All Forum Posts by: Mike F.

A crash?I don't see any visible signs at all, reexamine things every 3 months. The economy is more of an issue to me right now.

A couple of things - how are those properties being bought? A lot of them are all or mostly cash offers, that's totally different than someone buying a house with no verified job or income as back in 2006.

The other thing is multiple offers over asking are a result of a limited supply of homes for sale on the market, watch the supply numbers carefully.

 A lot of people are buying into marketing hype when it comes to granite versus quartz.

Use the facts to make your choices and not the marketing hype by the manufacturer of the product you are buying.

Hardness issues of granite and quartz are like speed issues between a Ferrari and a Lamborghini. The Ferrari will do 210 mph, the Lamborghini with do 220. You're driving them both to work every day, how much is the 10 mph going to be a factor in your comute to work everyday?

Granite and Quartz hardness issues are the same. On the Mohs hardness scale granite is a 6-7 and Quartz is a 7. Both of those hardness scales are giving you two products both of which are so hard that the difference is irrelevant.

For long term maintenance - over 90% of granite will not benefit from a sealer, if you apply a sealer you are wiping it back off with the rag you are using to buff it with, the stone will not absorb it.

Your choices between quartz or granite should be based on only two things - price and looks.

That's the point. If you passed on both of them, you really didn't have a lot of interest in the first place. Let's face it if your perceptions of both of those places was really high you'd have invested the effort. That's the exact idea, pair the broad numbers down to really interested prospects so you're spending your valuable time with 'buyers'. 

With any type of auto-filtering system there is always going to be a small percentage of loss. The idea in business though is nobody can run a business catering to the minuscule percentages, you have to play to the big percentages.

In other words it's like fishing - on Monday you can go out to an area that has 10 ponds.  7 of those ponds have no fish at all 3 have fish. You could spend Monday fishing for 10 hours, spending 1 hour per pond and catch no fish in the 7 ponds that are empty and catch 1 fish in each pond with fish. Your productivity comes down to catching 1 fish per hour. 

On Tuesday you go to another spot with 10 ponds, 7 of those ponds have no fish again, but this time you watch the water surface of all the ponds before doing any fishing, you qualify 2 ponds as having signs of fish and 8 that don't. You eliminated 1 pond with fish by pre-qualifying by watching the surface. You then spend 10 hours fishing the 2 ponds with fish. Your productivity is the same you will catch 1 fish per hour, but this time of course you come home with 10 fish since all your fishing was done in ponds with fish. Now you missed all the fish in pond #3 that had fish that you eliminated in your pre-qualification, but you still caught 10 fish in 10 hours one Tuesday where on Monday you caught 3 fish in 10 hours. 

Avoiding those 7 ponds with no fish in them through pre-qualifying is the same thing you do with a pre-qualification technique with tenants, you might toss out a couple good prospects, but it doesn't matter as you've gave yourself the opportunity to spend your time productively with just good prospects so the ones you tossed out don't really matter.

There you go, if nothing else that certainly shows the relationships between phone call prospects and email prospects.

There is no magic days of the week. If I put the ad out on a Tuesday I'm not going to put off the appointments for 5 days because Sunday is a superstitious magical renting day. I can rent a unit on a Wed or a Thursday as easily as a Tuesday or a Sunday.

 I'd like to see some statistics of turn over rates and profitability of rental units of self-managed versus property management company managed. I can only guess the results based upon all of the different property owner's stories I've heard over the years crying the blues about their rentals, with the common denominator being they aren't self-managed.

This ^^^

That's exactly right, why even mess around with 20 people who won't rent your unit if you can whittle that down to just dealing with 3? No emails, no text. Talk to them on the phone, qualify them, only set up showings with the best of the best, forget the rest, let them go waste someone else's time. 

This in not a numbers game as so many unfortunately think, it's not about throwing it all at the wall and seeing what sticks, it's about dealing only with real buyers of the product you are selling.

I have great success with this technique, when a property is available there will be calls all day long and I tell the first ones as they call in "We are showing the place at 5:00 pm today", set an appointment with 2 or 3 of them. With the next calls we tell them "We are showing the place at 5:15pm today." set an appointment with 2 or 3 of them. With the next calls its "We are showing the place at 5:30 pm today.."  None of them know that I'm setting appointments with multiple people at the same time.

I go there at 4:45pm, stage whatever needs to be done and I wait for people to show, in this case I'd be there for no more than 1 hour from start to finish, I have no idea who they are as they show up, if they are late or on time, as I've taken no information from them, I've only qualified them and set mass appointments.  If someone shows interest we work with them, the rest either leave or many never showed at all, but I don't care the only ones I care about are those that showed and are interested. Those are the only ones that matter. 

For what it's worth I don't ever correspond with potential renters via email or text, they have to phone call me so I can talk to them to set up a showing (which will be a group showing - and it will be a group showing that they don't know it will be until they get there and discover it for themselves by seeing other potential renters there at the same time, we never ever do an open house, and especially never on a weekend, if people aren't interested enough to set a specific appointment to look at the place I don't want to waste my time with them). You might want to try it. Email and text is too anonymous, plus you can tell a whole lot more about a person by speaking to them. Taking control of the situation eliminates all the time wasters. You're a bit way too 'customer oriented' in the way you're showing your property for me. I prefer to control every aspect of it and maintain methods that are super productive and minimize my time involved.