All Forum Posts by: Eric F.

What is the exact wording in your lease regarding repairs? You say he has been there for 2 months and is already doing stuff like this. It is not going to stop.

I hope your lease covers tenants making repairs on his own. If it does, I would file an eviction based on violation of lease terms.  Hopefully your lease says something along the lines of "landlord will handle all repairs" or "tenant agrees not to to make any repairs, alterations" etc etc

Seriously, 2 months in and he is threatening to sue over something he should not have done. Consider yourself lucky he gave you a reason to evict, file the eviction, and move on.

Question: Did you advertisement or lease mention a working fireplace? Did you tell him you would get it fixed? 

Personally I think yellowletters.com has the best looking product and templates by a significant margin. For me, click2mail has much faster turnaround times but they don't really have good templates so you need to design your own. If this is your first mailer I would recommend using yellowletters.com for their great templates. I've never placed an order with Click2Mail that took longer than 5 days to hit the mailboxes.  I have had much longer wait times with yellowletters.com. I think it is a location issue. Yellowletters.com is on the west coast so it their cards take a lot longer to arrive here in NC. 

If this is your first mailer I would go with yellowletters.com . Since you are in New Mexico they will probably arrive pretty quickly. You can ask their chat for advice on which product to use based on your list criteria. 

I have no affiliation with either by the way.

Getting a refi on a $36,500 property is not that easy. I would make sure you figure out how you are going to refi before doing so. 

@Nate Hawkins 15k profit on a wholesale is not too much. No profit is too much if your seller is happy and your buyer is happy. If the seller is happy with 15.5k for the property, and your buyer is happy at 30k, then you're good to go.

@Richard Marshall

"1) I dislike the bidding process on this site because ten-x (auction.com) can bid the property up themselves - and yes, it's stated in the terms when you register so it's okay for them to do so. So not only are you bidding against potential investors but the auction site has the ability to bid up the price to meet the reserve."

I friggen knew it. That should be illegal. They could technically bid it up to increase their commission due to getting 5% of the final sales price. 

Lets just say I have probably had 6 figures worth of 2,500 deposits charged and then refunded bidding on a certain type of asset on there and every single time I have been outbid in the last hour. After the 20th time the property appeared again after the first auction I quit going on it. 

At one point I was doing so many bids I had 2 credit cards I only used for auction.com deposits. Never won a single property. Was the higher bidder until the last 2 hours on at least 75% of the properties.

One of their reps was at our REIA and I asked if the bank or other parties with an interest in a higher sales price could bid and did not get a straight answer. I never logged on again

Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller is by far the best book I have read when it comes to explaining why real estate is a good idea for the average person. There are not any "hot strategies" or "secret tips" in it, but the book is easy to understand for anyone. It is the book I gave to my dad when I was getting into real estate so he could understand why I thought it was a good idea and the first book I recommend to people who want  a high level view of real estate holding. 

Michael, think about how long it would to find a VA, hire them, train them with everything they would need to know about the house, all the questions they would need to ask, more importantly all the questions they would need to answer vs how long it would take you to rent one house. I have a hard time picturing a scenario where this a) works well and b) saves you time.

VAs are all the rage, but they are for repetitive tasks. It would take you way longer to create a system for the VA to follow than to do this task yourself. If you had 50 houses to rent it would be one thing, but this is a single house.

Did the seller say they wanted $15,500? I am confused where that number came from. What did the seller say they wanted to get for the house? 

That comp range is ridiculous. You have to be more accurate than that. Your higher comp is over 50% of your lower one. Renting at a max of $650 a month, if you can wholesale it for a 15k profit I'd wholesale it and move on. It takes a lot of time at $200 a month to get that. I get the impression you are a newer investor (I may be wrong). That 15k can go a long way to your marketing and getting established. Right now you are hand writing 30 letters a pop, using that 15k you can start sending out 1,000.  

Finally, I want to commend you on taking action. Driving around looking for ugly houses and handwriting letters is not fun, but you did the work and hopefully are going to reap the rewards. 5 calls off of only 30 houses mailed 5 times is pretty darn good by the way. 

PS If the second, fourth, and fifth call have not sold follow up with them now. Call them today. And I would call the third one to see if he is interested in being a buyer.

This is a pretty vague question. First, I would not use the term wholesaler to a seller. This is not because I want to lie to them, but because the word will have no meaning to them. It would just create confusion. I do not lie to sellers, but if you say "I'm a wholesaler" they will have no clue what you are talking about and any explanation you try to give will only confuse them further. Just say you are an investor, which you are, and also almost everyone knows what that word means, at least in abstract.

If they ask further say "I plan on buying the house, but someone I work with may purchase it instead, is that OK with you? No matter what you will get the price we agreed upon." First, that should be true as you do plan on buying the house and even if you assign it, as far as the seller is concerned they got their price so it is the same as if you bought it, so honestly it isn't worth getting into the details because almost no seller will actually care beyond getting their price at closing. Second, this gets the assignment conversation out of the way. If you do planning on assigning it, you will have to explain the assignment to them at some point before the deal closes so why not make it a 2 minute conversation now instead of a 30 minute one later? If the seller does have a problem with it you now know you will either have to double close or just not to sign the deal. It is very rare a seller will have a problem with it. I wouldn't worry about it anymore than I would worry about getting hit by a bus driving home from the seller's house.

Honestly, it seems like sellers would have objections to all of this but in reality almost none of them do. They care about 2 things. 1) The deal closes and 2) the check is what they expect. Those are your 2 jobs. They will not care if you assign it, double close it, buy the house and then burn it down, they just won't care. I think this is one of the things a lot of people who attack wholesaling on this forum do not get. They think the seller gives a darn if you assign it and would go ballistic, but that is just not the reality of the business. If the deal closes and they get their money they are happy. Those are your 2 jobs. Close the deal and see to it they get their check.

I don't think beenverified.com has access to sensative information. I did not need to pass anything or get a site visit when I signed up. Maybe you could use that for the leads you outsource since the sensitive information does not apply. It has addresses, phone numbers, and stuff like that but nothing like social security numbers or what I would consider sensitive information. The best I can tell is all of their information comes from public sources. I looked at a summary of the Grahm Leach Baily Act and I don't see anything under "Nonpublic personal information" when I do a been verified search. Of course, I am not a lawyer so don't come suing 'ole Eric if I'm wrong!

Also, I just signed up for beenverified last week and I have only just begun gathering information from it, so I am not sure how accurate it is. I have not sent any mail or made calls off of it yet. It was recommended to me by another wholesaler on here who likes it.

My plan is to use been verified first, and then for my leads where their information is inaccurate I will sign up for TLOXP and see if they have correct information for leads been verified was wrong about. From there I will decide which service to stick with. I would have gone with TLOXP to start except I am moving offices in a couple of months so I figured with their inspection requirements I would just wait.

NOTE: Not sure if I need to disclaim this, but I don't work for been verified or get any commission. I know you need to say that in the guru forum.