All Forum Posts by: Steve Morris

how do I get them on the phone without them calling me?

I do commercial real estate. 99% of my calls are outbound. Good deals don't walk in on their own. CRE is a little more narrow field, but I think you need to go thru neighborhood by neighborhood and get owner's phones. Get your pitch (15-30 seconds) on why they should talk with you.

I'm not discounting a letter, but it's usually more of a warmup for a call than an inducement.

Anyways, my $0.02, at least you're trying and I've been wrong before.

I would love your feedback on my template below.

Try it - However, I get 10 of these a month for my rentals / residence and throw them all away.  May be different in TX.

I think you really need to get them on the phone and call.  It works a lot more effectively.

We have it in our lease that water is paid by the resident and I have never, not once, heard anyone ask why they have to pay for the water, they also pay for gas & electric.

I don't have a problem with that, but how do you do the metering/billing.  You can't have a separate water meter for each unit can you?  In Portland, that's like $2000 each!

"Does anyone here have experience with charging their tenants for water individually via submeters installed on water sources in their rentals? "

In OR, where water is d*** expensive (like $100/month for a 2 bed).  Installed sub-meters on the feed to the HW heater tank.  Not exact, but if tenant A uses 1000 gal and tenant B uses 500 gal, A is 95% likely using 2x the water as B.

The setup was the flowmeter on the tank (DM me and I can send info), then a wire to a parallel meter in an outside lock box.

Once a month I read, get the water/sewer bill, take 80% for tenant use, use a XLS to do pro-rates and then do a mail merge to send a separate billing to each.

The idea is to decrease water use.  If you charge a flat rate (like $50 for a 2 bed), that's $50 if you don't use a drop or you run the water 24/7 and your friends use your W/D.

"In my opinion, this is a terrible time to get into commercial."

I'd disagree, usually the best time to get into a market is when you have no competition or they're leaving. I do apts, people always need to rent and there is demand. If you have 10% vacant in apts, that's end-of-the-world. Almost any other CRE would kill for that sort of effective vacancy.

Add in that the really smart money realizes you make your best money when you buy (to paraphrase Buffett) and smart guys can get past the panic headline to objectively size up a deal.

Am a comm broker.  First thing, is do NOT denigrate residential brokers!!!  To do a good job selling houses you need a lot of persistence and organizational skills.  A lot of the sell is how do you "feel" about the house.

Commercial RE is more of a numbers game (though almost every guy has some unquantifiable gut-feel stuff).

I'd say:

1) Understand the metrics used and how they're calculated.  They're not that complicated (if you need help, DM me and I can send my PDF on buying/selling apts).

2) Show the upside for the buyer and how he will improve on the metrics.  This includes operations and financing.

3) Be able to get your point across quickly since you'll have competition in almost any specialty.

4) Make the argument more of "here's how I help you" rather than "I'm a great broker that's sold stuff" kind of puffery

5) Pick your specialty and location and learn it inside out.  Talking to owners directly is the absolute best way.

"When purchasing a property in a competitive market I want to make it different and stand out. How is that done?"

Do comm RE so we have our own buzz words, but I think any time you tell people a feature, you need to give them the benefit.

Like in electronics, saying I've got a 4.3GHz Xeon processor doesn't grab as many as saying "you'll get your work done 5 times faster".

Took me a long time to get "territorial" views.  The first thing I was thinking was you could see Mongol hordes before anyone else instead of "direct views of the mountains".

It's tough since we're in the biz and throw this stuff around all day.  However, buyer/sellers don't deal with the inside baseball aspect of it - Hence the need to "translate".

"Hi, there are over 100 Million homes on forbearance .. how will this effect once they are out of forbearance after 6-12 month from pandemic date. I have feeling this will 2008 all over again."

I do comm RE, but it feels a little different since banks are still lending, just with tougher underwriting.  However, you're right, if unemployment makes a lot of defaults, it'll impact new loans adversely.

The only wild card is how much money Uncle Sugar wants to throw in and where.  I think giving it directly to people is hella lot better than giving it to banks or govt that both skim a lot.

"I no longer really want to do out-of-state SFRs so wanted to sell my Memphis house."

That would be enough for me if I was talking to you.  As long as you don't fire sale it due to panic and can re-invest proceeds where you want to be, I'd be fine with it.

"I’m curious if all the people that responded LVP would still use it for a flip property? Is it easy to notice the hollow feel of a floating floor? I haven’t used this product before but it definitely seems appealing."

Get the moisture barrier/underlay.  I know it's more money, but fixes a lot of your complaints and adds to the marketability.