All Forum Posts by: Rachel Stewart

@Casey Rozenberg

Hey Casey, I do websites for small businesses and real estate investors (along with graphic design, logos, branding etc.) A simple but modern website on an all in one platform should run you about $150-$250 per year including domain and business emails.

Reach out to me if you want more info on creating a website, I don’t mind answering questions!

@Edward Agadjanian

It doesn’t look like you’re using it wrong, just a bad deal.

See how your expenses are greater than your income? That’s how you get a negative return. Either your mortgage has to go down (more down payment or pay significantly less) or other expenses, but those look pretty good to me. OR you need to get more rent.

The only thing I can see is you've got 20% for capex, management, maintenance and vacancy all together, that might be a little high if it's a newer SFR. Are you going to manage yourself or pay a management company.

I think we need more information but with that you’ve got here, sorry to say it just looks like a bad deal.

@Jason Capers I can! Send me a message and we talk about what you're looking for and how we can work together! 

@Damian Salto

The biggest challenge you'll have is people not taking you seriously because you're young and we have this bias that young people don't have a place in large scale investments like real estate (which is absolutely false). 

My biggest advice to you is drive your brand. Decide yours and stick to it. Your brand covers everything from your business cards and website to how you dress and how you interact with people. Having a brand increases legitimacy, it can be your number one tool to make people take you seriously. 

Having an effective brand is the difference between slow and painful growth and exponential growth when it comes to client facing industries. It can start off as simple as your business name + logo + mission statement. The first one is always hard for everyone, but don't make the second one just as hard as the first. 

Good Luck! 

@Riley Bakos a simple website can serve as your front-facing tool, some all in one website tools have simple lead tracking built in. 

But as @Bryce DeCora mentioned the ideal set up is having a website (contact form) that integrates directly with your CRM of choice. That can be a mountain of a tech project (I'm currently working on a 6-figure project to do this for a Private Equity backed client [day job as consultant]). 

Services like Carrot can do it, but they don't always offer the most flexibility and you're going to pay minimum of $500 a year. 

IMO, you're better off with a NICE, branded, simple website and a free tool that connects to your email easily or has .csv export functionality. This means your cost is about $500 the first year ($200 if you do your website yourself) and $150-$200 every year after that. 

It's really all dependent on your volume. 10 leads a month has very different requirements and budget than 10,000 leads a month. 

@Jonathan Farber Honestly, I work in data engineering consulting so I would probably leverage some code I or my colleagues already have but I realize that's not a solution for everyone haha. I've heard good things about this tool https://docparser.com/blog/extract-data-from-pdf/ but it looks like it gets expensive quick so it depends on your volume. Most parsers are set up to write to a database, so look for one where you can specify an excel sheet (preferably on a shared drive (Google sheets or MS365) as the "database". If you or anyone you work with have a programming background, here's a tutorial on a python based parser: https://tomassetti.me/how-to-convert-a-pdf-to-excel/

I guess part of my point is you can save money by creating a process (even if it means paying a freelancer developer upfront) you'll save money in the long run over paying someone to do it day in and day out. 
 

They serve different purposes. A CRM is to track your leads and customers. It's an internal record keeping system. Some CRM systems have an external facing interface where you can collect leads. 

It's hard to tell you exactly what you need without more information, but I'm guessing you want an interactive website. You want somewhere you can post your deals and get interest from prospective customers, and maybe even have people contact you if they want to do business with you, correct?

Not sure about the laws in Florida, always check with a lawyer.

However, I can answer about the website. I would go with an easy all in one platform that allows you to update it yourself. You don't want to pay a freelancer every time you need to update your pictures or listings. There are a number of platforms that make it easy to sign up and manage your hosting and domains without having to install a web server. Are you looking for a web presence or a CRM system? I've set up a number of these easy all in one platform websites for investors, so feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. 

As others have said, you probably want to do this yourself. That being said, there are lot's of ways you can automate portions of your underwriting process and flag properties that are worth more in-depth analysis. There are tools out that that make even annoying PDF input automated or almost automated. No need to pay someone to do that manual entry.

@Tim Jensen I don’t have any specific questions but if it’s a topic I haven’t researched much about so I thought I better do some research.

Although, coming from Chicago, I figure it can’t be much worse.