All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Charles

Past Week Accomplishments:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters sent.

Online Marketing – Three blog posts written and two posted. I also joined a few real estate LinkedIn groups that I could find in our county, although it doesn’t appear that any of them are active.

Networking – Attended the Ventura County Real Estate Investors Club monthly networking event. Nothing too exciting occurred at the meeting, but we still like going monthly to show that we are still in the game and meet any new contacts when possible.

Leads – We went to view two properties owned by a lady who called us from our direct mail. Our understanding was that we were going to be able to view the interior of each one, but that was not the case. I’m not sure what good people think is going to come out of us giving them “blind” offers, but guess we have to do what we have to do.

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail – Send out weekly batch of 250 letters. We are a little behind schedule as we are working the 3rd touch for our inherited list and trying to print our own yellow letters. We are having difficulty getting the print to line up on the paper, but we will not spend too much time trying to fix it before moving on with a different method.

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts. I also am going to update my LinkedIn profile. I’ve been reading a couple of articles about how to use that website more effectively, so I have some ideas that I want to implement in the next few weeks.

Leads – My wife and I worked more on our follow-up system and have implemented a better plan.  This should make us more efficient at answering and returning calls moving forward.

Networking – No planned events. 

Lessons Learned:

We learned first-hand the importance of networking and attending real estate related events. Several months ago, someone found our information on meetup.com and invited us to their investing seminar. We attended the invite not expecting too much to come from it. This event was right after my wife obtained her real estate license, and after talking with the organizers of the event, we learned that they had a brokerage aside from their investment company and were looking for more agents. After interviewing with several brokers in our area, my wife deciding to hang her license with them as they were on board with what we wanted to do with our investments as well as my wife being a retail agent. Also, we have been in search of funding for repair costs on our Oxnard project because the lender we found who is willing to be in 2nd position wants a big portion of the profits on top of charging a percentage for loaning the money. When discussing in passing the property with her broker, they became interested in the project and wanted to learn more about it. After meeting with the head of the investment side of the company this morning, he offered to lend us money as a traditional lender or partner up with us as a JV, both with better terms than the previous lender we were working with. Althoughwe still have some details to work out, neither of these opportunities would have come our way had we not gone to the initial seminar. This is one of the reasons we continue to go to networking events, regardless of the topic, because you never know who you are going to meet that you could end up doing business with.

Hey Christopher. Maybe you can further narrow down which niche you guys would like to pursue and in which market. I don't know anything about mobile homes, but I would bet that mobile home investing would be quite different in CA than NC. John Fedro writes some great articles on here about mobile home investing. Maybe you can read some of those (if you haven't already) to get a few ideas.

Past Week Accomplishments:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters sent.

Online Marketing – Three blog posts written and three posted.

Networking – Nothing to report

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters are written and ready to be delivered to the post office.

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts.

Leads – We received quite a few phone calls last Friday and today (at least more than we are used to). This will be a good test of our follow-up system. And just for clarification, I see our follow-up system as entailing two different items. The first item is trying to contact callers from any missed calls. Our telephone system logs the incoming phone numbers, so we are aiming to return every missed call within 48 hours (preferably 24). Obviously, we would like to return the calls as soon as possible, but since my wife and I work opposite schedules, sometimes it is not until late at night when we can catch up and confirm if either one of us has returned the phone call. Part two of the follow up system is calling people that we have already talked to but weren’t ready to sell. Basically, that is our phone call “drip campaign.” We are pretty good with part two so far, so now it’s a matter of shoring up the first part of the follow up system.

Networking – Will be attending the Ventura County REIA on Thursday night.

