All Forum Posts by: Eric Z.

@J. Martin , super excited for the summit. I might have an open house listing coming onto the market that weekend, but hopefully I can make it. 

In most of the desirable neighborhoods in the bay area, buyers are competing with multiple offers. People who can do all cash will do all cash, people who can't, will waive contingencies, bid over asking, and add more downpayment to solidify their offers. It's one of the worst time to be in the position as a buyer now. 

@Thomas May, welcome! Hope to see you around here. 

Not sure I agree with the whole good CPA doesnt charge thing. Good CPA value their time a lot more than others. 

Alpha Business Service in Fremont, they are EAs, but give good general tax advices(I paid them for consultation for my biz before)

I actually don't find talking to a CPA that useful unless they specialize in real estate tax. Most of CPAs are not specialized in real estate and are not tax strategy planners. 

What is your objective for door knocking? 

Give them something valuable to them. If they express interest, then get the contact info.  Your goal is not to make direct sell, but asking permission to establish future communication. 

A home valuation guide works well for some agents. 

Good luck. 

@Charles Ho, you are on BP, and you expect an un bias opinion? lol

I'm going to sing a different song here. One of the big reason for real estate is leveraging. Without it, it's not that much better than stocks IMHO. ( of course there are other benefits too, but thinking about them hurts my head, so I'm going to ignore them for now). 

S&P index averages about 10% a year historically. Homes in most of the bay area average appreciate about 5-7% a year for the past 20 year. Sacramento and Folsom are less. Without any leverage, you better off putting the money in the stock market.

So the question is are you comfortable with reasonable amount of leveraging? Judging from you own two homes outright, I'm assuming you are fairly conservative in risks. 

75/25 split with you mentor for the first 5 deals is fair. Starting out, you really need someone there to guide you. Make sure you have a good mentor though. 

You current financial situation will determine how you start. If you are cash strapped, started with being a buyer's agent. Buyer's agent has lower cost, but is not scalable. 

If you are not cash strapped, start with lead gen(for seller leads), there are just too many ways to do that, direct mailing, google, facebook etc

Either way here is a list of things you will need

1. like @David Hunter said, you will need a lead bait, don't do anything without a lead bait. The effectiveness of your lead gen will depended on two thing: your list and your lead bait. 

2. Started a contact database - your long term success in real estate is highly correlated to the size of your contact database. If you only focus on one metrics, focus on growing the size of your contact database.

3. Follow up with your contact regularly - it's just a matter of calling or email them once a while. There are tools to help you do that - contactually works really well for most of agents I talked to.

4. A website - this is your home base. This is where you turn yourself from a real estate sales person into real estate consultant. All outbound marketing effort should drive traffic to your website. 

5. Ask other agents if you can host open house for them - from all the agents I have talked to, this is the best and most efficient way to get buyer leads. You can offer referral fee to the listing agent. 

Being an agent is not an easy business. 50% fail, 40% barely floating, remaining 10% is taking most of the market shares. You goal will need to be that 10%. 

Hope this helps. 

umm... my point is it doesn't take millionaire or billionaires to push up the price here. Married couple both in tech with 400k/year can afford upward $2M, enough to push the market up already. 

Try being married, both in tech and each earn 200k/year. A 200k/year software engineer can be priced out because there are more couples with 400k/year than available inventories on the market. 

The calculation looks great, but here is the thing - your visitors don't care. The only thing your visitors care is if you have a solution to their problem. To do that you have to 1) identify their problem. 2) convince them you are the guy who can solve their problems. 

Also, I will guess most of your visitors are motivated by emotions not by logic. So explain numbers doesn't work too well in that case.