Hey!…..What are you doing here?
…trying to figure out if Scott’s sultry seductive Vegas-style offering is worth its weight? Amiright?
Is he offering you your “get out of jail” free card (for those Monopoly enthusiasts?) Gamble much?
I get it you are tired of going to the J-O-B or current station in life, and you are trying to improve your game.
-And you might be asking yourself a deep-seated question like,
“Is this all there is to life?”
I know that was the question I kept asking myself. Seriously, follow me for a just a sec.
(and I promise I will tell you all about Scott Yancey and his super-sized sales process.)
I wrestled with that question. My question went like this.
If someone would have pulled me aside when I was a kid and showed me a picture of what my life would become,
would I want to shoot myself?
-I always envisioned a much brighter future. The future in my head always involved fun, freedom and friends.
If I had to design my life back then, it wouldn’t have entailed the following life-sucks:
- mortgages,
- medical bills,
- bankruptcy,
- divorce,
- alimony,
- child-support,
- and a boss that wanted more than I could give, but that is exactly what happened to me.
I turned in my youthful dreams of freedom and fun for a jail sentence of a sick sadistic rat-race life. It was like running up a hill of rocky gravel, no matter how hard I ran the ground gave out beneath me.
I call it pinball perseverance. You get bumped around and you just keep going with all the let-downs of life.
Now, if you are this far into reading this then you prob can relate.
…and I have a message for you.
I tried the real estate deal. Well, I more than tried. I bet the farm on it. I lost it all. So, I am here to tell you. I know what is at the end of that road for the average guy/gal.
The problem was that at the time, I didn’t know how average I was. I didn’t realize that when it came to negotiations and being an entrepreneur, I sucked.
Sorry Sam. It’s the truth.
So glad that is all behind me now. Why?
I met a guy with some mad internet skills. He mentored me and he showed me how to run a successful online business.
So am I gonna pitch his program to you now? Well no… You came to do research on Scott and I’d just be another Schmuck pitching you on a different idea.
Answer… In all seriousness though… what I’ve learned: if you don’t get the guy/gal who lives between your ears right first, there’s no help for ya. So if you really wanna win big, you need to get some great coaching to start.
You see, I have been right where you are now. Looking, learning, researching, rationalizing. It all got me nowhere. Actually, it got me in a courtroom filing Chapter 13.
So yeah, I’m gonna tell you to do something different.
The problem is that most of us that go to these real estate courses don’t have a ton of cash to throw around. If you make a mistake, you lose it,
while the guru tees up for another round of golf.
Amilyin’?
So that is my whole pitch not much of one I admit.
To sum it up like Nike on Antidepressants:
Don’t do what I did
I’d rather see you put $20,000 towards your credit card debt than sign up for some mastermind real estate workshop.
Before I get on to the review (and it’s a doozy),
let me tell you what the game changer was for me.
I needed to get aware of my own behaviors and beliefs. I needed to know my weaknesses and put safe guards in place to keep my biz from me.
So I recommend you learn as much as you can about yourself before you go crazy spending money on the latest program.
Take a look at my recommended resources area for more info.
I would imagine you are ready to take a stroll with me through what I found on the latest TV star gone guru.
Scott Yancey Real Estate Seminar, Books and Product Critique
Well . . . how to put this . . . .
If you spend any time online researching Scott Yancey, you’ll quickly find that folks out there either love him or hate him.
I kid you not. So let’s start with the neutral and the positive and then move into the other. I’m not at all into slamming people, so that won’t be my focus. But I will be honest and report what others are saying.
Yancey possesses the personality traits that I see common to successful real-estate investors and wealth builders: teachability, willingness to work hard, tolerance to risk, and an abundance mindset.
By abundance mindset, I mean a person who sees wealth and success as achievable and deservable (not a word – but I mean they feel they deserve it) possibilities (as opposed to someone who only envisions themselves making minimum wage because of this or that perceived handicap).
