All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Charles

Hey @Conrad Metzenberg.  Welcome to the site.  My wife and I live down the 101 from you in Ventura County. We are just starting out in the fix and flip world.

Past Week Accomplishments:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters sent.

Online Marketing – Four blog posts written and two posted. Since writing the posts is the most time consuming aspect, this is actually the first time I’ve been ahead of schedule.

Networking – Attended the open house that one of the local lenders had at their new office. Nothing exciting to report, but writing this has reminded me that I forgot to send a follow-up email to the new contacts I made.

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail - Send out next weekly batch of 250 letters

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts.

Leads – Appraisal on the Oxnard property is scheduled for Thursday. We were given a heads up that three of the top items the appraiser will be looking for are code compliant smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and that the water heater is double braced. I checked the report from the home inspector about the water heater and didn’t see anything mentioned about it being braced. After he looked over the report, he said that he somehow missed it and doesn’t believe it is double braced. He then said that he would come over and install them before the appraisal for free. I told him that he didn’t have to do that but he said that the straps were inexpensive and it would only take him half an hour, and that he insisted as his favor for missing something in the report. I know who I will be referring people to in the future.

Networking – No planned events.

Lessons Learned:

We are not writing enough offers. Scratch that, we are not writing ANY offers and this needs to be addressed and rectified quickly. Viewing properties and writing a lot of offers was one of the first things that we were taught, but somehow it has been neglected. Part of that was due to me being out of town for 7 months and my wife not wanting to make a major decision on our first deal without any input from me or a second set of eyes, but we haven't gotten back on track since I've been back. Sending out direct mail is fine, but it is a disservice to limit ourselves and not take advantage of writing offers on MLS properties, no matter how stiff the competition is. The more offers we write, the higher the chance of eventually landing a deal from them.

@Christopher Telles

Thanks, but the only reason we may seem organized is because we are not receiving that many leads and we are able to easily track them.  As we grow in our business, what we are doing now will not be a long term solution.  I will check out salesforce and see what they have to offer.

@Juan Cristales

I am a spreadsheet junkie and that is how we are keeping track of most things right now. As i mentioned above, that is working for now, but i know there are betters solutions where we can track and manage a lot of our business from one application. Right now, i want to be able to answer a call from a seller who may not be motivated at this time, set a task or reminder to follow up with her a month from now, and then automatically have that task/reminder pop up in month without me having to actively search for it. I can make that happen using a combination of excel and outlook, but i want to streamline that process. 

Thank you @MARLENA BARTLETT.  We don't have many results yet, but we understand it takes a while to build up some momentum. 

@Jared Vidalespurchase price is 500K and rehab costs are 66K. An exact same model sold in November for 700K and another one in December for 728K. Prices in our area have gone up since then and we are going to finish ours just a tad bit nicer than those two. There is currently one that is 10% bigger than ours with the same number of beds/baths for 965K, so we'll see what happens with that one. That one is finished a lot nicer than we are currently planning. For our calculations, I have been playing it conservative and using an ARV of 700K. Our expected profit at that ARV is just below 70K. I also have the realtor fees at the going rate of 5% in our area, but my wife will be listing the property, so some of that money will be staying in our pocket. Once we get loan approval this week, we will still be short some of the rehab money. We are currently working different angles to obtain the rehab money. If we can't for whatever reason, we have a hard money lender who is interested in a profit sharing venturing, but that will of course be less profit in our pocket. If the sky crashes and everything falls through, we have been gathering information from local investors at our REIA who may be interested in a wholesale deal.

Past Week Summary:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters sent.

Online Marketing – Only one blog post written and posted.  Besides being out of town for some of the week, there was a lot going on at my day job.

Networking – Attended the Ventura County Real Estate Investors Club REIA. WE announced to the group that we were looking for GC referrals and received two business cards from GCs that were in attendance. We are building our lists of GCs to put in bids on the Oxnard property when the tenant moves out.

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail - Send out next batch of 250 letters.

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts.

Leads – Continue to pursue different financing options for the Oxnard property.We should have a loan approval from the bank this week for conventional financing. If that goes through, we will still need some cash for the rehab.Other avenues we are pursuing our Joint Venture type partnerships through a hard money lender as well as with other investors in our area.

Networking – One of the local mortgage companies is having an open house for real estate professionals in the area.  We will be attending this to hopefully meet realtors and other investors that we can potentially partner with in the future.

