i.e., marketing, structuring offers, etc.)—they fail because they think that selling is simply presenting a house to a prospect and the sale should naturally happen. That may happen in some fantasy-land, but I have worked with thousands of investors and I have been mentored by some of the most successful people in the world. Here’s a timeless truth: all the successful people consider themselves excellent at selling! Here’s another distinction that you need to be aware of: there’s a difference between selling and marketing. Marketing is the set of activities designed to generate qualified leads. Selling is the set of activities designed to convert those leads to cash. Selling is a lot easier when you are working with highly qualified leads. With those basic concepts out of the way, let’s return to our main point: income-generating activities. Real estate investing has a lot of smaller steps, including (this list is not exhaustive; it’s intended to give you an idea of what’s involved): Raising capital Marketing for buyers

Planting signs to generate buyer leads


Posting newspapers ads for buyer leads Networking with other investors to get referrals Contacting banks or realtors (for REO properties) Negotiating with banks (for REO and short sales) Running comps

Marketing for sellers

Planting signs to generate seller leads Posting newspapers ads for seller leads Networking with other investors to get referrals Contacting realtors for buyers

Selling the property

Answering the phone Getting buyers information Pulling the credit of the buyers Staging the house (optional but highly recommended)

By now, you know it’s not practical for you to do all of these activities. So, the natural question is: What should you be focusing on? Anything that requires manual labor I avoid, such as planting signs, any form of rehabbing and staging. Likewise, I delegate time consuming activities (bank negotiations, pulling their credit, and running comps) as well. Even if an activity is income generating, you need to ask yourself: Should I be doing this activity or is this something that can be done more efficiently by someone else? Here’s a short saying that was shared by one of our mentors: The secret to getting rich is to write a smaller check so you can cash a bigger one. The majority of our time is spent on raising capital and working with prospective buyers who have been heavily pre-screened (that is, our mortgage broker has pulled their credit and verified their income). To put that in perspective, I do 5-6 deals a month and I spend way less than 25 hours a week combined! The rest of the activities are handled by our assistants, our vendors and also automated by our software (including our sites for buying and selling). Both of us have other business interests and I also travel heavily, so I had to design a business that can be operated part-time, and from anywhere in the world, if need be.


How to Give Yourself an Instant Pay Raise

Here are some quick exercises you can implement to give yourself a pay raise. First, list all the things you are doing (this exercise may require you to observe yourself over several days):

Activity Income Generating

?

Delegate / Automate?

1. Planting signs Y Delegate 2. Painting the house N Delegate 3. Doing household chores N Delegate 4. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> 5. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> 6. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> 7. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> 8. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> 9. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> 10. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> 11. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> 12. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> 13. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> 14. << fill in >> << fill in >> << fill in >> As mentioned earlier, even if an activity is an income generating activity, you should see if it’s possible to delegate it. Quickly determine how much you want to make annually and then divide by 2,000 hours. That will determine your target hourly wage. For example, if you want to make $100,000 a year, then your time is worth at least $50 per hour. Then discipline yourself to do only those activities that will pay that much per hour or more. For many of you, this will require major behavioral changes, and I know it will not be easy. For example, almost 12 years ago, I determined that I could make way more growing my business than by saving a few dollars doing household chores. Since then, I haven’t done our own laundry, any household chores, or anything related to our cars (car washing, oil changes, etc.). On a weekly basis, by adopting this same philosophy, you can get back 8 to 10 hours a week that you can use to focus on starting and growing your real estate business.


This will address the common complaint: “I don’t have time to learn [or do] real estate investing.” By focusing on activities that generate income, your income cannot help but rise! In effect, you are giving yourself a pay raise! Becoming successful requires you to properly allocate your time to activities that pay you the most amount of money. While it’s commendable to be frugal, you can’t become wealthy saving $5 here and there.

