What Is My Next Actionable Step
I am looking for advice and feedback from the community on what actionable steps I can take to help improve our results and meet our real estate goals. We have only done one rehab so far, which was sold in January. My goal was to do 4 more deals this year (either rehabs or wholesales), but we have not done any. Part of me wants to believe that this is due to the current state of the real estate market and the competitive southern California market but another part of me thinks that is only an excuse. Below is a summary of the current state of our real estate "business." If anyone would like to share their ideas on what our next actionable step should be to help grow our business, I'm all ears.
Direct mail: We send out approximately 2000 letters/postcards a month. This is a budget that we can sustain, so I don't really want to increase that amount until we can do so comfortably. Our current response rate is below 1% (about 0.5%). We mail to a combination of lists (absentee owner, inherited, probate, divorce, bankruptcy, eviction, and NOD) and fulfill the mailings totally in-house.
Pay-per-click: I started a couple of Google AdWords campaigns about a month ago. I'm starting with a small budget for now while I collect the data and see which campaigns are working and which aren't. Eventually, I would like to get to a budget of $300 a month on this and then grow this as we start to get leads from this effort.
Organic SEO:I write blog posts to try and increase our web presence. Right now I'm only putting out about one a week, which is a shame. I don't know if I'll get to the point anytime soon where I can put out one a day, but there is no reason that I shouldn't be doing at least two a week (if not three). This should be something relatively easy that I can improve on.
MLS: We don't look at MLS properties anymore. We were for a short while, but then it became disheartening when our offers are constantly 100K - 150K below the accepted offers (no exaggeration). I don't know how anyone is making money paying the prices that are being paid, but some of it has to do with our lack of experience and not having solid relationships with contractors to get the best pricing. Also, we don't do any of the rehab ourselves, so maybe that's money we have to pay that other investors who do the work themselves don't have to pay. Even if we weren't getting outbid by such a large amount, it's hard for me to view properties quickly and make fast offers while still working a 9-5. Until this is something I can do consistently, I feel like my time is better spent with direct mail and our online efforts.
Networking: We attend most of the REIAs in our county that I'm aware of. We are pretty consistent with this. Where we are lacking is the one-on-one networking. Since I can't guarantee what time I can get off of work during the week, it's hard for me to do anything on the weekdays. Most of my weekends are open, so my hope is to start doing some one-on-one networking with experienced investors on weekends.
Wife: My wife is a full time real estate agent. Since she is still fairly new, most of her time is spent growing her retail business as opposed to investing. Since we are not getting many leads from the investing side, I don't think there is much of an issue with this. Luckily, we have been able to turn a few of the leads we have gotten from our direct mail that would not work for investments into listings for her.
That's about it in a nutshell. This was a little longer than I had hoped, but maybe that will help generate some ideas that I might be able to implement. Thanks in advance.