Successful investors and wealth builders seem to typically attach themselves to mentors early on (think Gary Johnston and his neighbor Volney), absorb their instruction and advice, and act on it. In college, Yancey was hired as a runner by a real estate investment firm. His boss, Walter J. Plumb III, told him that his last three runners had become millionaires.
Yancey began to understand why when later Plumb started giving him advice about real estate investment opportunities. Get your real estate license, Plumb told him, and convert your apartment building to condominiums, and then use your real estate license to sell the condos.
Yancey heeded the advice, did what Plumb suggested, and made so much on the sales from that deal and others during the year that followed that he quit college and went into real estate full-time.
(A little aside here . . . please don’t take this as an endorsement from me to not attend college!)
For many years following, Yancey worked with Plumb and another real estate investor mentor, Jon D. Quitiquit.
He gained much experience in purchasing large tracts of land, subdividing, and selling it to large home developers. Eventually, he went out on his own to do the same thing, experiencing success and profit.
In 2007, the economy tanked.
Yancey claims that he saw this coming, so he and wife Amie decided to pull out of real estate and cool their heels for a few years at their home in Cabo San Lucas.
They never carried out this plan because of a conversation that Yancey overheard. He was at a café near his home in Nevada, and at the next table over, heard talk of the real estate market in Las Vegas, where one could supposedly buy a house for as little as $36K, fix it up, and then rent it out for $900/month.
The truism Money is made in bad economies came to mind, and Yancey ditched his plans for Cabo and turned his eyes on Vegas.
The research revealed that there was indeed a large market for fixer-uppers, with significant profit to be made in buying low, rehabbing, and either flipping or holding properties as rentals.
Yancey and his wife dove into this investment sector and experienced great success in Las Vegas as well as in other parts of the country.
There was a surprising side-venture that came out of this enterprise. It turned out that rehabbing and flipping homes produced stories of high entertainment value. A&E Network
Television approached Yancey about doing a reality show based on his real estate projects. This led to Flipping Vegas, starring Yancey and Aime, which has enjoyed three popular seasons.
Now Yancey has turned his attention to another market: people who are searching for financial freedom and see themselves attaining that through real estate investing. The Scott
Yancey Events was birthed out of the desire to reach this market.
The events consist of seminars conducted across the country “offering educational training from experienced teachers designed to help people get a leg up in the real estate investment world.”
Yancey’s website claims that he “is a firm believer that people should find joy in what they do, and so he and Amie are now devoting much of their time to helping others find financial peace and happiness with the added income provided by real estate.”
This desire sounds great, and it sounds similar to what other real estate investment gurus proclaim: I’ve made it big, and I want to help you make it big, too, so I have written these books and hosted these seminars, and if you read/attend them, you’ll have all the important tools to do what I’ve done.
Please don’t get me wrong.
I’m not at all against parlaying knowledge and experience into a saleable product. People do that in industries across the board, from shame research to art from recyclables and everything in between.
My question is always: how much is charged and what content is provided?
Back to the subject under my microscope.
Yancey’s website shows ten training opportunities and resources:
- A live introductory event
- A three-day workshop
- Four different boot camp options
- A home-study course
- Software tools
- Inner Circle “1 on 1” Training
- Protegy “1 on 1” Training
No prices are shown, and you can’t sign up or purchase anything on the website. Instead, a box pops up with username and password fields to fill out “as you received them on your certificate in your welcome kit.”
A Look at Scott Yancey’s Real Estate Events
It becomes apparent that Step One requires going back to the Events tab and signing up to physically attend the “free live wealth-building event” in your area. This is advertised as a 90-minute event with free gifts: tablets for the first 50 people who sign up, a digital camera, and two resource discs. Oh, and a free meal.
Yancey may not be the presenter at this event, explains the website blurb, due to scheduling.
I checked out reviews of this free live event on Yelp.
Scott Yancey Complaints and Comments
There are 19 reviews, and 7 are positive.
Here’s one:
I had a great time at the seminar and am eager to go on to learn more. I was impressed with the depth of knowledge the trainers had about real estate and the industry. They mean business and want to help you with yours.
I have to admit to wondering about the positive reviews, however, when I read the negative ones, which all had the same components.
