All Forum Posts by: Doug N.

@Shetal Gandhias a programmer, you are likely ahead of most REI folks in terms of what you can do with data.

mash yourself a simple geodatabase from redfin csv's or assessor shapefiles. get up on qgis (20 minutes) and make some visual databases for your programmer self. Start reading everything in the forums. It will take a couple of weeks, but it will answer all of your questions. 

Drop me a line if you wish, best of luck and keep us posted!

Seattle Duplexes, 2015

Go @Daniel! Rip it up! 

I always like to think of it from the mail receiver's perspective. Would I rather look at - or even open - what is clearly a DM piece, or would I rather look at something that might (and I stress *might*) be a normal letter? 

I have sat on this fence many times, and I have to say curiosity always gets the best of me... I open any letter that might not be mass DM, and I think a lot of folks act the same way. 

Where I am, there are less than 2,000 MF (4+ doors) in the whole county. That's manageable for personal contact as well as DM. And I have found property managers to be happy to talk if they're not busy... drop by with a smile and get to know them. It's worth the time.  :)

A Street Full of Property Managers, 2015.

 Preach it, Christopher! 

Folks are always asking... "How can I out-perform the broker and agent?"

By out-performing them. 

No magic here, it's just work.

@Christopher Tellesis correct - make your own market, don't rely upon brokers or agents. 

it's simple: ID those parcels and owners, make a database and start talking to people, every day.

Good luck, and keep us posted!

@Bobby Thompson

 ok, deal... looks like we can hit them all in about 8 hours, so it will probably be just the right amount of caffeine... looking fwd to it!

You'd better call Saul. 

No, actually just tender it to the insurance company - they will probably make short work of what is clearly a D-grade shakedown. 

Best of luck!

Feeling too lazy for an original posting, so I'm just going to post what drHousingBubble writes on July 23... 

(drHousingBubble is a pretty hilarious writer, and covers socal extensively)

http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/california-texas-migration-cities-americans-are-ditching-resident-real-estate-patterns/#more-8279

...many of the recent buyers have come from China. And this nonsense that households in L.A. make giant sums of money. The median household income is $55,909 for the county. How many households make more than $100,000? Let us take a look:

$100k to $149k (13.6%) – not enough for a crap shack

$150k to $199k (5.9%) – enough for a crap shack

$200k or more (6.6%) – does this crowd want to live in a piece of junk home?

So in reality about 12.5 percent of households can afford a crap shack and keep in mind many of these households already own (and many are welcoming back those lower wage children back home). So your pool of potential buyers is tiny. This is why sales have gone stagnant after the investor crowd pulled back. The big push now is coming from foreign money and highly leveraged households. As things slow, inventory starts to build up.

It should be no surprise that the L.A. metro area is one of the top areas Americans are ditching.

@Willie R. I would dive right into the education part. 

Best of luck, and keep us posted!

In a case like this, the county is your friend. You could make your own OO list - get the data from the county and compare the situs address vs the owner/taxpayer address field.

The brokers charge a lot for data, so much so that it's really not an option for beginning investors. Where do the brokers get their data from? The county. The assessor's office, usually. And the original datasets from the assessors office are often far richer than what a broker might sell you.

I usually download the assessor's roll or a shapefile and load it into filemaker and do a calc on the two fields. Then I make an OO tag for those records.

Keep us posted on your search!

@Bobby Thompson that's great to hear - I look fwd to anything you post. I will drop you a line in a few days.

And if you ever come to Seattle, I will take you to a Starbucks in my neighborhood...