Anyone Used USInvest ? Looking at buying US propety through them

Ryan of US Invest,

Thanks for your input. As I said in my posting …..I wasn't suggesting that the person Andrew Mallone had anything at all to do with your company….just seemed a point of interest when I looked up the address your website quoted as it's US address since a few earlier posters suggested how important it was you guys had a US office.
Great your updating your website…..any chance your example properties could disclose the full street and suburb address while your doing some updates ?
Plus I don't see it as a conflict of interest with you coming onto the forum. If you can contribute legitimate information without directly selling it would be acceptable.

Ryan,

I’ve looked into US Invest as an option previously. Despite being an initially extremely attractive option, the fact that I am utterly unable to independently verify the house you are selling means it is simply a no go. I’m putting a lot of cash at risk here, in a foreign country to boot.

All that value you describe as being part of the $995 initial fee sounds great, really. I’d love all that stuff to be sorted.
However, given that there is no way of knowing what I’m getting myself into without ponying up a thousand backs, I just can’t go ahead. For all that I know you’re relying on people who know little and adding significantly to the house price before selling it on to them.

All this secret squirrel exclusivity business is honestly off putting, everyone else I’ve looked into has been pretty easy to do cursory evaluations on. Sold house are on their web site and their sale prices verifiable on Zillow.

I’d love for you guys to be on the level, especially considering the financing options you recently advertised.
But you need to prove it.

Here in the USA only know of one guy who charges up front fees and most people run from him.
'
Charging up front fees is not some thing I ever saw in the USA. Not until our company started working with international clients did we see people charging for information that is online. Then again we pay 6 % commission for a realtor to sell our homes. This is the norm, with out most people complaining. I can see both sides marketing and expense cost.

Starting to understand things more from the international reseller as I speak to more and more of the Australian resellers.

LOL that's the guy heard his name on one of my tours of Cali .This is only American that charges up front fees that I know of. Pretty much unheard of this in the states. Most people tell you where to go and how to get their. Again learning from the international buyer- and reseller about the different ways we do things.

