All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Charles

Hi @Annette D.My wife and I are located in Ventura County. We are mainly look at fix and flip opportunities on SFRs, but once in a while we get calls about small mutlifamily properties from our direct mail.  If you'd like, feel free to send me a private message and we can exchange contact information.  Maybe we can meetup one day and see if there is any way we can work together. 

@Santiago Almaguer Welcome to BP.  My wife and I are located in Oxnard as well. Please let me know if there is anything that we can do to help you along your journey.  My wife is a licensed realtor, so feel free to reach out if you need assistance with your next rental property.

it looks like @Glacier Garciamight be using the terms "bird dog" and "wholesaler" interchangeably.  I don't know that's necessarily the case though.  

@Victoria SandersHave you contacted any hard money lenders? There should be some that will loan based off of the ARV of a property. They usually want you to have some skin in the game though. I put together a list of hard money lenders that will loan in my area (Ventura County) which I assume means they will loan in the rest of Southern California as well. If you send me a PM with your contact info, I can email you the list and you can contact them to see if they can help you out.

If you truly have a great deal, you might also be able to find private lenders at either your local real estate group or by posting the details of your deal on sites like this. Make sure you have it under contract though so that no one back doors you.

I'm happy to report that my wife's last day at her "day job" was last Friday and she will now be doing real estate full time under a new broker she signed with. We are hoping that she will have time to do both the retail side as well as focus on our investments and viewing properties. I had hoped to start mailing to other lists by now, but that should definitely start by next week. Other than that, we have submitted a couple of offers on MLS properties that past month, but as usual, our offers got beat out by 100K or more. We are in the process of creating a better MLS tracking system which should help us streamline writing offers and keeping track of them. Needless to say we are not on track to meet our goal of 4 flips this year, but hopefully we can build a little bit of momentum some time soon.

@Kyle Mitchell

I'm a little north of you in Ventura County and my wife and I just completed our first flip.  My advice is to make sure that the property you buy is actually a deal.  You may get anxious if you don't find a great deal and feel the urge to lower your standards just to get your first deal.  Make sure that your numbers are solid and if it takes longer to find a deal than you were hoping, so be it.  We almost bought a couple of properties that we shouldn't have and we were fortunate that they did not work out.

@Mike WatkinsThanks for the heads up. i have a couple of other books in line next, but maybe i'll check it out after those.

To anyone still following this thread, I finally got around to finishing E-Myth Real Estate Investor.  I must admit that i have never read the original, but as Steven Johnson alluded to, this one is about setting up systems in your business as well.  The book goes back and forth between chapters written by Michael Gerber and then chapters written by Than Merrill and Paul Esajian.  So basically, Gerber explains a concept in one chapter and then the next chapter is dedicated to how that concept is utilized by Merrill and Esajian in their real estate business.  As i said, i never read the first one, so i'm not sure how much of this one would be repeat information.  Personally, I enjoyed how Gerber's concepts were presented in a way where the reader can see how it can be applied in your own real estate investing business.  i would recommend it to anyone looking to grow and evolve their business.  As a newbie, it gave me ideas on how I would like to set myself up now for being successful and working on my business, not in my business. 

@Gafar Odufuye

Welcome to BP.  My wife and I recently completed our first flip in Oxnard and are very familiar with Port Hueneme, Oxnard, and Ventura.

So it sounds like you are looking for either a duplex or SFR to live in? Please feel free to reach out to me if you need any assistance looking for your property. My wife is a real estate agent, and since we are also investors, she will understand whatever goals you have with the property. As you have probably seen already, prices out here are getting pretty crazy again, but she can definitely assist you with your search.

@Scott McCutcheon

We found the property through our absentee owner direct mail campaign. My wife will be doing real estate full time in a few weeks, so we hope to start submitting more consistent offers on MLS properties as well.