All Forum Posts by: Jonathan C.

Agree with Mike.  There is no catch all answer to what kind of finishes you need to put into a flip.  Check renovated comps close by your subject property that have sold recently and have low days on market (have sold fast).  After you look through 3 or 4 you'll start to get the idea for what level of finishes you need for your market.

@Chris T. Fireplaces are annoying from a managing the rehab perspective. They're always way more expensive than you think to repair.

That said, a fireplace is a nice feature for buyers.

However, since your fireplace will need significant repairs to get in working condition, I'd do 1 of 2 things:

1) get rid of it- remove it, dry wall over it, whatever. If it's open and not working right, home inspector/buyer are going to try to make you fix it. Definitely don't want that

2) (my recommendation) put in a ventless gas fireplace insert. You get the benefit of having a fireplace as a feature buyers will like without having to worry about the fireplace flue. Should cost you like 1500-2500 all in if you get a reasonably priced insert and have someone who can do the gas line for not much $$

@Joey DeFilippo - For my properties I start the pricing out at the very tip top of what I think they'll sell for. A price that I even think is a little bit ridiculous. Sometimes I get an offer at that price. If I don't, I do this:

I wait about 7-10 days- if I don't have an offer, drop it about 5k.

Wait another 7-10 days- if I don't have an offer, drop it about 5k.

Repeat

Takes a lot of the stress out of it. Instead of my obsessing over how many showings I've had, the comments from Realtors who showed the property, wasting my time by trying to follow-up with people who've seen it, I just keep dropping til I have an offer.

@John Weidner Yeah that's right- they'd be the dual agent in this case since they're listing agent then also represent me as the buyer.

1% referral is the the listing agent when I purchase of the property. I offer them an additional 1% of the listing price at the sale of property when renovations are complete as an 'above and beyond' incentive to them.

Some agents don't care about these incentives at all... but for a percentage of them, it seems to make a difference.

@John Horner That's good advice. That is very similar to how I got started.

I signed up for a local mentoring group run by an experienced investor. Over the course of a few weeks I started to get to know her and found out where she wanted to buy properties.

She told me she was always looking for deals and would love to buy anything I could find her that fit her criteria.

I just got my RE license so started looking on MLS every day and putting out offers. She helped me get all the contracts together, and when I got a response to my offers (usually a counter) I would reach out to her, she would eval the property.

If it looked good, I would go out, video the property, and send her the video. If she thought it looked good we would go forward with ratifying the contract.

My first 10 wholesale, which I did in about a year, were all to this one investor.

She also let me ask her a ton of questions and visit the houses while they were being rehabbed.

This is a great way to get started IMO.

@Dylan Grieve On my probate letters I use the same exact letter I use with my high equity owners- saying essentially: I want to buy your house and here's why you might benefit from selling to an investor.

I think if the letter tries to sympathize you may end up offending people because they may perceive the sympathy as insincere and that you really just 'want' something from them.

I prefer my probate letters to seem more coincidental- they're going through inheriting a house and 'just so happen' to get a letter about selling the house.

All that said, the best bet with any direct marketing is to test because you won't know until you try it. Try sympathizing, try not, see what works better.

@Michael Jobe thanks- just redesigned it. Still have work to do to make it better, but it seems to do a good enough job building credibility with homeowners so they feel like we're a real company vs someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Yeah I'm interested in going into other markets at some point. Actually have a friend in Philly and I'm seeing if I can work with him to get him going with some wholesaling and then possibly getting into rehab.

I'm interested in trying to expand into other markets and do bigger deals where I am- first step in that will probably be buying small 2-4 unit building and converting to condos. That's big in my area

Other brothers not too involved in day to day. They're a small part of what I do.

@John Weidner Usually with my searches in my areas I'm evaluating about 20-35 properties/day, and I make offers on 2-6. I have to offer on (roughly) 40-50 properties to get 1 offer accepted. It takes me about 1-2 minutes to comp each property- usually in total it's an hour or less each day.

Yeah the automation part is absolutely key. Here's my process:

1- run MLS searches

2- copy and paste MLS results in unformatted text format into a spreadsheet

3- sort the results by subdivision

4- run the comps for each one

5- figure an ARV number for each one

6- use my formula of 73% ARV less 55,000 repairs to automatically calculate the offer on each on *I will adjust repair number down to 48,000 for townhouses and up to 60-65k for larger properties or ones that need a lot of work

7- put in offer instructions for each one

-send to assistant-

8- have my virtual assistant (found on odesk) access my spreadsheet through google drive (all my stuff is done through google drive)

9- asst will use a program called 'pdfill' to populate the date, address, and offer price in my offer template (offer template is a completed offer with everything signed and filled out except for those couple of fields I just mentioned) *takes about 30-60 seconds to fill this out

10- asst sends offer in to email address or website listed on the spreadsheet

@Jessica H. Yeah I get a decent amount of calls, but (unfortunately) still a volume that I can easily handle myself. I have all direct mail calls going to a message that sounds just like a personal answering machine (basically 'hi, this is jon, leave a message and I'll get right back to you). The motivated ones, 9 times out of 10, leave a message, so I call those back first. Then I call through the hang ups as time permits. Those usually aren't worth much.

I had a longer, screening message before, but even with 1,500 letters a week, I'm only getting about 8-15 calls per week, so I don't have enough volume to make it so I need to screen people out. I basically call everyone back who calls me, but I wouldn't want it ringing to my cell, because that would be really distracting.

@Account Closed I have access to the MLS. I would strongly, strongly recommend anyone who is serious about real estate investing to get their license. You just don't have access to the best repository of information (MLS) otherwise. And when I'm comping properties, and staying on top of properties just put on market, I want to have the best information I possibly can.

@Allan Tamez - thanks, appreciate it. It's actually something more and more investors are doing, so now I'm also offering a 1% referral on the back end when I sell the house to try to continue to differentiate my offers over all the other offers agents are getting.

In my market almost everything that's priced even somewhat well is multiple offer on day 1, so I'm trying every trick I can think of to get them to go with my offer over someone elses.

3 main MLS searches I run every day: 1) everything under 230k, 2) short sales and foreclosures 220-280k, 3) short sales and foreclosures with 50+ DOM.

Based on the price points in a given market you would adjust those numbers accordingly.

@Jarrett Harris if it was something I was getting negative feedback from agents who showed the property, yes. I haven't found tree trimming to make any of my houses sell faster, so I generally leave it unless a) getting back feedback on it, or b) buyer or inspector make me do something with it.