All Forum Posts by: Calvin Rankin

My wife is adopted but met her birth mom some years ago so we do have contact with her. The birth mom is a very shady person who does a lot of highly questionable things which is why I'm asking this question here. The birth mom has a property in Los Angeles which she purchased in the early 90's. Originally the property was a restaurant but the birth mom rented it out 20 years ago to a lady who converted it to a store. The lady has always paid her rent which the birth mom uses to pay the property taxes. However, over the entire 20 years the birth mom never paid any of the income tax on the rent she received. She said that she was never aware that she was supposed to do so until she recently spoke to her lawyer about possibly selling the property. That's when the lawyer pointed out that she would be responsible for paying all back income taxes immediately upon the sale of the property. To avoid having to do this she came up with the idea of quick-deeding the property over to my wife and I and we would be free to do with the property as we pleased. The property is very run down and in a very run down part of town so I was thinking of wholesaling it because we wouldn't want to keep it. If we took it and wholesaled it then any amount we got we be profit since we wouldn't be paying anything to get it. However, because of the shadiness of the birth mom I am highly concerned that responsibility for paying the back income tax would somehow be shifted to us as well as the new owners. Is this something that I should worry about or am I simply being too suspicious of the birth mom's highly suspect character?

@Ezichi Oha I went downtown and they had me send an email for information regarding how to get the list. They got back to me and the list on CD is $325 and they would fedex it to me. I can't get the list right now but it's good to know where to go. Thanks!

Hi @Kristopher Gomez. Have you had much success with tax default lists? If so, which counties have been good for you? Since I'm new to everything I like to try to get good perspectives on what to expect. I don't mind working hard and working long even if if the prospects are slow as long as I know what to expect. @Johnny Rhee I didn't want to go into wholesaling land until I get experience with improved properties first. I've heard land can be a bit more difficult. 😊 I really appreciate the amount of feedback you gave. Would I go through the court or through the county tax assessors to get the tax default lists for Riverside and San Bernardino counties? @Ezichi Oha Thanks for the direction. It's really appreciated. Which department of the courthouse do you go to?

Hi everyone,

I'm right at the border of Los Angeles and Orange counties. I want to get a list of properties in both counties that are a year or two away from being in default due to delinquent property taxes (in other words they are a year or two away from going to auction for delinquent property taxes). I contacted the property tax assessor's office for Los Angeles County and they gave me the number to "Bid 4 Assets" which is the company that handles property auctions for many of the counties in California. Bid 4 Assets said that they could only give me a listing of the properties that were already in default and listed to be auctioned, and didn't know where I could get a pre-default list. Is there a way to get such a list? I'm a new wholesaler and I want to try to send yellow letters to property owners who are in the position of possibly losing their homes because of not paying their taxes but still have some time to work a wholesaling deal.

@Andy Rumple Thanks very much. It helps a lot to hear that I shouldn't let the phone silence get to me. I appreciate it. 👍🏽

Hi. I'm a new wholesaler who's stuck and needs guidance.

This first paragraph is more to give you background to the problem but is not about the problem itself. I'll get to the actual problem in the next paragraph. I started my marketing for wholesaling three months ago but then almost immediately ran into severe financial issues that I'm still trying to dig out of (I'm aware of the strategies like those mentioned in @Brandon Turner's recent video of what to do when financially struggling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR6b-c3iQ2k and had already been utilizing them before I saw the video. It's a very good video and I believe in the stategies btw). Because of the financial issues, instead of hitting the ground running hard I had to slow to a huge crawl. Instead of mailing out hundreds of yellow letters a week as I had planned I have been able to mail only 20 each letters each week. I don't mind that because I have a "start where you can and do what you can do" mentality (and as I have heard so many times even on these boards, "all it takes is one deal to turn everything around no matter how small your marketing"). So based on this, as of today I have managed to mail just over 300 yellow letters. This is the background.

