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Real Estate Private Lending: WARNING Things Not To Do Using Craigslist and Bulletin Boards

By Michel Lautensack

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 02Aug2009 Word count: 509 Viewed: 91 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

We've talked about advertising with Craigslist and using bulletin boards a little bit. A word of warning here, just be careful of the language you use. I personally got in real trouble using Craigslist. I warn you of trying to make sure that it's informational. You can talk about a seminar or a free report or free information. All that is fine.

Do not talk about a specific deal or investment. That will be deemed as a solicitation. I do put out an asterisk here with Craigslist and bulletin boards, because I know the SECs trolls Craigslist. That's well documented. That's how I got in trouble.

My Experience with Advertising on Craigslist

So again, be careful. I got in trouble because I live in Philadelphia. An individual in Pittsburgh, at least it was a Pennsylvania residence, started responding to my ads. He started e-mailing me, sounded very sophisticated, a very smart guy.

We went back and forth by e-mail, probably about a dozen times back and forth with a lot of questions. I kept answering his questions. I started talking about particular opportunities that I had. I even talked about the different programs and how they worked.

The process went on for a couple weeks. He ultimately said, "Yes, I want to invest." I said, "Fine, here's my title company. Talk to them. Set it up. Send the money to the title company." That's the way it should work. Then all of a sudden, he disappears. He doesn't return a single e-mail. I thought, "Well, that's odd. Why would you have 15 or 20 e-mails with me and then just disappear?" So I didn't think that much of it. A couple weeks went by and I thought, "No big deal."

Then I got a big, thick package in the mail from the Pennsylvania SEC asking me a lot of questions and within their letter were a lot of my e-mails that I'd sent to this individual. They had actually cut and paste e-mails back and put it in the letters, but I knew exactly who it was.

In the end, all they did was kind of slapped my hand pretty good. They made sure that I no longer used Craigslist or no longer used a website or no longer used Internet advertising to do direct solicitation of these types of investments. There was no financial penalty involved. I was just told that I could no longer do that type of advertising. Believe me; I complied within about 10 minutes. I never did that again.

One thing you'll notice, of all of these things I've talked about tonight, I've not talked about a website. I'm not a big believer in a website, other than a way they can opt-in to get your free report or something of that nature. I do not have a website that says, "Here's my program. Here's my returns." I do not promote that in my materials at all just for that reason.

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