Lessons Learned:

• It was good that we got some decent phone calls over the last two business days, following a relatively slow week last week. None of the callers have really been motivated and most of them seem to want over market price. We understand only a small percentage of callers will have a situation that’s going to fit our fix and flip model, but our hope is to turn some of the non-motivated sellers into retail listings. Not too many seem interested in listing their properties on the open market, and I’m not sure what makes them think that we would want to buy their properties for above market price, but it is what it is.
• When we talk to sellers, we usually try to present them 3 offers varying in purchase price. One offer with hard money, one using conventional financing, and one using seller financing. In the case of the Oxnard property, the seller chose the offer with conventional financing. If you are going to use conventional financing, make sure that you have all the associated costs accounted for. In our case, we underestimated what the closing costs would be when using bank financing. Fortunately, we overestimated the rate of the loan we got, so that basically is going to even out. We also did not take into account the price of the appraisal. That was $560 for the appraiser to initially come out and now we are going to have to pay an additional $125 for him to come out again and verify some work we did on the deck to alleviate his safety concerns. Although these $685 is nowhere near a deal breaker, it’s a small reminder to make sure that you are taking everything into account.

Hey @Brionne Moss.  I know that there will be busy weeks and slow weeks, but even if not much is going on, I still like to try and find something to write about that others may find value in. Hopefully next week I'll have something better to write about. 

Nothing too exciting happened over the last week, so this update is rather small and uneventful. We continue to plug along though and stick with the fundamentals in order to build up momentum for the future.

Past Week Accomplishments:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters sent.

Online Marketing – Three blog posts written and two posted.

Networking – Nothing to report

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters are written and ready to be delivered to the post office.

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts.

Leads – We are continuing to work on and evolve our follow-up system. Although we have gotten better about keeping track of things, I don’t think we have the sense of urgency to get back to callers quickly. Although we haven’t received a “hot” lead in quite a while, we should still start getting in the habit of responding to callers promptly. Most of the calls have been from landlords who want us to make them an offer without viewing the property and are asking for unrealistic prices. While we understand that most of these will never become investment deals for us, hopefully we can turn a few of them into listings for my wife. We need to work on getting back to these callers the next day vice “in a few days.”

Networking – No planned events. 

@Henry L.

I'm not a buy and hold guy, but it seems to be the general consensus that good cash flow is difficult to obtain in much of Southern California. There are some areas in Oxnard and Ventura that are at a lower price point, so you may be able to find something there. I would also check out Fillmore and Santa Paula.

@Tom Beatty

My wife and I live in Oxnard.  Feel free to reach out to me if you would like to bounce ideas off of each other.

Past Week Accomplishments:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters sent.

Online Marketing – Three blog posts written and three posted. I have been finding quite a few things to write about lately which is easier than trying to come up with content based solely off of keyword research.

Networking – Nothing to report

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters are written and ready to be delivered to the post office.

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts.

Leads – Appraisal on the Oxnard property came in at 675K. I’m not an appraiser so I can’t really question that number, but I’m surprised it came back that high. However, the appraiser noted safety issues about the deck that we need to correct in order to get final loan approval. It kinda stinks that we are going to have to spend money “fixing” the deck that we are going to totally redo anyway, but guess that’s the downside of going with conventional financing. Still have to get in touch with the appraiser again, but the repairs appear to be minor enough that my coworker and I should be able to do them ourselves. This loan process has taken way too long already and we are itching to move forward, give the tenant his 6 week notice to move out, and get this things started.

Networking – No planned events.

Lessons Learned:

• We created a “system” for better tracking and following up with phone calls. It works well for now, but we’ll see how scalable it is when we get to the point where we are receiving more calls.
• We started sending out our direct mail on May 19th. To date we have sent out 2755 mailers and received a whopping 15 calls, for a response rate of 0.5%. Our lists account for over 3000 names, so we have only touched each person 1 time. 4 calls were to be removed from list, 6 calls were people wondering what we did and are now on our follow up list, and 5 are "hot leads" that we are working to either fix and flip or list on the MLS under my wife (the only lead that looks like an investment opportunity is the Oxnard property). We understand that it takes multiple touches to start seeing better results, so we are not deterred at this point.

@Monica Cantrell

Thanks Monica. I know that I don't have much to provide, but hopefully things will get more interesting. 

@Conrad Metzenberg

we are in escrow on our first flip in Oxnard.  Right now we are marketing to Ventura, Oxnard, and Camarillo, but we are hoping to grow to the rest of the county and maybe Santa Barabara