So what’s up with the so-called “David Lindahl scam” that’s been permeating the real estate investment world? Well, while I definitely don’t have all the answers, I can speak from my personal experience on this one. I first learned about David Lindahl and the Apartment House Riches course through the now-infamous Learning Annex tour that featured Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki. They came to my town, and I knew that I had to at least go and check out “The Donald”. Up until that event, I had never heard of David Lindahl, and didn’t know a thing about multi-family investing, and never even actually considered it. But, I will have to say that David Lindahl opened my eyes to the world of multifamily and commercial real estate investing. He had a basic seminar that explained some basic differences between multi-family investing and traditional single-family home real estate investing. A lot of it made sense to me; one of the things that really stood out was the way the banks treated multi-family properties differently than single-family properties when you are shopping for a loan. A bank will lend money on a multi-family property based on the amount of income it’s producing, while they mainly base how much money they’re going to lend on a single-family home on how much the appraised value of the home is. This (and other things he pointed out) really piqued my interest in investing in apartment houses. I will have to say in all fairness that he seemed like a genuine guy, and he was one of the few that I actually know first-hand that he does what he’s teaching, and doesn’t make money only on the “seminar circuit”. While I do believe there was a slight element of “hype” to his presentation, I can’t say that he was unrealistic in the things he said. He let us know the pros and cons right off the bat, and was pretty down-to-earth with his whole approach. So, long story short, I bought the Apartment House Riches course right there at the seminar, and at the time the purchase price was upwards of $700.00. But, of course, I was going to make that money back in only 90 days, right?

Well, I can’t lie and act like you can just sit back and do nothing and money is just going to fall out of the sky. He teaches in the course about the type of marketing you’re going to have to do to get leads, and he even includes some letter templates to send to multifamily property owners to see if they’re interested in selling their properties. He goes into a lot of key financial formulas, such as how to calculate net operating income, the gross rent multiplier, the “Times 10 Multiplication Valuation”, and other cool formulas to help you analyze potential investment properties. He also has some audio CD’s that I truly learned a lot from; not so much from the statements he made that were also present in the manual, but the casual statements and stories he told that gave context to some of his past apartment deals. All in all, I will say that the course was not heavy on “fluff”, but actually contained some workable, practical information. The major problem for me was, I realized only after I had reviewed all the information and listened to all the CD’s that I really just didn’t want to get into multifamily investing. I had dollar signs in my eyes, and so I went for what I thought would be a great stream of income, but at the end of the day, I really didn’t want to spend my time managing properties (or even hiring and overseeing property managers to manage my properties), and I just didn’t really have any kind of passion for multifamily investing. I know myself well enough to know that I will not stick with anything that I don’t like doing, even when there’s a promise of awesome wealth or whatever. I will also say (again, in all fairness) that David Lindahl is no stranger to the upsell; once you buy his course, he usually begins marketing his boot camp to you, which costs into the thousands of dollars, and if you think that he’s not making any money from these boot camps and seminars, please don’t kid yourself. He’s making money from apartment investing, true indeed, but he has a very nice sideline income promoting seminars and boot camps to his “students”. So at the end of the day, I cannot comfortably say that David Lindahl’s Apartment House Riches is a scam, because every business worth doing is going to take some work, but if you think that you’re going to get the whole kit and caboodle with just the initial course itself, don’t be deceived; you’re going to be solicited for more seminars and boot camps once you buy the course. So to call David Lindahl a scam is somewhat unfair, but I won’t say that he’s squeaky clean either. Just one man’s opinion.