Lessons Learned:

One of our biggest problems thus far has been handling missed calls and our lack of a proper follow-up system.  Our phone calls ring to both our cell phones, and since my wife and I both work separate jobs, sometimes it's hard keeping track of who answers calls and what follow up is needed.This weekend I found a way to integrate our current CRM software with our Outlook calendars which will enable us to set reminders for when it is time to follow up with sellers.  Instead of it being up in the air with regards to properly tracking the phone calls, I have taken responsibility to determine and track exactly what happened with each phone call we get. Although this is nothing fancy, this should work perfectly with the limited amount of phone calls we are getting until we are able to increase our marketing budget.

I also realized this weekend that we are not writing any offers. I understand that it takes multiple touches to get decent results from our mail campaigns, but we have not looked at any MLS properties in months. Once my wife establishes herself with her new broker and gets a feel for what her routine will be, we are going to have to find a way to start viewing properties and writing offers.

Past Week Accomplishments:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters sent.

Online Marketing – Two blog posts written and posted

Networking – Attended the Ventura County Real Estate and Investors Association. One of my main goals for the meeting was to try and get GC referrals. One of the regulars that we met a while back referred a GC that he is currently using on a project.

Leads – Only two of the three contractors showed up for our walkthrough of the Oxnard property last week, and out of those two, only one sent me a bid. Good news is that his bid was right in line with our estimates. The odd thing is that he is quoting 18K for the deck repair. I anticipated it would be a little more expensive than your average deck since most of it is over water, but that still seems super high to me. We still have approximately two months until we will close on the property, as we worked with the seller to give the tenant time to find a new place to live and move out. Once he is out, we will get more GCs in there to hopefully receive more bids.

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail - Next batch of 250 letters were sent out today.

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts.

Leads – My goal for this week is to continue building options for the Oxnard property. My 1st option was going to be to use a conventional loan for the purchase and then a "business" loan through a lender that offers new businesses terms based off of their personal credit. After talking to my POC today, she reminded me that the conventional mortgage going in my name will greatly reduce the amount that they will lend me and my plan will most likely not work as I thought. She believes that she might have a program that we can finance the full purchase and rehab with, so she is going to get back to me with the terms so that I can see if her numbers work for us. We are also contacting other investors for possible JV opportunities as well. And of course if all else fails, our last resort will be to wholesale the property.

Networking – No planned events.

Lessons Learned:

It seems like dealing with the Oxnard property is a 2 steps forward, 1 step back process. Although there have been small setbacks and hurdles, there has been nothing yet that we haven’t been able to overcome or are looking to plan around. For every hurdle we encounter, that just makes us more prepared to prevent those hurdles in the future.

In reading one of Gary Keller’s books, he mentioned to not wait until you need a team member before you start looking for that person. For any other newbies out there, I would recommend reaching out to GCs and pre-screening them to find some that you will want to work with in the future. Lucky for us, we have time on our side due to the seller’s timeline, but things would be different if we were in a time crunch. I am envisioning that we will want to have at least 3 different crews that we can reach out to at any given point in time as to never be in a situation where we have a property and no GCs to turn to.

Yet another late posting. One of the things I’m trying to do better is to prioritize my action items in the limited amount of time I have for real estate. With lead development and the property we have under contract at the top of my focus, other things have to fall to the bottom of the list. I may be late in posting my weekly update once in a while, but I will continue to get them out.

Past Week Accomplishments:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters sent. Largely thanks to my wife, we have been pretty good at staying on top of this.

Online Marketing – I wrote 2 blog posts but only got around to posting 1 of them. Things should be slowing down with the Oxnard property after this week, so hopefully I can gain some momentum in this area.

Networking – Nothing to report

Leads – Developed a scope of work for the Oxnard property and began searching for GCs to bid on the project. We started by asking people we have had direct contact with through our networking efforts. For whatever reason, there seems to be very few investors who have actually done any rehabs in our area that we can look to for referrals. Or if there are any, they don’t seem to be attending REIAs or hanging out on bigger pockets. Didn’t have much luck with any referrals, so I then started reaching out to GCs from business cards I’ve been collecting around town, as well as some online searches I’ve performed. We have three GCs lined up to meet us at the property tomorrow and give us bids. As long as their numbers are somewhat in line with the costs that I calculated, we should be full steam ahead to removing our inspection contingency and proceeding into financing.

