When I first read about bandit signs I couldn’t get an idea of what they were. Imagine a normal family, in Italy, that wants to get familiar on how you invest in real estate in the US and buys two dozen books, all from apparently reputable authors. And then this thing about bandits signs comes up. And it can’t be just a printing error because author after author keeps mentioning them.
It took me a solid week to figure out what they were and probably another month to understand why on Earth would you use them and where the name came from. They are basically a form of curb advertising that is free (except for the cost of the signs and of placing them) and that can be against local city regulation, although they are very much tolerated in many places.
Me, Alex and Stefano turned into bandits with our bandit signs!
One trick about using them , as I found out, is to place them on Friday evening and get them back on Sunday night: then nobody complains. But who could imagine I would have been using them myself? They are very far from the advertising methods we use in Europe, they simply don’t exist there. Usually, when you sell a house in Italy, you are allowed to put a sign on the side of the very building and that is pretty much it. When the building is an apartment complex, as it is often the case in big towns, then you can often see several signs posted one next to the other on the side or at the entrance of the building, and they need to be a standard size, they look pretty much the same and, let me say it, they just don’t work. An alternative is to see behind the shop window of an Italian Realtor’s office.
Italian "bandit signs" placed on the side of the building that contains the apartements for sale -courtesy of splinder.com.
For example, when I sold my house in Milan, in May 2008, just before coming to the US, we used the side signs and we used local Realtors and none of them worked. We had all kind of people walking in the house to visit and nothing happened. Then we turned to the Internet and started to promote our apartment using also flyers and voilà we had the house sold in a few weeks. And it was sold to an Italian family who lived in France (Versailles) and had to return to Italy for work. So even before coming here I was well cognizant that the modern marketing techniques used in the US real estate market are superior and can be effective everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »
In every major travel you encounter people that lead you along the way and that walk the path with you guiding your steps on your new course. Sometimes they are perfect strangers that yet become your friends right away because they share your same immediate goal and destination. These are the type of people that can change the course of your life, because they are unexpected and yet they can steer your course on a safer track, letting you cross the new territory using their eyes as a guidance.
The first important and major friend I met after arriving in the United States is named Chris Krimitsos (you can find more about him at commanderblue.com). Chris is by far the best promoter I have ever met. He is just natural at it. He has the knack of interacting with people in an informal and yet powerful fashion and he is a kid by election, having chosen a teddy bear as his brand image and buddy.
Roberto and Chris during an interview on a TV station
Anybody opens up when confronted with Chris, and yet is one of the sharpest video producers and interviewers in the nation. He knows how to bring out the best or the worst of anybody and he always does it with elegance and with the candid smile and open face that have become his hallmark.
I first “encountered” Chris on a webinar recording. I was traveling around in Milan while listening to a real estate webinar series by one of the leading investor coaches in the US and I plugged into my MP3 player the recording of an interview with him. I was struck by the fact that he was one of the few (then) real estate investors that had developed a whole system for selling houses with the auction method. You basically invite many people to your home during the week end and ask for bids, and then you ask for higher bids on the phone once the real life auction is over.
I was amazed by the detail with which he explained the whole system and I can still remember most of his words and I am setting up an auction for the next week end suing his very system. But the thing that really got to me, then, was that the interview was actually about a mastermind group that he had setup (little I knew then, but I was slanted to become part of it pretty soon). So he had been giving away most of his auction system for free during a webinar that was actually on another subject! And then he discussed extensively how to build a mastermind group too.
Sometimes we can see the future but we have no “proof” of what we think is going to happen. When I decided to move from Italy to the US with my family, in the beginning of 2008, I also made the transition from a very successful computer journalist and editor to an entrepreneur dealing in real estate at an international level. I was very lucky to have a wife, Maria, who was completely supportive of me and was ready to go through all the uncertainties and changes in life to make it happen.
