Guru, Whatcha Got?

I am just getting started as a real estate investor in Los Angeles, California. I was expecting to jump right into wholesaling without incident. Boy was I wrong.

If you've read my profile then you know that I'm a seasoned television producer but at the ripe young age of 41 and without ANY real estate under my belt I've decided to dedicate some of my time to getting in the game.

The thing is, I really don't care about how much I make, not right now anyway. I make a good living being a producer but of course I want more, I have a family after all. 

I just want to close deals. I just want to close my first deal. Hell I'll even settle for being nearby when someone else closes a deal!

So enter the gurus. Before Bigger Pockets was on my radar, Cody Sperber was. I signed up for the "Clever Investor", and "Fast Track Profit System" courses and I jumped right in.

I'm no sucker so my expectations were limited and I really do think that for the $400 I spent in total that I got a fantastic education about real estate investing and how I can get into it.

One thing started to become clear though as I went through the process. Cody is in Arizona and I'm in Los Angeles. There must be differences in our market, right?

Enter my first expensive lesson. What works in one market doesn't always work in others. 

I was geared up to be a wholesaler, it sounded great! Then I talked to a realtor friend and she said wholesaling is dead in LA. I took that with a grain of salt but it was not the reaction that I was expecting. Regardless I forged ahead. I got my business cards, ordered my sticky pads, set up my websites and was about to get my bandit signs ordered when I noticed something about my area. All the bandit signs were gone. I asked around as to why that would be the case and was told it was because either law enforcement got real strict and was patrolling even on the weekends or all the other wholesalers realized something that it would cost me more time, energy and money before I realized it. Bandit signs produce few leads if any and they are all junk. Now, this was a problem for me since so much of my "training" was bandit sign strategy. Ugh, what now.

Direct mailers. Lucky for me Cody's course gave me this great mailer to send out. But to who? Oh right, I need to buy a list. So I did. I used parameters that I found from other real estate investors online and purchased a list of 1,000 absentee owners. The I paid to have postcards printed and mailed per Cody's template. Then they went out. 

Out of the 1,000 postcards that went out I received ONE phone call and NO submissions to my website. Oh and the one caller was another wholesaler.

Now I thought I was done. That's it. This sucks and I wasted a lot of time and money. 

That's when I found Freedomsoft. For only $300 I was going to be able to generate instant leads, instant buyers and instant sales! How do you think that went. If I did want to use their seller and buyer leads then I'd have to send mailers to both, and pay a lot for them. It wasn't the one-two click and done that I had thought it would be.

So what do you think happened next? Kent Clothier's "Find Motivated Sellers Now" software. I'll admit that this one had me convinced. Why? Well I had also found Biggerpockets.com and had been listening to all the podcasts, reading the blog posts, participating in the forums and I learned one very valuable lesson. Common sense costs money. All the programs that I had, everyone else had. I knew this but ignored it enough to convince myself that I needed these programs, all of them. 

Now I just started using the "Find Motivated Sellers Now" software and thanks to Biggerpockets.com I've learned that you need to keep mailing to prospective leads. It may take 5 mailings before I get a good response rate. 

And I feel like I finally found that outlying edge where the opportunity really is and that is in the leads that no one wants. Just today I put two and two together. The first clue was that with Kent's software they tell you not to mail to vacant property owners who's mailing address is the same as the property address but instead Kent teaches you what to do with them in another course. Then on a podcast today someone spoke of the returned mail leads, the ones that come back from the post office. If the post office can't find them then other wholesalers might be ignoring them. If that's true then I need to find them and maybe there I can focus on the individual and make something happen.

Maybe then I can close my first deal. 

Here's to hoping!