All Forum Posts by: Scott C.

I'm trying to get feedback on whether becoming a licensed General Contractor would help me have a better chance of securing a private loan from an investor to rehab houses. I'm not planning on doing much of the renovation myself, but I don't have alot of experience in construction or real estate so I think alot of potential investors would be reluctant to loan me money right now. Private Lenders, what kind of resume do you look for from new (and young) investors before you loan money?

A sales company I used to work for trained us to always start off a conversation with something positive. You could try rewording your script like, "I heard you may be interested in selling your property. As an investor, I can close quickly on your property and buy it from you as-is. I will be honest with you that due to the many foreclosures in the current real estate market, my company is only able to purchase properties significantly below market value...

Hope this helps.

Thanks guys for the responses. In terms of researching a market to determine if flipping to resell is feasible, what characteristics do you look for in a market? I know the lower number of Days on the Market the better, but what other real estate factors do you look at?

Do you factor in the number of new listings each month, or the number of sales closed each month, etc? Or do you only care about the Average number of Days on the Market for a neighborhood?

I am curious what market factors experienced investors look for when they are deciding whether to rehab and hold or rehab and resell. Obviously the fewer Average Days On the Market, the better (I'm thinking up to 90-100 DOM, resell, over that rent out).

Have experienced investor's found patterns in MLS data that indicate when is a good time to rehab and resell or hold. I'm hoping to find a threshold to qualify data to support one exit strategy or the other, particularly to potential lenders. Do you look for a certain rate of sales closed each month compared to available houses on the market, or how the number of new listings a month compares to the overall number of houses in that market, etc?

Bienes Raices The reason I'm asking is I just received a call from an interested party, but when I told her I charge $40 per adult for app fee she hung up on me. :roll:

Maybe the $40 dollars in your original post was a typo. I don't know what market you're renting to, I was assuming 3 br with 3 adults at $40 each, that's where $120 came from.

Eddie, i didn't convey my thoughts very well about the 18000 in damages. I had meant you should get as much of a security deposit as possible to help offset when something like that happens.

Some good advice one of my old sales managers gave me is to think about it as if you are playing the lottery. Every time you pick up the phone, it could be worth ______ $25k/$50k/$100k to you.

Bienes Raices, I think the problem is the cost of your background check. Check out CitiCredit.net. They have packages starting at $20 per report. You can save money on the reports by doing the criminal check yourself; only takes 60 seconds. I know the Florida Dept of Corrections website allows you to search the database for criminal records.

With this economy, if I was a potential tenet of yours and saw you wanted a nonrefundable application fee of $120 for the unit (assuming 3 br), I wouldn't apply to your place just b\c of the amount of the app fee unless you had granite counters or something no one else was offering. However, I don't think you should necessarily lower your security deposit from a full month's rent. My brother's friend just had $18,000 worth of damage done by grad students.

P NW has a very important point. I have worked as a insurance sales agent and we made hundreds of cold calls a day. It is a $10,000 dollar fine if you call someone on the Do Not Call list. We used a service called Gryphon (IIRC) to protect us. You dialed a 1800 # to get in the system, then dialed the numbers you were trying to reach. The service tells you if the number you we were trying to reach is on the DNC list. I don't know how much it costs, but it did work great if anyone does a lot of cold calling.

Don, I suspect it would not be worthwhile to hire a VA that is not native to your regional area. With cold calling, you have the first 3-5 seconds of a call to create a repoire with the person on the other line. I think if you outsourced your calling, people would assume the caller is a scammer, much like you probably do when you get an email you can tell is sent from overseas.

I just came across this thread and was wondering how everything ended? Sandra, did you end up selling the house?