All Forum Posts by: Chris Magistrado

This is very good! I'm excited to see how your journey grows! 
I just finished a book by TJ Hines, "Wholesaling as simple as your ABC", which helped me understand the world of Wholesaling much better. It's also written in a very, relaxed way with slang that normally I don't read in books, making the entire experience feel more like a conversation with a friend, rather than someone snobby. 

If reading isn't your thing, (It's not for many), a new technique I do is upload the book to Google's NotebookLM, and you can summarize the book by generating a podcast-like discussion, and listen to the whole thing. If this is of interest, I can help you out.

I'll check out Dealcheck! And I'll send you a connection!

 You bring up a strong point in education in general. The biggest factor students should consider for any education they take on are:

1. What's the percentage of students that sign up vs the ones that "make it"? 
2. Are there reviews you can gather from both students who succeed and those who didn't? Did these students come in dry or have experience, money to help them through the program, etc?
3. DO THEY ACTUAL REVIEW STUDENTS THEY ACCEPT?! This is the biggest one. I mean, in terms of real estate, how bad are NINJA loans (No Income, No Job, No Asset)? 

If the educator/teacher/mentor does not have any checks to who signs up, then it's more than likely just a cash grab where they're looking for students to pay. 

WARNING! 30-day refund programs are good, but be careful.. While the reality for most of them is they will refund you, they can and usually purposely engineer their courses such that, "in order for you to be successful, you have to try it for 90 days". By that time, you can't refund. 

The MOST valuable thing in MOST paid courses and teams, is the network of people you join. People interested doing the same stuff as you, but also the mentors. 

All of this being said, I will also say, most programs will say something like, "be your own boss" or "business is easy". It's not easy, you can be your own boss, but that means being accountable and responsible, something most people just are not strong willed to do. Great mentors can sniff this out in the beginning and make sure their not wasting students time and money. Bad people, take advantage of this and don't care. Again, you can figure this out by the number of successful students / number of students.

I'll checkout Backflip! Looks like they're trying to sell lending services through their app.

You’ve brought up some of the challenges I faced in this. Accuracy of both the input data and the results.

First is the providing information it comes up with that isn’t there. Certain models like the ones ChatGPT are trained on do this, but other LLM likes Gemini don’t. It will only respond with what you give it, nothing more. This leads to better accuracy. I have a friend who uses this to summarize legal proceedings for his business. (He’s not a lawyer so it’s not life and death. 😂)

Second component is understanding what the AI indersgands when it views a photo and how accurate it is. This again has to do with how well the model is changed. When reviewing test results across multiple LLMs, one performed significantly better in this challenge, which means I used that one for the image progressing. I’m sure video will follow once better base models release, maybe even this year.

Third is your existing P&Ls. If you have historical data of what flips you’ve done, it can be trained off that, and only that as you desired. You can also just tell it what percentages you want to hit.

Fourth, you can adjust the prompt so it will tell you directly that it needs more information about certain things, and can suggest more investigation into areas of your flip to increase the confidency score of different parts in it’s rehab analysis. You can also request the confidence score by percentage if you want, and adjust it accordingly.

The way to test accuracy in Machine Learning, is by training the data on most of the deals. The you take a few deals, only give it them input, in this case photos, what returns you want, loan details, etc, and compare your final results with what they got. It’s not a crystal ball and it’s not going to catch major shifts in the market. That’s a whole other level of having to monitor the news, which I think is much more of a challenge. 

As for what it does, it’s nice to get a generally idea of what needs repair and areas to consider and what to look at. If you want an instance of this, happy to chat and see if it works for you. 

I built something to make deal analysis easier, and I’m pretty proud of it. It’s still rough and has plenty of room for improvement, but I can upload photos of a distressed property, tax records, comps, lender rates, and local rehab costs.

From there, it analyzes the photos to identify repairs, explains why they're needed, estimates costs for each item, calculates the total rehab budget, determines ARV based on comps, and provides an expected return—basically automating a lot of what spreadsheets already do.

It’s not meant to replace an analyst, and of course, everything still needs to be verified. It won’t catch everything in photos yet, and comps can be off, but as a way to speed up deal reviews and analyze more properties in less time, it’s been pretty useful. It can even learn from past deals to help refine the analysis over time.

I built this mostly to better understand the components of a good deal. Now that it’s up and running, I’m wondering—are there other tools out there that do something similar?

I'm surprised at the responses here, and think there could possibly be confusion and an assumption that might be created in the responses.

To provide a based answer, my question to @Zoe Brennan is, are you working on the investment opportunity with your time as well? Are you open to spending 40hrs-80hrs a week doing things other investors might not do? Do you have skills that compliment wholesaling or flipping? Whether it be cold calling, knocking on doors, flipping, and possibly doing some rehab work yourself?

For those who have $0 - little funding, you have to do more of the work yourself, and even possibly work to earn some more to start funding more of your deals. What I understand, (and please everyone jump in to agree or provide constructive feedback), the multiple ways to make money and lower the cost of investments in real estate can be found in different parts of each process. It seems this starts with finding the property. Wholesaling, where you can put a property under contract and sell that contract for more money. If you flip the contract, you can make $5k-$20k (more or less) depending on how well you position yourself. You could do many of these and increase capital, and/OR do this to find a discounted property.

The next area you can earn more capital or decrease the amount to pay for a property, is rehabbing and possibly flipping. You can use your existing $25k + HML to cover your first flip, and make anywhere between $10k-$25k in the course of 3-6 months (given market, location, etc.) You can do a few of these to build up more capital and/OR do this to get a better deal on a property.

If you find your deal (wholesale), rehab something and use HML, then get a conventional loan on it, ideally BRRRR it, you could have a great start. The level of difficulty depends on your skillset, time, and ability to learn. The money will come with any of the skills you acquire for this.

My opinion, if she has a lot of time on her hands, already has skills like cold calling, sales/door knocking, etc. she could be in a great position. If not, if she has the time to learn, she could use that $25k and make some moves with it, all while increasing capital.

I'm open to having a discussion about this topic to those who say it's unrealistic. I acknowledge I am new to this board, to real estate investing in general, and there is always more to learn. It seems flippers that do HML start out with about this on their smaller deals, no?

 Excellent! Sending a DM.

Thanks! Just got your message. I replied!