All Forum Posts by: Roger Rustad

I use ScanBizCards on iPhone.  Works like a champ.

Wix isn't bad for those who need something quick and dirty.

Once you get some experience with websites, you'll likely need some of the flexibility that a solution like Wordpress offers. Plugins there such as Formidable Forms give you just about everything you need for collecting leads, and then using that tool, you can integrate it with SMS tools like Twilio and automation tools like Zapier (which can auto put that in your CRM funnel for your broker team to follow up on).

Anyone else here have tech upgrades that helped them up sell MDUs?

Here is a list that of things I put in to help a friend pack his MDU with college kids.

• Fastest Internet possible
• Premium cable channels
• Upgraded security -- contacts on doors, cameras, etc.
• WiFi everywhere! Ubiquiti units were dirt cheap.
• Bandwidth throttling (make torrents the lowest priority). Best deal I found was using open source solutions (e.g. PfSense)
• Big TVs -- 9/10 times we can buy two of the same broken one and replace a few of the guts until we get it working.

I'm building a list of free and open source tools to help a group of friends sell their houses and am looking for input from others who also do this.

• SugarCRM (big fan of this -- not the easiest to use for newcomers, but provides great value when on a budget value)
• Wordpress (big fan here -- once we build a template to showcase a house, then we can then we can script out these installs)
  
• LAMP / LEMP -- Linux + Apache / Nginx + MySQL/MariaDB + PHP/Pearl (the platform all of this rides on).  I use Digital Ocean ($5/mo VMs) for various customers.

Roger

about.me/roger.rustad

Hi forum, I'm a new real estate investor and am looking to network with others.

My current real estate target is to pick up smaller duplexes in the NorCal Bay Area and/or SoCal OC area.

Roger

I’m an engineer also. Here are my reasons for making a switch.

1) Better long term investment of our time. Many of us in the startup sector have been burned (crappy IPOs, our equity watered down with each round of funding, etc). Real estate gives us more control over the value that we know that we can add.

2) Niche targeting. Those of us in the IT / tech sector know about many ways that we can enhance the value of properties. We know those “little things” which create lots of value for those with second offices. When we see others doing things like putting flyers on doors, we think to ourselves, “Hyper targeted ad words would probably be a better bet.”

3) Leverage points. When you’re an engineer (particularly on the product side), you’re always asking yourself what the exact impact of various changes are. When you get used to thinking like this (and are canned if you don’t!), you can easily adjust to the real estate sector.

4) Automation. A lot of real estate opportunities come from finding the needle in the hay stack. Those of us in the IT industry who are used to digging through “hay stacks” (e.g. system and network logs) are used to creating filters to find the exact thing that we need.

5) Quantification. Math does not scare us. :)

Roger