Need some help getting my training wheels!

[Travis Lauchman]

Good Evening Everyone,

I have been a BP member since early this year but otherwise am entirely new to real estate. Recently an interesting opportunity arose that could enable me to bid adieu to the desk job and enter the real estate field full time.

The business mainly features gutting and rehabbing row homes for immediate resale in Baltimore, MD. The owners are interested in homes within generally established neighborhoods or neighborhoods on the “fringe”. I haven’t delved deep enough to fully understand their target profit margin, but they do a really beautiful job with all of their rehabs - gleaming hardwood floors, kitchens dressed to the 9s, updated outdoor masonry, etc. which leads me to believe they must be somewhat selective with location (Baltimore still has some 16,000 vacancies) and sure of good resale value.

Anyway, the title of the role is ‘Property Research Manager’. The owners do a fair amount of volume but are looking for someone that can focus exclusively on finding potential gut and flip properties in an organized way. They are seeking someone who can establish systems for conducting efficient research that’ll bring them more business. They also want some sort of weekly reporting mechanism on progress.

SO… what would you do/how would you go about being successful in this role? I need to bring some ideas to the table when I next meet with the team so I figured I’d reach out to all the experts and seek some free lunch! Any advice/ideas welcome and thanks in advance… I’m really hoping to land this one and enter this field!

A few of my very initial ideas include:

1.Honing in on desired locations and becoming expert on neighborhood. Figure out which homes look/feel like they could be good gut/flip candidates. Take addresses of these homes down and input into a database (Microsoft Access maybe?) with as much detail as possible.

2.Via state assessor website lookup mailing address of record owner. Send out short and informal letters with purchasing intentions. Leave phone numbers for follow up and ask for a call either yay or nay (thanks @tomtarrant). Record when letters are sent and to where so that auto reminders (maybe every 6 months) may be set.

3.Continue this trend but in other neighborhoods and build networks of people who can keep their ears to the ground. Begin common “beat” of neighborhoods to check in.

4.Figure out which websites to scour and how to do so proficiently to find such deals.

5.Become friends with really good wholesalers.