All Forum Posts by: Douglas Mallett

ouch.

pronounced 'oh, my!'

!

you already have the tools to do this.

turn your callers toward sfr's. 

find off market motivated sellers.

there is nothing more to say here.

!

days on market speaks volumes. 

a thousand folks have passed on this, at a minimum.

most of them are pros.

why did they pass?

what a great question!

all the best.

Quote from @Sandra B.:

My husband and I are really interested in getting into real estate, every year that passes without us acquiring a property feels like we're falling behind.

this is FOMO - do not succumb!

what's to miss out on in a declining market?

if you have questions as whether this mkt is actually declining, check out calculatedriskblog.com. - or read up on the macro data...

"The numbers do not lie, but we often lie to ourselves." (Me - just now.)

Bill McBride has correctly called the last few tops and bottoms, and he is quite data-based, and accurate.

Notably, he is not a participant on this forum, or any other! He reads the macro data and acts - and writes - accordingly.

All of that being said...

What is the reason all of your current property investigations end up in the negative?

The same reason that the market is stuck right now.

Which begs the impertinent question of...

"Why do you seek to invest in a market that is clearly declining?"

This is an excellent place to start - examining your assumptions, perceptions, biases and fear. 

If we can not see the target clearly, we can not acquire it.

Go to SCORE, run by the SBA - these advisors  will tell you the same thing, and also challenge your assumptions.

This is not easy to hear this at first.

But... it is much easier than reading a future financial statement that Impassionately documents your flight of capitol.

Sit back, release the FOMO (sometimes the hardest part), complete your self-education (far apart from BP and like forums, lol), make your plan and stick with it.

Don't believe me?

It's cool - I don't care... it's not my money!

But - do get a consult with a high net worth real estate CPA who is a RE investor with many years in the game.

Then all will be clear.

All the best!

haha, these are mailmerge form letters sent by the 10,000's...

every field in that merge came directly from the county assessors office - LSM gets the tax roll, extracts the usecodes for vacant residential, and then starts printing and mailing letters.

these folks send letters and wait for replies, then offer startlingly low prices over the phone or email, all without even looking up the parcel.

they are not interested in a typical sale at all.

call them and play it out - it's educational, free and sometimes very entertaining!

ps - occasionally the exception to this exists.

all the best~!

automation is great! data is great! 

i like to reflect on the fact that all of the resale RE data aggregators get their data for free from the county assessors roll... hilarious, no?

these are public records - our records - and are available to us for free, or a nominal production fee.

GIS records are usually free as well, eliminating the need for geocoding and including not only parcel boundaries, but a long list of parcel and building attributes, such as grade and condition, sq footage, yr of const, etc. very sweet, and open source GIS software aptly handles the task.

re scrapes - you can easily scrape any site that is humanly accessible, even if robots.txt and other means try to keep you out - look at scrapy, beautiful soup etc along with some vpn proxy farms. or you can hire this out.

and why scrape when the county will email you an 80mb csv? for free! lol!

converting monthly capex to a probabilistic distribution seems like it is the same thing, unless i am missing something...  0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2000 is the same as 200 x 12, right? maybe above my pay grade, but this seems true...

i just hired out a 100k scrape for a govt site that limited gets to 1k requests - got the data in about 20 hours, he used 93 proxies.  hired this out bc the public records request was taking some time to complete, and the price was very cheap.

i am not sure that showing recent high appreciation paths is solid, and i speak from some experience. one way to test this is to model YOY data for this and see if it tracks, which it likely won't as this is more of a random distribution. it sounds like you have the chops to do this - if you model it, let us know the result for a few years of data...

i use these same ideas and test them out - one was to model the churn rate of different areas, the rate of sale each year. i found that these are varied as well YOY, although there is some tracking, ie high net worth areas turn at about 3% annually, and lower socioeconomic areas turn 6-8% per year - past that, this analysis was not too helpful for finding sellers.

at the end of the day, we want to find sellers.

i believe that there is no better source of data than the county - they are the originators, and they are required to provide us copies - daily, if we want!

i can extract any asset class right now from a dataset of 629k parcel records... duplex, apartments, 4plex, vacant commercial, mobile home, etc... and do almost anything i want with that data, like export it to a Google Earth KMZ file (parcel boundaries) with all attributes listed in the description, and hyperlinks to the county tax lookup, etc.

a great way to qualify parcels for development potential, and more.

all the best!

Free data, courtesy of the county....

this may not be the ideal time to learn about new construction - i am thinking this should have been done long ago.

you are the coordinator of anything that happens on that lot - you are the gc and this is your job!

the county often has cheatsheets for new owner/builders, and your best bet may well be to get to the county planning desk, hope to find a sympathetic ear and get some idea of the permitting and construction process.

and i am sure that Google has your answer as well - there is no shortage of sites that offer this info in all variations and sizes...

all the best!

there is a fast way to find out if they negotiate...

generally speaking, overpriced stale properties are the result of the sellers' 'magical thinking'...

all the best!

mortgage qualification comes first - make sure you can pull the trigger.

go with a mortgage broker and not a bank as you will get better, faster service.

realize that most re brokers will not proactively search for you- they will offer you a targeted search returns off the MLS, and maybe maybe might call you every so often asking if you are looking at it. your mileage may vary, of course.

a re broker can not lower your interest rate, period.

a good mortgage broker will have already told you this, as well as having educated you about rates, qualifying, tips on increasing your max qual amt, etc.

to find a good re broker, ask around or interview them - ask hard and direct questions, and see how they respond, as this is how they will negotiate for you, for better or for worse.

you should also know at this point what typical re broker fees are - this is very basic info, available from google or chatgpt in about 0.0000003 seconds processing time.

my best advice?

hit the books, level up and get the basics down first - then you can begin for real.

all the best!

Hello Nicholas!

The county treasurer is... not helping you, and is wildly misinformed about a lot of things.

These are OUR RECORDS, folks!

OUR PUBLIC RECORDS!

Yes, I am shouting , and for a very good reason.

The bureaucrats are the stewards of OUR records - even as they hotly deny this!

File a PRA (public records act) with the county and ask for your rightful records!

Do remember that a lot of county employees are very skeptical of these facts, and will often be quite hostile and rude to you when you assert your rights to request and inspect public records.

This is just a fact, and I have the experience of about 80 PRA requests to back this up, as well as having prevailed against a local administration in court, with them having to pay me atty fees and damages in high 5 figures.

Keep pressing - dm me if you wish - and push the issue upstairs until you get some respect.

You will sometimes find a reasonable voice in the upper echelons of county management, someone who knows what the black letter law is, and is aware that these records, are, in fact, free and available to everyone.

You can request tax records, assessor roll records, planning dept records - even all of the county administrations emails, including attachments.

You can request logs of all other prior county records requests, just to see if they are throwing you under the bus while daily supplying the tax roll to Cole Data or Axle, etc.

You can even request their entire Planning Dept database, all 25 gigs of it! This is part of what what my lawsuit was about.

And so on...

Do not let them tell you anything except "Your responsive records have been produced and are now ready for your inspection - prior to payment!"

Please feel free to contact me, anytime at all.

It is simply unconscionable that our tax dollars go to this type of bureaucratic f*ckery, and I am surprised it is still a thing after so many public records lawsuits.

Attached - screenshot of a public records request data return from 4 days ago - all taxpayer names (optionally exempt from website disclosure) for about 727,214 parcels... total cost?

$0.00

All the best!