Jason Hartman is interviewed about the Platinum Properties Investor Network and why real estate is the best device for building wealth. He also talks about each step of his complete investing methodology as well as the importance of his “area agnostic” philosophy for maximizing your returns.
Announcer: Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman, President of Platinum Properties Investor Network in Costa Mesa, California. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before and a new slant on investing, fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible.
Jason is a genuine self-made multimillionaire, who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now, here’s your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.
Larry Moreno: Welcome to another edition of Sponsor’s Spotlight. I’m Larry Moreno and Jason Hartman from Platinum Properties is with us. We’re going to find out about Platinum Properties Investor Network and his radio show, which is heard Saturdays at 4:00 p.m. right here on News Talk 870, KRLA. Jason, good to talk with you.
Jason Hartman: Likewise, Larry, it’s great to be here.
Larry Moreno: Well, it’s good to have you on the program. You know when you hear about wealth building these days and you hear the word “real estate,” sometimes people wonder, well, is it too late? Are there still opportunities out there? Do I need to get out? But from what I understand, there are opportunities, but maybe not necessarily right in our own backyard. Tell us a little bit about what you do on your program and what you focus on.
Jason Hartman: Absolutely. We do a weekly radio show here on KRLA and just love it. It’s called Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman, and basically, Larry, what we do is we help people first through education, and then through the rest of our business process in diversifying their real estate portfolio so that they’re not investing in speculative, crazy things. These are the people that will lose money when the real estate bubble bursts. We’re helping them diversify and take a very prudent approach to real estate investing and we’re doing that all over. We’re not doing it in our own backyard anymore. For 20 years, I’ve been in the real estate business here in Southern California and before last year, I never bought a property outside of Orange County, and now, I own properties in nine states and I feel very good having such a diversified portfolio.
Larry Moreno: What is it about real estate that makes it such a good thing?
Jason Hartman: You know, Larry, real estate just has such wonderful characteristics and I think that’s why it’s been the most proven road to wealth for millions of people around the globe. Nothing else has the type of characteristics that real estate does. The stock market doesn’t offer them. Owning your own business doesn’t offer them. Bonds certainly don’t offer them. I just don’t know too many people that get rich with these other methods, yet I know zillions of people that become very wealth through proper, prudent real estate investing. It has leverage, which means you can use your banker’s money to grow your wealth. They take most of the risk in that equation rather than you taking that risk. Tax advantages, it is the most tax-favored investment in America and the tenant pays your mortgage off for you, just a whole host of things that no other investment class offers.
Larry Moreno: Well, you know as we hear your program this week, it’s great to hear about your success. But what I like is that you’re working to help other people to get a taste of that success, too, through your Complete Solution for Real Estate Investors program. Tell us about what you do with that.
Jason Hartman: Absolutely. I just love it. I was in Phoenix, Arizona, last night, Redondo Beach the night before, doing seminars and educating people and I probably had – it may sound a little funny to your listeners, Larry – one of the biggest compliments ever the other night. You always have that one or two skeptics in the audience that think this is another hokey real estate seminar with some guru that’s recommending imprudent, sort of fly-by-night strategies. But this guy, he was very skeptical. I could see him there in the audience and he came up to me afterwards and he said, “I just want to shake your hand and tell you this is the best real estate seminar I’ve ever been to.” And then he paused and he said, “Including my own and I teach real estate investing at UCLA.”
And I thought that was just really great to hear. And what we do in the Complete Solution is we approach real estate investing the way a financial planner at one of the big financial services firms, Merrill Lynch, Paine-Webber, whatever, would approach investing. We just do it with a much better asset class, real estate, rather than stocks and bonds.
Larry Moreno: I do want to remind our listeners that we’re talking about a program that you can hear on the radio each Saturday at 4:00 p.m. Great time for listening as you’re tooling around on your Saturdays, just punch it up there, News Talk 870 KLRA, and you’ll hear Jason Hartman from Platinum Properties Investor Network on there. Now, let’s take a look at some of these. We can’t give them all the information in our short time on the air, but we can kind of whet their appetite. So take us through just kind of the headings of these categories.
Jason Hartman: Absolutely, Larry. It’s just a simple but complete solution. It’s a five-step process. The first step, Investor Education and Consultation; we do the education through our seminars, consultation one-on-one, analyzing each investor’s personal financial situation, their risk tolerance, their time horizon, their goals, when do they want to retire, are they looking for cash flow, capital appreciation. Everybody is different, so we look at their individual situation and advise them based on that.
