Armando Montelongo Seminars, Bus Tours: trainers are recycled seminar speakers from robert allen and James smith, do not trust their success stories San Antonio, Texas
Anyone thinking about taking a free real estate seminar program by Armando Montelongo, host of Flip This House, you need to understand how these work. The sole purpose of the initial free three day event is to get you to purchase a $3000 seminar where they are going to teach you how to be successful in real estate. Most people believe that this is the event where they are going to learn the skills they need to get started.The sole purpose of the 3 day event for $3000.00 is to get you to purchase the bus tour and additional training in the $25,000-$35,000 range.
The speakers of these events are professional speakers.... NOT professional real estate investors. They get paid 10% of all the sales for the weekend. So if they get 10 people to pay $25,000 ($250,000 total) they walk away with making $25,000 for one weekend of work. That is why they are so good at what they do. Seminar speakers make a killing. Unfortunately they get up there and lie about deals they have done.
Most of these deals are not in fact real deals at all. These speakers bounce from seminar company to seminar company. Adam Sachs and Chris Sanders (who teach at armandos courses... I sat in for one....) just a few years ago were working for James Smith at National Real Estate Investors Seminars (i also met them here!!!). They say the same thing at all of these events. They teach creative financing using credit cards on day one... and give out prizes to the students that can raise their credit card limits the most. The sole purpose of this is so that students can put themselves in debt on day two when they buy the package.
The same people who are selling "personal mentoring" for Armando Montelongo out of Utah were selling for Robert Allen's Enlightened Wealth Institute just last year. Look up Ron McMilllan and you will find that he was pitching Robert Allens Nothing Down techniques and all of a sudden is an expert in flipping real estate using Armandos techniques. The phone guys get an even bigger percentage of what you spend! Ask them what their cut is.
The sales people at these events are paraded up in front of the class as success stories and students are told how they went from "where you are in your seats" to being financially free using these techniques. What they don't tell you is that 99% of them would be broke if they weren't being paid the $1500.00 per weekend to sell you in the back of the room. 99% of them are not doing real estate deals. They are making a modest living running your credit cards.
The reality of these seminar companies is that the people teaching them are professional speakers and salesmen. Their 3 day pitches are mostly lies. The easiest way to do this is to ask them to show you the HUD-1's of all the deals they told you they did. Guarantee that can not produce them.
If you purchase all of Armando's packages you are out of pocket approximately $60,000 On top of that any deal that you buy at one of his seminars, I would bet my bottom dollar that he is receiving a kick back from the vendor. He has asset protection deals, foreclosure buy and hold deals and even partners people up in the class to do deals together.
Have him guarantee in writing that he is not profiting from these deals.
Everything in this post is fact. Ask Chris and Adam if they worked for James Smith. Ask Armando if he gets kickbacks on deals pitched at his events. Ask the speakers after they show you what deals they have done to produce a HUD-1. Ask them flat out if they get paid 10% of the sales in the room.
Unfortunately seminar companies prey on people who truly want to change their financial future and do not bank on the speakers lying to them about deals they have done. No one even suspects that it is all bogus because they are new and naive and don't understand how truly deceptive seminar companies are in general.
Armando's company will come and go and these same speakers will be working for the next Armando/Robert Allen/Trump/James Smith.
I will continue to attend their events to provide more evidence of their deceptive strategies.
I make a living full time investing in real estate. I attend these events because they are great ways to meet students who want good deals.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
poeticjustice
United States of AmericaArmondo and sloppy business practices
#2Consumer Comment
Tue, July 19, 2011
I ordered the courses wanting to listen to them. Naturally they wanted my credit card number "so they could bill me shipping". Of course the real reason they wanted it was to get a valid credit card number. I then decided to change my credit card number right after shipping as I was leery of these people. I became very busy at work and did not have time to review the courses. I kept getting pressure calls while working from some guy who wanted me to hit my friends and relatives up for huge amounts of money. That made my guard go way up. He asked me if I had listened to the CD's. I said no, I had not and I probably should return them before the trial period ended. He said, "no, just keep them and if you still don't have time and you wind up returning them late, it won't be a problem". Well I wound up returning them...perhaps a week late because I never had time to listen. I do have a certified receipt of that.
Then came the complaints in the mail about how my card could not be charged. What I found interesting is that not only were the complaints about them not being able to charge it for the course but also they complained that they were not able to charge me for some kind
of monthly subscription I never signed up for.
In the end, stuff went on a credit report-but not mine! It went on the credit report of the person I was with when I ordered them. Apparently the collection agency just assumed the other person was me and as is usually the case, the collection agency that hassles them does not believe a word they say. I am afraid to try to straighten out the matter for fear it will damage my credit. I take all of what I was told as a verbal contract-including the salesman/rep that told me I could be a little late returning the materials. I will not cooperate with anyone that intends to wrongly damage my credit or put me through hassles I did not earn. I suppose there is 1000 dollars at least in lawsuit to sue that collection agency for damages. We'll wait until the statute of limitations is over so they can't move the bad credit to mine after they are sued.
In defense of sites like this, credit is a "guilty til proven innocent" concept. Creditors use a system that denies people justice in a court of law. In light of that, they too should forsake what they feel is a court of law over free speech. Just as they can verbally lie to someone and then demand proof on paper that the person they lied to was actually lied to, so should they have to prove on paper someone making remarks about their business was never verbally lied to. If phone conversations made in the past are lost evidence, so is anonymity in the present. If oral contracts are legal but not practically enforceable, then mountains of consumer complaints are legal and not suppressible. All good businesses get complaints, bad businesses get mountains of them.