The age group from 55 to 64 has the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity. And this number has been increasing annually since 1996. And with good reason the depressed economy, massive layoffs and sheer necessity. Which stems from people suddenly realizing that they are not prepared for retirement? The statistics say that in order to retire comfortably it is going to take 200,000 to 250,000 dollars at retirement.And Baby boomers have been hit hard as a result of the depressed economy and by how in some industries by middle age you are too old to be there any longer so you are laid off. In just about all instances Baby Boomers fall short of those numbers. There are other factors involved here like children having to move back home due to having lost their jobs as well. More baby Boomers have to raise their grand children for various reasons. It is these and more reasons why Baby Boomers are a Majority in Home Based Business Ventures.There is a very slim chance that anyone has been able to save anywhere near the amount. That the statistics say you will need to retire comfortably. And Baby Boomers want to work for themselves anyway. So it is these reasons that are making Home Based Business Ventures more attractive to this age group. Having to offset the effects of over consumption and not prioritizing on saving for retirement. The ratio of people from 55 to 64 starting a Home Based Business Venture in more than twice that of a person less than 25 years old.So this will undoubtedly be a continued trend seeing as the issue of Health Care and unforeseen illness come into the equation. But on the other hand it is the Baby Boomers who are excelling in being Home Based Business Entrepreneurs. And they are creating some impressive results creating some rather impressive lifestyles. Gaining the freedom to focus on their health and enjoy full rich and highly productive lives. Baby Boomers are a Majority in Home Based Business Ventures.Because with their age comes a great wealth of life experience. Which is no doubt is serving them well in their transition from employee to entrepreneur. The experience that you acquire from living and meeting people and having long standing friendships this entire thing will serve them very well in their new Home Based Business lives

