Mark Davidson

I have been an owner operator of an auto body business for the past 25 years. The business was funded through my real estate investments in my 20's. I bought our current business location with a contract sale where the seller provided the financing for the first 5 years. I experienced the stress of a balloon payment coming due and was very fortunate to actully get bank financing at the last days. It has always been my intentions to use the profits in the auto body business to re-invest in rental properties again since I did have 5 units before selling to buy my 1st parcel of business property. We then bought our current log home on 10 acres in the country and leased our previous home for a year before selling it to our tennants for a $115,000 profit. This was when the market was at it's top. This did not include the improvements we made to the property for the 8 years we lived in it. The proceeds went to fund our collision business.

Since then I have bought an adjacent lot with a house that its only hope was to be demoished. We added an expansion for our business from buying that property but since 2003 when we added the major overhead to our busines we have not been very profitable due to the large overhead and flat line sales due to the current economy.

So we seek training and networking to re-lanch into real estate with marginal credit and little money available for investing. We do have (without current appraisal since 2003) about $100,000 of equity in our business property, but it currently has 2 mortgages on it. I am not sure if a lendor would be willing to make a 3rd position on this for the equity to purchase other property or that it would be wise for me to risk the collision business property. Our current home has little equity in it since we refinanced last year and rolled the line of credit into a 2nd mortgage. Over half of the line of credit went to fund the collision business. The appraisal of our home dropped signiigantly from the last appraisal when we purchased 8 years ago. This home was not finished by the builder and did not even have an occupancy permit and many violations to be corrected before we could obtain one. They have all been resolved and the house is 98% complete and we are ready to move on to our next project.

My wife & I have 7 children and 6 grandchildren. 2 of our children are still at home and my wife has had dreams of our family working together on a forclsoed property we found in a prominnent neighborhood priced about $100,000 below what another home in the neighborhood is selling for that is in good shape. We are needing confidence to put the numbers together to know if it is a good deal or not. I am 50 years old and to take on another project of that size does concern me and am looking more to sub-contracting some of the work needed.

I am looking forward to renew the excitement and gain more knowledge in real estate investing. It has been a pleasure reading through Dean's books of Be a Real Estate Millionare and Profit in Real Estate Now, in which I rarely finish any book I start and am not an avid reader (Except for the Bible) By the way more about me is that I am dedicated to my Lord Jesus Christ and have enjoyed reading Dean's book and am convinced that he too may have faith and undoubtedly has very strong ethics and character as well as I appreciated him permitting one of his students testiomies including a passage from Isaiah.

Thank you to all involved in Dean's focus and desire to help people in real estate.

Mark Davidson

www.davidsonautobody.com