I had imagined that the very strong euro to dollar exchange rate and the availability of cash for investment in Europe and particularly Italy would have spurred a whole new industry, connecting the two sides of the Atlantic. I had also envisioned it would have benefited both ends.
The top page of page 15 of the Financial Times dated July 21, 2009
I had no evidence of it except for the couple deals I already made myself from Italy using the capital I had obtained by selling my own home in Milan. But I was confident that my decision couldn’t be too wrong: in a market ridden with foreclosures and bank owned properties, where cash is king and where many local US investors have deserted the playing field, the chance of buying with an upfront discount of at least 20% given by the exchange rate creates big opportunities for those who are brave and competent enough.
(The meeting in Monte Carlo: Daniele introduces the speech by Mark Jackson while I translate)
It was kind of astonishing to me that I could buy a big single family home in Florida for one fourth of the money I got from the sale my house in Milan. And there are houses that cost less that a parking spot in Rome. Yet there were no marketing data that could support my idea: I was developing a brand new niche.
You can’t begin a major life project by planning everything in advance, in all its detail, because life is never as organized as we would like it to be and we all live surrounded by other people who have emotions, desires, pains and ambitions. So when I arrived in the United States about one year ago I made sure that my decision was final and that turning back was not really an option.
This has proven to be the main successful action in all the projects that came after that. I had made some extensive planning, don’t get me wrong, I had examined different possible markets and businesses and I had come to the conclusion that real estate was going to be the “thing”.
Caption: my twin boys jumping on Clearwater beach. “Only by jumping into something completely can you reach the maximum heights”.
There was a major crisis underway in the USA and every crisis brings opportunity with it. There was plenty of education material available, which allowed me to enter the field from abroad. I soon found out that much of the information I had gotten originally was no more applicable or was simply inaccurate, but it allowed me to get new education and to select properly the correct sources.
I remember my wife Maria, while still back in Milano in 2007, who occasionally “reprimanded” me because I was spending most of the nights reading books about real estate in the United States while in the morning I was running my regular job and was preparing our move. She wanted me to rest more but more than anything she wanted me to relax because she knew I was going to learn while doing.
Commitment and dedication was more important than mere education, and only through real commitment I could get real and valid training. We burned our ships, there was no turning back, and indeed we tackled every project with our total dedication and determination.
Me (in white) and Daniele (in black) during a recent presentation at Century 21 in Seminole
We need to go back to July 2007 and shift all the way to Treviso, a splendid Italian town pretty close to Venice. Me and my wife, Maria, were traveling on a business trip. She had a small marketing company with a partner and I had taken a day off from my regular job as the editor in chief of a computer magazine owned by a very major Italian publisher.
The center of Treviso - courtesy of redbubble.com
Maria had been selling on me the idea that it was time for me to quit the journalistic profession I had been doing successfully for over 30 years and build my own company. And she is great at sales.
On our way back to Milan, we had stopped in Treviso to look at the beauty of it and to have some time together, and while I was kissing her on top of a romantic wooden bridge right in the center of the town, she voiced the wild idea: why don’t we move to the US?
My twins Stefano and Alex shortly after arriving in Florida. Getting both ready for a party
The following 12 months were an escalation of activity and a challenge that we all met as a team: me, Maria and our two twin boys, Alex and Stefano. We decided that our destination was going to be Clearwater in Florida, both Maria and I had been there and I started to make my plans to gradually leave my job and we began to sell everything: our houses (we had two of them on Milan), our cars, or records and books. Everything went and we were all on a plane on July 9, 2008 headed toward the United States with the project of starting a business in real estate by using the knowledge I had accumulated in the months before my departure and by investing the capital we had put together in a lifetime of work.
The dream was to have a business that could provide us an increasing revenue stream without us always working on it. I was going to use the financial formula I had learned for Robert Kiyosaki and several others. It has been an incredible ride so far and I sure it will still be. This blog starts today with the objective of telling a bit of the past, present and future of my family and my business so that you too can follow some of your dreams.
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