What are Below Market Value (BMV) properties?BMV is an abbreviation for the term Below Market Value.Below Market Value (BMV) properties are residential properties that are available below their market value. This is normally because the owners are faced with some kind of financial difficulty and want to or need to dispose of their property quickly and without going through a protracted marketing and sales process. The precursor to this is quite often the threat of repossession.In recent years, a whole new industry has sprung up around Below Market Value (BMV) properties. Property investment chat rooms are full of individuals claiming to have found a Below Market Value (BMV) property at a 10%,15% even 20% below its market value.As a trained surveyor my first reaction to this is ‘poppy cock’. There really is no such thing.The guidance from the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors on how a surveyor should value residential property is contained in Appendix 5.1 of the Royal Institute for Chartered Surveyors Appraisal and Valuation Standards (Red Book). The basis for the valuation of a residential investment property is normally its’ market value. Market value is defined in the Chartered Surveyors hand-book as:’The estimated amount for which a property should exchange on the date of valuation between a willing buyer and a willing seller in an arm’s-length transaction after proper marketing wherein the parties had each acted knowledgeably, prudently and without compulsion.’Therefore, if as an investor you think that a property is worth £200,000 because maybe a similar property sold for that last year, and you buy it for £180,000 you might conclude or be told you are getting the property for 10% Below Market Value (BMV). Rubbish, if the property has been marketed i.e. advertised by an estate agent and unless you have held a gun to the seller’s head, the market value of that property is £180,000.How do I beat the credit crunch?Where a Below Market Value (BMV) property could exist is if the property was not fully marketed first. This situation occurs where property buyers are able to access so called ‘distressed or motivated sellers’ who cannot afford or want to go through the normal marketing and sales exercise. To find out how to access motivated sellers.It is also true that because of the speed and unpredictable nature of the auction process (you are never sure how many and what buyers you are going to get) it is possible that properties bought through auction could be described as being Below Market Value (BMV)The Below Market Value (BMV) Property IndustryThe new Below Market Value (BMV) property industry has emerged during the current property boom because companies have latched onto the large potential profits of buying property at a discount and then renting these investment properties back to their original owners. Favourable financing conditions have meant that these companies have used their instant paper profits they make on these transactions to borrow additional funds to expand their operations. The industry even has its’ own trade organisation called the Property Buyers Association (PROBAS) comprising of companies that offer to purchase a distressed sellers property for cash as well as sorting out the legal side of the transaction.Morally there are arguments for and against these companies who use their ‘negotiating’ skills and the desperate situation of the seller, (who often need to get their hands on cash fast;) to obtain a significant discount to the value of the property. They argue that they are providing a useful service for their clients; others would say they prey on the vulnerability and desperation of the less fortunate members of our society.Beware of the Below Market Value (BMV) ‘middle men’This new industry has given rise to a spin off sector aimed at landlords & property investors who want to emulate the success of these companies by locating their own ‘motivated sellers’ and purchasing Below Market Value (BMV) properties that they either keep or sell on at an instant profit. Companies and individuals have set up to exploit this property investor led feeding frenzy. Property investment chat rooms such as Russ Whitney have been taken over by chumps masquerading as property professionals, whose previous job, if they had one was probably opening the door to a load of drunken teenagers in a city centre bar.These individuals set themselves up as Below Market Value (BMV) gurus and introducers either offering to sell their full-proof Below Market Value (BMV) finding system or increasingly to sell potential investors so called Below Market Value (BMV) leads to individuals they have tracked down who are ‘desperate to sell’.The question is always, why? Why would these individuals be passing on leads for so called Below Market Value (BMV) properties if they are such great deals? The simple answer is that they are ‘chancers’. If they can sell a few leads for a couple hundred pounds and then an introducer’s fee for the sale of a property at a couple of thousand, it’s not a bad days ‘pay’!One only has to look at the whole off-plan debacle for parallels. Here again naive and overly ambitious property investors were manipulated by unscrupulous middle men out to make a ‘fast buck’. The result is that many property investors have been left high and dry having over paid for new investments and are now facing financial heartache for many years to come.Below Market Value (BMV) dangersThese are not the only dangers lurking with Below Market Value (BMV) properties. Even where a landlord manages to side step the middle men and does all their own leg work there is a little know hidden danger with so called Below Market Value (BMV) property which all relates to the provisions of the 1986 Insolvency Act.The result is that a landlord who legitimately purchases a Below Market Value (BMV) property could find that several years down the line and unbeknown to them that the seller has become bankrupt and suddenly their trustee is coming after the landlord with a court order to either reverse the sale or claim back the difference between the open market value of the property and it’s sale price. This is because the Insolvency Act allows trustees of a bankrupt to protect themselves from the bankrupt giving away their assets or selling them at below the market price. A landlord purchasing a Below Market Value (BMV) property is potentially exposed to these provisions for up to 5 years assuming no fraud or the parties are associated in any way.It is possible for a landlord who is looking to invest in a Below Market Value (BMV) property and is worried about getting caught out by this legal loophole to cover them self. What they need to do is to get the seller to Execute a Deed of Solvency and thereby effectively sign an undertaking to say they were solvent at the time of the sale. A landlord’s solicitor as part of the transaction will then need to arrange an insurance policy. This policy will cover the landlord for the two year period from the date of the transaction in which they are exposed to the potential that the seller goes bankrupt and that the trustee can make a claim against the landlord to set-aside the transaction.Property investment karmaThe older I get the more I believe in the karma of property investment- ‘what goes around comes around’. Let’s not forget that much of the promised profit from Below Market Value (BMV) properties is at the expense of desperate and easily exploited individuals who have ended up in financial difficulties. There is some poetic justice in a property investor motivated by greed and prepared to exploit vulnerable individuals to end up with: a ‘crap’ investment property, occupied by dodgy and bankrupt tenants, who are then taken to court by disgruntled trustees and to top it all because of a falling housing market end up paying more than the property is in fact worth.

We’re not too proud to say we made gigantic mistakes when we hired property managers for some of our properties. Our biggest errors happened before we even bought the properties, but we continued to make them until one day Dave was reading his name in the paper, calling him “an absentee landlord of a local crack house”, and we were making the discovery that our other property manager was robbing rent money from us.

When my husband and I moved into a triplex we own in Toronto, we dismissed our property manager and started collecting rent from the other tenants directly. Imagine our surprise when the checks were for $100 more than we expected! The property manager had lied to us about the amount of rent we were getting, and he had been pocketing the difference. We figure he stole at least $2,000 from us in that one year. The worst part is that his scam was easily preventable.

Make sure this doesn’t happen to you by asking for copies of every lease agreement. And ask for photocopies of the checks. If the tenant pays by cash or some other method (we use a lot of e-mail money transfers with our tenants), get a printout of the transfer or get copies of the receipts given to the tenants for cash payments. It is good to have this documentation for tax purposes and it will help prevent your property manager from taking an extra cut off the top.

