My Future Business Partner

I had run across this local investor a few times.
I don’t even know how we met first, but I knew that he was a player in the investor arena in my area.
I scored a meeting with him at one of our local Starbucks after winning a new flipcam that I had just won from REITips.com via a contest put on by a Monster Investor Bob Norton and a Super-Smart Web Guru JP Moses.

At that appointment he taught me a tip on how to find cash buyers via the MLS.  It was a method that I had never heard of before. 
Well, after that meeting I STEPPED ACROSS the line in the sand and used that method to find a buyer that bought a house from him.

I sold his house using a method to find a buyer that he taught me.
And he actually brought me in as a partner and paid me the amount that we agreed upon.

This was powerful.
I now knew that he was a guy of integrity and that I could trust him — it’s unfortunate that I had to have a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ attitude at this point.  But given my previous experience with real estate investors, I found this to be necessary.

What he learned about me was that, although lacking knowledge, I was willing to take action.
I acted on what he said.

He also taught me what I was looking for in a deal, how to run comps to a science, etc.

I still didn’t feel super confident until a deal came up that I felt was a deal.  I went and checked it out.  It felt like a deal.  It smelled like a deal.  When I told my investor friend about it he said, “yeah man, I just put my offer in on it yesterday.”

He ended up buying this property.  And from this point on, I was confident with the definition of  ‘a deal’

I’ve since learned something very important.
You can have 100 people sit in a room, have an experienced investor tell them exactly how to do something, and only 4-5 people will actually go out there and make it happen.  It’s not the teacher’s fault.  These people may have even paid a ton of money for this information.

It’s just the reality of human nature.
Be the person that steps across — even if you get sand in your face the first 2 (or 200) times.
Soon after, this investor and I got more and more serious, our relationship grew, and we decided to become business partners.
And thus, Port City Properties LLC was born.