If you live near a major American city, some time this year you're likely to encounter Donald Trump on a billboard or in a radio or newspaper ad for the Learning Annex Real Estate and Wealth Expo. As if you hadn't seen enough of him on TV and in the gossip columns, Trump has extended his reach with a 20-city speaking engagement, said to pay an average of $1.5 million per speech. That's $30 million for a couple of hours of talk every few weeks.

The Web site for the Real Estate and Wealth Expo says, "One weekend can make you a millionaire." That's certainly true for "The Donald," but how about for the 800,000 people so far who have plunked down $25 for a last-minute bargain entry fee or $299 for the special "discounted" VIP pass? A CR Money Adviser reporter recently attended the expo at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. Here's what she saw.


Tips and testimonials

The program begins with a keynote speaker--in our case, "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer on Saturday and "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" author Robert Kiyosaki on Sunday--after which you can attend one of some 72 courses given throughout the weekend, crowds permitting. In many of those seminars, you'll get a brief outline of the presenter's techniques and then a sales pitch for additional seminars so you can learn how to use them. The more in-depth sessions can cost big bucks.

James Smith's seminar, Real Estate Flipping: Grow Rich Buying and Selling Property, is typical. He begins his presentation with his life story. Growing up dyslexic and at the bottom of his high school class, Smith was told by a guidance counselor that he wasn't college material. Now, onstage, he gives that counselor the universal single-finger salute. "I'm absolutely unemployable," he says. "I want to make you unemployable too."

His message: No matter what your background or how poorly you did in school, you can work for yourself and make money the way he did--buying properties at 30 to 50 percent below market, fixing them up, and selling them again. Forget that some say the market for flipping properties is over in many regions. Smith tells his New York audience to invest where they live and in three other markets. North and South Dakota and Pennsylvania are out, he says; their population growth is expected to slow. The best cities for flipping properties are in Mississippi--Gulfport and Biloxi--where housing is cheap and a new Federal Gulf Opportunity Zone law allows for faster depreciation of assets.

Smith gives a bit more advice, but he leaves out details on how to judge a property, how to manage it, and what to do when the market doesn't cooperate. His program is short on real-estate tips and long on humor and self-help talk. "When you succeed in life, don't forget the people that still struggle," he says. And later: "Nobody will be as good to you as you."

An element in Smith's show, and in many seminars at the expo, is live testimonials from people who followed the guru's lead and are now living their dreams. A young woman appears onstage to recount how she bought land holding two billboards for $20,000, and those billboards are now generating $24,000 a year in rental income. A 22-year-old graduate student tells the audience that she put her 12th property under contract last week. Smith says it would take about five hours of work a week for his audience to do the same.


But wait, there's more

You shouldn't do it alone. You can get help, Smith announces toward the seminar's end. A live, three-day training with him will show you the ins and outs of property flipping. The cost: $3,995. And if you sign up right here, right now, he'll give it to you for $2,995, plus you can bring a friend free. Add your kids for $500 each. For even more-personal training, you can pay $5,995. Finally, if you enroll today, you'll get both the three-day course and the personal training for $5,995, and it's tax-deductible. The Internal Revenue Service, however, says investment seminars may be tax-deductible if you're already in that business and use them to improve your skills. For newcomers, they're not.

In the same huge lecture hall, Bob Kittell extols the benefits of tracking insider trading (stock trades made by company executives) and market timing (buying and selling securities based on what you think the market will do). If you have the right analytical tools, he maintains, you can guess right and make a bundle in very short order. Both assertions, however, run counter to much of the research. For example, a recent Morgan Stanley study showed that inside buying predicted stock rises correctly only 52 percent of the time.

Kittell, too, has something to sell: a two-day workshop, access to his online investor tools, and a six-month subscription to his Web site for $9,489. But if you register right now, you can have everything for $1,999. And as a final incentive, you can bring a friend to the workshop free.