Then we do a financial analysis based on what they told us in that consultation. How to properly use leverage to grow their wealth. Then we help them acquire the properties and allocate their assets in a diversified manner so that they spread and reduce their risk. The fourth step is Maintenance, Management, and Monitoring. And this is where most real estate investors really fall apart in the management side of it. Real estate investing is not hard, but you need to be a decent manager of your property managers and we help them do that.
And then the final step, Larry, which is overall Wealth Accumulation and Asset Preservation, that’s the goal of real estate investing. It just works and it works really well when you do it properly.
Larry Moreno: Now, who are your customers? Who is picking up on this, hearing you on the air and calling and participating, and getting started out there, Jason?
Jason Hartman: Great question. Anybody can really do this. You only need about $12,000.00 to buy each property, depending on your credit score and your situation and ability to qualify for loans. You can get into these properties for about $12,000.00 each. And the average California homeowner last year, Larry, got a gift and that gift was in tremendous appreciation, over $200,000.00 for each homeowner in California on average. And with $200,000.00, again depending on your ability to qualify for loans and everybody’s got a different scenario there, you can buy 12 properties. I mean it’s just phenomenal what you can do and you can diversify, spread your risk, and sort of build a little real estate empire all over the country.
Larry Moreno: And the people are doing this. Now, you also have some very strong opinions about the real estate industry itself, and I understand that there’s things that you don’t like about the real estate industry.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, in every industry, it’s got its problems and pitfalls and being in real estate for 20 years, I tell you, I think I’ve seen everything. I’ve been to the seminars. I’ve seen the fly-by-night sort of scam artists and the unscrupulous people out there, and believe me, like in any industry, they’re out there. And you’ve got to be careful of them.
The other thing is that real estate is a very fragmented industry. With that comes opportunity, but also problems and pitfalls. And we try to help our investors handle that fragmentation and what I mean by fragmentation is you’ve got a whole bunch of different people doing everything a different way in different areas, and they’ve all got their sort of own way of working and we help them kind of consolidate them and manage that. So we try to put an end to the fragmentation.
And the last thing, Larry that I really don’t like about the industry is that every practitioner out there pretty much seems to be attached to one area. It would be like walking into a big financial planning firm and they would say, well, just buy this stock in ABC Corporation, and that’s really what I have to offer you are only these stocks in this area, for example.
And what we are is we are area agnostic. What that means is that we don’t care what area. We just go into the areas that make sense. And markets are a dynamic thing. They’re constantly changing and we monitor this for our investors, so we go in and out of markets as they make sense and drop them when they don’t make sense, and we rush into them and bring our investors into them when they do make sense. So being area agnostic means that the real estate counselor is impartial. They just go where the investment makes sense.
Larry Moreno: Now, what about us back here in Southern California? I know that it’s gotten tough. Nobody’s predicting as much of a write-up as we’ve had in the past, but for those of us who do own homes in Southern California, it’s not like we can all quick cash out and go somewhere else right now, at least if we’re going to stay here. What is your thought about your own principle home that you live in here in Southern California. Is it still a good thing?
Jason Hartman: Well, I’ve lived in Southern California almost all of my life and I own a home here and I do have still one rental property here. And I think, when you look at your own home, everybody’s gotta live somewhere. We live in a beautiful place. Just have your home and enjoy it here and stop worrying about every little investment angle of your home. You need a place to live, okay? So that’s one part of the equation.
But the other part of it, Larry, is what to do with the equity in your home. The equity in your home, if you’re a homeowner here, is asleep. It’s not working for you. Put that equity to work. Take a refinance on a prudent, fixed-rate loan and spread that equity around into several diverse markets and reduce your risk that way.
Larry Moreno: So if it’s just sitting there as numbers on a piece of paper, in fact, there was an article that said that the L.A. area saw 15 percent valuation go up in the last year here. If it’s just numbers on a piece of paper, I don’t have that in my hand unless I refinance, pull it out, and then put it into other things, right?
Jason Hartman: Larry, that’s exactly what we’re recommending to our clients. Get that equity out now while you still can and get control of it so that you can use it. You can put it to work for you.
