Don’t you love going to a real estate investing seminar and the presenter is so excited about all the money he’s made and all the money his students have made and all money you are going to make because using his system is soooo easy and nothing bad happens if you just follow his methods? Well, then you may be dissapointed because the Complete Property Services free monthly seminar offers none of that.

President of the company and presenter, Glenn Dickson gives a realistic view of investing in Houston residential rental properties. Quitting your job and sitting on the beach for six months each year isn’t part of the program.

Glenn explained that the difference between your mortgage payment and incoming rent is not really cashflow, but rather savings for future repairs and maintence. I know from experience that one AC replacement can easily wipe out a year’s “cashflow”.

Don’t get me wrong Glenn does not try and disuade you from investing in real estate. In fact he thinks it’s one of the best investments out there. He just seperates the hype from reality and let’s new investors know what they are getting into.

A really good piece of info at seminar comes from the famous Complete Property Services maps detailing Houston’s rental market. The top map shows slower home sales represented by the red dots and faster sales with the green dots.

The bottom map shows areas where rents have gone down in the past month as red dots and green dots in areas that rents went up.

Steven Kaufman, President of Zeus Mortgage, was the guest speaker. He went over the recent subprime fallout, the astounding default rates and how it may affect Houston investors. Never without a memorable analogy, Steven explained it like this, “If you were putting together a recipe and it were made up of a little dab of tougher requirements to get a loan,

a few dashes of higher forclosures, a pinch of increasing mortgage rates, add to that some consumer doubt and fear of decreasing home values, mix it all up in a pot; do you know what you get? Something I call Buy and Hold soup and it’s mmm, mmm good”.

The Complete Property Services free monthly seminar is held the first Thursday of each month. You can check their web site at http://www.complete-property-services.com/news.html for more info. Definitely one to put on your list.