Talk soon

Hi formites, I was alerted to this post by one of our potential clients and whilst US Invest does not like to get involved in forum discussions (due to an obvious conflict of interest), I wanted to answer a few of the questions floating around on this post. I am one of the Managing Members of USInvest and I currently occupy the property at 2650 SE 7th dr. Pompano Beach, FL 33062. The owner of this property is a gentleman by the name of Craig Chown. Being in the Real Estate business, we are always looking for ways that we can buy distressed Real Estate for less than market value. This deal was brought to me about a year ago and we occupied the property based on the premise that US Invest may in fact one day acquire the foreclosure either for ourselves or one of our clients. Prior to me taking over the property, there was a tenant by the name of Anthony Mellone living in the property who hadn’t paid rent for over a year. Having been in the industry for several years, and a well known property investment coach in America, the owner of the property approached me to see if I could help him remove the tenant and negotiate a deal with the bank to purchase the property. Whilst we did not have to go through with the formal eviction, the aforementioned tenant was removed and US Invest began to negotiate a short sale whereby we would negotiate on the borrowers behalf to purchase the property for less than what was owed on the mortgage. Public records are widely available in the US and I must congratulate you Speedy Gonzalez on your detective work on this subject! It must be made clear, however, that I personally have never had personal contact with the previous tenant and neither has USInvest. The house was in Foreclosure when I was approached to enter discussions with the bank and, like many properties in foreclosure, this property did have an unsavory tenant. I hope this clears things up a bit as to the address discrepancy that has been brought up. The American head office of US Invest is not in Florida. Its actually located at 600 Alexander Rd, Princeton, NJ. We have a 7,000 Sqft. Office in Princeton that houses our Sales, Marketing, Administration and Economic Research Team. We have an office in Florida for our Acquisitions Team as its very accessible to our current markets. This is a nice home on the water, but is internally fitted out as a working office. We have 6 Acquisition officer’s working and living from that location. This offers us a huge advantage to make sure proper research is done. Nearly every night you will find multiple Acquisition staff burning the mid-night oil on our due-diligence procedures. To act in the most professional manner possible I do not intend to self-promote US Invest in any way in this forum, but I will answer all comments thus far. I am not aware of any posts ever made by our staff or clients and should you have any concerns or questions, please feel free to contact me directly. And to lastly answer the recent posts. Florra, We are sorry we could not do enough on our end to win your business. That is regrettable on our part. Please also be aware we do not guarantee any returns whatsoever. Yes we do sell property with active tenants paying a monthly amount so it is a very low risk investment, however all investments carry risk. 12-16% is definitely achievable and we have members experience these returns year on year. But we also have property in the 9-11% region too. We are realistic with what is achievable and we have a very good reputation in the market. Were not out there promoting 20-30% returns from areas such as Detroit or Vegas, because we have been in this business since 2007 and have kept a good reputation because we do things the right way. We offer quality investments in areas that will actually come back to pre GFC levels and surpass them. The fact that we have been around for 5 years and you have not found anything bad regarding our company is hopefully taken as a good sign. Zmagen, Your post had some good humor to it. I would like to point out, though, that our membership encompasses a lot more then access to our website to see what properties we have to sell. We give away quite a bit more then that, and our membership is also fully refundable. We do not make money from people becoming members; we make money from selling quality investment properties. I will try to explain our membership strategy because I see you are also in a similar business Selling Japanese property to Australian’s. I commend your approach to selling property, but this is not our current model. To begin to explain our model, let me point out that we spend quite a bit of time and money researching the right markets. We have two full-time research teams. One team researches the State, City and Town we look for property in and the other team researches the viability of the homes in the chosen “hot spots”. Our team is headed up by Reid Stewart in our Florida location. Reid is one of the foremost experts in US Property Acquisition. Reid’s team look through thousands of foreclosures a week in our chosen "hot spots" to bring to market what we believe to be the absolute best property investments around. All our homes are fully renovated and tenanted, so a full turn key service. During the renovation process we always replace the basics like carpet, paint, tiles etc. We also give new bathrooms, kitchens and appliances in most cases. We then replace everything that’s older then 5 years. So for instance a boiler with a 20 year shelf life we will replace if it’s over 5 years old, same goes for the A/C etc. We do this to ensure our members see real returns and not pipe dreams. Last thing we want is a member buying a property rented out with 12% net return, but after 9 months the HVAC goes bust and they need to shell out money to replace. This therefore is not a 12% return, and could end up becoming a negatively geared property like the majority of what’s on offer in Aus. We take massive pride in the service we offer, and repeat business is the foundation to our success. So to quickly explain why we charge a membership. As some of you may know there is a lot of work involved with getting an overseas client ready to purchase in America. They must fully understand the tax implications with not only the IRS, but also the ATO, they must be properly structured with the right corporate veil to protect themselves from what we all know to be a highly litigious nation. On top of all that our members want finance, which is not a clear-cut scenario when America runs on the FICO score system and Australians don’t have credit here. So we have a lot of work to do to make our members acceptable to the US banks that we have partnered up with. There is a lot more we do long before a person can buy a property in America with us. Anyway to cut a long story short and to try and keep this post from going on forever, a few years back we never charged a membership fee, much like your model now zmagen. Because of this we experienced a lot of window shoppers that were not serious investors and wasted a lot of our time. We move a lot of property on a weekly basis and can only give our full-undivided attention to people who are ready to buy property in America. $995 is a drop in the ocean when you are about to spend $40,000- $150,000 on a property. For what our members get, this amount is insignificant to them, and if some of you reading this are thinking that its not an insignificant amount to you, please rest assured that it is fully refundable. We also ALWAYS refunded back the $995 on the first purchase of a home with us. Were not in the business of trying to make a living off a refundable $995 membership fee. Its purely a deposit on future business. The membership strategy has been very successful for our company and our members and we make no apologies about it. Things stay exclusive for our members and when our weekly properties come to market, our members have a very real opportunity of getting exactly what they want without those properties being available to any guy with an internet connection (no disrespect to your current model zmagen). And on the flip side it benefits us, because we only deal with the right people who are ready to build their property portfolios. It’s a win-win. Thank you all for reading this lengthy post. We do not wish to enter into a debate with anyone and respect all your views and comments. Our company does not want to market itself on public forums, but we had to answer the current questions, I hope you can all appreciate our standing. I would like to apologies for the current standing of our website. It is currently going through some much needed changes, as we have grown from 30 staff to over 70 staff in the last 9 months, so “our team” and “the contact us” will be getting updated this week as will some other aesthetics, so please bear with us. The website should be updated before the end of this week were told. Should you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to contact me directly at [email protected] and I would be happy to discuss this with you in person. Humble Regards, Ryan

Explorer74

There is another thread titled "US Invest" on this forum. I questioned them about the Princeton address they also list. I find it extraordinary that they got creative and did some cutting & pasting and showed the office building they supposedly operate out of with US Invest signage. When I questioned this the reply was that "well the signage doesn't actually exist but we are getting one made up" How convenient !!

I thought the signage looked photoshopped!

I have to agree with Marks comments. Only deal with companies that deal direct with the owners. At least that way you know exactly what you are getting.

It has been my experience that so called wholesalers rarely provide good deals.

Yes agreed, there are a few. Not many though. The trouble is transparency of cost price they paid and rehab actual costs. 

How can you really assess both these.

even price records on zillow are wrong or slow to update.

so how can people really know cost base. 

If it is over valued then lending becomes impossible from us banks

I agree with Joel. There is no right or wrong. Buying wholesale through MLS listings means the investor has to find the contractors to do the estimates and then running risks that there could be cost overruns. Then finding tenants and property managers etc…if there are delays it eats into the return. Don't get me wrong…it can be done if you have the right contacts….I have a realtor that I deal with myself and when her contractors do an estimate…if there are cost overruns then they wear it at their cost. But the odds of everyone having that same sort of deal is pretty rare. Like Joel I have had plenty of clients who had a choice and chose the turnkey path where they wanted it all done. Couldn't agree with Joel more about the turnkey company actually being the owner and as long as it's a transparent transaction you will do quite well. There's also the argument that the best deals don't make it to the MLS anyway.