The rather interesting headline in todays Worthing Property Weekly was…”A Return To A More Steady Market”

Damn, damn, damn!  We all wanted another year of doom and gloom about house prices - never have there been so many empty houses with motivated sellers and prices being slashed.

The article goes on to say “The property market is correcting itself rather than heading for a spectacular crash, according to the National Association of Estate Agents.  It based it’s claims on information contained in the latest report by the Royal Institute of Chartered askdatabase.com/images/askbanner2.gif?AFID=182957">surveyors…….The house price falls are modest and the picture is still patchy with some areas of the country finding it tougher than others….credit crunch affected confidence….underlying factors that support property market remain:  low unemployment, historically low interest rates and a pent up demand for houses.”

As I say, Damn, Damn, Damn!  I was rather hoping for those 15-30% drops my friends (non-property investing) boyfriend is confidently predicting and I told you about last week.  On her usual entertaining note, Judith has written about her personal rather up and down property investing story here.

“My history with property investing is somewhat checkered to say the least. In 1979 my Dad lent me £500 towards buying my first home which cost £9,000 and on which Ken Livingstone, then Leader of the GLC, gave me a 100% mortgage. I sold the flat in 1983 for £21,000 and bought a house costing £43,000. I sold that in a sealed bid in 1987 for about £85,000 and bought a house for £125,000 and then rented it out in 1990 as an HMO (house of multiple occupancy) even before we knew what such a thing was, and bought a flat to live in costing another £125,000. So at that point I owned two properties worth a quarter of a million, following nothing better than instinct, naivete and native cunning.

And then interest rates went to 18% and I struggled manfully with the cashflow of my business in difficult market conditions and to pay both mortgages for about three years until I finally caved in and in 1992 both my homes were re-possessed and I found myself in debt to the tune of about £300,000 and facing bankruptcy. Snakes and Ladders. Back to Zero. Er, make that £300k below zero.

So, if I suffered so badly in the last “crash”, how are things different now?  Why am I buying, buying, buying and more to the point, how am I doing it?”

(Nicola’s note:  Our next Money Gym Presents day is on Property, and not only will the best thing since vienetta Ice Cream be presenting there - Greg Ballard - but Judith and myself will be sharing the “Top Five All Time Ways To Make Money From Property” - find out more here.) 

Judith says:  One of those ways is something we only came across this year, but has blown us - and many of our Money Gym clients - away.  Dave & Rick’s cashflow investor plan means you don’t acquire more assets - or “slumbering giants” as I call them - and don’t get me wrong… you do need some slumbering giants.

But what if you have no equity to leverage, no inheritance to invest, no savings deposits and no good credit rating? How are YOU going to make large lumps of cash in the property lane of the Wealth Highway?

No, this is not your normal BMV (below market value) stuff either.

It’s a unique way of matching up people who want to get out of property fast - you can often buy their house for £1 within an hour (!), and others who want to get into home ownership without a large deposit or the ability to meet current mortgage lending criteria and for those of us who love to help people to have a thoroughly lovely time giving them all what they want and getting rich at the same time. And none of us will have to deal with banks or mortgage lenders.

Bliss. Have I died and gone to heaven???

I LOVE THIS IDEA - its Rent To Own, a.k.a. Lease Options. It’s relatively new to the UK, but Rick has been doing it for twenty years, he’s even made telly programmes about it over in Australia and David is his mentee, a business systems analyst who has adapted it to fit in the UK and been doing it over here for a number of years.

If you have any ambitions to get into property for yourself, then here’s your chance. If you want to cash in on the low prices around at the moment for investors in 2008, then here’s the way to do it.

If you just love helping people and have no difficulty in being very, very well paid for that, then this is just the ticket.

From the outset in January I have been able to visualise myself doing this and I want to take as many cash-poor property investors with me as I can as we study along with Rick & Dave. The package includes a year-long mentoring programme with fortnightly teleclasses - and I suggest you keep aside the evening of 30th May and the day of 31st May for additional training. You may have to pay £20 for this because I have only told you about this tonight because we have been very carefully evaluating this before we recommend it. Oops, sorry about that.

If you like the sound of that, you can go to an introductory evening in Maidenhead, Berkshire, on Thursday 29th May - may I please explain that Dave has also been mentored by some of the internet greats like Stephen Pierce and Armand Morin, hence its one of the long, red, cheesy USA-style sales letters (with added audio and video). Yikes!

PLEASE DO NOT LET THIS PUT YOU OFF! This is vital, as I could so easily have allowed this to put me off. Thank God, I didn’t.  Underlying this sales letter is the best thing I have seen in property since passive investments, and it serves a completely different market - those of us who want to make lots of upfront and then ongoing monthly cash in property without necessarily starting with any cash or property of our own.

With another final reminder about discarding any aspect of the sales letter which turns you off, please have a look >>