Is this your last chance to get rich in real estate?
Several months ago Silvia Cuevas took stock of her life, and it was a profoundly unsettling experience. At 40 she had a solid job with a modest salary at the public library in Santa Ana, Calif. She’d carefully squirreled away some savings and bought herself a little house. She was financially secure – and utterly dissatisfied. All around her, Santa Ana throbbed with the feverish energy of recent immigrants eager to cash in on the promises of America. A short drive from Disneyland, Santa Ana boasts one of the highest concentrations of Latinos of any city in the U.S., and these days it is a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. Cuevas, though, felt as conservative, meek, and, well, dull as a church mouse in Vegas. “I was going nowhere,” she recalls. “How was I going to find my fortune?” Then a girlfriend introduced her to Nouveau Riche University.
Not exactly a university, Nouveau Riche offers real estate investment classes -and a host of related products and services – to would-be tycoons. In April, Cuevas plunked down tuition of $16,000 and attended a weeklong program in Phoenix. Two weeks later, emboldened by her instructors and an advisor assigned by the university, she refinanced her home, taking out $200,000 – a large share of her equity. She used the money for down payments to buy – sight unseen in one case – three investment properties through a real estate agency controlled by Nouveau Riche. By midsummer Cuevas’ portfolio of investments had grown to include a condo in Colorado, three acres of undeveloped land in the Smoky Mountains, and a three-bedroom house in San Antonio. Her debt load has grown too, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans she took out on the properties, but she doesn’t worry. “I learned how to be bold at Nouveau Riche,” Cuevas says. “They’re the market experts, so I trust them to help me buy. I can’t wait to make my next purchase!”