I also have been working with the seller who has the vacant lots in the mudslide area of La Conchita. Someone from the county finally called me back and told me the first step I should do is to call another department and find out if the lots have been “red tagged.” I’ve been trying to get a hold of this other department for almost a week now, but you know how it goes when you deal with the city or county.

Received a phone call from another seller as well. Unfortunately, we made a rookie mistake and offered WAY too high of a price. Luckily, we caught our mistake before they accepted the offer. They left us a voicemail while we were out and I think they want to accept it, but we have been playing phone tag ever since. There is no way that we can proceed with that offer, so we are going to explain the situation to them and let them know what we believe the new options are.

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail - Next batch of 250 letters were sent out today.

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts.

Leads – As stated above, we will be meeting the GCs at the Oxnard property tomorrow. If everything goes as planned, we will remove the inspection contingency at the end of the week. We agreed with the seller to give his tenant 6 weeks to find a new place and move out, so that will give us some time to find new GCs if need be.

Networking – There is another REIA meeting this Thursday. I have not yet been to this one, so looking forward to seeing what it's about.

Lessons Learned:

I don’t know if it’s just me, but my experience in real estate over the last year has been that a lot of the people in the business are not very good about returning calls/messages or following up with what they say they are going to do. Maybe it’s because my day job is mostly in an office setting, but I’m very surprised with the lack of follow up. Responding to emails and calls is something we try and do promptly, so not sure if I’ve just been unlucky in the past year, or if this is the norm for the industry.

@John Baker

I agree with Joe B in that the only people who make it seem easy are probably trying to sell you something. if you listen to the podcasts on this site, you will see that most (if not all) of the successful investors will tell you how much hard work it is, especially starting out. Most of them state that starting out with little to no money is possible, but it takes lot of hard work and will not happen overnight. As the saying goes, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.  Keep your head up and stick with your plan. You have to be consistent with whatever means you are using to generate your leads. 

@Jose Tamayo Jr

It was good to meet you too and thanks for the encouraging words.  We would love to be doing more mail than we are currently, but we have to stick with a budget that we will be able to sustain. Once we get some profits rolling in, we will ramp up our marketing accordingly. 

Apologize for posting late yet again this week. Once Queen James loses to the Warriors, that should be another few hours a week that I'll be able to concentrate and get this written on a timely basis.

Past Week Accomplishments:

Direct Mail – Weekly batch of 250 letters sent.

Online Marketing – Wrote and posted 2 blog posts, one short of my weekly goal.

Networking – Attended the Ventura County REIA meetup. Nothing of note to mention, except the fact that I was able to meet in person fellow BP member @Jose Tamayo Jr

Leads - Received the signed contract back from a seller who contacted us from direct mail.  Met the physical inspector at the property yesterday and we are expecting his report by COB today. He did not find anything major, but noted that there is minor termite damage (which we already knew) and the electrical panel is from a brand that has had noted failures. Although it is currently up to code, he said if the end buyer has an inspection done, the other inspector may recommend replacing it. Also a couple other minor items with the plumbing, so once we get the report back, we will see if there is enough in there to warrant maybe asking the seller for a lower price.

We received another lead from direct mail and went to visit the property last night.  My wife will be running the numbers today in preparation for making an offer. We also received a call from a gentleman who wants to offload four lots in the La Conchita area.  This area has been hit with two landslides in the past 20 years that have caused property damage and loss of life.  I am currently waiting for a call back from the county to get further clarification on the rules and guidelines for building in that area.  Although this is probably not something we would be interested in ourselves, I can pass his information to another investor depending on what information I get back from the County.

My wife has chosen to work as a realtor under Malkin Properties, LLC in Ventura. I'm very proud of her and look forward to her working the retail side of the house as well as using that to advance our investing goals.

Goals for this week:

Direct Mail - Next batch of 250 letters will be sent out today.

Online marketing - Write and post 3 blog posts.

Leads -We need to have a termite inspection on the property under contract.  Although the physical inspector did not think there was any structural damage, he recommended that the termite inspectors come out for confirmation as well as treatment options.We also want to get at least a couple of GCs to the property to give us their bids and confirm that my repair estimates are within range before our contingency period ends next week.  And obviously we will continue to follow up with the owners of the property we visited last night as well the la Conchita seller.

Lessons Learned:

Although it is way too early to celebrate any kind of success, I am a little pleased and surprised at the results we are starting to see. I honesty wasn't expecting to see much action until months down the line when we got into multiple touches on our mail, but I see this as a good start.  We need to continue with the fundamentals and slowly build up momentum to reach both our near term and long term goals.