All Forum Posts by: Dell Schlabach

You actually maximize your leads by having a really good realtor who is interested in making sure you get a deal.

Your local realtors all have access to the same inventory, having three realtors showing you the same stuff is not very efficient use of anyone's time in my opinion. 

The challenge is to find a good realtor willing to figure out what you want and showing you a lot of properties that meet your criteria. 

I personally would not lock myself in with a realtor for 90 days without knowing if they perform. On the other hand If i was the realtor, I probably wouldn't take clients, at least I would not work very hard for them,  who are shopping with three or four realtors.  

This can be all over the map. I rarely use a designer, but I have when we went from 150,000 houses to a 350,000 house.

I paid 125.00 hour and it took her about 10 hours, for walk through meetings, selecting all the finishes and paint colors. 

There are plenty of designers that work for a lot less locally, but I was impressed with this designers work. 

You will need to figure out where the water is coming from and divert the water.  

Is the window underground with a window well?

Do you have a picture of the outside, be helpful to diagnose the problem. I get called out on water intrusion issues all the time when the crews have exhausted their options. We typically start with a garden hose and use the process of elimnination until we discover the real cause/source. Better to fix the outside then to keep replacing wet windowsills. Trading wood for plastic wont stop the intrusion.

 Seems like a very bad rule of thumb to me. It doesnt tell you anything sbout if its a deal or not. There are plenty of properties that are goid deals above list price. We got one this week that we paid 12,000 over list. Good solid deal that we will mske 20-25k on. 

We were in four multiple offer desls this past week on bank owned properties, we got one out of the four. One of the properties had 14 offers, to offer 40% of asking price on these would be silly and a waste if time.

Many properties we look at are not deals even at 40% of list price. 

I personslly dont see any logic in offering 40% below list, except maybe on hud houses that have been on tbe market for over 60days, or probate that have been on the market a long time, and you have done your analysis to make sure its a deal at that price. 

My take

I too believe its possible to do a hundred flips, not easy but not impossible, we have our sights set for 48 a year by 2017, but i could think twice as big if i had the right partner. 

With two or three really good people handeling the key components I believe it 

 would be doable. 

Key components

1. Finding the deals

2. Finding the money and handeling the admin and system setup

3. Developing and managing the rehab contractor team. 

1. and 2. I have or could put in place to go to 100 without great difficulty, we would expand into three more counties and duplicate the current system that is generating so far this year just over one  house purchase a week.

We have access to private money as well as a couple banks that will do rehab loans at reasonable interest rates.  At 100 rehabs you would need about 50? in the cycle at all times, if you wrap each house up in a six month cycle from buy contract to sell contract...currwntly we are at 22 weeks average. 150,000 per house avg x 50 houses, = 7,500,000. Doable. 

3.  If you want to move  your family to Ohio, and you can handle the contractor rehab management side, I can put the people in place to handle the rest.  We should be able to 26 year one, 52 in year two and in  year three hit the 100 mark.

Cuyahoga Valley is a nice area to raise a family :-)

Welcome

Just ran across your other post about scaleability ... from your first post on this thread I assumed you were relativly new trying to figure out what you wanted to do, and how to go about it. 

I see you have a relatively clear vision  and more experience then most "rehabbers" hanging out here, makes the challenge bigger, but the principles strategies still apply. 

We have similar struggles in scaling up, but when you do 12-15 pretty much hy yourself, you know it can be done. There is a ceiling of complexity we tend to hit that can be extremly difficult to break through. 

Maybe I shold do the response in the scalability thread, since this one is about how and who with. Good questions, I recall goung to all tbe reia meetings and not being able to find any full time rehabbers, and nobody seemed to know any. I went to one of the bigger ones in the area and the night of the round tables where they had moderators at each table moderating an aspect of real estate, and it was advertised as having a table on rehabbing, that table had been deleted, I asked why and was told they couldnt find a moderator.

I asked realtors and everyone I ran into, a lot of people knew people who rehabbed, but everyone was doing it part time, as a side business. Which struck me as really odd after all the books I read, seminars and boot camps I had attended, if it was  so lucrative that peopke are paying 3,000-75,000 for mentoring or coaches, why coukdnt i find anyone making a living at it.

Apparently a bit more difficult than thay make it seem :-)

After the crash when I decided to focus exclusively on rehabbing, first year I did three, doing all the work myself, next year six after hiring a couple peop, e, hired a few more and rehabbed 12, doubled tge staff and did 13, oops something wasnt working

Welcome to the site, great place to hang out and learn. 

We Buy Renovate and Sell Stark Summit and Portage Counties, your back yard. 

There is also a Stark County REIA trade show in Canton KSU, you may want to check out this Saturday all day.

What aspect of real estate are you getting into? 

The best to you.

How to find the right people to talk to?

        Find three to six of the top people in your area, or possibly out of your area, if you are planning on competing locally. Find people who are doing what you want to do, call them, email them, track them down on a job site, sit outside their office door with a big gift until they give you two minutes to arrange  meeting... 

Most successful real estate people in my experience are willing to meet for free, coffee or dinner, if not ... Offer then $200.00 for 45 minutes of their time over dinner or coffee, most wont take it, but it show them that you value their time and information. If you decided to do this next week, and met with four or five successful people doing what you want to do, it could cut potentially cut years off your learning curve. Most likely one or two of those people would then be available for you to call when you run into obstacles, and if they couldn't solve the problem they know people who can. 

I know plenty of people who for years have been attending real estate networking events that you really would not want to ask for advise. 

But do I want to meet with newbie guy everyday for lunch?

        No you dont, not if you want to learn something, if you just want to network and enjoy coffee that be ok, but wont get you far in your bussiness.

 Any advice? How would I be able to do this in large numbers?

              Large numbers will make it seem like you are doing something, but likely it will be spinning your wheels and getting confused. You dont need large numbers, you need one or two good people who know what you want to know.   

Its a lot like the new people who want to build large buyers lists, I run into them all the time, if they just figured out what I want they could sell me 50 deals a year, if they can find 100, I could hook them up with a couple other guys real quick. Most wholesalers only need one to three good buyers, and you can find them in a week, you dont need to spend a year networking to build up a list of 50-100 potential buyers. This is s not a numbers game. Its a game of deciding what you want and then figuring out who can help you get there. 

It has been said that if you dont have what you want, either you dont KNOW what you want or,  you don't know how to get it.

Do you know what you want to do? Wholesale? Rehab? Buy and Hold?

If you dream a little, you had enough money to create your ideal real estate business, three years from now, what would that business  look like?

 True the house we sold and took a hit on was a cash buyer, purchased by an executive transferring to Corps.  Cleveland branch.  

 @Jay Hinrich can afford to pay cash. Finding cash buyers is not the real problem. The problem is, how does the cash buyer make money on a skinny deal like that?  Get it for 400,000 maybe it's a deal for a cash buyer.