How To Maximize Your REI USA Membership By Stacy Rossetti

 

What perks do you get with your REI USA membership? In this episode, Stacy Rossetti shows us what you get as she goes over the website features and sections, corresponding services and what’s available to you on the REI USA website as well as an overview of the Private Lender website where you can find details on what private lending is and how it works, more information about the process and what she uses to raise money.

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How To Maximize Your REI USA Membership By Stacy Rossetti

I’m going to go over REI USA member benefits, and I’m going to go over some of the tricks that I do with my private lender as well as raising money. During this session, I wanted to get into REI USA again so you guys know what you get, but then also, want to talk about the private lender programs that I have. The truth is that if you are a real estate investor, you’ve got a private lender program. You don’t know it yet, but you do. You should start thinking about what that program is going to be.

I’m going to get into some of mine because what has happened is over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve met so many different types of private lenders. I’m 100% privately funded, so everybody knows I haven’t gotten a bank loan yet. I raise money. That’s why I say I got a private lender program for everybody. I’m like, “I got a program for you. I could do that.”

The REI Page

I’m going to get into that here in a minute, but I wanted to go over and vet the REI USA stuff one more time. Let me talk about the REI USA page. I want to make sure that you guys know all about it and where you can find everything. Everybody on the page is a member. You cannot attend any of the summits that we offer unless you are a member of REI USA. Especially for everybody coming in and trying us out, I appreciate you guys checking us out. We are here to help you and keep you moving forward in your real estate investing journey.

You can check out all of our teachers under Teachers Spotlight. You can check out what everybody teaches and get their bios. Not everybody teaches, so in case you do feel like there is a topic that you need, we teach on a lot of different topics. I want to make sure you know we got a lot of amazing teachers here. Some of them are teaching and some of them are not, so make sure that you check everybody out. You can find what all the coaches teach, what time they teach, and then also, what is the focus of their sessions.

The good thing is that our teachers for REI USA do everything. They’re teaching on one topic, but the truth is they can do everything, talk about everything, and pretty much teach everything. I know all the teachers are saying, “I teach at this time.” It’s right under the Events Calendar. You can scroll through, and then you can register for any session coming up. It all goes in order by date.

 

We typically put all of the sessions up for the next 60 days. That’s how we do it. Every once in a while, you’ll see a special guest. Once a month, we typically have a sponsor come in and do a session on what they offer as well too. If you click on the Training Calendar, it will bring up a calendar view. If you don’t want to scroll down, you can see all the sessions for the entire month. You can click on it and sign up for whichever one you want to do. I want to make sure that all of you knew that there are a couple of different views on that.

If you signed and missed them or didn’t sign up, there are training replays. We’ll have them on the bottom right. It will be broken out, so it’s not one long day. You can watch it as well. Also, finally, the Sponsors Directory. We have a bunch of different sponsors like Ameris Bank and Advanta IRA. We do have a lot of lenders as sponsors for REI USA. American IRA is another custodian for self-directed IRAs. Karen offers lists, so if you need to get a list, whether it is an absentee owner list or a pre-foreclosure list, then you can also go through Karen as well. She has been my list broker for years. I asked her to come to be a sponsor. She said, “I’ll be a sponsor.” That’s why she’s here.

Josh is an attorney, so if you need an attorney. RentRedi offers software for landlords. Residential Capital Partners is a lender. John Maurer is also a lawyer. Nuview offers self-directed IRAs. New Western is a wholesaling company that wholesales properties, and then LegalShield offers free legal advice. You can check all of them out.

I didn’t mention this one more thing, which is the Partners page. A lot of you are like, “I need to get started. What do I need?” We have a list of partners at REI USA. I don’t know if you guys have heard of Deal Machine, but Deal Machine is an app that you can use to find properties. You scan the property and it gives you the information of the owner. FLIPPERFORCE is software that helps you manage your rehabs. We have a whole bunch of stuff. I want you to look through Investor Carrot. They create websites for you. There’s land stuff as well.

Membership Perks

MyOutDesk is a virtual assistant company, so if you’re wanting to hire a virtual assistant, that’s what they do. They manage those for you. We also have PropStream. They do comps and lists. Privy also does comps. REI Print Mail mails our letters out. If you want to do letters, they’re a fulfillment company. ROI Muse is a deal analyzer. They offer deal analyzers. What I’m saying is that we have a lot of partners. If you need any help with anything, then please check it out as well so you can build your company out using these kinds of software. That’s it.

