Joe Land --- I do not recommend

Joe was a nothing-down guru in the mid-'80s. I "debated" him on a 60 Minutes segment titled "Nothing Down" on March 16, 1986. Morely Safer was the correspondent.

Land said you only needed one technique. His was buying, at a discount, a mortgage someone had taken back on the sale of a house. Then you got a new institutional mortgage for 80% of value and used the mortgage you bought at a discount as down payment. The face value of the mortgage you bought at a discount was bigger than 20% of the value of the property you were buying, so you actually pocketed several thousand dollars proceeds of the new first mortgage at closing.

Morley Safer explained it well. He said the crux of Land's technique was persuading the owner of the mortgage that it was not worth what it said, then turning around and immediately persuading the owner of the house you were buying that the mortgage was worth what it said. There is no doubt some sellers are that dumb, especially those who are trying to sell overpriced property. But there are no institutional lenders who will knowingly do that deal.

I debated Land subsequently on a conference call that included Joe, me, and Time magazine reporter Jon Hull. Land insisted that he had done this deal many times and that many lenders would do it. I asked for the address of a property where Land had done such a deal. He refused to give one, citing confidentiality. Time promised anonymity to the lender. Land still refused. I urged Morley Safer to ask the same question of Land. He did and Land refused to provide him with an address, also.

Land stopped doing real estate seminars not long after the 60 Minutes piece ran. He later did TV infomercials in which he sold audio tapes purportedly containing subliminal self-improvement messages. All you could hear was sea gulls and ocean waves. I am told that at one of his real estate seminars, Land once told an associate, "These people would buy blank tapes if I told them to." Later when he was selling the seagulls-and-wave tapes, he said, "They aren't blank, but they're pretty close."

I always thought that blank-tapes story epitomized the real estate B.S. artist segment of the guru business.