All Forum Posts by: Frank Chirkinian

@Will Pritchett Well I was sort of making that reference to those cities by what has been discussed on this board. There's been a great deal of discussion about those markets on BP.

As for my own market, I track open inventory of the MLS and sales activity to gauge my own market condition. If you look back on this thread, you will see that I posted the chart showing our growing inventory here in S Florida. It's a red flag for me, and I'm waiting for another buying opportunity in the coming months. I believe we'll see price retreat from their highs of last summer, at least here in our market. Don't know how much of a pull back we'll see, but there are just too many investors that flocked to the market in the past 10 months. When I see that, along with prices escalating I begin pulling in the reins.

I'd have to agree that adverse possession is an illusion. I don't believe we've had one case here in Florida where that strategy was used to take possession of a property. You've got to show you've cared for the property and lived there for many years before the courts will recognize you. A squatter in a million dollar waterfront home tried to use that strategy to delay eviction here a couple of years ago. They finally arrested him and threw his stuff out on the street.

@Dennis You may be right about that. This transitional period is going be problematic for most. Need to work smarter.

@Tony Cavalli Yes I think that's part of it. When I started mailing in Jan 2013, I don't think we had as many investors back then using DM. I think it's a combination of the number they're getting and the fact that our RE market in SF has recovered in the past 12 months.

@Samantha Everything goes through cycles Samantha. One day its short sales, another its dealing with sellers to wholesale, etc. While the DM is a strategy, hitting absentee owners is costing greater amounts of capital to deploy and the ROI has decreased quite a bit. My ROI started at about 20:1 and is probably now 5:1 if I had to guess. Right now it appears to me that the market wants to pull back in terms of price. We're somewhat overheated here in S Florida (no pun), and there's nothing wrong with a pull back in prices. No market goes straight up, and this real estate market has bounced up and will probably bounce along the bottom for a few years until we really start getting longer term traction around 2017 I think. The trick will be in finding the right strategy to match the current market conditions.

@Dennis Lanni Thanks for the suggestion. I did have a couple of VAs working the phones for about two months. We basically called everyone in the areas I was interested in investing in. Revised our script many times. We generated some leads but nothing that panned out. I think had I made the calls I may have a closed a deal here or there, but that's not the best use of my time. I need to outsource and scale everything I do or I don't do it.

Having said that are you using a targeted list to make your calls? Have some sort of criteria. We didn't use any and literally made probably over 10k calls. Still have the list of leads.

As for MLS, yes it will be more useful as inventory starts to grow again. I pull the MLS inventory daily here is S Florida and here's what it looks like.

Let me revise the previous statement to no closed deals. We received plenty of leads...mostly tire kickers.

@Ceasar I have about 7 different websites, but I did a PPC campaign when I first started and was lucky to get a great deal in my 2nd week of launch. Since that time (Oct 2013), we haven't generated any leads and spent about $1,800 on PPC. We're not focused on SEO and have my VA doing SEO daily. One deal though from launch in Oct 2013 is more than I expected, but very lucky.

@Russell Gerwer I wish I could post my excel SS so you can see exactly what I did over the course of a year and how the response rate changed. I do a combination of in-house and out-of-house mailings. I target absentees with yellow letters and vacant land with postcards.

@Brian Gibbons Thank you for the kind reply. I wanted to tell it like it is. And you're right, absentees are not the only targeted group to be hitting. I find myself having to change gears every 6-18 months in this business. That's the nature of it - finding opportunity wherever it may be. If you're not comfortable with that, then find some other business to be in.