Driving for Dollars and The What-Do-We-Do-Now?! Aftermath

If you were one of the dozen or so people that read my last post, you may remember that I said I'm great at gathering information but a little wanting in the organization arena. Actually, I'm great at organizing when I don't have two chatty little beings vying for my attention, which these days happens between the hours of 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. about every other day (or now, for 15 minutes before I see my first client-in-crisis). A couple of nights ago, I got really excited about the BP blog post I was an hour and a half into completing. And then my computer battery died. And then I realized that there is no AutoSave function when you're blogging. And then, after 15 minutes of panicked searching for some remnant of my brilliant thoughts (wink wink), I resigned myself to the lame fact that everything was gone.

In a nutshell: To make sure that we did something that looked like concrete action last weekend, we tossed the kids into the car at nap time on Sunday afternoon and did our first Drive for Dollars. Prior to leaving the house, we followed the oh so helpful advice of  @chrisfeltus (I'm so new to this I'm not even sure I'm Pinging Chris Feltus the right way, but at least I'm trying, right?!): we created a spreadsheet to track the properties we wanted to follow up on. We included: PROPERTY ADDRESS, NOTES, ABSENTEE OWNER? Y/N, ABSENTEE OWNER ADDRESS AND A SPACE TO NOTE CAMERA SHOTS. If you haven't read them yet, I highly recommend reading the following posts:

http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2013/05/03...

and

http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2013/05/10...

After a couple of hours (with breaks to threaten screaming kids and acquire necessary beverages and portable snacks), we ended up with a dozen or so houses to look into.

Later that night, we started the dig for information. It's tedious, but it's such a great learning experience. Basically, our first two houses had deceased owners, which meant trying to track down current owners. While we're pretty sure we've found the owners (or at least family members of the deceased), the only contact information we can find is active Facebook accounts (and I'm pretty good at conducting successful internet searches, so either I'm not aware of all my resources, or the information simply isn't out there). Wanting to make sure that we did something else that we could mark down as concrete action before the weekend was over, I (very sensitively, in my best counselor voice) sent private Facebook messages to two hoped-for contacts. (It's now been 4 days with no response, so if you have ideas of a next step, please, please chime in.)

One of the other properties appears to be a small part of a $1.5 million bulk auction buy. From what we can tell, the property has been boarded up since it was purchased in late 2013. My question: we have located the LLC named in the purchase. The LLC has two named manager-owners. One owner we can't find contact information for. The other is an optometrist in our area, and we were only able to locate a business contact number for him. Is it kosher to contact a place of business in this game? I know I'm still overly timid in my newness here. I'm willing to make the call, I just want a little reassurance that it's acceptable practice.

And with that, I just received a text telling me that my first client is here to see me, and so I'm off.

Our plan for this weekend: 1) Gather information on the remaining 6 or so properties and make calls 2) Get 1-3 networking events on the calendar, 3) Another round of Driving for Dollars, and 4) Format our first set of direct mail (post cards) and have them ready to send out by Monday.