All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

When you buy something with a tenant in, verify everything that the sellers/agents/tenants tell you.

I'm not saying that everyone is lying but very often when landlords try to sell their buildings, it's because they can't stand the tenants or lose money one way or another.

Each office is managed independently and has its own quirks but it is fairly competitive, especially if you are an agent who produces enough to cap. Capping is reaching a $ amount where you start getting 100% commission.

Little late but yeah, I'm ready to jump ship. Started using them in November and it was a nightmare. Mail merge failed and they sent the postcards anyway!

"Dear {Homeowner_1}" etc

so they credited me.

January 3rd, send 2nd mailing.. on the 19th it wasn't sent. They wanted me to cancel and make a new one.. just ridiculous.

Stay away from Click2Mail if you like your sanity

How was this property picked out? Ask them to drive by it and see if they're really interested in viewing it. It's free, regardless of title.

There's no point in wasting a lot of time before they're even interested in buying it. If they do then submit an offer contingent on the title search.

Deion, it really sounds like you already had your mind set to it and you were only looking for validation.

The reality is that being an agent is like a snowball that gains momentum over time. Unless you plan to do cold calling/ door knocking 8 hours a day, 5/6 days a week.. there is no reason to start full-time and especially take a loan.

When you're just getting started, you won't have 25 listings/buying clients to manage. In the first several weeks/months you'll be lucky if you have a handful. Managing those properly will take a few hours a week but definitively not 40-80.

Might as well find a temporary job and use those proceeds to fund marketing yourself as an agent.

Gavin, how customizable is their IDX solution? When I got started I was turned off by the fairly high monthly fee and figured unless you share the cost with someone else, it wasn't a great investment short term. But their websites looks pretty good and they work well. Mine generates a few leads but looks terrible compared to this. I'm probably losing many.

Hi Deion,

Please don't take out loans and such to get started. Throughout the country, getting started as a real estate agent costs about $1k to $3k (from what I've seen). It's not a lot of money compared to other businesses. Just try to save up that money while working another job, and start part time until you gain momentum.

The 3 best ways to get results fast cost virtually nothing - networking, cold calling and door knocking. They aren't scalable like direct mail but you can't beat the return.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the education lunch idea. That's one of the things I'd like to do in the future.

My question is a bit more in terms of finding a list of these people that I could market to passively through an educational mail campaign. Kind of engineering this relationship.

The ideal candidates is usually the person that is older, risk averse and doesn't want to be an active investor (ie they would rather invest in mutual funds than stocks).

Thanks for the suggestion. One of my close friends used to be a financial advisor so maybe we could play that angle.

Are they owner occupied? Or vacant

Any equity?

Those were the 2 big issues when I looked into those. Handwritten letter works best.

I was in a particular situation. Moving here from Canada I didn't have a full time job but had a lot of savings so I started as an agent full time. Starting from scratch without a sphere of influence and without being known in the community, it took me a while to get the ball rolling and start gaining momentum.

I started recruiting for the brokerage company and I recommend people to start part-time unless they are willing to do "active" forms of marketing such as cold-calling and door knocking. Those methods work but most people hate doing it. Joining a strong, established team also works.

If the person is only going to send postcards and wait for people to call then you can do that part-time. In retrospective I should have been more aggressive about cold calling in the first few months.