This paragraph describes the problem that I need help with. A number of sites that I've visited mentions that usually (with some variation) within 30 days of getting out your first 200 letters you can reasonably expect to get your first deal. They mention that to get that deal you will have to go through a lot of phone calls that end up being no deals at all. That's fine because I'm more than willing to wade through a whole bunch of "no's" to get to the one "yes". My problem is that I'm getting no calls at all to even get the "no's". In my first 150 letters or so I was getting no calls at all and then within a three day period I got six. I was so excited. Finally action was happening. I was finally getting the "no" calls and knew that eventually I would get to that one "yes", even if it took a few more months at the rate that I was doing my mailings. But then after those six calls it all stopped again. I've had no calls at all since then. This has been so frustrating. It got so frustrating that I couldn't even bring myself to come here on BP or look at any investing videos on youtube because just thinking of doing so reminded me that nothing was happening and made my frustration go up (I still kept sending my 20 mailers per week though. Nothing stopped that). Finally, I got past the frustration so that I could get on here and post today to get some guidance. Some of you will want to know where and to whom I'm marketing. I live in Norwalk, CA and since most of the info that I had read or watched suggested that it's best to start marketing in your own area (to help get familiar with your own market) I've been marketing in Artesia, CA which is less than a mile away. All of my letters have been going to absentee owners. Since I've been getting nothing but crickets I'm thinking of switching areas and targeting tax delinquent owners rather than absentee. Any other suggestions that you guys have would be so appreciated so that I can get out of this rut and start getting calls (even if they are all "no's". A "no" is better than no call at all). Thanks in advance.

Thank you all for your great feedback. It seems there truly is a wide variety of ways to go with this. @Daniel Moctezuma I don't have the budget to send out thousands yet. What method do you use to identify probate and the other targets that you mentioned? I connected with a local title company who was kind enough to give me access to their software to create my own lists. I can identify tax delinquents with it but haven't seen that it can identify other categories. The software is TitlePro247. Are you familiar with it? @Chrissy Arnold I like the language that you suggested. It adds a very service-oriented feel.

Hi. I'm new to wholesaling and I finally started getting some calls last week which I was really happy about. For my direct mail campaign I've been sending put letters with the following verbage: Hi! My name is Calvin and I am interested in $Buying$ your house at in If you are interested in selling this or any other property you might own please call me at Because everything that I've read here on BP says that its best to handwrite your letters and envelopes because it feels more personal to the seller, that's what I've been doing. However, the problem that I'm finding with handwriting everything is that I'm throwing away about a third of the paper and even more of the envelopes that I'm using because of errors that I make while writing them out. That's a ton of wasted paper and envelopes. I know that if I can get one deal that will more than make up for the cost of the paper and envelopes that get thrown away. But the problem is that I have an extremely small budget right now and manage to send out seventy-five letters each week. It's true that one deal can make up the lost paper, but don't you have to market to get the deal, and if you're losing a third of your marketing material into the trash and your budget is small aren't you losing the potential to get the deal? I know that I may sound frustrated but I'm really not. I'm just super curious about what the best options are. So my question is this, are the number of responses from hand-writing yellow letters along with the envelopes so much significantly better and effective than simply printing everything out on your home printer that it outweighs the costs of throwing away a third of your materials? I really would appreciate the perspective of you more experienced BP investors. Thanks in advance! :-)

I'm new to wholesaling and have just gotten started. When compiling lists for my direct mail I have not been removing trusts, llc's, and estates. Should I be? I generally send the same letter that I send to individuals except that instead of "Dear James" I'll address it to "Dear 123 Family Trust". Am I just as likely to get responses from these types of leads or am I better served to exclude them? I've been wondering about this.

Hi everyone. Everything that I've researched about talking to potential sellers seems to fall into one of two categories - 1) how to talk to motivated sellers who are contacting you based off of your marketing or they were referred to you, or 2) how to talk to absentee owners (people who own the property you're interested in but they live somewhere else) that you're cold calling. But how do you talk to the person who owns the property and lives in it and they are not the ones initiating the contact with you? I have found two very distressed properties that I would love to get under contract but the public records show that the occupants are the owners themselves. How do I initiate the conversation with them? How would the conversation go?