All Forum Posts by: Brian P.

My personal experience is one out of every five pieces of returned driving for dollars mail has led me to a deal. If I hadn't recently decided to really retire (60 years of habits are hard to break), I would offer to buy your returned mail any day.  

When I was a new agent real estate was not new to me, I had been an investor for 10 years and my father was a contractor/home builder, but I was new to being an agent and my real estate board had a guest speaker, one of the top agents in California.

I was floored, the guy was short, pudgy, balding young, and was so introverted he about had a mental brake down when he had to string two words together with a stranger and he sent me on the right path when he could muster enough inner strength to blurt out see the people, talk to the people, and see and talk to them again and again.

Other agents when we were walking out were commenting what a waste of time but they were just given golden advice and instead of joining them at the bar I went back to the office and just sat at my desk thinking about this guy and after a few hours I went out and bought some three by five cards and file boxes for them and being born on a farm I said to myself I am going to farm people and thanks to another agent who I call my mentor that other agents avoided because of his long stories, he became and agent in 1909, and those stories and his opinions were pure gold. God bless the day I sat down next to "Old Henry" at a board lunch.

Matt 

Glad to see the name Realty USA still exist, I opened an office with that name in California in 1972 to add to my offices and never saw another named that until the 90's and can't remember what state it was. 

Rochester the birthplace of my father-in-law in 1901 and the place he and my mother-in-law loaded up their Hupmobile with a few belongings and their first born daughter and hit the new Lincoln highway to California halfway through another Rochester winter in 1934. A good decision for me, it put his second born daughter directly in my sights. Never would have met if the winters had been more to his liking there.

Now I going to suggest you go to the agent training videos on you tube, there are some good ones but the founder of this site seems to believe if you help a poster my suggesting some person at another site that bigger pockets will fall into the ocean even if it is not an rei site, but to me it falls into the initial purpose and mission of this great site.

Courtney

Is the home similar in age, size, and condition to the comps? Is the market about the same or better then when the comps sold? If so the Property should sell within 30 days at list price and if so that is why I would go thru the listing agent and the motivation of double ending his deal.

Because your on this forum I don't think your interested in paying that kind of price and regular terms, basically market value, so you need to find a newer ambitious agent willing to learn how to work with investor type clients and train him/her to work with you. 

Where do you find this type of agent? I would hit open houses and just bs with the agent but your really checking them out as a potential agent to work with so talk about them not about you. Hi, how is your open house going today, much traffic? Tell them you are a investor and your learning more about this specific area at the present time to start the ball rolling. Also later suggest that as an agent they are from time to time going to run into property or owner in such bad shape that they aren't really going to be interested in listing it and maybe it can be made into something marketable by you.

Consider a sandwich lease option, with the limited info we have this seems to be an option.

Wow, returned mail, you just said one of my favorite phrases. I once had a investor really upset at the return mail he was getting and what it cost him. I said would you feel better if I gave you $5 for each returned piece? Yes he said, OK I said and we had a deal. I would guess each of those $5 bills returned about $500 to me. When I told him that he just said I wanted to cancel our deal and if I was really making money he would be happy with $10 from now on and his mama didn't raise no dummy. I guess I should have sent his mama flowers and candy on a regular basis.

Ben

House hacking, god I hate that label, but to each their own, I guess attaching a computer term even if misused is cool and modern. Now to the point Ben, do not let prices upset your thinking, if you have to, try and think in percentages. 

I had one investor in the Midwest that I had developed a friendship with who was doing well dealing in $25,000 dollar houses and averaging about a 20% profit and doing about 20 deals a year.  His wife was a corporate lawyer at high pay and was promoted and transferred to the S.F.Bay Area. When he started to look into investing in the high priced area they had moved to he freaked out at the prices.

One morning he showed up at my brokerage office and the first thing he said was do you know how high prices are in the bay area? All I could do is smile and say yes I do business in all the bay area counties.  He asked how many rehabs I did a year and I said four, He groaned four an then asked what is your profit margin and I said 10% and he groaned again even louder and looked even more depressed. I let him sink further into his chair and finally said why don"t you ask my average sales price when I sell?  OK he said what is it? $2.7mil I responded, so a $270,000 profit. 

Life began returning to his body and eyes, and he kept saying wow I just need only one a year and I reminded him he could still wholesale and work lower priced properties and other things while hunting these deals. I told him don't worry about the prices, the only thing you need to know is are there buyers for it when your done so you can collect a check and presently the answer is yes.

I know this is a radical idea but have you just ever considered just going to the department of real estate website for the states you want to know about. 

There are only a couple of gurus I would recommend to anybody and I'll keep them to myself because BP frowns on such postings.

Decades ago 9 friends and real estate investors on the side used to meet on Saturday mornings for breakfast and to hash out our investing. It was a great group, and if you needed some money quick you just gave an IOU when you borrowed it, complete trust, the IOU was just in case you got run over by a bus, the wife would know what she had coming. Also every Wednesday night was dinner and dancing with our wives at a favorite place. 

Anyway one of the early gurus wanted to join the group and we agreed to let him sit in. His true mission was not to invest as he said but to write a book, and he did, and it became a best seller, and of course he sold courses where you could learn all his secrets gathered from his vast experience. Up to then his number of deals was zero, but later he got into some actual deals by piggybacking on some of his students action. Point is the guy was a total fraud but the stuff he swiped from us without giving us credit was priceless, and so it is now, almost every guru sooner or later steals some nugget you can actually use if you can spot it among the fools gold.

Where is the money?  Prove it. Put it into escrow. I have gotten private money from some strange sources and circumstances over the years, I just want to make sure it is in the pot for me to use, it belongs to who put it there, and I am the only one who can remove it. 

Suspended business=non-existing business, I don't do business with things that don't exist.