[bctt tweet=”If you are a real estate investor, you’ve got a private lender program. You don’t know it yet, but you do.” via=”no”]

I also want to get into the dashboard and what your dashboard is going to look like. At the top, you’ll have your dashboard, which shows you all the different sessions that you’ve watched. It also shows you what level you’re at and what level you need to get to. I’m at iron and I need to get to bronze. In order for me to get to bronze, I have to complete five training sessions. Once I complete those five training sessions, I’ll get a free coaching call with Mike Watkins. For every five sessions that you watch, you get something for free.

At ten sessions, you can get a free ticket to Darlene’s foreclosure boot camp. There are a whole bunch of teachers that have given away free sessions. If you’re a newbie and you’re like, “What are my next ten steps?” We show you the ten steps. These are going to be things like filling out your profile, getting a demo done with Christy, etc. Christy is our community manager. If you have any questions about anything, email Christy. Her email is Questions@REI-USA.com. She can also give you a demo.

She manages our Facebook group that you can join. You can start using your affiliate link. You do get paid for any referral that comes that you bring in, so if you use your affiliate link, we will pay you for referrals. You can register for a training session, watch a course to get you started, hit five sessions so you can get a coaching call, and then you can talk to sponsors. These ten steps are like your homework.

You need to get some marketing strategies to get going. You need to pick what market you are supposed to be focusing on, and then you need to be talking to lenders. These are the three big things that you should be focusing on when you get started. I also put those as part of your ten steps. There are five free courses that you can watch to get started. These are all the free courses for all members.

You can then check out the Properties for Sale page. If you do have a property you’re selling, you can list it there. All the members across the country will have access to all the properties for sale. That’s right at the top where you can list it under Properties for Sale. That is available to you. I wanted to make sure you had access to that and that you knew where everything was.

 

The Private Fund Page

On the investor page on my website, I have two different pages. One of them is for private money lenders and one of them is for my fund. I have a 506(c) fund. My goal is to always be funneling people to my website. My website showcases me. This is how I raise all my money. I’m a very virtual investor. I’m pitching every single week. Through all of the posts and things that I do, people come to my page. They fill out the registration and it puts them right into my email list. They get one email once a month for twelve months. The email is typically a case study of a deal I’ve done, what is private lending, or something about the fund.

I want you to come to my page and check it out and see how we all set it up. I suggest when you do find a big group, people gurus, or people that are doing it, how are they presenting themselves? If you go to a lot of websites, you’ll see there’s an investor’s page. A lot of real estate people and companies always have an investor’s page. Instead of checking it out as somebody that wants to invest in the company, you’re checking the page out thinking like, “How are they setting this up? How are they getting their website set up?”

You’ll see that I have a disclaimer at the bottom of the page. All I’m doing is educating everybody on what is private lending, who borrows at high rates, how I get paid, what is a long-term investment, what if you need to liquidate, what the closing process looks like, and what’s the benefits of private lending. I got some video testimonials. I’ve got more questions being answered.

I have a presentation on what is private lending. It’s about 25-minutes long. It’s a good presentation that explains to people what private lending is. There are all kinds of stuff. If you want to set up a meeting with me on private lending, you’re going to go through an application funnel. The application funnel is going to ask a whole bunch of questions first. Some of the questions are like, “How much money do you have? Have you ever experienced lending before this?” There are a couple of questions in there that if you don’t answer the way that I want you to answer, then you don’t get access to my calendar. I set this application funnel to weed out people that don’t have any money or don’t have a lot of experience in doing this.

If you remember, I said I use Facebook. I’m a Facebook person. Of all of the different social media outlets out there, what I do is Facebook. I honestly don’t do anything else. We use a company called Publer. I don’t know if anybody has ever heard of Publer before. I’m on every single social media outlet out there, but I never go to any of them. All the posts that you see are all going through Publer. You can attach your accounts there. For example, if I want to do an REI USA post, I would go through it and click all of REI USA. I could do my post, and then it syndicates it out to all REI USA outlets that we have. We have Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

[bctt tweet=”When you do a post on social media, you want to be leading everybody to your website or whatever you have, that’s going that you’re going to be shared with investors if you have that setup.” via=”no”]

This is how you saw posts in the Facebook group. For me, this is how I or my team posts out in the Facebook groups. It’s called syndication. There are people that are like, “Social media is so hard to manage because there’s way too much out there. I’m not getting on every single thing.” That’s what we do. We use Publer and then we’ll broadcast it out or syndicate it out to every single site as one post. That’s all you would have to do.

We are utilizing social media to broadcast our wins. If I find a facility that I want to buy, or if I find something that I want to buy, then I’m broadcasting that out. If I get something under contract, we broadcast that out. Another thing that we do, too, is throwback Thursday, or whatever you want to call it, as we broadcast the anniversary dates of our purchases. I’m always like, “I don’t know what to post,” but we got a lot of purchases, so then I told my team to post out anniversary dates of purchases. It’s something like, “Five years ago, I bought this facility.” Once you get into it, it’s very easy to think of content to post out.

