All Forum Posts by: Johnny Kang

@Erin Dorsey Robinson

Both my tenants lost their jobs. One moved back home to be with his family in Turkey. The other tenant moved temporarily to upstate NY where his family is (I'm in NYC), however is planning to come back when things are safer in NYC and wanted to keep his place in the mean time. We agreed on 1/2 of his regular rent. 

Almost everyone I know told me not to do 50% off since they're getting unemployment, along with the extra $600/wk from the federal government. The way I see it is everyone's been impacted by this pandemic one way or another. He's been a great paying, long-term tenant who was never late and even offered to pay 1 month in advance before he went upstate; not to mention, everything is costing more, either due to price gouging, not being able to find things on sale and having to resort to buying whatever is on the shelves, or the manufacturers themselves having to charge more to the stores simply due to higher cost of production with people getting sick and the employers having to pay other workers over time, etc. 

So if I can afford it and at the same time, somehow provide some relief in this stressful situation, I think a little generosity goes a long way.

@Brandon Bickley

It's good to see you've decided finding an investor in your area to shadow, while providing value was the best way for you to get started in real estate. RE has many aspects (finance, negotiations, sales, marketing, dealing with tenants, accounting, technology, raising money, construction and more); I wish more beginners would take this approach.

Tasks might entail anything from going to the property and taking pictures, picking up supplies, doing some admin work, marketing, website building/managing, social media, running initial comps, making follow up calls. 

The main thing is, be a student, observe, but also be proactive. Don't have the expectation that you'll always be given explicit instructions on what to do, or how things work. If you hear a terminology you don't understand, try to look it up yourself, or if they're going over figures, see if you can reverse engineer & arrive at those numbers doing your own calculations. 

If they see that you're motivated and willing to help, you might find someone who'll take you under their wings and open up doors you would've never had access to. Good luck on your journey! :)

@Noah Brinker

It all helps; proper domain name, back-linking, properly tagging, social media, unique content. Just make sure everything's congruent to what you're trying to accomplish.  

@Jordan Berry

Hmmm, yeah the ones I looked at definitely didn't have returns like that; Thanks for sharing. I'd love to check out your site. You can send me a DM. Thanks again. 

@Frank Chin

You've got some funny stories hahahaha ; "one tawsan on the check for the amount. Funny, I even managed to deposit it."

Sorry for the late response. I didn't get a tag notification. Posts aren't mobile friendly. 

I'll be going to contract in the next week or so, depending on when we work out the details between the seller & myself and my partners. I'll let you know once we've closed on it.  

Business is on the books. It can be run absentee, but for the first 6 months to a year, I'll be in there to systematize & streamline it since I know the business. 

I've looked at several laundromats, but seemed to me, the margins were fairly slim.  

@Josh Rodriguez

As others have alluded to, there are many ways you can build your funnel. Just be sure to at some point, automate and streamline your process so you can work "on" your business, and not "in" your business. If you don't make that transition, it'll start to drain you soon or later. 

Below is my funnel with the help of my 4 VAs. 1 Data scraper, 1 skip tracer, and 2 cold callers. I use share Google Docs/Sheets with them, and they go into individual sheets I have for each category and populate the property data I've instructed them on, gets uploaded to our auto-dialer and the cold callers reach out to the owners. 

I vet the properties to see if it's worth taking a look at in person; then my business partner goes and meets them to build rapport, and yadi yada. 

Now that outbound marketing is automated, I'm working on online inbound marketing, which will also be automated. Hope that helps.

@Barry Pekin

Awesome question!

Initially when I read the title of your post, I thought to myself, the 5 & 6 figure checks I was able to make on deals, but I realized when I did have closings in those figures, I felt nervous and at unease, because I wasn't sure if I could repeat transactions of that sort because I was too new to know how to make them repeatable. 

I know what boosts confidence is getting results; but I also know that results are a by-product of the process involved in getting a particular result. 

Coach John Wooden who have won 10 NCAA national basketball championships in a 12 year period had his players focus on the process, not the result. 

When the initial seed of automating my business, at first with VAs, and now working on online marketing, I know results will follow, in a predictable manner. That's been the biggest confidence booster. 

@Bryan Richardson

I understand your reasoning behind your strategy, but here's my take on it;

Deals are hard enough to come by, but when you dwindle that down to only target owners who'd be willing to carry paper, I think you're decreasing your odds of finding a deal even further. 

There's a difference between going after a targeted list, and making your requirements so stringent, that you may loose out on other deals you can close on. 

Last week, my cold callers collectively made 1332 phone calls using PhoneBurner, and we got 4 good leads that may turn into something in the coming weeks/months. Who knows, but it took A LOT OF CALLS, to say the least. We'll deploy whatever strategy makes sense and not limit ourselves to 1 specific strategy. 

If you were looking to find owner financing deals as a way to close on a transaction due to limited funds, how about increase your arsenal of financial resources, as opposed to primarily targeting such a narrow potential deal source? Just a thought. 

@Erica L Hunt

Oh, it was the other way around. Oops, sorry. lol

@Erica L Hunt

A lot of people might say to to Upwork, or other VA specific sites, but there are some issues with that.

1) Those sites have to make money, so you're paying fees to a middleman, increasing the amount of money you have to spend on VAs.

2) More important than the 1st point, good VAs with high ratings have a choice of which employer(s) to work for. They may take the job you posted, but if something better comes along, they'll drop you without any notice, or just disappear on you, making you go through the whole process of posting, hiring, training, etc. Believe me, I've had this happen to me on more than 1 occasion. Wasting time on training the wrong people is not something you want to keep doing. 

What you have to do is find people in those countries directly (a lot of people hire people from the Philippines because their English is good, currency exchange rate is favorable to people in the States, and their accent is not as thick as people from other countries). I used to use Craigslist, but now I just have my VA post on her Filipino VA Facebook page if I need to hire someone.

I have 1 Admin VA, 1 Skip Tracer, 1 Cold Caller (looking for another cold caller).

I make them go through my vetting process (email me your resume, send me a video/audio around the tasks I want done, have them go through a trial day, etc). My hiring & training process is almost 100% automated, so I hardly spend any of my personal time on it.

Once hired, I send videos on specific tasks I want done. (a) I don't like to repeat myself. (b) if I have to replace someone, I can just send them the videos, so no need to spend time training them.  

If you want quality people who'll stick around so you can focus on other things, without having to constantly start from zero, create a hiring funnel so you only have the best people work for you, without having to spend more than you need by paying fees to a middleman.