Diary of a New (wannabe) Investor in Southern California

[Cornelius Charles]

I joined BP in March of last year after stumbling across the site while searching for real estate information. After a few months of research and study, my then-fiancé and I decided we would pursue rehabbing/wholesaling as our niche. Although we had the best of intentions; wedding planning, our honeymoon, and me being called out of town for my day job for 7 months derailed our plans. Now that we are married and I am back in town, we can finally pick up where we began.

While I was out of town, I read a few forum posts from seasoned investors chronicling their daily investing lives. I toyed back and forth with the thought of starting a weekly post from a newbie in the high priced market of Southern California (I’m in Ventura county). The more I thought about it, the more I began to question whether I should do it or not. I then realized that if I was feeling uncomfortable about doing it, that meant it was something that I definitely needed to do. My plan is to post our accomplishments (whether good or bad) from the previous week along with our goals for the upcoming week. I will continue this thread until the end of the year and see where that takes me. Not sure if anyone will care to read the diary of someone just starting out, but at the very least, maybe some of the pros can provide some tips for other newbies to learn from. As my wife and I just returned from our honeymoon last week, I will only write about our goals for the upcoming week.

Goals for the week:

Our main focus right now is on generating leads, so we are concentrating on marketing, marketing, marketing. We have three main campaigns we are working right now, which are local networking, online marketing, and direct mail.

Networking – There are two or three local REIAs that meet on a monthly basis. There is one fairly “large” one that we have been going to for a while now. There are a couple of others that have recently started on Meetup, so we will visit those on the next available occasion. While not directly related to networking, my wife recently passed her real estate salesperson exam and has been talking to quite a few brokers in the area. Our goal is to narrow it down to two or three brokers that she will focus on interviewing further by the end of the week.

Online marketing – While I was out of town for my day job, one of my focuses at night was trying to improve our website and growing an online presence. Thanks to some of the techniques I learned from Antonio Coleman, I feel like I have a good foundation built and the knowledge to try and dominate organic and local searches. Antonio teaches to try and write a blog post every day, but with a full time job and everything else going on, my goal is to at least write and post three blog posts a week. Eventually I would like to dabble into the world of pay-per-click, but you really have to know what you are doing if you don’t want to waste a lot of money. I share all my blog posts on the main social media sites, but I do want to become more proficient in social media marketing. When my wife signs on with a broker, I will be taking a look at facebook ads to see how we could implement that.

Direct mail – We will be sending out 250 mail pieces a week. Our first set is complete and will be dropped off tomorrow. We have 150 names from an inherited properties list from USleadlist that I plan on touching once a month. We also have 3000 names from an absentee owners list (in-state and out-of-state) that I plan on dividing up and touching quarterly. I have seen a quite a few topics lately from new investors from Los Angeles and other parts of southern California talking about their horrible response rates, so I have sometimes questioned myself. However, I believe in the methods of many successful investors over the years and owe it to myself to give it a go.

I feel like this post is already too long, so I will leave it at that. Please feel free to ask any questions or provide any feedback.

[Jeff Greenberg]

@Cornelius Charles This is some great stuff. I just stumbled on this and enjoyed catching up.  It is a brave man that finishes up a book on RE while on his honeymoon. This blog is a testament to what it takes to be successful in this or any business. 

I look forward to hearing more about your successes in the future.