Using the Web and social media to sell real estate



I have been avidly reading in these days a very old booklet titled “The Art of Money Getting” written by the entertainment genius P.T. Barnum. In this booklet he lists the twenty golden rules that a successful businessman should adopt in order to gather a fortune. Rule 14 states: “Don’t indorse without security” and tells the story of a businessman who was to eager to lend money to another getting only a simple “note” rather than asking for a full security that would backup his money.

The story tells how this easy money eventually spoiled the borrower who ventured into risky investments and lost everything that he owned plus the money he had been lent by this other businessman. The story, although one hundred years old, is very applicable to our days. Many people try extravagant investments getting no real security to back them up and risk to lose their wealth in the process. It is not usually in the first transaction that things go bad, it is later on, when the confidence in obtaining easy money overcomes prudence and disaster shows up unexpected.

Sometime the idea of easy money and the cognizance that others are making a fortune with some kind of a “proven” system invited us to cross the safety boundary, but it has been my experience with international investors that only one thing really counts: security of their money and the knowledge that whatever happens to me or to the deal, they will have all the necessary means to recover their investment.

I never take money unless I can back it up with a mortgage and not only that I also go the extra mile of putting an insurance and some other way of controlling the property on top of it. Developing this multi level of protections has taken me months and lot of work and has prevented me from taking advantage of some deals that might have given immediate return, but that were risky.

Today by reading P.T. Barnum’s advice I see that I did right and that in doing so I have built a much stronger relationship and a much stronger position for myself. It is not easy because it takes more work than usual and you need to combine legal and tax factors on both sides (US law and international law), but when you do it right you have no real competition. I often see American investors trying to tap on the international market, but they very often fail on providing the adequate level of protection and therefore fail in obtaining the funds they are striving for.

My suggestion is: do your homework and provide the highest possible level of security and the money you need will arrive to you and you will sleep comfortably knowing that you have done everything possible to make the relationship a success.

Roberto Mazzoni