My Very First Deal (4 Years Ago)

[Brandon Jackson]

This is the story of my very first deal which happened 4 years ago in September of 2011. I had become a member of the ************* Success Academy, and was talking with a coach weekly (Pretty much worthless in my opinion). At this same time, I had been reading books by *************. The particular one I was reading when things starting happening was "Your Town Your Real Estate". It's a great book, and I would recommend it to anyway looking to get educated about real estate.

While reading the book, there was a passage that gave you a script on what to say when making an offer to a bank and guidance on how to find good deals, and I used this pretty much verbatim when I was finally ready to make my offer. The information said to call around to smaller community banks and see if their REO department had any properties they wanted/needed to get rid of.

I called around to a few small local banks, and found one that had 2 properties they had in inventory and needed to get them off the books. One of the properties caught my interest! It was a 2 bed, 1 bath 1140 sq. ft. single family house. They initially told me $21,000. I immediately drove by the house and the neighborhood that same day just to get a feel for the neighborhood and see if it looked worthy of following up. I was pleased!

For the next month I called every 2 weeks about this property to see if it was still available, and it was. The first follow up call, they had dropped the price down to $19,000. The second follow up call, $15,000. After this, I decided to go to the bank and show them that I was a serious buyer so I filled out an application to see what i could qualify for. After filling out the paper work, I asked if they still had the property and they did. 

The VP of the bank and I went down to the property and built rapport to whole time on the way to the property (about a 25 minute drive). After looking at the property and walking through it with the VP, he told me if I offered $10K, he would be on my side and convince the president to go along. 

After going back a few times and modifying the offer, I ended up purchasing it for $7,000 cash. This was money that I had saved up from working at my job. I didn't even use my loan approval thru them to attempt I put an additional $10,000 into the property, and went back to the same bank to refinance it. It appraised for $45,000, i got 75% of that ($33,750). 

Since that first deal, that bank has loved me and i've loved them. I've done 4 loans with them since. AND....The VP that I built major rapport with has now moved up in rank and is now the President! Now I just need to find some good deals!!!

If you want to dig deeper into my background, check out the link below. It's my journal I was keeping when I first started my investing journey.

Happy Investing!!!

Critique me please. Too long? Too detailed? Not detailed enough? Run on sentences? etc...