All Forum Posts by: Arthur Botting

I talked to a mobile home owner today. They called me from a bandit sign. They live 2 hours away! But its in a small metro area. He said he wants to sell it at his cost. The only thing is he doesn't own the lot, just the trailer. Is there a way to determine what the trailer is worth? I'm skeptical of Zillow and Trulia.

I'm listing this for a friend.  Its a buy and hold at 1525 West 138th St in Compton, CA 90222.  Listing price is $280,000.  Contact John King at Home Team Realty.  310-963-2082.

Good luck!

I believe Fortune Builders is over charging for their program.  As others have said a basic education is key but if you read the books that Bigger Pockets sells that is every thing you need to get started.  The money that you'd spend to learn from Fortune Builders is money you could use for marketing or capital for your real estate investments.  I believe that when you're starting out the most important money you'll spend is for marketing.

I understand that Bigger Pockets is very wary of a lot of educators/gurus.  For good reason.  I do think there are some very good educators to learn real estate investing from. But any real estate program that keeps upselling their programs is probably someone you should be wary of too.

Johnathon and Robert,

Thank you so much for both responding to my post. I was driving myself crazy yesterday trying to get the mail merge to work. I got up this morning and read the article that Robert sent me and Bullseye! The info was right there. All you have to do is save the Excel file as a .csv file. I'll have my first 125 pieces going out today.

I hope you guys have a very successful year in real estate investing. And thank you for taking the time to help me. I am grateful. BTW - that article is very helpful! You should look it over for your next mailing.

Arthur

I am trying to do a direct mail campaign myself. I have a Macintosh computer that is running Office 2008. When I open my data source in Excel I get a an error message that says "This file needs to be opened by the Excel Workbook text converter, which may pose a security risk if the file you are opening is a malicious file. Choose OK to open this file only if you are sure it is from a trusted source."

I choose OK because I have created the Excel file myself but I get an error message that says"The converter necessary to open this file cannot be found."

Has anyone else had this problem? I have searched the internet and not found anything that works to fix the Excel workbook text converter problem.

Can anyone on Bigger Pockets help me?

I found an ugly house on a lot a lot that's zoned R2. The house is a tear down but the upside is that 2 units can be built on the lot How do I estimate what I should offer the owner for the lot? How can I estimate what it costs to build 2 3/1 units?

I am thinking about buying a condo at an auction to fix up and resell. I live in Los Angeles and there is a healthy market for condos. I have never done this before and would really appreciate input form anyone with experience with this.