True or Fraud? I'll let you be the judge...read on please !

Hello my dear readers and I want to start this post by simply apologizing for misleading you on purpose- 

You might’ve typed any word searching for something in particular that you thought you were going to read here and instead I want you to read and find out about something that I think it is very important. You might already heard about it or about this man rather; the name is BURZYNSKI...... Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski !!

The Burzynski Clinic in Houston, TX

Last night I saw the documentary by the same name which tells the story about this Biochemist and Physician born in Poland who had this “crazy” idea of finding the cure for cancer which got him into a lot of trouble with the American Cancer Society and the FDA  ultimately risking  a prison sentence and a hefty fine. The amazing thing narrated in this documentary is that his clinical trials started back in 1976, and according to what is portrayed in the film, as soon as he started obtaining positive results such as actually CURING CANCER he got bombarded with questionings, congressional hearings, subpoena of all his records and files, all kinds of obstacles were posed for him not to continue his research and studies-

Anyways, I will not bore you with the details, I want to one more time apologize for having misled you to my blog page but I truly felt compelled to help spread the word about this documentary, wether you agree or not ..... you will be the judge! 

In Times of Turmoil....(PART IV)

                                          AWESOME PHOTO COURTESY OF Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Welcome back to PART IV of this series of posts dedicated to investing during uncertain times, and as I promised on PART III, I will discuss a little bit about what I think is a safe investment in Real Estate, examining the positive and also the very few negative aspects of them. 

As I mentioned, nowadays I really like NNN investments such as Walgreens, CVS, Dollar General, any Telecom/Cell Phone company.... you get the idea, strong and stable tenants. What I like abut them first of all is that their NNN status allows a worry free ownership, the tenant is responsible for all the expenses such as property taxes, property hazard insurance, general maintenance of roof and structure and also cleaning , landscaping, exterior paint, parking lot.....EVERYTHING!! 

This is the perfect investment for those foreign national investors by the way,  those that simply cannot or do not want to deal with the property management aspect of the asset since they are not in the US. 
The CAP is generally lower in this type of investment and also is directly related to the area where the building is located, but the NET revenue is nevertheless good, not to mention safe, since it is considered a very conservative lower risk type of investment. 

Across the board nationwide, any of these chain drugstores generates a NOI of roughly 7.25%, (the lowest I have seen is right here in Miami-DADE County where it is very hard to get anything above 6%, but then again premium location comes with a premium price tag). 
Is location at all important for this type of investment?  Well, since the leases are corporate guaranteed, Yes and No, and let me elaborate a little on that; either company will usually sign a very long lease, I have seen 20 years initial term with 10 options of renewal for 5 years each; every lease is structured differently but more or less they have a similarity among them and that is their length, if the Tenant decides to close that location they will pay the rent for the reminder of the initial term or the term they are currently on, risky? Maybe, but if you consider the stability of these type of tenants the risk is very much mitigated. 
Aside from Real Estate I am a day trader and I have performed the due diligence of analyzing these companies from a trader stand point, and they look solid as a rock, plus remember that the Owner/Landlord is getting a check every month without any effort on his part, as I would call it “Non Energetic Income”, the other factor that may stop the average investor is the price tag on one of these which can easily run up the double digits territory (as in the $10million +range depending on the area where is located). 

Other good ones and solid as well are the AT&T’s and the Verizon Wireless’ which can bring an even higher CAP but with shorter term leases though, nevertheless the top Telecom companies are nowadays very solid.

Mobile phone traffic in the US is at an all time high and in crescendo. 
Dollar General stores are also in my list of “good” mainly because their CAP rate usually is above 8% and sometimes over 9% depending on the area. 

They are mainly located in lower income rural areas and prices generally are a little over $1million, very good for those investors with a decent amount of capital but not high enough to get into a chain drug store deal; of course the rule of thumb here is “the higher the CAP the higher the risk” like everything else in life, but once you have evaluated the status of that corporation which eventually would be your tenant, and once you have established that indeed is a corporate guaranteed lease the risk is greatly diminished and the investment therefore is a lot safer than buying a strip mall or apartment building. I will get into the GSA properties on my next final PART V of this series. For now....

Cheers!

In Times of Turmoil.... (PART I)

                                            Picture Courtesy of: McClatchy Newspapers

In times of turmoil is when poor decisions are made, is exactly when out of desperation a person, without the right tools or knowledge ends up getting into all different kind of messy situations that are hard to get out of, and I’m talking about economic decisions, commercial moves that need to be taken and done with a cool head. That is what I’m seeing a lot in our current environment and I try to advise people about the risks involved by investing into something for them unknown or something that from my trader and commercial investment realtor point of view does not make sense; take “Stanford” for example, I have personal friends and customers that invested heavily with his firm just because they were offered a steady 15% return and we all know how it ended up. 

   Picture Courtesy of Scott Olson/Getty Images

Obviously the amount of capital and disposable cash that any given person might have available for any given investment is a determining factor directly related to the amount of courage he or she might display at the moment of making a financial decision, and I’m talking here about those people that even though they have a large amount of cash not necessarily means that they have financial education and if they get it right, out of pure sheer luck, they look good and get the admiration of others, they are then called all sort of names such as “ballsy”, “risk taker”, “financial wiz” and so on, and if they don’t get it right then they really don’t get affected much since most likely, that loss will be written off their taxes at the end of the year.

But for the majority of folks out there, that are the average “Joe” with limited supply of cash but enough to get themselves into a mess, there is not room for error, no mercy if they mess up, so getting financial education is crucial, and I am not suggesting that everyone should become a trader or read a ton of books about trading the markets, but do a little research about safe heaven investments where money can be “parked” for a while until we get to see clear skies one more time. Here in Miami, from where I am blogging and where I have lived for the past two decades, the economical climate is somehow different thanks to foreign investments pouring into our city, but the rest of the Nation is still suffering and seems that recovery is far from being achieved. I don’t want my blogs to be lengthy so I will divide this topic into several parts where I will share with you what I have learned by trading currencies, reading and studying the markets, getting coached by whom I consider the best in the business of trading commodities, my financial coach at AMR University, and of course real estate investments that I have analyzed and look safe. Hopefully many of you will benefit from my attempt and I really hope you’ll enjoy it.

Cheers!