Complaints ran the gamut:
the 90-minute presentation was actually a butt-flattening four hours long; the free meal was a skimpy sandwich, chips and cookie in a box balanced on the participant’s knees; to get the free camera, you had to mail in a certificate, and when the camera arrived, it was cheap (“something I’d buy for a buck at Dollar Tree for my pre-schooler” said one reviewer); and the tablets never seemed to materialize for anyone. One resource disc held minimal content; the other was a pleasant surprise: a digital copy of Yancey’s book, Go Time.
The biggest consistent complaint was that the useful content of the free event was minimal, and most of the four hours was devoted to pitching the seminars and boot camps.
“Don’t waste your time.Throw your invitation into the garbage,” said one reviewer of the free event on Yelp. “Some information was interesting but the rest was all about going to their 3-day seminar for a low cost of only $2000. Then while we ate, the next pitch on how to invest your money came with another pressure sell to attend their seminar for $500. Finally the 3rd pitch came on how to buy tax lien properties by attending another seminar for only $300.”
Next I checked out reviews of the $2,000 seminar.
I found one positive one. On the Independent Penguin, Lynn Black in January 2014, wrote:
“It was absolutely wonderful! I couldn’t believe what resources were available to me as I wound down the 3 days… I was on fire. Long story short, I did my first wholesale deal in less than 4 months. This first deal literally changed my life…and definitely changed my way of thinking. I’m now at one wholesale deal, one rehab-flip, one 3-bedroom home, and I have had a counter offer accepted on a duplex I’m partnering on with my girlfriend. So, say what you want… Scott Yancey’s program has turned out to be a game changer for me.”
At the Better Business Bureau’s site, there have been 20 complaints against Yancey over the past three years.
One long report about the three-day seminar included this paragraph:
“We did not receive the training as promised when we signed up. The $1997.00 we paid stated we would get a mentor, a group leader who help us, access to various funding sources that would assist us with the capital needed to help us start the road to a successful real estate business. The only thing our group leader talked about was us giving more money and trying to find out where we had any other assets to get the money from to attend the workshops in Las Vegas.”
In Yancey’s defense, the BBB report shows that the customer was refunded her tuition.
A second report on the BBB site is similar:
“My wife and I bought and attended the $1,997 workshop held April 17th 2014. This supposedly would provide us with the necessary training, knowledge and step-by-step methods to understand and possibly earn money in Real Estate. Instead, the $1,997 workshop went over the same things that we got at the initial free orientation, flew through snippets of high level stuff which could not be understood, and we had to listen to several stories of the leaders’ unbelievable success and then presented with product pitches to spend another $20k to $40k on more workshops in Las Vegas.”
The records indicate that this customer also received their money back.
Other complaints at the BBB are unresolved, but reasons for that are unclear.
The site Reviewopedia contains 93 reviews of Scott Yancey.
Most are negative, with titles like, “Scam!,” “Bait and Switch Seminar,” “After the $2K Seminar, You Have to Buy $30K to Continue,” “They Just Want Sheep to Fleece,” and “All Lies.”
On RipOffReport.com, an angry reviewer posted this at the beginning of a long complaint:
“I’m really in shock our Government has not shut these aggressive, degrading fast talkers down. I paid the $2K for education. [Instead] I got a seminar about how jacked up I’ve been my entire life for not investing or knowing about this technique to rip people off.”
So, guys, there you have it, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Let me repeat that I’m not out to slam anyone. But I also want to get the facts out there.
Scott Yancey definitely has a lot of skill, experience, and knowledge. He obviously is good at real-estate investing.
And there are some folks who are happy with the education they have received from him. But there are lots of folks out there who are not.
So, just be careful.
Keep your eyes open and your wits about you if you go forward with this company.
Success to you!
Sources:
- (independentpenguin.com)
- (biggerpockets.com)
- (yelp)
- (BBB)
- (yanceyfreebook.com)
- (pissedconsumer.com)
- (ripoffreport.com)
- (reviewopedia.com)
