I just got back from an Inside Track property workshop (the free version). Did anyone pay for the actual workshop?
For those who do not know the company:
- they for two hours tell you how to make millions and get all kinds of people telling how they were on benefit or doing a dead end job, and after Inside Track they drive big fast cars and holiday in the sun.
- but to find out the details of the story you have to pay 4K, which is then reduced after 20 minutes of of tension building to 2.5K which is then reduced to 2.5K + bring a friend. Then finally you get a set of DVD's worth 1K if you sign up immediately (literally that second). I saw three people run to the sign up desk with a cheques/credit cards ready.
The basic business model revolves around borrowing cheaply and buying under market value.
Usual s**te. Strange how people who've made millions, or know the secret to making millions, need to sell their secrets for a few grand instead of using their method themselves to make even more millions.
The Guardian tells of how two people lost a lot of money using Inside Track. I asked the man at the free seminar who made 30K in one week from his bedsit (5 years ago) why not offer a money back guarantee is the system really works. He said some people are too lazy to make the system work, so the company will not guarantee a return.
It is definitely a hard sell. As a parallel I was once roped into a disused shop in Oxford Street (years ago) and I saw a man make about
300 pounds in 3 minutes. It was all tension building, and great deals - not to be missed. He actually got people holding up and waving cash whilst another man went round the room collecting the money waving in the air. Some people were even jumping in excitement over the deal (a pocket radio).
I am interested in property investments but in property money can be made and lost very quickly so it is a scary business. The big stories like the Duke of Westminster started centuries ago, so the game is easy for them.
On that point, the funny example was the speaker who made a big point of his high salary from Inside Track (to prove Inside Track works), but he also made millions from off plan and other deals (to prove the system works). The two points are contradictory. He said he quit his director job in corporate London after seeing Inside Track, but then started working for Inside Track!
Anyway, I am still interested. When solicitors charge 200 pounds/hour it pays to know something. As an example of the high losses one can have: I lost 2K on an attempted buy of a shop which fizzled into air when the lender refused to lend (dry rot). The rot would cost 10K to fix and also the 999 leasehold was loaded with high cost clauses which already had cost the current occupant 60K in two years!
Just about anyone can make money in a steeply rising market. Recent years have been exceptional, and even without a major price correction, housing is now going nowhere slowly except maybe in bits of London where foreign money (particularly Russian I believe) is distorting the market.
There is a glut of "luxury flats" in the pipeline just about everywhere in the UK. Interest rates are rising. There will be tears before bedtime. Or even sooner...
I do not wish to sound like an Inside Track rep, but is that not the the same story broadcast everyyear for the last 2 years. In fact, the IT guy even showed a collection of headlines all saying a crash was imminent. Those headlines went back to 2003 and every few months the same one appeared.
I was really looking for someone who actually did the course. The IT company is going public and profits of just Instant Access are a million pounds a month (ref Guardian) - so their business is safe.
One thing that troubled me a lot was that almost everyone I met - especially from IT - looked shifty. I read people a lot in my work as I sell to rich people who will spend thousands of pounds very easily without even thinking. I have seen enough rich people to know the manner, language and signs. No one at IT looked rich. They were according to them all rich. But the look and feel and read of them was shifty, looking over the their shoulders, looking for a hint of a good buy in someone's trash - people hoping to be rich.
Rich people are very relaxed, and will not think much or at all about
1000 pounds: simply to them that is not much money, and many even live in their own world with almost no knowledge of how others live.
When I was at the Hilton for the workshop, I saw there a lot of people who were not rich and the whole hotel was image focused. I know about bathrooms, and when I saw the bathroom at the Hilton I knew straight away that the management had not spent much money on it and had gone for all show. A good bathroom waste, basin, mixer will cost thosands, the Hilton one cost maybe 200-500 pounds (according to contract rates/volume/time).
That to me is an example of the difference between looking rich and pretending to be rich and actually being rich.
My read was the IT people were pretenders. The presenter ( a self declared millionaire) even complained about coffee costing 3 pounds at the hotel - that is not something rich people complain about!
He then said he judged people by their shoes (yawn, that is so old that you need to go back to Victorian Britain for that to make sense - look at the shoes of Larry Page (billionaire many times over), Brin, Branson, or countless others.
So why do you seem to want to give them lots of money for that statement to be expanded out into a flashy brochure and DVD?
Shirley, what you want to do is find someone to discuss securing finance and see what might be plausible in your area. I think its best, at least to start with, to concentrate on property that is nearby, so you are more likely to know what's going on in the area and are closer at hand if there are any problems.
Quite true, and I was, and still am, one of those.
It boils down to whether you assess property prices against their historic value - see the long term real house price trend graph on the latest Nationwide report or whether you assess them using interest rates associated with the low inflation environment we now have and believe that they deserve to be valued more like bonds, were the yield determines the price. As inflation has dropped over the last few decades, so have interest rates, so capital values deserve to be higher. The latter is a 'this time, it's different' scenario, which the famous investor, Sir John Templeton described as the 4 most dangerous words in investing.
If I were looking to do this I'd seriously consider as the MD David Humphreys has made some valuable contributions to The Motley Fool - Property Investing - Practical forum -
IMO after taking advantage of the rises in the property and equity markets, the only good investment at the moment is paying down debt.
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