Real estate middlemen and women

Dean Graziosi is one of those "experts" who makes a living selling real estate books, real estate CDs and other programs explaining how you can make money in real estate by following his advice. If everything were that easy, I guess we all would be rich.

As you can imagine, I don't have much patience for so-called gurus, as everything about them seems a bit incredulous. Graziosi claims he's a multimillionaire and a best-selling author.

Like me, he lives in the Valley of the Sun (Phoenix metro area) and I thought I would make contact. So, I gave a phone call to his public relations team and a few days later he and I were chatting.

Graziosi definitely has a winning personality, which probably is why he makes such a believable guru. And he really came off as a nice fellow.

There was an interesting item in our discussion that caught my ear: He had noticed through his various forums a large uptick in women getting involved in real estate.

Of course, there are probably a million female real estate professionals across the country, but Graziosi advocates a whole different approach to the business. His program is for you to be a virtual wholesaler and create a business that could be conducted from home -- all it takes is a phone and a computer.

The idea is to be a middleman. You go out and find motivated buyers who have cash but not a lot of time to seek out acquisitions and then find the great deals, match the two, and as Graziosi said: "make money in the middle."

Graziosi has a good sense of what's happening in that middleman market because he runs a kind of bulletin board on his website. "I watch it everyday -- I'm addicted to it," he said.

The site gets 300 to 500 postings daily.

At first, it was typically guys posting up. Then once in a while a husband and wife team would post. Starting about eight to 10 months ago, he notes, "we saw a wave of women posting, saying 'this is what I've done, this where I'm at.' "

All of a sudden on the site there were a host of Anitas, Renas, Laurens and Carolyns and they were each motivating each other, creating a round-robin of professional support. "One might say, 'I don't think real estate is going to work for me,' and the others would come in and say, 'Don't you dare give up on your dreams. Look what I did.'

"It has been like a snowball going downhill; it's just been great to watch the evolution," Graziosi said.

So what's causing so many women to try their hand at real estate without actually buying property? ...CONTINUED

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