Becoming Successful Is Not Linear Many of us are guilty of “linear thinking”, which originates from school and working in corporations. “If I finish 9th grade, I will then go to 10th grade”, or, “If I pay my dues, then I will be given a chance.” Linear thinking is very limiting and does not reflect real life at all. To put it another way: money loves speed! If you study successful people, such as Bill Gates or Donald Trump, they don’t practice linear thinking. They set out on a major project (in many cases, multiple projects) and then reaped major rewards for their contributions. This is related to the previous point about focusing on income generating activities and forgetting the rest: your income will grow and in many cases, it will not grow linearly. For example, Trump skirted bankruptcy and in less than 3 years, he bounced back and is now worth more than ever! In other words, what took him over 50 years the first time to acquire, required less than 3 years during his comeback. While growing up, I was told: “Avoid get-rich quick scams.” This advice is well intended and was rooted with what happened during the Great Depression. Unfortunately, this advice can blind you to many, many wonderful opportunities! While it is politically correct to share the story of the tortoise vs. the hare, in real life, the hare already ran off with the money by the time the turtle finished the race. Using us as an example: I was making about $30 and $75 per hour in Corporate America, respectively. When I did our first deal, I made over $25,000 with less than 12 hours of work, and that translates to $2,000+ per hour! As you can see, I completely


skipped, leapfrogged from $30 to $2,000 per hour in one step without making any stops along the way! Like many other investors who closed their first deal, I briefly felt guilty getting paid so much for so little work. Measured as an hourly rate, this can be in thousands of dollars per hour, which, as you can imagine, was a little disorienting (I am glad to report that I have adjusted just fine)! I am not advocating you chase some pie in the sky dream, but be very careful whose advice you take. Listening to the wrong advice can limit your success, in many cases, for the rest of your life!

A Quick Recap What I’ve tried to do in this manifesto is share with you a low-risk, simple and very effective investing approach that can quickly make you thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars! You only have to focus on one major activity, which is locating buyers (vs. doing multiple things, as is the case with every other investing approach). Here are other things that I covered: The #1 reason that investors fail (and how to avoid this through wholesaling) What business you are really in How to get $1 million of real estate using only $100 Where to advertise to get your properties in front of 20,000 buyers for (almost) free What steps you must take to close quickly and get paid The importance of systems What you need to get started What income generating activities are and why you should focus on them Why you need to delegate How to give yourself an instant pay raise Why success is not linear

When you understand and apply these strategies, you will be able to make money with less effort and less time.

An Invitation to Make More with Less Time And Effort These strategies, while valuable, are only appetizers compared to what I discuss with our hands-on coaching clients. Having worked with thousands of students in multiple disciplines, I have found that hands-on coaching and mentoring is the fastest way to help investors to succeed.


In addition, I will provide you with automated tools, the same tools I use, to create enormous leverage to further accelerate your success and cut down your ramp up time. You will also get marketing templates, legal agreements and scripts (I have invested tens of thousands of dollars to create these templates, agreements scripts and I use them daily)! If you need it, I will even negotiate some of your deals for you, and you keep 100% of the profits. If you are serious about getting results faster than ever, I invite you to fill out a brief questionnaire so I can schedule you for a 1-on-1 session. In this no obligation session, I will determine if there’s a fit before I proceed. This program is very hands-on and requires an investment (the exact investment varies by the program and what rebates/discounts you qualify for). The groups are kept intentionally small so I can provide lots of personal attention. Be warned that this program is not for everyone…if you want to join a group to “feel good”, then please look elsewhere. Our program is hands-on and intensive. I meet 3 times a month and there’s accountability because I want you to succeed. To schedule your 1-on-1 session, please call our office at (678) 318-1888 during business hours, Eastern Time. Due to overwhelming demand, I often have to schedule the 1-on-1 a week out or more.

