Rich Dad Real Estate Seminar

Having recently attended both a free 3-hour seminar on real estate investing and a 3-day, $495 seminar on real estate investing, I thought that it might be helpful to start a blog on this experience.

A quick disclosure – I am a real estate agent and investor. I am a fan of the Rich Dad book series. I have read most of the books and I am a believer in the concept of building a portfolio of income producing investments.

As a newly wed, I thought that the 3-day seminar would be a great way to share my world with my new wife, to help us communicate and discuss our financial plans, ideas, and goals. I think that this goal has been met. While I have always had my wife’s support, I feel like we are much better partners now that we have jointly created a plan to achieve our goals.

Back to the seminars…
Both of these events provided some interesting concepts, but were light on details. When details are discussed, most of the hard stuff was dismissed or minimized. As an example, the whole process of building a database of buyers for Lease Option clients was consistently made to sound trivial. The same can be said for building a database of investors for wholesale properties. As a real estate agent, my experience is that building a database requires year of hard work – not something to be minimized.

The financial examples consistently overstated profit outcomes (have you had a tenant move into a rental with an option to buy pay a 10% option fee – i.e. pay a $20,000 option fee to purchase a $200,000 home?).

The sales tactics were high pressure. Every effort was made to be dismissive of any real questions. When people asked about success rates of past students, the presentor was dismissive in stating that the question asker was looking for permission to fail. Networking was discouraged, as was any kind of critical group discussions.

For better or worse, my wife and I ‘invested’ $35k in 8 seminars, software, and a 3-day one-on-one visit from a real estate expert mentor.

I believe in education and, while the price was shockingly high, I expect to be able to make more money in future deals using ideas/techniques that I learn in this process. I also expect that this series of seminars will help me move to the next level of real estate investor. If these expectations are met, the $35k price tag will be a great investment.

Stay posted…