Investment dollars to grow

[Andrew Orr]

Hi there,

My name is Andrew and I am 48 and live in St. Petersburg, FL.  I had an early retirement and have been watching some money I have sit there for many years. Doing nothing. 

I have about $120,000 that I am looking to use for fix-n-flip investing in pursuit of a higher IRR. It would be great to grow this to over seven figures before I turn 65 in about 17 years. I view this as being a conservative goal. Five million would be even better!

I grew up in construction. My dad built hotels, actually some all over the world for Holiday Inns. He later became his own GC and built hotels for people for the rest of his career.  I would spend summers working at job sites so the construction aspect is not foreign to me.

I am also a trained CFP, certified financial planner, so the numbers aspect is not confusing.

I suppose the main challenge I have is actually buying a house. My realtor has submitted bid after bid. Houses are selling the moment they hit the market. Most others resort to highest and best price auctions.  I understand that I must be competitive but I am not going to price myself into a loss.  I suspect a lot of these buyers that intend to fix and flip will lose money on a lot of these homes because their mistakes get amplified by their already low price. 

I guess the second thing I need help with is finding houses outside of the MLS universe. What are some successful ways people are using to get houses before they hit the MLS.

So, it's been fun.

Andrew

[Johnny Kang]

@Andrew Orr

Basically, what you're trying to do is market to motivated sellers. You can do online & offline marketing. 

Online marketing consists doing a combination of things so your site ranks higher in the search engines. So having an SEO optimized website, doing Pay Per Click ads, blogging, video marketing, etc. Offline includes doing yellow letters, post cards, bandit signs, news paper ads, etc.

There's an abundance of material on BP regarding all the methods I've mentioned, so just type in the search box which method you'd like to learn more about and learn that method really well before trying other forms of marketing. 

I prefer doing yellow letters because once those letters go out, you should be getting calls starting on the 2nd or 3rd day. (I've always had more success with letters than post cards). Online marketing takes time to do it properly so if you want to find off market deals sooner than later doing letters is the way to go. (just remember, there's a lot of competition in FL, so don't get discouraged if you don't immediately get the results you were hoping for. Due to competition I've learned how to do my own yellow letters to keep costs down right now so I can target a larger audience with the same marketing budget). 

Also, read about what wholesalers do; not that it's what you're trying to do, but they know how to market to motivated sellers so you can use the methods they use that works to find deals.