This morning I attended an introductory meeting (a.k.a., "sales pitch") for the "real estate investment college", Nouveau Riche (NRU). I had stumbled upon the company, quite randomly, a few months ago while perusing some of the local groups at Meetup.com, but until recently I just couldn't bring myself to take the time to check them out in any detail.
The first red flag to jump out about NRU, though, is that its founder, Jim Piccolo, was also the founder of the MLM company TruDynamics (a.k.a., Travel Dynamics). In my book, anyone who starts a network marketing company is not a trustworthy individual.
There's always a chance, though, that a person can reform, and I wasn't really doing much with my Saturday morning anyway, so I figured "what the hell?" and headed to one of their twice-weekly meetings. When I arrived I could tell immediately I was in the right place, since two of the cars parked there had huge wraparound signs on them, asking "Did you make $30K last month?" and, if you didn't, suggesting to call the supplied phone number.
Much of the content of the meeting itself can be found here, including the actual Powerpoint slide show used by the presenter. Several things struck me about the meeting, though. There were roughly 15 people there, including myself, but I'd say 10 or 11 of them had already either purchased the R2E2 or paid the full "Regents" tuition. This struck me as odd, but one thing they did seem to stress - especially when 4 of the attendees stood up to tell their own success stories since joining (one of the 4 strongly implied that her 19-year-old daughter would be skipping "regular" college and just attending NRU - yikes!) - was NRU's "community" aspect. Supposedly you won't ever be left out in the cold if you join up. I'm guessing many of the people there were enjoying the community? (Yes, it's true that at least some of the people were probably there in hopes of earning a commission on a sale.)
Another thing they stressed was the Investor Concierge service, which sounds pretty cool, but, as this website points out, the example property shown in the presentation used suspicious numbers, such as a 5.25% interest-only loan. For reasons I'll get to in a moment, I strongly suspect the Investor Concierge has a chronic shortage of properties - profitable or not (I'd suspect mostly not) - but a look at one of the "Last 20 Sold" houses using the site's guest account revealed something even more suspicious. Here's a screenshot of a Phoenix AZ property listing on the Investor Concierge site (click images for full size):
Here's the same property's details from the records of Transnation Title:
The discrepancies ought to be patently obvious. The Arizona Regional Multiple Lising Service corroborates Transnation Title's data (big surprise there!). No recent sale of 3302 W Acoma has taken place - at $139K or any other price. I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but I hope you're as disturbed as I am by the implications.
They also highlighted their "business opportunity" aspect - not surprisingly, invoking Kiyosaki's "cashflow quadrant" in the process. While it doesn't technically meet the definition of MLM, the "opportunity" certainly resembles it in many aspects. I'll skip going into any real detail, but the basic idea is that you, as a sales rep for NRU, bring in 2 paying customers, which will result in 50% commissions being paid to your trainer/sponsor/mentor person (the one who introduced the company to you). After that, the first two people those people bring in will result in a 50% commission being paid to you. It's not MLM, exactly, but it does suffer from the serious drawback of quickly creating too many sales people in a given region.
Think about that, for a moment. You might remember that old shampoo commercial: "They'll tell two friends, and they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on..." That may work great for shampoo, but is such a scenario even remotely workable for real estate investing?
For sake of argument, let's grant that, say, 5 of the people with the big car signs really do, consistently, month in and month out, make $20K-30K selling NRU tuition packages. They claim that 98% of the people who sign up do so at the "Regents" level. That's an $8K commission to the person who signed them up. So, that's roughly 3 new "students" per salesperson signed up every month, or 3x5x12=180 new "real estate investors" recruited in a year by those 5 salespeople. Now, as you know, those 180 people were, in part, enticed to join NRU with the promise that they could each also make approximately $288K in a year. But to do that they'll have to bring in another 6,480 people. And what about those people? How easily do you think they'll each make $20K/month?
