The Self-Directed Real Estate Professional

By Jennifer D. MeachamMarried 26 years, Denise and Bill Graves have spent the past year working side by side at
Boerne, Texas-based The Graves Group.

“I started out doing 1031 exchanges, so that was the push initially,” says CEO Denise. She’s a luxury real estate broker, who founded The Graves Group as an extension of Bradfield Properties in 2002. “We brought Bill onboard full-time last year, because we found that the five of us had a need for someone to look for an alternative to a 1031.”

Enter Bill Graves. At 55, Bill has logged 25 years as a real estate broker in the San Antonio, Texas, area; 20 years in retirement planning, including working with IRAs and 401(k)s; and 17 years as a certified financial planner.
His solution? Tax-sheltered real estate investing using self-directed Individual Retirement Arrangements.

It was a seamless addition, given that Bill had been investing in real estate using his own SEP IRA since late-2003. “I wanted to start use it for personal benefit – to test the waters first – and then start helping my [retirement planning] clients with their untapped IRA money for real estate investments,” Bill says. “They may have personal residences, one to three vacation homes, and are tapped personally. What this does is open up a whole new pool of funds for real estate investment activity.”

In October 2006, Bill also joined a consortium of financial professionals at Asset Exchange Strategies. It’s one of dozens of organizations cropping up to train and “certify” agents and advisors in self-directed IRA investing rules and strategies.

“Since then our business has been 90 percent traditional real estate transactions and 10 percent IRA based,” Bill says. “Over the next year I forecast that to be more of a 60:40 split. The Web site is up, the relationship with AES is established, and now I’m starting to advertise. Before it was word of mouth; now we actually have a viable status.”

The new division has helped make The Graves Group the “No. 1 sales team in the Texas Hill Country,” as ranked by the San Antonio Business Journal. In 2006 it logged $40 million in sales volume, and in the first half of 2007 another $19.3 million.

With “a few” self-directed IRA purchases for clients under their belt, they’ve discovered that “the process doesn’t seem to be a whole lot longer on the ones that we’ve done than the regular loan process,” Denise says. “We coordinate with Bill to set everything up, but everything else is the same. It’s streamlined once everything is in place. It just takes an expert, just like in any other specialized transaction, who knows what they’re doing.”

Jennifer D. Meacham is a business/personal finance columnist and co-author of “IRA Wealth: Revolutionary IRA Strategies for Real Estate Investment” (Square One Publishers, New York). Nominate a “Self-Directed Real Estate Professional” to be profiled here or e-mail your self-directed retirement investing questions to Jennifer at jd@self-directed.info.

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