The most useful person at the free workshop was stacking chairs afterward
My neighbor got a postcard and didn't want to go alone, so I went. Free workshop, Saturday morning, an airport hotel ballroom off the second parking lot. Maybe ninety people, mostly over fifty, a lot of couples.
The first ninety minutes were fine. Genuinely fine. A woman walked through how a rehab budget goes wrong, and her numbers weren't crazy, and she made a point about holding costs that I'd never had put to me that plainly. I took two pages of notes and I still have them.
Then there was a break, and after the break it was a different presentation with the same person delivering it. Testimonial video, a chart with an arrow, and then the packets came out. Three thousand nine hundred for the weekend intensive, and a sheet where you were supposed to write down your available credit across your cards, framed as an exercise in knowing your own capital position. My neighbor filled his in. I didn't fill mine in. Nobody made me, and nobody said a word about it, but a guy in a polo came and stood near my row for a while.
What I actually think about is after. My neighbor went to sign up at the back table and I waited, and there was an older man breaking down the chair rows. I said something about the crowd and he said he'd worked this ballroom for a long time, and that he'd sat through the same pitch in 2009 when he was still thinking about buying a duplex. I asked if he ever bought it. He said no. He said the first hour was real, every time, and that's what makes it work.
My neighbor paid. He went to the weekend. He hasn't bought anything either. The two pages of notes on holding costs are still the best thing I got out of any real estate anything, and they were free, and I'd feel better about that if I hadn't watched thirty people write their credit limits on a piece of paper.