Master of many domains
Posted on November 26, 2003
By Mark Barrett, Staff Writer, Asheville (N.C.) CITIZEN-TIMES, Nov. 8, 2003 5:18 p.m. (reprinted by permission)
ERWIN HILLS - Mike Summey might be the only person to get a hug around the neck from a home seller for agreeing to buy the seller’s house for half its appraised value.
Many people in local business circles might know Summey primarily as the former owner of Summey Outdoor Advertising, a billboard company that had extensive holdings in Western North Carolina and South Carolina when Summey sold it. …(continues) …
Summey is also a founder of the Council of Independent Business Owners and was a key player in efforts to beat back city of Asheville restrictions on billboards and elect more conservative candidates to Asheville City Council in the early 1990s.
But it was Summey’s role as a property owner - he is one of Buncombe County’s largest individual landlords - that led him and a co-author, Roger Dawson, to write their book published this fall, “The Weekend Millionaire’s Secrets to Investing in Real Estate.”
When Summey handed out business cards to people who had gathered at a local restaurant a few years ago to watch election returns roll in, that’s what the business the cards referred to, reading, “I buy houses, apartments, other income properties.”
Summey gave a card to a young woman at the restaurant - Summey calls her Kathy -after she told him she had just inherited a home and might want to sell it one day.
Two years later, Kathy called. She and her husband had moved to Florida and rented the home to a friend, who was supposed to make the mortgage payments and look after the house. She hadn’t done either, Kathy said, and Kathy and her husband had just learned that the bank planned to start foreclosure proceedings by the end of the month.
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BOOK SIGNING
Mike Summey will autograph copies of “The Weekend Millionaire’s Secrets to Investing in Real Estate” from 10 a.m.-noon, and from 2-5 p.m. Nov. 28 at Barnes & Noble, 89 South Tunnel Road, Asheville.
Summey stopped by the house, but couldn’t get its occupant to let him in. Kathy and her husband drove through the night from Florida to meet him there the next day.
The house was a mess, but structurally sound. Summey says Kathy and her husband just wanted to get rid of it, however, instead of waiting to get the home’s full value. Kathy said they had decided that if Summey would pay off the remaining $22,000 on the mortgage, add $20,000 to that and do it all by the end of the month, their worries would be over and their credit intact.
Summey agreed. Then, he got his hug.
“They were tickled to death,” he says.
So was Summey. The house was appraised a few days later for $84,000.
Buying wholesale
Summey doesn’t suggest that the typical real estate investor will be able to buy lots of homes for half their value. But the premise of the book is that there are enough homes out there that can be bought at “wholesale prices” that an ordinary, disciplined investor can amass a substantial portfolio over time.
The book advocates a “get rich slowly” system. It describes ways the authors say buyers can identify suitable properties, structure purchase offers so that the price is low enough to allow the buyer to rent it out for a profit but high enough to be acceptable to a seller, and manage the homes for the long haul.
Techniques include locating homes that have been lingering on the market for months or years or that a bank or individual owner needs to sell in a hurry. Summey says he sometimes offers a higher price predicated on making payments interest-free - and thus less and less burdensome to the buyer over the years as inflation takes hold - to get some sellers to “yes.”
The general idea is not to speculate in real estate, but to buy it in such a way as to be virtually certain of making money every month you own it.
The system can take a while to implement, Summey said.
“I’ve probably made 25 to 30 offers for each one that I’ve bought,” he said. “You have to find the deals.”
Mike Summey
The first time Summey brought one of his no-interest offers to Harry Giezentanner, a local real estate agent and builder who was working with Summey on a deal, “I told him he wasn’t quite bright there,” Giezentanner said. The deal went through.
“He’s willing to try anything if someone will step up to the plate,” Giezentanner said. “If they don’t, it’s OK.”
Giezentanner and Bart Boyer, president of Asheville financial planning firm Parsec Financial Management, said Summey is not the only one who has made money with patient investments in the local real estate market.
“If someone would buy the book and follow the guidelines, yes they could become successful,” Giezentanner said. “But, there are a lot of people looking” for the same properties Summey recommends.
Boyer said, “real estate, I think, is very viable and is competitive with the stock market over long periods.”
Anyone who invests in property should be careful to keep their assets diverse in case property values and the demand for rentals change for the worse, Boyer said.
Keeping some money in the stock market as well makes a real estate investor more attractive to banks considering a loan and reduces the damage a real estate downturn can do, he said.
Setting goals
A lot of people might be content just owning a large billboard company they built from scratch, as Summey did.
But in 1966, when Summey was laid off from a job as a laboratory assistant at a defense contracting plant in Swannanoa at age 20, it left a bad taste in his mouth that lingered a long time. The company and, later, real estate investing were ways of spitting it out.
“From that day forward I just never really had a desire to work for somebody else,” he said.
He says the experience caused him to set two goals, which he wrote on a piece of paper that he carried in his wallet for years: “I will become a millionaire by age thirty and be able to retire by age fifty.”
Summey started his own sign business, which grew over the years. But as regulatory pressure on the sign business increased, Summey said he decided to diversify into real estate.
Summey said he probably owns 200 homes in Buncombe County alone, and has more in other areas.
He doesn’t spend any time fixing leaky faucets or trying to collect rent payments.
The book advises hiring a property manager to handle those issues, allowing the investor time to look for more properties. After meeting the tenants at one of his properties when he visited to have his photograph taken for this article, he said, “That’s the first time these people have ever seen my face and they’ve lived here 10 years or more.”
Summey met his co-author when he hired Dawson, a real estate investor and negotiating tactics expert, to speak to meeting of outdoor advertising executives a few years ago. Summey later got involved in the world of motivational speakers and investing and business strategy programs.
He has appeared on television with Carlton Sheets, a pioneer in the business of selling real estate investment advice via infomercials who wrote the forward to Summey and Dawson’s book.
Summey, 57, said he has met the goals he wrote down so many years ago, selling his sign company in 1996. He describes the book as an effort he fell into to humor his friend Dawson.
Now, he spends a good bit of his time trying to persuade people to buy the book, which Summey said is selling very well, and adopt its program. A program of audiotapes and CDs based on ideas in the book is to follow next month.
Sure, the system takes some work, he says.
But, he says people with drive and discipline can make it happen. He says his main asset when he got started was simply that he was “crazy enough to believe I could do it.”
Contact Barrett at 232-5833 or MBarrett@CITIZEN-TIMES.com.
Mike Summey bio
Age: 57
Early years: Grew up in southern West Virginia and southwestern Virginia. Moved to this area to be with his father, who he didn’t see for most of his childhood. Summey contacted his father in a letter when he was 17, writing, “For seventeen years I have not heard one good thing about you. PLEASE answer this letter if you get it.”
Lives: Erwin Hills
Family: Wife, Linda, a former member of the Buncombe County Board of Education. Three sons. One, Jason, gained national attention in the late 1990s when he led members of Erwin High School’s Class of 2000 in a pledge that none would drop out of school. Several eventually did, although then-Principal Mal Brown said the effort reduced the number.
Political involvement: Has worked as a consultant for several candidates for local offices. Active in efforts in the early 1990s to get more pro-business candidates elected to Asheville City Council. A 1995 Citizen-Times study named him as one of the 30 most influential people in Buncombe County.
Etc.: Holds two patents for devices used in the billboard industry.
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