All Forum Posts by: Robert Laird

Hey Daniel!

Welcome to BiggerPockets! Your at the right place to learn more about the real estate investing business. I would suggest reading the Ultimate Beginners guide for starters. I found it really helpful especially the chapter on how to invest using other peoples money. Hope this helps and welcome to the site!

http://www.biggerpockets.com/real-estate-investing

Rob

Hey Charles!

We have been doing postcard mailers for months now. We usually get around 1% call backs and around .1% deals. So if we send out 1,000 postcards we will get an average of 10 call backs which will result in 1 deal. Also it is usually the 3rd or 4th time we mail people that we get the most call backs. Hope this helps!

Rob

Tom,

Some county websites have public records with property info. If you go to the counties GIS system, sometimes you can put in an address and it will show you who is on title and their mailing address. Hopefully the county that the properties are in has this. Hope it helps and happy hunting!

Rob

Christopher,

Congrats on writing the script to scrape the tax assessor sites! I use a program to scrape zillow and the criteria that we use is single family homes, under $400,000, not sold in the past 5 years, built earlier than 1990, and having a price difference between asking price and zestimate of at least +$30,000. I do not know what kind of properties you like to invest in but I am sure you can tailor the program to your specifications. 

If I were you I would take those vacant property addresses and run them through the county GIS system to try and find the owners. Then send them a letter in the mail asking to buy their vacant property. After you drive for dollars your pretty much looking for anyone who will sell their property for a deal that you can afford. 

I hope this helps and happy hunting!

Rob

Dominiqe,

If you want to find owners who own their property free and clear ask your list provider for owners who have 100% equity in their home. Thats the best way to narrow it down to those owners. Hope this helps!

Rob

Hey Matthew!

Congrats on you and your wife looking to get involved in real estate! I am no expert, however if you want to start having actual dialogs with experienced real estate investors I would recommend your local real estate investor meeting. Most areas have a weekly or monthly get together for local investors. It is a great way to get to know local players and gain some knowledge face to face. Another thing you might want to look into: I know a lot of investors need help with their day to day on marketing or answering phones. You might want to look into possibly helping out a local real estate investing company to get to get to know the ropes. Who knows they might even pay you for a part time job. What ever you end up doing I wish you and your wife the best of luck in your future endeavors!

Rob

Hey we all start somewhere! I am glad your starting to post Marco, even if we are not all experts I believe we all have something valuable to contribute. 

In terms of networking I would recommend posting on forums that are relatable to what you like to invest in. For example, if you mostly invest in multi-family units then comment on those types of forum posts. Also, you could try and make an effort to connect with a couple bigger pockets members everyday. 

Either way, congrats on your efforts to start posting and I wish you the best of luck in the future!

Rob

Congrats Ned!

Keep up the good work! I think I have a ways to go before I hit 5,000...

I almost forgot! 

Jon has a good point, Brandon Turner just wrote a book on this topic. Check it out!

Rob

Brent,

I would assume that the length of residence is how long the people who owned the house stayed there. The last market sales date is the last time the house was sold on market. So if you wanted to find properties where the same person has lived in it for a long period of time I would use the length of residence criteria. However, if you are looking for houses that were recently sold or have not been sold for a very long time I would use the other criteria. Hope this helps!

Rob