According to a recent article on azcentral.com, homeowners in the Metro Phoenix area who default on their mortgages get an average of 300 pieces of mail from foreclosure investors. Assuming your typical pre-foreclosure investor sends a "campaign" of 5 letters to one house, that means that there are somewhere around 60 people competing for each potential investment property. The competition has gotten so fierce that now some foreclosure sharks are sending oddly shaped colored envelopes with hand-written addresses - and even including pieces of Jolly Rancher candies inside! All in the hopes that their ad doesn't simply go straight to the trash, ignored. Nouveau Riche University wants to increase that number from 60 to 6,480 competitors, plus! Does that seem even remotely sustainable to you? Are you interested in being one of those 6000+ "investors" competing for investment properties? In what other industry (aside from MLM) are the "sales reps" actively working to undermine their own success by training their own competition?
In spite of the obvious mathmatical unworkability of NRU, their introductory meeting's sales pitch is definitely a slick presentation, and you can't help but get caught up in the warm and friendly atmosphere they, no-doubt, carefully cultivate. At the conclusion of the presentation they instruct you to immediately go and tell your sponsor-person if you're interested in signing up, learning more, or just want to leave. I told my Independent Student Advisor that I was somewhat interested in learning more, but that I still had a number of questions. Foremost in my mind at this point is why this person, who has been with NRU for about a year, doesn't appear to own any investment properties - at least not locally.
It probably goes without saying that I won't be plunking down any money for this "opportunity" any time soon.
A superb, must-read, critique of the whole Nouveau Riche phenomenon can be found at cockeyed.com.
UPDATE, 7/16/07: I received an email today from my independent student advisor contact, asking me to remove all mention of her from this post and the comments following. The ISA's contention was that the inclusion of this information is "disrespectful" and "unnecessary". I have agreed to remove all mention of her name - to protect against the possibility of unrelated future Google searches by, for example, potential stalkers - but I believe that the links to the public record are necessary. Anyone interested in the truth should be in favor of greater transparency, in my humble opinion. This is why I include links to both the Maricopa County records, and the AZ Corporation Commission records, since she claims not to own any investment properties by name.
As part of this update, I had to delete several of the comments from the comments thread. Those are reproduced here, with the ISA's name replaced by strings of X's.
KIWI said...
And by the way, XXXXXXXXXX DOES own several properties here and in Las Vegas! Please do not make assumptions about things you know nothing about.
7/02/2007
Einzige said...
Kiwi,
What's with the ALL CAPS? Do you think that by shouting at me you'll win others to your cause?
You say: I KNOW WHATEVER I SAY WON'T BUDGE YOUR STUBBORN MIND...
Quite the contrary, I am more than willing to listen to substantive arguments, consisting of logical analysis and the presentation of empirical evidence in support of your assertions. Unfortunately your comments so far have provided neither of those. Instead, you've simply made a number of bald assertions and insults to my character - while simultaneously ignoring the bulk of my complaints against NRU. Hardly persuasive stuff, I'd say.
WHY WOULD YOU THINK INTEREST ONLY IS BAD FOR A BUY AND HOLD?
I'll skip delving deeply into the details, but each potential loan is going to have its pluses and minuses, and should be evaluated on an individual basis. The main questions with respect to an interest-only loan should be: 1) How long is the interest-only period? and 2) When the reset comes, what are my best- and worst-case monthly payments going to be? I suppose there are situations where an interest-only loan is appropriate, but given the future's uncertainties, I'd prefer knowing what my payments are going to be.
Why don't you explain your thought process, rather than insult me for my apparent ignorance in this area?
And by the way, XXXXXXXX DOES own several properties here and in Las Vegas!
How do you know this? Note I didn't "assume" anything. All I said was that she doesn't seem to own any investment properties locally, based on Maricopa County records associated with her name and the name of the corporate entity I could find associated with her - I even provided a link to the relevant MC records! I didn't claim that this was definitive proof.
On the other hand, if she wants to convince potential recruits that NRU is an effective means of becoming a successful RE investor, she ought to make it easy for folks to find evidence that she actually is one herself. Don't you think?
What about you, Kiwi? Where are your investment properties? I'd like their full addresses, for starters. Maybe some rental agreements, too. Otherwise I think those of us who are incredulous are entitled to remain so.
7/02/2007
UPDATE TWO (01/09/08): It seems that all of my ISA's promotional web sites for NRU and real estate investment are now defunct. This is certainly not evidence in favor of NRU.
