All Forum Posts by: Gordon F.

Hello, I’m looking at picking up a few notes on some properties in Birmingham, and I’m having problems finding an agent that could provide a BPO plus some drive-by photos for a fee.  In addition, in the event the properties defaulted, I’d like to be able to use them for reselling the properties.  I’ve called several agents with follow up emails. but none have returned my messages and emails.  Could anyone referr an agent that would work with me?  I appreciate it.

I think you were dead on, and this was a wise decision.

Hi Tracy, I'm assuming notes you find through direct mail campaigns are posted on the Notes Direct platform, or can we contact you directly?

Who are we kidding, the entire city of Houston is a flood zone... but only every 500 years.... which happens every year.  Of course, I jest; however, you have to be careful with where you buy.  That'll definitely affect your insurance.  $3,000 is just LOL though. I had to re-read your post to make sure that wasn't me misreading that number.

Alan, thank you very much for sending me that whitepaper.  It was super helpful and helped me identify several actionable things I could be doing to make my meetups significantly more productive.

Kevin, this is interesting, and thanks for sharing.

I legitimately cringe at some of these neighborhoods that are being gentrified. However, I guess time marches forward.

The town home craze inside the loop is horrific, in my highly subjective opinion. The current modus operandi seems to be to build four houses per quarter acre and charge three fourths of a million for each. I'm probably hyperbolizing there, as I don't know the real numbers, but I'm sure you get my point.

Talking to some developers tonight, I learned half an acre in The Heights goes for $800k now. I thought they were kidding until I searched for the price on a half acre lot I know is available in Montrose, and it's listing price is $975,000. LOL when did we become California? And at $45/bbl oil no less...

So this is an interesting post.  I have a good real estate friend of mine who's been buying notes since the early to mid 70's.  He's actually a real estate attorney and through pure serendipity, he fell into notes investing.  Nonetheless, when I asked him where he got his money from for investing, he said he had a facility with a local bank.  He also said it was way easier back then to get that sort of thing versus today, but he noted that it's most important, regardless of cycle, to be bankable.  It sort of sounds like you might have done the same thing, and I think that's really interesting.  Of course, he was practicing law for a long time before that ever happened, but just as importantly -- and to your point -- he built a relationship with his local banker.  

Scott, thanks for the insight, and this makes a lot of sense.  I appreciate the reply.

Also, @Scott Kimberly I like to use @Scott Carson as an example, because I personally think that he's done a great job at building a business, and you can probably use his path through all of this as a guide.  Note that he and I don't know each other at all, and he certainly doesn't need my approval of his business.  

Having said that, he started in 2007 and now in 2019, you can see where he's at after 12 years.  That was going at it 24/7 as his full-time job, I believe, during all of those years.  Assuming you were able to quit your day job now, you could probably reasonably expect to have a nice business from note investing by 2031.  That probably seems far away, but for every day you don't start, that number gets pushed farther out.  2032, 2033, 2034... 2055, etc.

@Chris Seveney is still full-time employed, I believe, but I also think that's as a real estate agent.  Chris, correct me if I'm wrong -- I'm sorry, I don't know your full story.   Nonetheless, the impression I get is there are a lot of synergies with note investing and his day job, so he's probably able to make it work easier than someone who's not involved in real estate at all.  

I think @Jay Hinrichs took over his family's real estate business and then has worked his entire professional career to get it to where it's at today.  Jay, I admittedly don't know your full story, either, so correct me if I'm wrong.  Nonetheless, it sounds like he was able to pick something up that was already going, and then it's still taken years of really hard work to get to where he's at today.  So even starting out a step ahead of others, it still takes a long time, blood, sweat, and tears.

If you're looking for reasonable time lines for someone who isn't currently involved in real estate (and I admittedly don't know your full story either, so maybe you are involved with real estate in some fashion currently), I'd say it'll take 12 years to build a solid business you can live off of, if you did it 24/7/365 for all of those years.  This also assumes you have some minimal amount of capital to start.  Can you at least fund one deal on your own?  If so, that's at least a starting point.  That's where I'm at, so we'd be in the same boat.  If you're going to do it part time, I'd double that time frame, but that depends more on how many hours of sleep you need a night.  If you can pull 20 hour days and keep it together, that's awesome, go for it.  That seems to be where Chris is at, so maybe some tips from him on how to successfully pull off combat sleep would be helpful.

Apologies to anyone whose information I got wrong above.  Feel free to correct.  I also know I left out a metric ton of details on your stories, so feel free to include.

I'll second Tracy's question.  Are new investors welcome?

This is highly discouraging, even if it is true.  Flipping is a logical way to get started, and it's how Scott Carson says he got started.  If that avenue of opportunity is now a dead end, well, that's an issue.

But your point is probably right.  As an example, let's use Scott Carson.  If he's been making 50 phone calls a day since 2007 when he says he started, then he's called just about every mortgage lender in the U.S. -- probably North America -- in the last 12 years.  If we assume 250 working days a year, that's 150,000 phone calls to lenders over the last 12 years.  150,000.  There aren't that many institutional/bank lenders in the U.S.  So he's clearly covered them all several times over.  If he's not doing a deal with them or hasn't done a deal with them, there's a reason.  Now, if you take all of his students who are doing the exact same thing, you have 1000% coverage of institutional/bank lenders. Probably more coverage than that even. And that's just one small group of people doing it. Now let's expand that to all the groups doing it across the country. So if you find a NPN deal that none of them have jumped on already or know about, there's a reason.

Performing notes are probably a slightly different ball game. I was talking to an attorney who has been buying performing notes since the 1970's in the North Texas area, and from that conversation, I get the idea that there are more than enough fisherman out there fishing through county records and using mail campaigns to reel in seller financiers. So there's maybe a small margin of potential over the NPN market, since anyone can FSBO and those people are harder to find, but the margin probably isn't much.

It honestly sounds like the notes market is over-saturated as it currently stands and is getting more saturated every day.  Maybe I'm wrong about that.