Real Estate Investors Association of Greater Cincinnati

The popular television show is much more than smart contestants. It could be a reality in YOUR future when you learn how to mold a million-dollar marketing mindset.

When you want to become successful in the real estate investing business, implementing a solid marketing plan for your business is going to be one of your first priorities. This will be the main strategy that will separate you from your competition. In addition, you need to develop long- and short-term strategies and goals for your business as you go.

Decide what your focus is going to be regarding the type of properties you would like to purchase in your real estate investing business and create a plan of action that will begin to bring in motivated sellers in droves and create deals for you. If you don't know what exit strategies to use, make getting educated one of your top priorities. One of the best ways to do that is to work with a mentor who can help you achieve the goals you have set for yourself.

Getting a good education in the buying and selling of real estate and having someone to hold you accountable will quickly separate you from most of your competition.

Don't be afraid to do what those around you will not. Dare to be different and consistent in your marketing efforts and the results will be amazing. Niche your marketing and become an expert in your marketplace. Become educated within your marketplace so you know what your property values are and what your personal target market is going to be. ... Read More…

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The first house I ever bought creatively, I barely negotiated at all. It was 2016, I was pregnant with my second baby, and I’d been looking at houses for about six months without buying a single one. Then I found one that made sense. I gave the seller pretty much what he was asking for, and in return he financed the whole thing for me at zero percent interest for a year, nothing down. No bank. No big pile of cash. I just figured out what the seller actually wanted and gave it to him. That was my first real taste of creative deal-making, and it changed how I saw this whole business.

Most people think there’s only one way to buy real estate. You save up, you go to the bank, you put twenty percent down, and you cross your fingers that you qualify. That’s fine for your first house or two. Then you hit a wall. The bank caps how many loans you can have, your down payment money dries up, and you sit there watching good deals go by because you can’t fund them. Creative finance is how I got past it, and it’s what I’ll walk through in the morning session.

Let’s talk about what I mean with creative finance. Master leasing is when you control a property and rent it out without ever owning it - you lease it from the owner with the right to sublet, and you keep the difference. Subject-to is when you buy a house and take over the payments on the loan that’s already there, instead of getting a new one. A lease purchase is a rent-to-own setu ... Read More…

I was today years old when it dawned on me that there’s no such thing as a “normal” real estate market.

I was brought up on the same generalizations that you were…

• Real estate appreciates at some average rate every year.
• Net rents rise slightly faster than inflation.
• Values always go up over time because everyone needs a roof over their head.

I bet that taken over 50 or 100 years, those statements are 100% true.

But saying that real estate appreciates 3% or 4% a year “on average” is like saying “it’s always about 55 degrees in Cincinnati” because that’s roughly our average annual temperature.

In other words, technically true, but experientially ridiculous.

Sitting here on this 84-degree September day, I can’t remember the last time it was exactly 55 out. We don’t experience weather in averages, any more than we experience the 100-year average real estate market.

We experience cycles, and we experience how 4 or 5 key things come together in those cycles to create the market, and if we pay attention, we experience how it looks to adapt to that market and put together the kinds of deals that make sense FOR that market.

Case in point: when I started investing in 1989, we were coming out of a period of very high inflation and interest rates that made today’s “high” rates look cheap.

Rents had struggled to keep up for over a decade, because tenant incomes couldn’t keep ... Read More…

Does it seem to anybody else like the easy availability of financing has gotten sticky, especially at the person-to-person lending level, but even with some more conventional lenders?

I don’t necessarily mean that there’s less money out there—though maybe there is, because I know more investors right now with truly failed deals than I’ve seen in over a decade. I mean that the same money is staying tied up in deals longer, creating a domino effect.

Here’s what I’m seeing:

A private lender makes what’s supposed to be a six-month loan.

The borrower’s exit is to sell the property or refinance into a DSCR loan.

But then the property doesn’t get any offers. Or the appraisal comes in low. Or the DSCR lender moves at the speed of cold molasses or suddenly wants to reduce the NOI by 20% because the lease is month-to-month instead of for a year.

So the sale or refinance doesn’t close on time.

So the private lender doesn’t get his money back in 6 months.

Which means that lender no longer has the money available for the next loan they already committed to make.

Which means that the next borrower can’t close, either.

One of these delayed sales, missed appraisals, or unpaid lenders can tie up the same dollars through several deals.

More money stuck in properties means less money on the street means more private lenders getting more conservative, and it’s not hard to understand why.

They’re les ... Read More…

Instead, he died owning two houses with a combined value of less than $200,000, with almost no cash in the bank, and living mostly off Social Security.

Dad was a sort of real estate pioneer. He was smart, a millionaire back when a million dollars was real money, one of the founders of Cincinnati REIA, and the teacher of what was probably the most popular real estate investing class in Southern Ohio.

Through DECADES (he bought his first apartment building in 1964 and his last rental house around 2004) of work and sacrifice, he built a portfolio of about 100 apartments and 150 single-family houses.

And then he got Alzheimer’s.

Long before the official diagnosis, we could all see that something was wrong with his executive functioning.

