Sat, Nov 07, 2009
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You're Not a Real Estate Crook Are You?
| | Monday, May 18, 2009 @ 09:55 PM EDT
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Contributed by: Jason Hanson
Jason Hanson Properties
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I want to talk about this whole Roland Burris fiasco and Governor Blago-(however you spell his last name...I know this is old news but I don't care.) For those of you in the complete dark, Burris is the Senator that was appointed by the disgraced Illinois Governor who tried to sell the Senate seat. The reason that this is on my mind is because I just saw another article about this and because of two investors I recently had contact with.
Okay. So everyone knows that the Governor was caught on a wire tap trying to sell the vacant Senate seat left by President Obama. And there was a whole uproar that he shouldn't be allowed to appoint the Senator because obviously the person would be "tainted". Well, he ended up appointing Roland Burris as the new Senator.
Right after this appointment I read an article in the Washington Post that I thought was brilliant. The article said that no honest person would have accepted the appointment because it came from a crook. The article went on to give the following analogy: If someone robbed a bank and then went to the Red Cross and said “I would like to donate $200,000 to you guys”, would the Red Cross accept the donation? Of course they wouldn't because the money was stolen.
As most people know, it has come to light that Mr. Burris had contact with the Governor's staff and it appears he lied under oath. Why did Burris accept the nomination? Because he was greedy and power hungry! (let it be known that several others were offered the Senate seat before Burris but they declined). No honest man would have accepted a Senate position from a corrupt and crooked Governor.
What does this have to do with real estate investing? Everything. Your reputation is based on who you associate with. It doesn't matter if you are the most honest person in the world, if you do business with someone who you know is less than honest in their real estate dealings. Let me give you two examples: First, there's an investor I know who's pretty successful but has a reputation of not being reliable and not keeping his word. He's not dishonest per se, but he doesn't do what he says he's going to. This investor has come to me on multiple occasions trying to get me to partner with him, or invest money in his deals, but of course I never have........I'm not saying I wasn't tempted by dollar signs, but my reputation and integrity is worth no amount of money.
The second example is from a real estate event I recently attended: At this event another investor came up to me. He was trying to do deals with me and wanted to partner up on a few things--Now, I know this investor has a terrible reputation. I've never heard anyone have anything positive to say about him. I also have some close associates who got greedy and went into business with this guy and got burned. I smiled and listened to him make his pitch to me while thinking in my head "hell no".
Listen. We're all human. I'm not going to deny that a small part of me wanted to do it because there was the potential for a lot of money to be made........but the more likely scenario would be that I would get lumped in with this guy, as a person who couldn't be trusted, my reputation would be ruined and I probably would not have seen a cent of the promised profits.
So please be careful. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. And if you know of someone who can't be trusted, avoid them like the plague---even if they promise you big bucks.
Word Cloud:
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