My name is Matt Bowman. At the time that I am writing this (2006), I am 32 years old. I have been a "creative" real estate investor for the past 9 years. I began investigating the "creative" side of real estate investing when I was considering getting married. I lived in a small apartment with my girlfriend and her 2 kids.

At the time, my credit was very poor and I had no money saved. I made $30,000 a year as a computer technician and always ran out of money before I ran out of month! I knew that when I got married, I wanted to be able to buy a house for my new family, but also knew that I did not have the credit to qualify for a mortgage or the money for a down payment.

When I was a teenager, I studied many books on real estate investing and finances in general. I remembered reading about how it was possible to do "no money down" deals even if you had poor credit. The problem was that in the books that I had read, they suggested getting money for a down payment from credit cards, loans from family, taking a loan against insurance policies, etc. All of these options were not possible for me.

I was still convinced there had to be a way to get into a house of my own. I searched the internet for information and happened upon a few real estate investing web sites. I began to read more and more about the people who were actually doing these "creative" deals with little or no money and not ever having to qualify for a mortgage at all. I figured if they could do it, I could do it.

I bought a few courses and books and studied further. I then took a step that most people don't after studying the "creative" techniques of real estate investing- I took action! I began to look around for properties that needed fixing up. I began looking at some mobile homes that I could buy cheaply. None of these resulted in decent deals.

I got out there and made a TON of mistakes and lost a lot of money that I could not afford to lose. I then decided to try running an ad in the paper that said "We buy houses" to see if I could get any better deals than the junk that I was trying to make work.

I somehow fell into my first lease option deal. After fumbling around and nearly losing the deal, I got my first tenant/buyer and collected a $3,000 option deposit in cash! I had lost so much money and time playing around, trying to make deals work and all of a sudden, someone was counting out $100 bills into my hand! I finally found how to make it work for me!

It took a lot of persistence and effort, but I continued pushing on and eventually signed my second lease option deal. I began paying close attention to what was getting the deals and what was breaking the deals. I paid attention to what sellers said that was in common with all the other sellers I talked to. I paid attention to what was the same about the deals that I got and the deals that I lost.

Eventually, I worked out a "system" for working deals. At first, I stuck mainly to lease options since they seemed to work so well or me. However, as I began to crank up my marketing, I was drawing in a lot of calls and had a wide variety of deals presented to me. This meant that I knew I was passing up a lot of good deals if I simply tried to make everything a lease option.

I expanded from lease options into flips. I then included owner financing deals. I learned about and started setting up "subject to" deals, where I had the seller deed me the property, making me the owner, while leaving the existing mortgage in their name. As I learned more and drew in more sellers, I signed more and more deals. Over the years, I eventually signed up over 100 "creative" real estate deals where I did not put any money down and never once had my credit pulled or needed it to qualify for a mortgage.

After perfecting my "system" for doing lease option deals, I was encouraged by a number of people I had helped by e-mail or phone to write a course on it. I wrote my lease option course in April of 2000. I began mentoring a number of beginning investors using what I had learned over the past few years. I was working deals for myself and helping others with small details of their own deals or just getting started.

After releasing my course, several people asked me to come visit them in different areas of the country to work with them for a week or so to get their businesses going. I traveled around to various areas of the US and Canada, helping others get their marketing going, handling calls that came in, and sometimes, helping them sign up their very first "creative" deal.

As I traveled around, almost every single person who asked to come work with them told me that they hoped that they could learn from me, but were pretty sure that they wouldn't be able to do any deals. Almost everyone told me that the market where they were was so hot that houses sold in days and many times for more than what was being asked for them! EVERY SINGLE TIME I showed up, deals started coming in. EVERY SINGLE TIME! I told my students that the market was indeed too hot to work deals and it was only because I was a "deal magnet" that we were able to sign up deals while I was there!!

I have had many ups and downs in my life associated with real estate investing. I have made a large number of mistakes and took many hard-earned lessons from those experiences. I know that I don't know it all and will probably make a lot more mistakes in the future, but try to use my mistakes to teach others and guide them towards getting deals done while avoiding the costly mistakes that I have made.

I now work deals in my own market and continue to mentor others. I sell a few courses that I have written and hope to continue to add more educational material to my offerings to help others get started in the exciting field of creative real estate investing.