People always ask me, “How are you all over the place on social media?” Publer is what it is. “I don’t know what Publer means.” That is what we’re using to syndicate out. It costs $1 an account. I’m not sure. You’d have to pay a monthly fee for it, but it’s not a lot of money. You can also add your team if you don’t want to do it. Personally, I don’t want to do all that. I have Christy. Christy goes onto Publer. My community managers and social media managers are also managing all that for me. As you grow, you get to delegate that out. Utilize social media.

Another thing that I was going to say is if you don’t want to do Publer and you’re like, “That’s way too much,” then what I like is Instagram. With Instagram, you can post out to Facebook, and with Facebook, you can post out to Instagram. You can connect those two together, and then you can syndicate those out. Two is better than nothing. The point is that we’re always posting out everything that we’re doing in the self-storage world. The reason that we do that is that we’re trying to get our name out and let everybody know what we’re doing. That’s how we raise our money too.

A lot of times, with my posts, I’m like, “It’s the one-year anniversary of my Fayetteville location.” I’ll post a picture of a storage facility, and then I’ll say, “You should check out everything we do at StacyRossetti.com.” I lead everybody to that page. What I’m saying is that when you do a post, you want to be leading everybody to your website or whatever you have that you’re going to be sharing with the investors if you have that setup. I know I’ve been doing this for a while, but at least you can get an idea of how I’m doing this.

 

Everything that I do and everything that I post on social media leads back to something. That’s the rule. If you start analyzing my posts or the posts that my team does, there’s always some link that’s leading to something else, which is the whole point of social media. My personal page is not on Publer, so nobody’s posting on my personal page. It’s only the business part. If you wanted to post on your personal page, you could do that as well, but my team does not do that. I post something on my personal page.

Terms Of The Program

When you start getting out and talking to investors, you’re going to find that there are several different types of investors out there. The very first investor that I had was a private lender. I borrow the money from them and they got a lien on the property. I did this when I did rehabs. I’ve also done this with facilities. Somebody will come to me and they will say, “I have $300,000 or $400,000. I would like to work with you. How can I work with you?”

I talk to the investors too. This is where I ask them, “How much money do you have?” When they tell me how much money they have, then I know where I can put them. I’m the type of person that with whatever amount of money I have, I’m going to be able to put them somewhere. If you didn’t see on my investor page, the minimum for me to work with somebody is $300,000. It’s hard to find a storage facility that’s less than $300,000 unless it’s a tiny one.

We buy bigger facilities. Most of the time, my lenders have hundreds of thousands of dollars to work with. When I meet somebody that says, “I only have $60,000, $25,000, or $100,000,” then I still don’t want to miss out on these people or not do anything with them. Over the past couple of years, I’ve created different levels for all the different investors that I meet. I have private lenders where I have debts and I borrow money. I’ll pay them a high-interest rate of 8% or 10%. That’s one level that I have.

I have another level where I could partner with you. Let me tell you a deal that I did. I found a storage facility. The owner was willing to sell it to me. I asked him if he wanted to owner finance it. The property was $600,000. I got him to owner finance. I asked him, “Would you be interested in owner financing? I could probably bring $200,000 to the table if you can owner finance the $400,000.” He said, “I’ll owner finance it.” He gave me 4% interest for 10 years and amortized for over 20 years. He also gave me the first two years at interest-only payments. We worked through those terms.

[bctt tweet=”Learn all the different ways that you can raise capital and then all the different ways that you can structure your deals.” via=”no”]

I still had to come up with $200,000 to bring to the table, so I went out and found somebody to bring me $200,000 and I partnered with that person. Now we partnered on this deal together. Depending on what you work out, the split could be whatever. I’m doing all the work. I brought the deal, so they don’t get as big of a split as I do. I bought a $600,000 facility without bringing any money to the table at all, and that’s the power of utilizing the types of lenders that come into your life. There’s debt and then there are partnerships.

On top of that, I have the fund. It took me a long time to get to this point. All these people that are coming to me don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they do have money they want to invest with. They can always put that money right into the fund, and then we can use it as crowdfunding. My fund is more like a crowdfunding fund. Over the course of the last couple of years that I’ve been investing, I’ve come up with different ways to utilize my partner’s money. I may not be able to use $25,000, but there’s something that we can put you in.

