My Journey

[Charles Cline]

Ok, I am a brand new investor. Just to break down where I am. I am a licensed General Contractor, I was a realtor in the past and recently have submitted my application to renew my RE license, I am a client of Fortunebuilders education, and I have a mentor. Financially I have very little funds saved up, but decent cash flow coming in. I have coordinated with my mentor that he will fund all deals that I find and we will split the profit. I just need to find the deals.

The methods I am going to use are Bandit signs, which I ordered and should be in next week, and I am going to use Direct mail marketing. I purchased a list from Listsource of absentee owners in my town with equity and got just over 1000 names. I am breaking those names down into 100 name groups. I am sending out 100 every Monday and 100 every Wednesday until they are done. I am using yellow letters and I am going to track the mailings and test the results. I am going to try different things each time I renew the mailing to see what gets the best results. Next I am going to buy a list that has owner occupied homes that have elderly tenants and start adding them to my mail list. I am also going to start sending letters to NOD list of foreclosure radar (or is it property radar now?) I am going to send the list every 6 weeks on the absentee and every 4 weeks on the NOD.

I am going to track the results, or lack thereof and post them here. Please let me know what you think of what I am doing and what I can do better, any advise would be greatly appreciated.

[Dev Horn]

Man, I don't want to discourage you on this one point, but NODs are tough because they rarely have equity, and short sales SUCK especially in California where the bank can just bundle up their REOs and sell them to Blackstone Capital at 90% ARV. Stay away from anything where you have to negotiate with a bank - you think sellers are intimidating? A bank REO guy does this every day with people who have hundreds of millions to invest in SFRs.

In RE investing, you are looking for the magic triad of circumstances:

1) Motivated seller - NEEDS to sell ASAP

2) Distressed property - will not sell on retail market until it's repaired

3) High equity - this gives them the ability to negotiate on price down to where you MUST be if this is a business and not a charity ;-)

If all three of those do not exist, the deal could be elusive and you could waste a huge amount of time chasing it.

Oh, and the house MUST NOT BE LISTED. Once an agent is involved, you have no ability to work directly with the seller - and that is an absolute MUST.