Larry Moreno: It becomes a leverage. It becomes a way for you to buy other real estate by not paying that much down and then having whatever growth those markets have or income properties those markets have come back to you. Whereas if it just sits there, it is an untapped resource that can fluctuate and you’re not using it.
Jason Hartman: You are absolutely right and I’ll tell you something. So many Americans, for the past several years, have been using their home like an ATM machine and whenever they want money, the problem is they’re doing it in the consumer [Inaudible].
Larry Moreno: Yeah, they shouldn’t be spending the money on one-time things. If they’re going to pull it out, use it to invest in something. And these are the kinds of things you talk about with the listeners on the radio. Final minute here. Let’s just remind them where the show is and what they’re going to hear on the show.
Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Every Saturday, 4:00 p.m., we interview lots of people, we take your phone calls, and we discuss virtually every aspect of creating wealth through real estate investing.
Larry Moreno: And I understand some of the shows are archived on your site. Where can people go to hear those?
Jason Hartman: Go to www.realtyinvestornetwork.com; that’s www.realtyinvestornetwork.com. Click on the Radio Show button and all of the shows are archived there. You can listen to them, download them to your iPod, and use the podcasting feature, or burn a CD, whatever you like, and listen to them at your convenience.
Larry Moreno: Jason Hartman from Platinum Properties Investor Network, again, thank you so much for being on the program on this edition of Sponsor’s Spotlight.
Jason Hartman: Thanks, Larry.
Attention agents, brokers, and mortgage people. Do you know that we cooperate? Do you know that our network is an open system that you can refer clients and outsource your investor clients to us and receive passive income? It’s a really great opportunity. All you have to do is register your clients at www.jasonhartman.com and tell them to attend one of our live events, our live educational seminars. Listen to our podcast, go to the website, and request our free CD at www.jasonhartman.com.
And if they invest with us per the terms listed on the website, you will get a referral fee. We have lots of agents, brokers, and mortgage people that receive surprise referral fees that they weren’t even expecting. They get a check in the mail and they are just happily, happily surprised. It’s a nice extra supplement to your income. So be sure to take advantage of our broker cooperation. Agents are welcome. We cooperate with outside people and we’d love to help you with your investor clients.
Hey, I just wanted to announce a couple of quick things for you. If you are able to come to one of our live events, we would love to see you and meet you in person. We’ve had people fly in from all over the U.S. for them. So hopefully you can join us for some of those events.
I wanted to mention to you that we have a new offering, a free CD, a free audio CD, that you will really, really like. We’ve had so many people that have given us really good comments about them, and you can go to our website at www.jasonhartman.com and just fill out a little quick web form and you can either download it or you can have the physical CD mailed to you in the postal mail. But get the free CD, especially if you are a new listener. You need this. And if you are a regular listener and you’ve listened to all the other old shows, you don’t need the CD so much, but it will be a nice review for you either way. But if you’re a new listener, you definitely want to go to www.jasonhartman.com and request the free CD.
Remember that Platinum Properties Investor Network has moved. We are in our beautiful new office in Costa Mesa, California, 555 Anton, Suite 150, in Costa Mesa, California, 92626, and we’re right by world-famous South Coast Plaza. So come in for a visit and a little shopping.
Also, we just uploaded another video podcast and I’d highly recommend that you subscribe to that. There’s some stuff that just lends itself better to video than audio. If you want to see what’s on that, subscribe to it, you can go to www.jasonhartman.com. If you use iTunes or an iPod and you’re an Apple person, then you can go to the iTunes Store, type in Jason Hartman, and two podcasts will come up, the video podcast and the audio podcast. And you’re probably already, if you’re listening, a subscriber to the audio podcast, so make sure you get yourself a free subscription to the video podcast as well.
And this particular one that we just loaded in the video podcast is about Naked Short Sales and what goes on with this short sale and manipulation of the stock market. It’s a very interesting report from Bloomberg News and I think you’ll really learn a lot from that. So be sure to tune in and watch that.
Be sure to see appropriate disclaimers and disclosures on our website at www.jasonhartman.com. Remember that we are not tax or legal advisors.
Anyway, we’ll talk to you next week. Thanks for listening.
This material is the copyrighted creative work of either Jason Hartman, the Hartman Media Company, Platinum Properties Investor Network, Incorporated or the J. Hartman Company, all rights reserved.
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Duration: 23 minutes