Other things you can do to protect yourself from a bad property manager include:

Before you buy a property, make sure you are able to hire a good property management firm. There are some properties that good property managers will not manage. And if they won’t manage them, there’s a good chance they are more work then they are worth.
Research your potential property manager obsessively. When you’ve found a firm that you think you’d like to hire, get references and find out what other properties they manage. Drive by those properties and see how well they are maintained. Take a walk around and hope to bump into a tenant. See if the tenant is happy with the property management company. And definitely call a few of the owners of these properties the company manages and find out if they would recommend the company.
If there is one unit that always seems to be vacant, check on it. Visit the unit or have someone else visit for you. Confirm that it is vacant. If someone is living there, you want to find out why you aren’t getting rent for it. And if it is really vacant, you need to see it yourself to find out why and fix the problem.
If you are being charged for snow removal, check the weather history and make sure it actually snowed that day. If you are being charged for repairs, get receipts or photographs of the repairs.
We’ve learned a healthy dose of paranoia goes a long ways. So trust your instincts, but check them too. A few extra phone calls and a few extra steps here and there can save you thousands of dollars a year.

Working in research and development for a large infomercial company, I had many opportunities to do large advertising campaigns with lots of different online advertising agencies and Internet marketing companies. I would literally go online for days researching companies and the types of advertising they offered to find just the right ones to meet the needs of our company.

We spent thousands of dollars before we were able to come up with accurate measures of which campaigns were actually converting prospects into customers. But after much testing, I came to an interesting conclusion about online advertising.

Many advertisers have a large emphasis on the amount of exposure you get to your web site, but after running many expensive campaigns, I have learned that this is not what matters at all. The things that matters most in web marketing usually boil down to how many qualified, targeted click thrus you can generate to your site.

Click thrus are the main thing you need to focus on when creating an advertising campaign. For our company, it has been the most accurate measure of the quality of any type of advertising we bought, whether it was banner ads, email campaigns, popunders, search engine, pay per click or any other type of advertising you do on the web.

Click thrus represent an Internet user who has been motivated to visit your site by clicking on an email or online advertisement of any type. It is the highest quality traffic you can have coming to your site.

Once you get this type of high quality traffic to your site, you can then focus on trying to convert your visitors to customers and sales. If you have a tracking method or software, you can then determine your conversion ratio. The conversion ration will tell you how many visitors you will need to get to your site to convert a sale.

If you can figure out how many click thrus it takes to make a sale and you know now much it cost to get clicks to your web site, you can then use that information to predict the results of some of your advertising campaigns. Armed with this information, you will then have a lot more confidence when spending money or time on any type of online advertising.

If you are looking to generate high quality click through’s to your web site, you will find that this is not the easiest thing to do. You will find many types of online advertising and lots of companies making outrageous claims on how much exposure you get. But when it comes down to it, exposure means nothing if you don’t generate click thrus to your web site. If you want to generate true targeted traffic to your web site, you should definitely take a good look at these types of advertising.

Email Marketing – Email marketing is probably the most direct way to generate click thrus to your web site. You can either hire a third party company to mail to their lists or you can build a list of your own.

Email is great because you can instantly reach large numbers of interested prospect and start to generate click through’s within hours of sending your message out.

This method of marketing does have its drawbacks. It is getting more and more difficult to send email, because of SPAM regulations and extensive filtering by ISP’s. Fortunately, many marketing tools are coming out to help the average person start and maintain a list without knowing a lot of technical knowledge.

The best way to use email marketing is to build an opt-in list of prospects that you can mail to over and over again. Using a third party list or company to email will cost you a fortune if you do it over and over without building a list of your own. This is why it is important to concentrate on building your opt in list. Many of the people who opt in to your list will eventually become your customers if you have a solution to their problem.

Coregistration – This is powerful list building method many Internet marketers have been using for about 3 years now. Coregistration advertising is the process of generating opt-in email leads to add to your mailing list or autoresponder for marketing purposes. Using this form of advertising, you can build a large list of qualified prospects in little time.

The quality of coregistration leads can vary from company to company so it really pays to understand how they are generated and how old the leads are. The best types of leads to buy are called Opt-In coregistrations where individuals have specifically responded to your ad for more information.

You can also get other type of leads that are cheaper, but they are not as high quality as the leads generated specifically for your business. In addition, these cheaper leads are harder to deal with when mailing your messages.

Once you have these leads in your email system, they become a source of targeted click thrus every time you mail out to your lists. In addition, you are basically getting free advertising once you have your own list. Coregistration helps you get to that point quickly if you use it correctly and if you find some solid lead sources.

