About Pax Properties and Its Founder, Justin Ford
Justin Ford is the principal and sole owner of Pax Properties. Pax has owned, renovated and operated over 40 properties in nine cities in four states over the last 19 years. Through the boom and bust, Pax has bought over $100 million of real estate and has renovated and operated over 1,000 units. In that time, Pax has consistently delivered superior returns while never being late on a single mortgage payment or losing an investor a single dollar. Mr. Ford attribute’s this unique track record to his company’s long-term outlook and its focus on cash flow, operations and conservative financing.
Prior to starting his real estate business, Mr. Ford spent 17 years as an editor and publisher in the financial publishing business. For 12 of those years he was self-employed by his own company, Seeds of Wealth, Inc., though his main client remained his former employer, Agora, Inc., the world’s largest publisher of financial newsletters. This career took Mr. Ford all over the world and he believes it helped make him a better investor.
He has visited central banks, finance ministries, stock exchanges, and leading public companies—from Beijing to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Prague, Paris, London, New York, Sao Paolo and Buenos Aires, among others. He has worked with, interviewed and learned from Global 500 CEO’s, high-level public officials and truly independent analysts.
From 1993 through 1999, He published international investment and business-to-business newsletters, covering Latin America, China, Africa and the former Soviet Union. During this time, He also became the founding publisher of the US version of The Fleet Street Letter, then the oldest continuously published financial newsletter in the world, with roots in the 19th century.
In 1997, He began publishing The Richebächer Letter, a monthly analysis of global capital and currency markets written by Dr. Kurt Richebächer, the former head of Dresdner Bank and a leading Austrian School economist. Dr. Richebächer’s training in classical economics and independent analysis enabled him to warn of the crisis brewing in Asia before it erupted in 1997 and the Internet bubble before its collapse in 2000. In 2002, he began warning in great detail of the brewing derivatives crisis, even identifying the major banks that would be most impacted in the eventual crisis. On more than a dozen occasions, the viewpoints of his analysts were quoted by The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and The Financial Times.
In short, Mr. Ford has had the good fortune to work with and learn from independent analysts around the world—free from the conflicts of interest that led to the disastrous analysis and decisions of so many ratings agencies, financial institutions, and government agencies during the bubble.
This is not to imply Mr. Ford has had a perfect track record. There are at least two properties he has owned about which he says, “if they were fish, I would have thrown them back!” But his fundamental approach has helped him weather difficult markets and his own mistakes, make reasonable decisions more often than not and have cash and credit ready when opportunities arose. Through his writings and individual coaching, Mr. Ford has helped others benefit from this same type of business-focused approach to real estate.
Authorship of Books and Articles
Mr. Ford has researched, written and edited hundreds of articles and papers on financial markets and real estate investing, as well as a number of books. Following are some highlights.
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Seeds of Wealth, 2000 (Agora Financial Publishing), a parent-directed program for helping children develop good money habits from an early age.
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Dr. Van Tharp’s Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom, 2002, contributing author, (McGraw Hill).
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Main Street Millionaire, 2003 (Early to Rise Publishing), a course on real estate value investing.
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Sunbelt Value Cities, 2005 (Early to Rise Publishing), co-author of a study that showed far greater value for real estate investors in markets such as Austin, Texas than in the then-inflated markets of South Florida, California, Arizona and Nevada.
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Justin Ford’s CAP Strategy: Bubble-proof Real Estate Investing for Lifelong Income, an updated version of the MSM course—with a focus on Cash Flow, Amortization, and Positive Leverage (CAP).
From 2004 to 2006, Mr. Ford wrote over two dozen articles in Early to Rise, a personal-success e-zine with over 400,000 readers, and repeatedly warned of dangerous real estate bubbles brewing in major US markets. In January, 2010, he wrote an article for The Sovereign Individual, an investment newsletter, saying that for the first time in years markets like Florida and California now offered compelling value. The article was reprinted by the California Multi-family Investors Association. In March 2011, Daily Wealth, the largest individual investment newsletter advisory in the country, quoted Mr. Ford’s views on the current real estate market and rental demand.
In 2014, Agora, the country’s largest publisher of investment newsletters for individuals, began to publish a new residential real estate investment course by Mr. Ford: Justin Ford’s CAP Strategy. The premise is that there are four ways to make money in real estate: cash flow (C), amortization (A), Positive Leverage (P) and Appreciation. Appreciation is the only one you can’t control, yet it’s the one that many investors focus on. This is why so many investors and banks got hit hard in the crash. You are, however, in control of whether your investment has cash flow, amortization and positive leverage. The course teaches that by focusing on these factors you can steadily build income and equity even if real estate prices never rise by a single dollar.
Formal Education and Training
Mr. Ford has a B.A. from Fordham University and has studied economics and finance at the graduate level. He was a scholarship exchange student abroad, lived in four countries and has traveled to dozens of others. He speaks, reads and writes English, Spanish, French and Italian.
Mr. Ford has a Florida Real Estate Broker’s License, a Community Association Manager’s License, a Mortgage Originator’s License and Certification as a Building Inspector.