All Forum Posts by: Ethan Summers

Investing out of state can be a breeze with the right tools/ team in place. I will say training a team can be a nightmare so partnering up with someone who can train the team "in house" maybe a great strategy @Lance Card !! 

@George Moehlenhoff the biggerpockets podcast is always a great resource. My biggest advice is stay persistent and switch up your message consistently. In my first year of direct mail not switching up my message and being creative like changing colors of my envelope landed a lot of my mail in the trash i assume. Also stay on top of people that you keep getting retuned mail from thats where I developed a lot of income because its lower competition. My advice hire a skip tracer to find updated phone numbers / addresses for your returned mail. Chances are other investors are having a difficult time locating this potential seller as well. Hope this helps Pm me with any questions. 

I landed my first couple of deals from skip tracing the returned letters from my mail campaigns. I used first class postage and received a good bit back, so my inner marketer spoke to me and said "track down these owners because nobody else is likely targeting them." 

Once gathering a large quantity of these returned letters I set my plan in motion.I wanted to skip trace my lists in large quantities so I could better my chances of landing a deal. I cold called and resent mail to the correct addresses of these individuals and was able to land two deals with about 12k net profit on both transactions in the same month, not bad for a newbie!! This success led me to skip tracing my entire direct mail list and marketing on multiple channels. I haven't looked back since and have been apart of over 50 real estate transactions in my short 3 years of marketing and investing! Cheers to all, PM me any similar success stories. 

@Sanja Noble I have done multiple pieces of property check your local laws. However in my case my closing attorney was able to put the properties on an exhibit and attach it to the sales contract. For example I had an agreement with the seller for one set price for all properties on "exhibit A". So my attorney attached "exhibit A" to the purchase agreement which listed each property that would be apart of the sale. Hope this helps! 

@Jorge Solis I would definitely focus on the multi family if you intend to stay in the property you buy for at least one year. There are many techniques to find off market deals in your area. Landlords that are tired of up keeping their properties, Heirs that were deeded a unit that they have no intention of keeping. The list goes on and on, In my opinion your best bet is to just start marketing to find the best deal for you since you are already pre-approved. Pm me if you'd like to discuss some "off market" marketing/acquisition strategies. 

 "google drive for dollars"

I simply take a target zip code/street in my investment area and begin to use google maps to walk up the street using my mouse to zoom in on any property that may look distressed. Google always has pretty up to date images on the maps app/feature.I then take these addresses and put them in an excel spreadsheet and I typically do some research on the county tax assessor site. Once i locate owner names i skip trace the owner find their current address and phone number, I usually like to just give them a ring but often times ill follow the phone call up with a yellow letter or postcard if i cant get them on the phone. Hope this helps! Feel free to PM me if you have any questions. 

@Yia Her Great success story for you DM i love it. 

To answer your questions from my research there are about 74 million baby boomers & about 75 million millennials. With that being said around 35% of millennials own homes which is roughly 26 million homes to target. When it comes to creating offers Ive ran into baby boomers who wont just sell there property at 50% of market value. So i truly believe creating great offers that provide profit come from solving problems. Given deals ive worked on in the past there are plenty of problems to be found in both respective groups. Not to mention the average American home buyer sells their home or has to refinance every 7  years or so. Wouldn't you assume a generation consumed by technology glued to a computer or mobile device screen would want to see your message on that screen? I agree with a previous comment on this thread every home owner has a mailbox. Do you think our job as marketers is to be seen everywhere, being omnipresent?  

@Charles Picarella do you need to pull the list for your campaign? Or are you in need of someone to send out your letters for you perhaps both? 

@Nancy Brook Ive used both, definitely prefer just using list source. Or get aquatinted with a trusted list broker in your area. 

@Brandon Proctor The short answer to your question is that there isn't a company that offers a flat-rate subscription where you're able to skip trace as much as you'd like. If any company is offering this, the data is significantly inaccurate. Tools like Spokeo and White Pages may offer "unlimited" plans, but the numbers are outdated. As a workaround to this issue, I applied for access to TLO and a couple of the premium data sources. Once we skip trace all of our lists, we cold call all every lead and gauge them for motivation. I researched this topic exhasuvaiely last year and found that the only way to do w efficiently is to have everything set up in-house.