All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

@Brian Stupack

Hi Brian, welcome to the club! You picked a great time to go deeper with real-estate investing, there is so many opportunities within your reach right now, that all you have to do is look around and you'll find them! The fact that you have properties of your own, and made your own deals is HUGE! PLUS, you have done your own property management, 2 properties at the same time, for 3 years! Are you serious? That's incredible! You have skills and knowledge that many investors don't have, and that is very valuable. Trust me when I say this man, you are powerful and you have potential to be great!

So you want to know and do everything that's related with deals?  I can suggest a few things...

Find deals

To find deals, whether to flip or to rent out, is to find bird-dogs and wholesalers in your area of choice(Winnipeg in your case I assume?)  Understand what your criteria is, find 10-50 bird dogs and wholesalers, give them your buying criteria, and watch them find the leads and make the deals for you.  @Bryan Wesley is a wholesaler.  Grab a coffee with him and go to town!

To raise money for deals, I can suggest this from another post I've made...

Open a word document and write down every single person that you know. People from every place you've worked, former classmates in college, friends, family, everyone is fair game! Once you feel like you have every single person written down, understand this. Every single person on your list, has money saved up. Every single person that they know, ALSO has money saved up. If you can be seen as the expert and make a good impression with that one person, that same person, through word of mouth, will do the marketing for you. Stress the fact that the ROI from you is FAR BETTER than ANY investment they could get at the bank, and you'll have people begging to give you their money!

I also suggest meeting up with @Paul Kuegle as well.  He's a very easy person to talk with and he understands how the game is played.

Hope this helps!

@Bryan Wesley

You came to a good website Bryan, there is SO MUCH information on this site, that I relate it to an encyclopedia. Problem with encyclopedias is that you have to know what you're searching for, and it sounds to me like you already know what you're looking for. I'm not sure if you want to be wholesaler or are already wholesaling, so I'm assuming you've never made a wholesaling deal yet? You also want to know everything there needs to be known about wholesaling and finding cash buyers correct? I can suggest a few things...

1) For cash buyers, go to local real-estate investor meetings. The groups that I feel to be real and legit is Team Made real-estate and Manitoba real-esate investor association and can be found on meetup. If you want people who will take your wholesale deals, you have to find the flippers and buy and holders(rental property owners) in your area, tell them that you're a wholesaler and understand their criteria. If you know what your buyers are looking for, then you know what kind of deals to make. If you have a great deal for a house flipper but only have buy and hold buyers, then you're either going to be desperate looking for a flipper or lose the deal all together. To answer the age-old discussion on here....build your buyer's list first, not after you get the deal!

2) Wholesaling is the simplest to understand, but the hardest to perform. Mainly because many people don't build a foundation before they start. To me, what doesn't get talked about much is bird dogging. Bird dogging is driving around looking at properties, finding homes that could be a good potential investment(distressed properties), and selling that lead to anyone who's interested. Wholesalers, flippers, buy and holders, etc, are people who pay you for each lead they're interested in. So already, you're building your buyers list for a variety of investors, and probably getting $10-$50 per lead. You're building your buyers list, reputation, experience, and your foundation while getting paid to do it. Pretty sweet deal!

3) Deals are made, not found. The main difference between bird dogging and wholesaling is negotiation. Instead of finding a potential property and giving it to someone else, you act on it instead. You find the owner, you make a offer and negotiate with them to put the property under contract. If everything goes well, you give that deal to someone else and make a commission out of it. So if you want to be a master wholesaler, you must be a master negotiator.

Example: You find a potential property selling for $200,000, and the houses around this property average for $170,000. You make an offer for $140,000(70% rule). If negotiations go well, you got the property for a great price and your flipping buyers will be fighting each other to get your deal. Heck, you can probably negotiate your commission with your flipping buyers as well!

Lol, I didn't mean to write an essay! What I'm trying to say is, welcome to the club Bryan! It's always great to see another person hungry for a better life. Would you like to go for a coffee sometime? :)

@Bryan Wesley

I agree with Dishant, business casual or business attire is the best.  I prefer business casual because I hate wearing ties, but it's up to you.  Really, it's about positioning yourself as the expert and showing them that you're serious.

If I was selling my house and a guy wearing dusty overalls, muddy shoes, had a scruffy beard and smelled like he hasn't had a shower in a few days, started talking to me about real-estate, I would think he knows more about construction than real-estate.  If a guy walked in wearing a perfectly pressed suit, crisp white shirt, shiny oxfords, and with looks to kill, I would say holy cow!  This guy's a professional and he knows what he's talking about.

