Feature Story: In May/June 2007 issue of Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine Building Wealth Through Property Investment
Master Investor Jim Piccolo
Moving Students from Smart to Successful
University of Real Estate Investing
By Scott C. Seckel
Nouveau Riche University is honored to announce the feature story on Jim Piccolo, NRU Co-founder, CEO and President, and Nouveau Riche University in the May/June 2007 issue of PERSONAL REAL ESTATE INVESTOR MAGAZINE! Appropriately dubbed a “Master Investor,” Jim Piccolo divulges the story behind the creation of NRU, bringing to light the “better alternative” known to those with the good fortune of being introduced to the NRU Community.
“This master investor’s story is about discovering the benefits of real estate investment and the passion to pass on his revelations….Unlike the gurus…he went about teaching by actually caring that his students profited by the education they paid for, and that the education had universal value.”
Here are some excerpts from the article:
His story began when he realized how well the real estate associated with what his 28 companies were doing. "Wait a minute - we bought this building for $1 million and now it's worth $4 million, and maybe we made a half million a year on the bottom line over the last three years," he said. "We made more money just owning the real estate than we did running the business. That kind of got me excited about real estate and doing more with it...
Back to Piccolo's bad day. Eighty-five percent of the students, both the $20 book buyers and the $50,000 seminar junkies, weren't buying real estate. He put the seminar junkies in a separate group and asked them why they hadn't bought any homes after dropping $30,000 to $50,000 on learning how to. "The top reason was fear," he said. "Fear is born from lack of confidence. Lack of confidence is born from lack of education... We thought we needed to learn more about learning. That was the turning point for Nouveau Riche. The only way to learn more about learning was to go find an expert on learning..."
He and his partners hired a PhD from San Diego State to teach them about learning. They found out about a very simple process, used by every university in the country, called instructional systems design. Piccolo gather every piece of real estate education. "Every book, CD, tape, eight-track - it filled a room." The PhD and his team tore apart all the information and found about 20,000 things you need to know to be a residential real estate investor. They brought in subject matter experts, who categorized all the knowledge. "There was information about mortgages. There was information about landlording. There was information about legal, how to structure yourself. There was information about taxes, renovation - a whole big bucket of information..."
In Piccolo's lap sat two things: a strict set of academic criteria and the knowledge that not all of his students had been to college. "We found that gap, and we built a preference-driven system," he said. "When a customer joins Nouveau Riche University, they decide they want a tuition package... They fill out a personal preference questionnaire. We're going to teach you what you want to know..."
"The gurus are going to stand up in front of a room full of a thousand people and say, 'This is my system. Do as I do.' Realistically, less than 25 percent of that group has a specific interest in that particular preference." Why study medicine if you want to learn about law? Why learn about renovation when you want to learn about hard money?...
NRU has a 93 percent customer approval rating. The school grew 500 percent in 2006. More than 3,000 students will have enrolled by the end of this summer... "We went back and did a survey of our investors," Piccolo said. "Sixty-seven percent of the have purchased real estate. We built a curriculum around the way people learn, and that's what sets us apart. We've made real estate investment education legitimate...."
Click here to read the entire article in Personal Real Estate Investor Magazine.
