Mike Butler
Mike is a focused, aggressive real estate investor, who takes pride in avoiding banks to buy investment property. Mike realized early on he MUST have a strong foundation to grow quickly and safely. Mike has reviewed many property management software programs only to discover they fell short of what he needed. Mike has spent thousands of hours tweaking and researching Quicken and QuickBooks Pro. His method is getting the results that he needs. In May 2002, Mike was invited to be a featured speaker at a regional conference of CPAs and the rest is history. His simple laid-back street level teaching style is easy to understand and benefits all levels of investors, from the beginner to seasoned veteran. Successful investing utilizing tenant tracking and effective property management and bookkeeping techniques enabled Mike to retire in March 2000 after 13 years as a Louisville Police Detective. He was featured in Money magazine, June 2001, in the article "Can Real Estate Make You Rich?". Mike Butler is a Kentucky licensed real estate broker, a realtor, member of KREE, and a charter member of NARPM.
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Tenants Are Not Your Customers
Recently, I had the pleasure to participate in a national conference for landlords. During my presentation, I asked the question: “How many landlords think your tenants are your customers?” The majority of the room raised their hands. Then I dropped the mental bomb and made the statement “Your tenants are not customers!” After making this statement, I intentionally paused for a few seconds to simply observe the reactions in the room.It was amazing. The expressions on the faces in this room full of landlords ranged from mostly confusion to one fella who absolutely refused to have an open mind even…
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Should I Get Real Estate License?
New investors almost always ask “Should I get my real estate license?” or “Should I become a real estate agent?” It’s almost immediately followed up with a comment similar to…”I was talking to or I saw on TV and said… I don’t need to be a real estate agent to be a real estate investor”. Most of the time, they’ll add, “…in fact, it makes things more difficult for you as a real estate investor.” (Look at the head this noise is coming out of we’ll address this subject in a bit.) Does this sound familiar? It makes me cringe…
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Removing the Bad Apple Faster and Legally
Just like computers crashing, tenants dealing dope is simply a matter of when it will happen and not if it happens. There are no boundaries. Although the media tries to portray it occurring primarily in low income neighborhoods, dope is everywhere and dope dealers are part of our society at all levels. Your rental properties are not immune. I don’t care if the rent is $100 month or $5,000 month, dope dealers live in all areas.This dope dealing animal is something that can sneak up on you. You can have the best tenant screening program in the world; however, tenants…
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Protecting Your Assets
Protecting your assets should be a critical part of your investment program. Years ago, we had several reasons not to worry too much about it. Here were some of my excuses:1.) The old “can’t get blood out of a turnip.” If you don’t have any assets, there’s not much for them to get. When getting started, I usually didn’t have much cash and not much equity. Not much there means not much for them to get. It felt safe.2.) Insurance was labeled as the first line of defense in the asset protection arena. Buying good insurance and a lot of…
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Market Conditions
Understanding market conditions and having that “6th sense” of what is going on, allows the successful investor to stay out in front and operate where there is no competition. Just like the book “Who Moved The Cheese?”, screening tenants for your rentals is critical now more than ever. We have seen many small market indicators creep up on us over the last few years. Although each condition by itself is not too bad, when combined all at the same time, results in a major impact on our rental market including single family homes.These factors include the nightly news regular update…
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Let Your Fingers Do the Walking: 15 Questions to ID a Motivated Seller Fast
Wouldn’t it be great if you could “cherry pick” properties for sale in your town? You really can if you have a system to capture information allowing you to quickly handicap the property AND retrieve it again in the near future for good effective follow up.Capturing great deals seems to be the most common desire of investors. But where are they? How do you find those great deals?What sets the super successful investor apart from the slow mediocre investor? Are they luckier? Odds are they use a very powerful tool. This tool called KNOWLEDGE allows them identify deals others can’t…
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Identify & Expand Your Comfort Zone
This subject is very important and is the foundation you build and grow your real estate investing. Many gurus will tell you “how to do this and how to do that”; however, seldom do they consider what is acceptable to you. Let’s start with a “Comfort Zone” test question. Here is your test question and investment scenario.It is 10 a.m. on Monday morning. You are contacted with a real estate opportunity. A good solid 3 bedroom brick ranch in a good neighborhood needing paint and carpet. After paint and carpet, the house will be worth $85,000. Paint and carpet will…
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Forms, Laws, and Hats Made Simple
Forms, Laws, and Hats we wear will be made simple and we’ll tackle and address the painful, hidden confusion and frustration of trying to “do the right thing” as an investor.When I got started as a real estate investor, I had a job as plain clothes detective in my town. I’d like to think I was promoted from uniform patrolman because I did a good job. Some of the baggage associated with being a good cop involves your knowledge of the laws, your people skills and a good work ethic, along with an acceptable and not too offensive level of…
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Answers to All Those Questions You Forgot to Ask About Land Trusts
It’s amazing to still see many investors who aren’t using land trusts at all, along with investors using them improperly. On top of this, there’s a boatload of investors who are victims getting abused with every property purchased. Somewhere out there, somebody knew somebody who had a friend who did this or that and the investor becomes a victim. Although hard to believe, some investors go to their local veteran attorney and amazingly have been told they’ve never heard of a land trust.What Is A Land Trust?A Land Trust is a simple fill-in-the-blank document to “hide” or keep the real…