@Chad Hotovec

I see now,  I've always had a hard time understanding that concept.  The moment I read the part "whatever comes after the 'but'", my mind drew a blank and made me feel puzzled.  Do you have another word for it?  Like when someone tells me to explain something clearly, I draw a blank.  When someone tells me to explain it simple, I explain it to them clearly.  The difference in words makes a difference for me, I'm weird that way.  :)

I can completely relate to your past situation as well. I thought I didn't have enough of my own saved money, so I put REI on hold, gone to school to get a "higher paying job", and save up a big nest egg that way. Then I learned on a deeper level, what the power of OPM has for REI and the wheels started moving again. Networking, applicable knowledge, mentors and action are important for me!

@Aly W.

Interesting that you say that it's not a get-rich-quick scheme. Maybe that's another reason why people avoid REI. They developed the expectation that it's a get-rich-quick process till they face the reality and see that it's a get-rich-slow process instead!

Then again it also depends on what kind of finances you use for your REI. If you only use money from your own savings, yes, you'll be 60 before you know it. If you use OPM for your investments however, it will go MUCH faster!

@Chad Hotovec

Interesting answer.  Could you explain more about what "limiting beliefs" are?  Could it mean like a person is close-minded and doesn't budge on their opinions, no matter how silly it is? 

                I also like to note about "deviating from the crowd".  It's so sad to see so many people who have great potential, but they don't act on it because they're afraid of embarrassment or how their personal image is seen from others.  Pursue your goals even if people in your life don't support you, because eventually, you'll come across people who WILL support you!

@Aly W.

I don't know if I'm getting philosophical here, but everything in this world has a balance.  Nothing is purely good or purely bad and if it was, we would be suspicious.  You got the gurus who only talk about the good and then you got the washed up investors who talk only about the bad.  If you investigate in either case, you will find the opposite.  The reality with most people, is if something good happens, it's not talked about because it's almost treated like a expectation.  If the littlest bad thing happens, you get everyone talking and criticizing!

When I talk to people who have never invested in real-estate before, half of them have no interest in it, while the other half are fearful of it.

I usually investigate the people who are fearful of it and try to understand why they're afraid.  Most of them will always talk about the horror stories of bad tenants or midnight tenants(tenants who leave without notice, before their next payment), evictions, and how stressful it is been a landlord.  They hear one or two bad stories and then associate every possible aspect of it to be bad, without investigating further on the good aspects.

I've never had a rental property, tenants or played the role of a landlord, but the way I see it is this.  If you have a good tenant screening process, do your due diligence, and manage risk, most of the time, you won't have bad tenants.  Sure you'll have the occasional rotten egg, but most of the time you won't.  If you're property is vacant, and you just put in some random person, regardless of who they are, then the odds of having a bad tenant increases.  With all the tools at our disposal(tenant screening,  due diligence, etc), we can control the odds into our favor and have a better probability of getting a good tenant.  

This is what I tell people who are afraid of rental properties and REI in general. I've been discredited by these same people because I have no direct experience with it. So I'm asking buy and hold investors and property managers alike: "am I right about this subject?  Or do I have no idea what I'm talking about?"

Thanks in advance!

@David Sarlo

Welcome to the club David, it's nice to see another Winnipeger on Biggerpockets!

You're looking for private money for your investments and rehabs correct?  I can suggest a few things. 

1)  Join and attend the real-estate investor groups in Winnipeg.  I've joined and attended 5 different ones, and the ones I find to be legit and beneficial is Team made real-estate and Manitoba real-estate investor association.  Team made is free admission for every meeting and MREIA is free for the first meeting, after that, it's $50-$55 a month I believe.  Both groups have meetings once a month.

2) Open a word document and write down every single person that you know. People from every place you've worked, former classmates in college, friends, family, everyone is fair game! Once you feel like you have every single person written down, understand this. Every single person on your list, has money saved up. Every single person that they know, ALSO has money saved up. If you can be seen as the expert and make a good impression with that one person, that same person, through word of mouth, will do the marketing for you. Stress the fact that the ROI from you is FAR BETTER than ANY investment they could get at the bank, and you'll have people begging to give you their money!

Heck, you're already half way there by the sounds of it.  You've been helping friends and family, for 40 years with renovating houses.  You're seen as an expert renovator.  All that's left to do is to learn the real-estate investment lingo, and you'll be seen as an expert real-estate investor.  I'm so jealous!  :D

Wow, you also own your own home inspection business too?  You are the real deal my friend!  Would you like to go for lunch sometime?

@Aaron K.

Thanks for the quick reply Aaron!

Asking specific people to invest, do you have to be a company in order to do so? Or can you be just a individual? I personally haven't made any deals yet, so I probably won't create a LLC quite yet.

@Sarnen Steinbarth

Wow Sarnen, I really wasn't expecting anyone to answer my questions, thanks for the reply!

I was wondering if you could provide more details on why it's legit. Such as, if you compared TransUnion's software to another similar software that is NOT legit, what would be the differences?