We were young,” Joni relates, “and we thought Corporate America would take care of us, so we kind of… left the real estate world at that point and went on to what we were trained to do in college. My husband is an engineer, and my degree is actually in dental hygiene.”

Fast forward to 1998. Joni, at that time a busy Mom of three adolescent boys, was looking for a little more flexibility than her Dental Hygienist position could afford. Remembering the success they had enjoyed with creative real estate techniques, what did she do?

“My husband and I opened a gift store.”

Huh?

“Bill kept his full-time job,” Joni says, “but I went on and did the gift store. Unfortunately, that didn't work out as planned and after six years we ended up closing shop.”

Sometimes, it’s the detours that put us into position to take advantage of life’s opportunities. Had she still been a Dental Hygienist, Joni may have missed what happened next.

When they closed the store, Joni looked at Bill and said, “Gee, I don't know what I wanna do. Do I wanna go back into hygiene? Do I not wanna go back to hygiene?"

One day, while looking through the local newspaper, something caught Joni’s eye.

“There was a little teeny tiny ad for a weekend real estate conference in my hometown,” she says, “and I looked at it and went on-line and checked it out.”

The next thing Joni knew, she was telling Bill, “I'm going to check this out and see what it's all about.”

Joni spent four days at that event and came home and said, ‘You know what, Bill, let's try this. Let's see if we can make this work.’”

A Taste is All it Takes

What Joni attended, in April of 2004, was a Thursday – Sunday conference sponsored by a local real estate investing group. She paid a couple of hundred dollars to attend, and she immediately started networking with other investors, both new and experienced. She also learned about a creative investing technique that sounded somewhat familiar.

“They talked about selling real estate using that lease option technique,” Joni states.

At the seminar Joni got a taste, one she found she enjoyed.

“It was definitely just a taste of a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and after that conference, I signed up for a real estate investment group in our area and started buying home-study courses and going to boot camps and things like that, and just really committed myself to getting as educated as I could in this business.”

The group Joni joined is in Novi, Michigan, near Joni’s home, which is in the Pontiac area. She was impressed right away with the group, which numbered about 250 people.

“What they do,” Joni relates, “is bring in other real estate investors that have a product to sell, and they get up there and talk about how they were successful and the things that they were successful with. 

“What it did is it gave me, month after month after month, a look at different ways of doing this business. Whether it was wholesaling, rehabbing, short sales, lease options, buying using the lease option, buying using subject to, all the different ways that you can do this business.

“Most important, quite honestly, was just meeting other people, other investors that had great success doing this business and networking with them and talking to them about what they did, what kind of mistakes they made, what kinds of things to avoid and what kinds of things they were successful with.”

I asked Joni if she found most people willing to share their knowledge.

“Most of them, yes,” she replied. “I mean there's always… a few people that like to keep their information close to their sleeve. Unfortunately, they are afraid of competition when really there's more than enough business for everybody.