When the Real Estate Game Cost $9.95

By JULIE CRESWELL

IN the alternate universe of late-night TV infomercials, Carleton H. Sheets once reigned supreme. Standing against a backdrop of tropical seas and gently swaying palm trees, he promised that viewers, no matter how down on their luck, could soar into the ranks of the super-rich by investing in that most bubblicious of assets: real estate.

“Even if you have no money, no credit and no experience in real estate,” you, too, could achieve financial freedom, he advised in a sonorous baritone that, after mesmerizing insomniacs for several years, gained even greater purchase with viewers during the recent housing boom.

All you needed was Mr. Sheets’s real estate course, available for the low, low price of $9.95. Only five minutes left for this trial offer. Call now. “Why not make this the moment you stop dreaming?” he intoned.

The dream that Mr. Sheets dangled in front of average Joes and Janes was a hand in the game, a piece of the action. When property values began soaring in the late 1990s, so did the frequency of Mr. Sheets’s infomercials. For millions of real estate wannabes sitting in their living rooms, he embodied the bubble as much as Citigroup or Merrill Lynch did.

“He was the king of the real estate infomercial,” says Sam Catanese, chief executive of Infomercial Monitoring Service, a research firm in Philadelphia.

Today, Mr. Sheets presides over some holdings of his own that appear to be troubled, his late-night profile has greatly dimmed, and the world that he so avidly promoted — easy real estate riches — is in shambles.

Even so, he retains a loyal flock of true believers.

“If you write the truth about Carleton Sheets, you’ll make a lot of people mad,” says David L. Hancock of Burlington, N.C., a Sheets devotee who credits his mentor’s training course for his start in real estate investing.

“The truth is, some people take the information and use it and some people are simply lazy,” says Mr. Hancock, who has also appeared in Mr. Sheets’s infomercials. “It’s just like any diet or exercise book out there. They probably work, but how many people are willing to stick to them?”

Some people say it’s a little more complicated than that.

“These guys all said, ‘I’m going to teach you how to get rich in real estate, even if you have no cash, no credit, no common sense, are unwilling to make any effort or take any risk.’ That’s literally their pitch,” says John T. Reed, who has written books about real estate investing and rates real estate gurus on his Web site, www.johntreed.com.

On his site, Mr. Reed has made a sport of ripping apart Mr. Sheets’s advice and techniques.

“Sheets targets beginners. The curriculum he devised for those novices is not what I think beginners need to know,” he writes on his site. “In fact, it appears to me that the topics he chose to write about were selected to maximize Carleton Sheets’ income, not to increase the incomes of his customers. The customers that most real estate gurus go after are relatively uneducated, inexperienced and poor.”

Mr. Sheets, after a brief telephone conversation from his home in Stuart, Fla., declined to be interviewed. “I’m proud of the life that I’ve led and what I’ve helped accomplish for a lot of people,” he says. “I keep telling people that I gave them the cloth but they were the ones who made the clothes.”

The Professional Education Institute, the Burr Ridge, Ill., company that is Mr. Sheets’s longtime partner, says its offerings have always provided value.

“P.E.I. and Carleton Sheets have received thousands of letters from satisfied customers praising Carleton Sheets’s programs. Last year alone, we received over 3,000 such letters,” the company said in a statement. “All P.E.I./Carleton Sheets products/programs meet the highest standards to ensure they provide tangible benefits to their students.”

Nor, says P.E.I., is it significant that portions of Mr. Sheets’s personal portfolio may be distressed.

“It is neither surprising nor noteworthy that some of the properties owned or partially owned by Carleton Sheets may have, at least temporarily, lost some value,” the company says. “Nearly every property owner in the U.S. today has experienced at least some — if not significant — depreciation in property values.”

And it may be that Mr. Sheets, who titled his 1998 book “The World’s Greatest Wealth Builder,” remains a true believer — as he was in early 2007, when, at the peak of the housing boom, he offered wisdom to real estate novices.

“I’ve been a successful real estate investor for 35 years,” he said in an infomercial that was shown that year. “History shows real estate is the most stable and consistently profitable investment people can make.”