All Forum Posts by: Marcel Theisen

@Omar Sanchez Yes, I agree the Loftis book is good motivation to get out do a deal. That deal went well, it's a 4-Plex in Colorado Springs. It's fully occupied and cash-flowing so I am happy with the deal.

@Sean Tracey - My sister is a real estate agent so we have access to MLS, then I would confirm expenses, rents, etc and crunch the numbers to see which deals worked for us.

Hi Jacob, You mention that the tenants pay utilities, but are you paying for all the building's water? If so, $50 sounds low to me. In my 4-plex, I pay $300-$400/month for water/sewer and gas (hot water heater). You might want to double-check actual past utility bills from owner.  When looking at past utilities also take into consideration if the building was fully occupied at the time or not as numbers will fluctuate a lot.  It's worth confirming so you don't take an unexpected his on your projected cash flow number. 

I think people would be surprised how much you can do remotely. I live in Spain,  my sister lives in Colorado where we have a rental together. 

From over here I helped search for and analyze properties,  got the financing, set up online bill pay for most expenses, got insurance, do record keeping, negotiated lease for laundry,  compare quotes for repairs, etc..

Anything basically that can be done online or over phone is fair game. She deals with local stuff that needs to be face-face. 

I'm just getting started with direct marketing but find that volume discounts are one of the biggest ways to save. Depending on the printer they might do print runs in lot sizes of 5K or 10K pieces at a time and the cost per piece will come down quite a bit. I only have a list of under a 1,000 but if I order 5 months worth up front in the long run it ends up being cheaper.

Another way is to do Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) where you send a mailer to every address in a specific area-doesn't work for what I am doing but might be an option if you are farming a specific neighborhood. 

Some larger companies,  like postcardmania, claim if you use their addressing/mailing service the postage cost is less than doing your own bulk mailing because  they mail so much volume. 

Good luck - 

Richard-Thanks for posting-useful data! Glad to see where I am investing (El Paso County, CO) wages are increasing, not a ton (1.9%) but at least positive trend. Also surprised the county where I grew up (Stearns, MN) is up almost 5%, would not have guessed that.

I haven't been able to find a way (other than using MLS) for a specific zip code. Realtor.com has 'median age of inventory' for major cities but not sure that helps you at all... good luck.

http://www.realtor.com/data-portal/realestatestati...

Hi Jose- You probably have this covered already by asking for the mortgage statement but I would want to know loan maturity date, if rate is fixed, any delinquent payments.  I'm really interested in Sub 2 but the Due on Sale clause on many mortgages makes me nervous. I listened to BP Podcast 002 with an investor who has done 100+ sub 2 which convinced me it can be done but still have not done a sub 2 deal.  Good luck, I'd be interested in hearing about your experience/success. 

Hi Robert. I didn't actually get a loan with them so I can't give full review but I did contact them and got quotes on properties I was looking at. In the end their rates were slightly higher than commercial loan quotes I was getting. Here are some past forum threads that might help:

Dwell Financing Reviews

Dwell Financing Good or bad?

Hi, I am doing the same.  I have the mail list in Excel and then do mail merge using column headings. Are you printing the letters yourself?  I am using an online company to print and merge the addresses, their column order and heading names are slightly different than my spreadsheet so I download their Excel template and copy my data over into their template.