At the end of the talk, as the credit cards are flying, he answers questions. We ask how he can defend market timing when analysts at Dalbar, a Boston financial research firm, say it does more harm than good to small investors. "Hey," he replies, "everybody has an opinion."


Following a formula

In the small seminar rooms, we hear variations on the same theme: the personal history, the anecdotes, the testimonials, a few tidbits of real info, the pitch, the hyperbole, and the discounts. Get Free Money From the Government, Chris Johnson's course, offers the names of a few federal initiatives that offer grant money, such as the Teacher and Officer Next Door programs (intended to make it easier for those professionals to own homes). But most of his talk focuses on selling a $685 "Free Money" program of books, CDs, and mentoring by e-mail to help participants get more of the "inside secret knowledge" on government grants.

Some in the audience aren't buying it. "I could've gotten most of that stuff off the Internet," says Ken Beck, from Toms River, N.J. He's right. You can find sources for grants in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (www.cfda.gov).

Albert Lowry, who talks about making money on property bought at foreclosures and auctions, recommends some risky borrowing methods. For example, finance the purchase of an undervalued property based on the expected resale value, not the acquisition cost. He doesn't explain in detail how to finesse such a deal. But his course, he promises, will teach you how to find and evaluate properties, keep your credit record clean, and use every tax deduction available. It's worth $3,790, he says, but is available today for $995.

To their credit, most attendees that we interviewed weren't expecting miracles from the expo--just a little help. Anthony Cunha, a part-time real-estate investor from Kearny, N.J., went home with David Lindahl's $895 package on buying apartment buildings. "It connected with what I want to do in the future," he says. "You can make millions, but it's not a fly-by-night thing. It takes legwork. You have to weed through the promises." And, he notes, unless you can pay someone, you have to manage those buildings yourself. That means having to fix a tenant's drain at 3 a.m.--something none of the speakers seem to mention.


Trump is in the building

By the time Sunday evening has arrived, people are pumped for Trump. They've listened to sales pitches, testimonials, and hype. They've heard from Lindahl, child of a Boston fish-cutter who speaks on becoming an apartment-building tycoon, and Wayne Gray, a preacher's son who now touts the benefits of buying tax liens. They've been addressed by Kiyosaki of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad," who, alas, has no humble beginnings but proudly says he failed English twice. Kiyosaki exhorts his audience to embrace debt for its power to increase your wealth, and eschew savings, which can get wiped out by inflation.

But Trump is the main attraction for this crowd. His arrival has the fervor of a political convention: gold confetti, women dancing on the stage, and his theme song, "Money, Money, Money," playing on the loudspeakers. The audience waves inflatable gold-and-black thundersticks labeled "Trump." Bill Zanker, head of the Learning Annex, introduces Trump as "the greatest, greatest business speaker in the world."

When Trump finally opens his mouth, however, his words are remarkably benign. His speech, a pastiche of musings on everything from Iraq to Paul McCartney's divorce, is earthy and frank. He tells stories of his early days as a developer and how he got to where he is today, and tales of the guys who helped him and the double-crossers who got theirs in the end. He flirts with a woman in the audience and takes questions from folks who want the secrets to success. What are those secrets?

• Love what you do.
  
  
• Never, ever give up.
  
  
• Learn from your mistakes.
  
  
• Know your business.
  
  
• Think like a winner.
  
  
• Always stay focused.

Sound like adages from your Uncle Sid? OK, here's some more Trump wisdom to justify that $299 ticket:

• Always get even.
  
  
• Be paranoid.
  
  
• Always get a prenuptial agreement.

If that's a letdown, it's probably just as well. For an entire weekend, the audience has been hearing about systems that "you cannot mess up" and schemes that take just two hours a week to hatch. Trump's most sage words are the ones that bring us back to earth: "The best deals are oftentimes made by the gut," he says. "The problem is, there are many people in the room who don't have a good gut."