All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Charles

@Cami Pinsak

Yes, there's a dock. I guess since we are not doing any work on the dock itself, I did not think to include it in the video.  It is a shared dock with one of the neighbors and is in good condition.  

Thanks for the info. My wife went down to the city and paid for the permits last week, so she knows more about that than I do.  

@Conor Colburn

I would start with meetup.com and do a search for investment groups in your area.  It might take a few meetings to decipher who the real players are vs the wannabes, but it should get you going in the right direction.

@Josie Roman

We have been "active" in real estate for about a year and a half, but only started our direct mail in mid May of this year.

We are using an absentee owner list and an inherited property list.  We are not sending out any realtor mailers, so everything we have been sending is focused on us purchasing the home.  All of them have been regular letters and we have not tried postcards yet.  We are targeting older homes in Ventura, Oxnard, and Camarillo.

Past Week Accomplishments:

Direct Mail - Weekly batch of 250 letters sent.

Online Marketing – Only one blog posted written and one posted. We made the first video of our video marketing campaign. (https://youtu.be/IP7PjxVfAQE)

Networking – Nothing to report.

4509 Falkirk Bay – We hired our partner’s contractor to do the demo while we wait on bids to come in from other contractors. His crew finished up with the demo on Friday.

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail - Send out weekly batch of 250 letters.

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts. I’ve been well below our blog goal for the last few weeks, so hopefully I can get this going again. We will also make the next video of Falkirk as part of video marketing. I also want to study a couple of resources to make sure that we are optimizing the video marketing as much as possible.

Networking – Will attend the Ventura County Real Estate Investors Club in Thousand Oaks on Thursday.

4509 Falkirk Bay – We were supposed to get 3 additional bids from GCs today, but haven’t received a single one of them. If we don’t get them, we are going to have to make a decision if we want to go with our partner’s GC without comparing his bid to any others or if we want to waste more time waiting for additional bids.

Lessons Learned:

Here are some bullet points learned from making our first video:

#1. Buy an external microphone. We actually bought a wireless microphone and a wired microphone, but neither one of them worked correctly. After doing a little bit of research, it appears that recording audio on a cell phone is not as easy as it should be. As you can see in the video, the sound quality differs depending on how close I am to the recording device. Once we buy the correct microphone, it should resolve that issue

#2. You don’t have to buy expensive video editing software. Although not super expensive, I was originally going to buy video editing software for $299. My wife then asked me if I could find it cheaper, and that’s when I discovered the software that I used for this video for free. Although it’s not going to win any Academy Award, I think that I will be able to make it do everything I need to do in the future.

#3. You’re going to think you look and sound stupid. Fortunately for me, I have been looking and sounding stupid for my entire life, so I’m used to it. Just get over yourself and make a video.

#4. Done is better than perfect. In this case, we started the demo sooner than we were expecting. I therefore had to rush to the property after work and only had less than 90 minutes of daylight in which to film and take pictures. Although I know this could have been produced better, I could have spent hours trying to get it “perfect.” At some point you will realize diminishing returns, so just do it.

@Asif M.

I would recommend going to your local REIA and finding any experienced investors there. I know you want to be cautious about putting too much detail on here, but i don't know how much traction you're going to get with that little detail. Do you have the property under contract?

@David Hart

Thank you. Hopefully the updates will start to be a little more exciting than they have been over the past few months.

Midweek update:

Everything finally fell into place with the falkirk property and we closed escrow today.  While first contact with seller to close of escrow took over 4 months, now the real work begins.  I'm not sure what a realistic timeline is for close of escrow to start of demolition, but we have not even finalized our scope of work yet.  Fortunately, we are not paying hard money rates, but even with bank financing, every day gone is more money lost in interest.  We met with our partner and his GC today to go over the scope of work and we hope to have it finalized by tomorrow and start getting bids as soon as possible.  As we get into future projects, this is obviously something we want to get better at and have a more streamlined process.  When all is said and done, I am hoping that we can have this back on the market well before Thanksgiving and before the dreaded El Nino comes to town.

@Melanie Parker

My wife and I are in Ventura County, but i'm not sure there are any tips relevant to Ventura County that do not apply anywhere else. I have no idea what prices are like in Denver, but Southern California is not exactly known for inexpensive housing either.  If you have any specific questions, please feel free to send me a PM.   

Past Week Accomplishments:

Direct Mail - Weekly batch of 250 letters sent.

Online Marketing - Two blog posts written and one posted. Another hectic week last week made me fall behind in this area. We bought some of the products we will be using for our video marketing campaign (tripod, microphone, etc.) and hope to start implementing video within the next week or so.

Networking – Attended a mentoring session with the Ventura County SCORE. Although real estate investing is not the typical start-up business that SCORE caters to, our two mentors still provided us with a couple of pointers and ideas that we didn’t think of. We will look to go back in a few months to hopefully see if we can make some good contacts to help grow our business.

Also attended a Ventura County REIA. We have been attending for over a year and we have steadily been increasing our participation in the question and answer sessions. Although we feel we have a good level of knowledge built up over the past year, we don't really like answering too many questions until we can put all the theory into action and have proven results. However, this time another newbie mentioned one of her hurdles was the competition on MLS properties and her lack of money to buy homes with California prices. I then chimed in and told her of how my wife and I use direct mail to try and find off-market properties and that we do not have a lot money, so we are purchasing our first project with a bank loan and partnering with another investor for the rehab costs. After my response, my wife and I had several other questions directed towards us about our direct mail campaign and using bank financing. After the meeting ended and the networking began, three of the successful, experienced investors who attend every meeting approached us separately and provided us tips and told us how they were proud of what we have been doing and to reach out to them anytime. Although they have always said hi to us in the past, this was the first time that they actively approached us like that. Although this was nothing major in the big scheme of things, it still felt good to think that we actually may be making some progress into turning our venture into something bigger.

4509 Falkirk Bay – Our closing set for last Thursday has been pushed to next Tuesday due to the tenant needing more time to move out. We were at the house yesterday and he is almost fully moved out and should be gone by tomorrow. While we were there yesterday, we met with our partner and the contractor that he uses to go through our scope of work and walk the property. He gave us some good ideas that we will use to further refine and finalize the scope of work.

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail - Send out weekly batch of 250 letters.

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts. I have a 30 day trial for a video/audio editing software that I found online. The purchase price is $299, so we will be looking to see if there is any other software out there that can meet our needs for a lower price. Don’t want to spend too much time looking around though, as $299 is not a huge cost for a powerful piece of software that we will be using for the foreseeable future.

Networking – No planned events for this week.

4509 Falkirk Bay – Our plan is to close escrow on Tuesday and get started with the rehab as soon as possible. I think our plan moving forward is to meet with our partner again and finalize the scope of work and then start getting contractors in there for bids. Our partner’s GC mentioned that we should thinking about having someone start on the demo as soon as possible to not waste time, and then have GCs bid on the rest of the project. He said that his crew could do the demo in a week for $3500 (not including dumpster costs). I have nothing to compare that cost to, so we will have to determine if starting demo separately is something we want to do and the figure out what the appropriate cost for that would be.   

Lessons Learned:

We did a lackluster job last week of returning phone calls on a timely basis.  We also did not make much progress in terms of submitting more offers.  I understand that a lot of our attention will be on our first project, but we still need to concentrate on our lead flow and developing our business systems.  

@Justin Sandall

I just ordered the book on Amazon.  Did you ever get a chance to read it, and if so, how is it?