All Forum Posts by: Todd Brittingham

I think you're over analyzing it. Remember, you need to put clauses into the contract that will allow you to renegotiate later. It is better to get it under contract so you can control the property. Let your buyers do the work for you. They will tell you what the ARV is, they will tell you what the repairs are, and then you can take that information back to the seller and re-negotiate if their offer doesn't work with the contract you have negotiated.

I have a property under contract right now where I used this technique. The numbers are close using the 70% formula above. I am working with my buyers to determine what kind of offer they can make. They will tell me what the repairs are, and what the ARV is. If their offers are to low, I will go back to the seller and re-negotiate armed with ARV & repair data provided by my end buyer. If they won't budge, then there is no deal. But to be honest, there never was going to be a deal because what's the chance they were going to accept that same offer initially.

Run your numbers, but lose sleep over them. IMHO it's more important to get the property under contract if the numbers are close, and you can work out the details later when you have more information.

Okay, just a followup...we got zero responses from our letters...I am kind of surprised by this, but we're not giving up just yet. We're going to change the message a little bit this week and see how that goes. Plus we're going to followup with a second letter to all of those we mailed last week. We will let you know how it goes...

We sent out 20 hand written yellow letters last week and got 2 calls (10% success rate). We printed 98 letters this week using handwritten font and mailed them today. We will see how the printed letters work...

We used different messages in both letters. The first letter was short and sweet, and this week's letter is a little longer. We'll see how it works...

Oh and by the way, don't bother printing the lines...just buy some yellow legal pads and print on that paper. It only took about three trials adjusting the font size and line spacing before it lined up perfectly on the yellow legal pad paper. It went through the printer just fine...

We used Chris's method above and the letters were sent out today...we will see how it goes...

I'm going to try Chris's suggestion this week. I have 98 letters printed (all pre-foreclosure leads)...I'll let you know the success rate next week.

Thank you for your replies. We did send out 20 yellow letters last week and we got two responses...I thought that was pretty good (10% success) although the numbers are probably not statistically significant because of the small sample size.

We are going to try to send out some more yellow letters this week on a bigger scale (~100) to the list of pre-foreclosures that we have in our county. I plan these letters to be the first of 5 mailings we send to each of the people on the list. We will see what the response rate is...

However, the original intent of the post was to deterimine ideas for automating the sending of a direct marketing campaign. Yellow letters seem to go the opposite way and add a significant amount of time because I imagine that handwritten is best.

I do like your suggestion about having other people write the yellow letters. Can you tell me the cost of such a service?

And if anyone has other ideas I'm all ears.

Again thank you for your replies...

Currently I am focusing on sending letters to homeowners in pre-foreclosure. I have a series of 5 letters setup that I want to send to each homeowner over a period of 1 month.

Does anyone know of a piece of software or website available that can automate all of this? Basically I wan to upload my letters and my list and have the letters sent out automatically on a specific schedule over a 1-month period.

Currently I am using Click2mail.com but it is still to labor intensive because I have to submit each mailing myself...I WANT THIS AUTOMATED....

I have been using a phone service that I am not very happy with. Thank you for all the great ideas!

Thanks to everyone for all your comments. We will keep you all posted of our progress on BP...

Thanks Again!

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts.

Jon I agree that real estate investing is a job, and I appreciate your insight into the work involved. I think for us, the biggest thing is the ability to control our own desitiny with investing. Currently I have what most would consider a good job as an engineer for a very large company. However, there are sublte signs popping up indicating that my job, while fairly secure now, will not be around 5-10 years down the road.

As Robert Kiyosaki says, ..."plan for the worst times and you will only know good times"...

We are planning for the worst right now, and if nothing else the process will give us the abilty to control our own destiny in the future. The ultimate goal is to generate true passive income as you say. We will always keep in mind the difference between being self employed and being a business owner. The goal is to be a business owner where the systems are in place to have the business run itself. I think NNN commercial property fits with the idea of being a business owner because much if not all of the responsibilities of property management are put onto the tenant.