Search Engines – Search engines have long been a source of rich, targeted traffic, but competition and strict search engine rules make it difficult to simply put up a web site and take advantage of this type of traffic.

You could hire a search engine optimization company (often called SEO’s) to help you get your site placed, but this usually costs a minimum of $1000 up to $5000 or more and a significant amount of time to get results. Most web site owners would be better off applying basic search engine optimization techniques themselves and saving their money. These techniques can include gaining link partners, frequently adding fresh content, and utilizing relevant keywords. The results of these efforts can be just as rewarding as using an SEO company in many cases.

Once you get listed, you will start to receive targeted click thrus to your web site from people specifically searching for what you offer.

Pay Per Click Search Engines – If you are frustrated with other types of traditional advertising and you want a direct relationship between what you spend and the amount of advertising you get, you need to look into pay per click search engine advertising.

You can sometimes get traffic to your web site for as little as $0.10 per click. Once you try to advertise using pay per click search engines, you will find that many of the best keywords will cost you much more than this (sometimes $1 to $5 or even more)! The key to this type of advertising is to do research to uncover low cost keywords so you can bid on them get traffic to your site.

Using this strategy, you should be able to use pay per click search engines to easily produce targeted clicks to your web site.

PR and Media – If you are looking for massive exposure at a very low cost, pr and media could be your ticket. A solid pr campaign could easily bring hundreds to thousands of targeted click thrus to your web site.

Getting your business in the news can be a difficult task and you need to either hire a solid pr company that promotes from a marketing standpoint or you need to learn how to do some basic PR yourself. Hiring a PR company can be expensive, so it may pay to simply find an experienced freelance writer who will help you.

PR/media can be hit or miss and it can take some persistence to start getting stories published and to start driving traffic to your web site. But for the amount of time and effort you spend doing PR, it can really pay off in the long run in the form of hundreds, thousands to even millions of dollars in free advertising.

EBay, Amazon and Other Large Sites – Large traffic sites that allow visitors to participate, open accounts and create profiles are great places to get free exposure for your web site. There is a lot of traffic generated by sites such as Amazon and eBay which gives you the opportunity to harvest some of it through creating user profiles and participating with their communities.

This is a simple, low cost way to generate traffic to your site since it does not really cost anything to setup accounts with these sites.

Banner Ads – Many people say banner advertising is dead, but it still continues to be a great source of Internet traffic for many web site owners. The best part about banner advertising is that the prices have gone down significantly, so if you can create a banner that works, you can get a lot more quality exposure in comparison to other types of advertising.

The quality of your banner ad and your target audience will determine how many click thrus you get from your banner campaign, but many banner campaigns range anywhere from 1% click thrus to 8% click thrus, or sometimes as high as 20%. So if you are planning on doing any banner advertising, test a banner on a small level, and see how well it converts, and this will give you an indication of how well it converts on a larger level.

Affiliate Marketing/Joint Ventures – Affiliate markting and jv advertising are both similar in nature and. Most professional web marketers would say that it delivers the highest quality click thrus available on the web today. This is because these types of marketing are “endorsement” marketing where you have a particular person with certain credentials promoting your product. This personal referral often generates visitors who are hungry to see what you offer.

You can use this type of marketing by writing a letter to a potential partner who has a large customer base or by installing affiliate software on your web site and advertise for affiliate partners. Using an online affiliate program is very cost effective because you reach targeted visitors online and you only pay for leads or sales (usually a percentage of your sale or a set dollar amount).

Popunders/Guaranteed Visitors/Expired Domains – These traffic sources have been around for a while now and are all heavily promoted forms of advertising. But in comparison to the other forms of advertising, it does not perform as well. Personally, I have experienced sending millions of visitors from this type of traffic with hardly recognizable results.

Most of this traffic is not very targeted because the web site visitors did not get to the site by choice. Instead, they were solicited from third party advertisers using popunders or tricky web pages, which does not make that person a qualified visitor to your web site. There are some networks of advertisers who can provide quality popunders at a reasonable price.

Click thrus are a way to measure the quality of advertising because you can usually figure out how those clicks relate to your sales. That is why it is important to focus on how many click thrus you can produce when creating, marketing and advertising your web site. So next time you by any type of web advertising, try to get some indication of how many targeted click thrus you can expect to generate from that particular campaign, and you can get a good idea of how many sales you can generate.