Updates

I have gotten a lot of flak for giving away this information for free because others want to charge for it. Please invite your fellow investors to visit this site:

http://www.RockTheInvestor.com

To register to get their personal copy and to encourage them to distribute this manifesto as well. Too many investors wrongly believe that real estate investing has to be difficult, and I need your help to explain that, when done, right, that is simply not the case. Getting this manifesto in the hands of your fellow investors is a key first step. In the near future, I will be releasing similar reports that discuss other important aspects of real estate investing, and I hope that you will register to receive those reports as well. Bonus: Deal or No Deal? Bonus: Get Started Quickly! Bonus: Success Stories! Bonus: Case studies


Start With the Buyers Here’s a quick quiz: Why do investors acquire a property? No, it’s not a trick question. Hopefully, you are acquiring a property; you are doing it with the intent of selling it at a profit to buyers (either immediately or down the road). Given that until the property sells, you are not making any profit, and doesn’t it make sense to adopt a buyer-centric model? That is, identify and build a list of buyers so that when you do have a property, it’s easier, faster and more profitable to sell the house?! What’s amazing is how many different ways most investors are taught to buy property, and usually only one way to sell a property. Because of this, most investors are struggling right now (and for the foreseeable future) because they are simply not trained to sell in a good market much less a tight market. As mentioned earlier, it all boils down to proper marketing. Here’s something you should keep in mind: it’s easier to find a house for a buyer than a buyer for a house. So how do I implement this buyer-centric model? There’s a principle in marketing, which states that it is easier to get a person who’s bought to buy again, than to convince a non-buyer to make an initial purchase. Using that principle, the key is to then identify investors who are still buying in your target market and present good deals to them rather than advertise for new investors. Here are some list-brokers that I recommend you use for direct mail campaigns to create your list of buyers who recently bought properties: ListSource.com

InfoUSA.com Caldwell-List.com FindLists.com Dunhill.com

The nice thing about this approach is that with a modest investment, you can quickly build a list of investors who you can market your deals to (getting the deal is the next step I will share)! I look forward to helping you succeed! Rateb "Rock" Shukoor


About Rateb (Rock) Shukoor Success comes to those who dream BIG! No risk, no goodies! Rateb (Rock) Shukoor escaped from Afghanistan to leave a bitter past behind. He and his family were oppressed by the Russians, who at that time were ruling the country. During those times, his father was imprisoned by the Russians due to his work at the American Embassy. His dad’s work, made him a US ally that gave way for the whole family to migrate in the US. He came to the US in 1989, and started a life of freedom…freedom from the Russians, freedom to live, and the freedom to dream, and to dream BIG! Rock is a hard worker, who worked his way to college by working 3 jobs: McDonald’s, a Flea Market and a printing shop! In 1995, Rock married his wife Sahima and eventually they were blessed with 2 boys, Slaymon and Paymon. The birth of his boys made him work harder and made him look for opportunities to provide a better life for his family. Armed with his dreams for his family, he decided to enter Real Estate Investing. The rest you can call history! Today, you can say that Rateb Shukoor is living the American Dream. Real estate blessed him so much, that he is now enjoying the quality of life he has always dreamed of having! Rock has been investing for the past 11 years. And has bought and sold hundreds upon hundreds of single family homes in the State of Georgia. His success has drawn people to him, to seek his advice on how to become a successful Real Estate Investor. He frequently speaks at investment conferences, and has been interviewed and consulted by other real estate investors and promoters. He has helped thousands of investors nationwide over the years through his Hassle Free Real Estate Program. If you have the funds to invest, but not the time or expertise, you can spend time and money to learn the necessary knowledge required or just contact Rock Shukoor and take advantage of his Hassle Free Real Estate Partnership program. He is currently offering partnership opportunities. When you partner with him, he will secure your investment 10 different ways, protects you personally 4 ways and offers double digit returns on your investment. For more real estate investing information, visit www.RockTheInvestor.com or call (678) 318-1888, and learn more about how to get a high rate of return on your investment, totally hassle free, and without any headaches!

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