CREIA Monthly Meeting with Bill Goacher

Come join us the second Monday of the month for our General Meeting!

Hilton Biltmore Park, 43 Town Square Blvd., Asheville, NC 28803

5:30pm: Networking/Happy Hour
6:30pm: Meeting Begins

Members: Free

Guests: $15

Event Details:

As in the old saying about beauty, disaster is also in the eye of the beholder. At least that’s what Bill Goacher believes. He likes to tell a story about some rehabbers in Asheville who jacked up an old house on a steep hill to fix its foundation. That was simple enough until the house started to shift a little, and then a little more. And then the whole house rolled off its foundation and down the hill, ending up as a big pile of rubble.

Disaster? Sure. But as Goacher points out the investors still ended up with a nice clear lot in a very desirable neighborhood. “They sold the lot for $30,000 and ended up making $5,000,” he says. “They had anticipated making $35,000 or $40,000, but they still made five grand! So I’d say that in real estate the real disasters are few and far between.”

The former industrial engineer started investing in real estate more than 30 years ago to avoid the potential disaster of becoming an “odd lotter.” After five years of investing online, at www.creianc.com (http://www.creianc.com/), in the stock market and getting poor returns, Goacher attended a stock-buying seminar in hopes of turning his investments around.

“The guy teaching the seminar told us that an ‘odd lotter’ is somebody who buys fewer than 100 shares,” Goacher recalls. “A savvy investor watches what the odd lotters are doing, the small guys, and he does just the opposite because the odd lotters are always wrong. So I said, ‘Hey! I’m one of those. I’m always wrong!’ I only had a $6,000 nest egg at that time so I started looking to buy real estate.”

Where Goacher fell short as a wizard of Wall Street, he more than made up for it as a guru of Main Street snatching up more than $5 million worth of properties during his career. Even with that volume of deals Goacher’s only “disaster” was a multifamily property where he only broke even for nine years.

Of course most of his deals were not even close to that disaster. The key Goacher says is learning to see what others might miss and that means knowing your market. The best way to do this Goacher tells new investors is to look at 50 or 100 houses before making an offer on a single one. That way when the right property comes along you can write an offer immediately. However he likes to put it a bit more colorfully. “You can’t steal in slow motion,” he says.

Part of finding the deal Goacher says is making the deal by ignoring the asking price and instead offering only what the house is worth based on capitalized rent. It also means thinking creatively and seeing a deal where someone else might see an eyesore.

One of Goacher’s biggest successes was an old brick building in a mostly abandoned industrial section of Asheville near the French Broad. At the time in the mid-1980s no one saw value in large, vacant urban property and lenders laughed at him when he applied for a loan.

“I can tell you nobody’s going to lend you money for that building,” one banker said to him. “That area is full of vandals. And the building is terrible! It’s got no windows.” “Yes it does,” Goacher shot back. “I’ve counted them; there’s 82 windows in it. There’s just not very much glass.” In the end Goacher’s eye for a deal proved the skeptical banker wrong. He owner-financed the $130,000 mortgage on the 26,000-square-foot building and rented out its 14 units to entrepreneurs and artists.

His bold purchase marked the beginning of the neighborhood’s revitalization. Soon the rest of the old warehouses and factories were snatched up and when Goacher finally sold that first building in 2002, it fetched a tidy $535,000.

Like just about anyone who does anything for 30 years, Goacher has evolved over time. Now he pursues industrial and commercial projects rather than residential. But he still says residential is the way to start, with a combination of rehabs and long-term holds to both create income and build wealth. “You might do a dance that would be ‘Flip, flip, keep. Flip, flip, flip, keep. Then flip, keep, keep. Then flip, flip, keep, keep,’” Goacher says. “And eventually you get to the point where you build up your portfolio to where you have some of those that will build wealth, which are the buy, fix up and keeps.”

Goacher has reached – and exceeded – that point. But whether it’s residential, industrial, or commercial properties, he’s ready to keep dancing. Don’t miss this great opportunity to learn from one of the best September 11 at CREIA.