I tell all the investors, “Don’t get hung up on that if you don’t have to do this. I will figure out something for your money.” That’s the goal for you. As you grow your raising capital program or whatever you’re going to be doing, then you should be coming up with different ways or programs to utilize that money, if that makes sense. Someone asked, “How do lien positions work with second private lenders in the deal?” There are two different ways to do this. I saw Mike had three investors for his $200,000. What you could do is you could form a company together. You could form an LLC or whatever you want to form. That company can go out and borrow the money, and then they could partner together.

You can do each individual lender as a lien holder. There is 1st lien, 2nd lien, and 3rd lien. I’ve done both. When you talk to lenders, you have to get a feeling for what type of risk they’re willing to take. I have one lender that gives me $2 million. He always wants the first lien on the property. That’s how he is. I talk to another lender that’s like, “I only want a 50/50 split. That’s what I want.”

Every lender that you talk to is going to have a completely different risk level and terms. You have to work with them to see what it is. That’s how you create your private lender programs. You’re going to find one lender that wants this and one lender that wants this. Over time you’re going to learn all the different ways that you can raise capital and then all the different ways that you can structure your deals.

Private lenders are lenders that you know. They’re not some stranger. I have a fund for strangers, and that’s another thing too. Strangers go in my fund, and people I know and I’ve worked with over the past years are people that I’m doing private lender deals with. I’m sure Noah and Christy have done this because that’s what they do anyways. I’m going to let them go and do their thing. Thank you very much for spending some time with us and being a part of REI USA. We’re here to help you. I’m here to help you.

 

Important Links

• REI USA
• Teachers Spotlight
• Events Calendar
• Training Calendar
• Partners
• Questions@REI-USA.com.
• Facebook Group – REI USA
• Properties for Sale
• Publer
• StacyRossetti.com
• https://www.REI-USA.com/Stacy-Rossetti

 

About Stacy Rossetti

Real Estate Investing – My Journey, My Career My Life

As a real estate investing expert and coach, I have built my name on the results I have created – for myself and for my students.

Investing in real estate has changed my life, opening doors for me and my family and affording me an outlet for all my creative and entrepreneurial energy. Through scaling up a renovation company in Atlanta with hundreds of transactions to learning to invest passively through creative financing deals and storage facilities, I have not only overcome many trials and tribulations, but systematized and organized my days so that I can run several successful businesses.

Day after day, I work hard at what I do, striving to stay ahead of the curve by building on my knowledge and making shrewd decisions. This did not happen overnight, of course. My early days in real estate were slow, exhausting and hard, but little by little, I earned a sense of what worked and what I needed to do to achieve consistent results. Because I taught myself all this learning through experience and mentors, the process was gradual and required the utmost diligence on my part.

Today, I own and operate REI USA and StorageNerds. REI USA is an online education and networking platform that is exactly the tool that I would have wanted when I was getting my start, something that aspiring and established investors can turn to, a means to cutting your learning curve dramatically. Together my husband Pete and I currently own and operate eight storage facilities. Investing in self-storage is our passion and how we have decided to build wealth. It is the best kept secret in the investing world and I don’t know why more are not investing in it.

In addition to investing in real estate myself, I have since discovered another passion in my life – coaching and empowering others. Whenever I see that I have guided someone toward a breakthrough or helped them to transform themselves professionally, I feel deep fulfillment, confident that I am on the right path and reinvigorated to go out and do even more.

As a coach and teacher, I specialize in helping my students navigate real estate investing, rehabbing, and storage facilities. These are all complex, involved topics, but I have honed my ability to communicate the intricacies – and found ways to demystify them efficiently. Seeing the light go off in my students’ eyes, I know that the magic is happening, and in everyone I teach, I recognize myself – wide-eyed, hopeful, firmly believing in all the opportunities that real estate investing can present. For years, I have connected with my students through workshops, offering a glimpse into the thought processes and techniques that have led to my success.

In order to share my knowledge with as large an audience as possible, I have currently expanding beyond person-to-person coaching, developing a Self-Storage Investing mastermind and group coaching mentorship called StorageNerds. This mastermind draw on my years of experience in real estate and self-storage investing and break down my ideas and strategies in a way that even beginners can digest.

My passion is to help beginner investors learn to invest in real estate and my mission is Affordable Financial Literacy. REI USA embodies this mission by engaging those that truly want to learn to invest in real estate but don’t want to go broke doing it. Over the course of the last five years my husband and I have spent many years perfecting how we find, fund and run our storage facilities so we can be anywhere in the world. Our facilities are truly passive income and we love sharing our tips and tricks on how we manage them through our StorageNerds mastermind.

Renovating my first home in 2012, I knew that I had stumbled upon something big – a calling, a vocation, a passion. There was no doubt in my mind that I was going to stick with real estate and give it everything that I had. Collaborating with my husband has been a bonus, and I am grateful every day for the career that he and I have created together.