Two days ago, I was at Singapore Expo for Steven Molnar’s Real Estate Mastery Course. The event was scheduled to run from 9am to 9pm. Real estate investing is something that I’m inexperienced in, so I had hoped to learn something useful from the course.
The morning part of the course was a bit slow starting. We were taught by Steven about wealth and he also scratched the surface on some financial planning.
Then he gave an overview of different investment options, using “7 commandments” to highlight why property investment is a good option. It wasn’t quite what I came for and at times, I was close to dozing off.
Steven next shared a ten year plan whereby we could make an income of $180k from property every year. The plan works like this:
- Buy a 300k property with a 100% interest only loan.
- Pay the interest with your rental income.
- In 10 years, the price of the property would have doubled.
- Refinance at 80% to extract $480k from property.
- Pay off the loan of $300k and you would be left with $180k in cash.
- If you can repeat this every year for 10 years, you would have cash coming in every year.
The refinancing option allows one to extract cash from the property without having to sell it. This would be good for avoiding the payment of capital tax gains. In Singapore where there is no capital gain tax, we could possibly just sell the property and pocket the entire $300k instead of refinancing it. 
In my view, the success of this plan would depend on a few factors:
- Rentals must be able to cover your interest. Periods of vacancy might be risky if you cannot service the loans.
- The property must double in price. This might or might not happen. If you buy at a high point, you might be stuck with very little capital appreciate even after 10 years.
- Banks must be able to lend you as many as ten loans.
- Getting a 100% loan.
The 10-year plan would probably be too risky for most investors, but trying to do it for one or two properties might be viable.
How is it possible to buy property with no money down? We can’t obtain a 100% loan in Singapore but Steven suggests a few methods:
- Making use of credit lines for the other 10% that needs to be funded by cash.
- Making use of vendor finance. This is something that is new to me.
- Borrow or go into joint ventures.
A few other tips I picked up from Steven include:
- Always do your own independent valuation.
- Amateur investors look at price.
- Useful list of real estate websites (mostly for Australia):
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www.realestate.com.au
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www.residex.com.au
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www.domain.com.au
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www.hia.com.au
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www.abs.gov.au
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www.reia.com.au
The last part of the seminar was on some of the risks of real estate investing.
- Vacancy
- Property damage and bad tenants
- Loss of income
- Rising interest rates
- Market collapse
Steven also promoted his 5-day Advanced Real Estate Mastery Course and an upcoming property development project to us. Are they good?
If you recall my earlier post on
Steven Molnar, there seemed to be a couple of websites with negative feedback on Steven. Most of it was directed to his association with Henry Kaye.
However, if you look carefully at the
posts in this forum, most of the negative posts were made by people who were new users to the forum. It seems that their sole purpose in registering seems only to discredit Steven Molnar. I can’t confirm this though.
Other than one other site, I couldn’t really find much feedback on Steven Molnar or his Advanced Real Estate Mastery Course. That site gave a good review for the course but a negative feedback on Empowernet. You might find them interesting:
With regards to the
Ecoville project that Steven was promoting, I can’t really comment much on it without more research. If you are considering to invest in it, do check the valuation of the land (among other things) to make sure you are not overpaying for it. Remember what Steven taught us - do your own independent valuation.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of depositing $1k just for the chance to find out more about it.
I would like to end this post with a small bit of advice.
Attending a real estate course does not automatically make you an expert at real estate investing. Nor does it guarantee you wealth. It forms just one part of your preparation. The knowledge you acquire has to be put into practice and continously worked on for your saw to be sharp. This is no shortcut in investing. Great investors always do their homework.
Good luck.