A roof would leak, and he would spend weeks waffling about whether it needed to be repaired or replaced. Properties sat vacant longer and longer and deteriorated further and further. The manager of one of his apartment buildings essentially stopped managing it, leaving a heavily mortgaged building with a broken boiler and only two tenants in 13 units—one of whom wasn’t paying.

Dad knew, at least off and on, what needed to be done.

But increasingly, he couldn’t make himself do it.

And because his entire identity was wrapped up in being the brilliant real estate expert and self-made millionaire, he became fiercely protective of his right to keep running the business. Even after he understood that he had Alzheimer&rs ... Read More…

Ok, so this is me making the craziest-sounding post I've ever made here, but here goes.

I've talked to a lot of people now who've both been in real estate for decades AND who've done a lot of different kinds of deals, and so far, they all agree that we eventually develop what I call "Real Estate Spidey Senses".

What it feels like from the inside:

You’re looking at a deal where everything seems perfectly fine. The numbers work. The seller/borrower/partner is agreeable and aligned. Maybe the title and inspections even look clean. Nothing has actually happened that should make you nervous.

But something...

...Maybe it's in the seller’s story. Or a single conversation you've had with the proposed partner, out of many. Or the way the deal is coming together.

Something you can't put your finger on makes you think:

"This deal is going to blow up."

You can’t tell exactly HOW it’s going to blow up. You can’t point to a specific problem. You just have a feeling that something you don’t know about yet is going to present itself—and when it does, the whole thing is going sideways.

(There's a reverse to this, too: the rare scenario where the seller has said "No" in a seemingly no-going-back way, or maybe even signed a contract with someone else, and your spidey-tingle says, "I'm going to buy this one...")

Since in real life, I have very little in the way of "intuition", I have to think that tis is long-term, accumulated pattern recognition.

After y ... Read More…

If you don’t do subject to, this probably isn’t going to interest you a lot, but if you do, here's a weaponized autism evaluation of the new FHA modification rules for ya:

I just talked to about the fifth FHA-insured loan holder in three months who re-defaulted after a loan modification in which both the interest rate AND the payment went UP.

I KNEW something was up, because after years of hearing, “We’ll just take all those back payments and shove them into a zero-interest, zero-payment partial claim second that you don’t have to worry about until you sell the house or pay off the first mortgage,” this seemed like a pretty clear change in HUD policy.

So I finally got curious and looked it up this morning.

And sure enough, the policy really did change on October 1, 2025.

Before then, FHA servicers were still using the COVID-era loss-mitigation rules. One of the most common solutions was to put the missed payments into a “silent second” owed to HUD—the thing called a “partial claim mortgage.”

Those were great for homeowners and, assuming we understood that the time bomb was there, for us as sub to buyers.

Because those partial claim mortgages have no interest, no monthly payment, and they let the homeowner keep the original first mortgage—with its original interest rate and payment.

That was obviously a HUGE benefit to someone with one of those 2.5%, 3%, or 4% loans.

But…and maybe right ... Read More…

The time to do big cosmetic renovations on your rentals is when property values and rents are climbing, and incomes are keeping up with rents.

In those scenarios, it’s easy to BRRRR your way out of $20k in new kitchens and bathrooms, and it’s easy to justify the cost of the improvements, because it’s easy to raise the rents to get an ROI on them.

Right now, might not be that time.

OF COURSE I’m not talking about roofs, furnaces, plumbing, electrical, or anything else that affects safety, function, or the long-term health of the property. Fix the leaking roof. Replace the furnace that can’t be repaired. Maintain the property properly.

And I’m also not saying “Buy the property at a price that doesn’t take into account that it will NEED that new kitchen to actually reach the After-Repaired Value.

Too many people are already fooling themselves by saying, “The ARV is $300k, but I only need to put $30K into it to rent it, so $210 is a bargain” when, in fact, it would need $80,000 in work to be worth $300,000.

I’m talking about tearing out a perfectly functional kitchen or bathroom so you can install granite countertops, trendy cabinets, and luxury finishes—and then charging another $100 or $200 a month to justify it.

I’m not convinced that’s what the market needs right now, especially in B and C areas.

Rents have already outstripped a lot of people’s ability to pay them. And neither ... Read More…

Ya’ll. 

PLEASE stop asking general-purpose AI for financial and real estate advice.

Or…go ahead and ask it. But don’t automatically do what it says.

I’m not saying AI isn’t useful. I use it every day. 

And there are people building specialized GPTs and AI agents that are trained on particular kinds of deals, documents, financing strategies, and rules. Some of those may be genuinely useful—especially when they’ve been built and tested by people who actually understand the subject.

But asking Claude or ChatGPT:

“What should I pay for this property?”

“How should I finance it?”

“Is this a good creative-financing structure?”

“How do I make enough money to retire?”

…and then making a major financial decision based on the answer?

That’s…not…wise.

Oh, you’ll get an answer. 

And the answer will SOUND very sensible and fact-based.

But here’s the thing about generic AI: It doesn’t actually know how to set an ARV for your specific deal.

I doesn’t know whether the rent estimate you gave it is realistic.

It certainly doesn’t know that a 125-year-old house in that particular neighborhood probably needs a much bigger maintenance reserve than the generic percentage it pulled from somewhere.

It doesn’t know whether your “creative” deal violates a state law, creates a tax problem, or depends on a ... Read More…