All Forum Posts by: Greg Helbeck

I want to share with everyone the most complex deal I have ever completed so far.

Over a year ago I ran into a pretty good opportunity where there was a substantial tax issue on a specific house I was looking at. After doing some more investigating, I realize that there was a really good opportunity to solve a problem because there were a lot of things that didn't make sense on paper so I decided to do some further research. After rolling up my sleeves I found out that that property had been vacant for several years and there were major title problems aka “hair" on the deal that made it very tough for other investors to solve.

Btw…I LOVE deals with hair on them.

To make a long story short, after one full year of putting this deal together, we successfully completed the transaction and purchased the property. However, we purchased the property off of 17 heirs. The owner on the title was deceased and the deceased owner had no children and also had no living siblings which meant we had to hire a genealogist to trace down the family tree and get to the people who legally sell us the property. In this case, it was the cousins! We had to sell 17 different people on why this was a good idea for them and then we had to complete 17 separate affidavits and get them notarized and then work out the closing logistics because the heirs were all over the country. This deal was like a part-time job for a year! Here are my top three lessons from this transaction

#1. Sometimes it's super beneficial to pursue the non-low-hanging fruit. This deal was in a hyper-competitive market and I had no other investors competing with me because of the complexity of the title issues. Not a single one in sight.

#2. Sometimes it's worth it when you need to take massive time risks. On this deal, we had to have 17 separate people agree to the price and the terms so if one of the decision-makers did not agree, this whole thing could have been a wash and a year of my time could have been wasted. I knew that the risk would be worth the reward so I decided to take the risk and it obviously paid off.

#3. Even in a hyper-competitive market, if you're dealing with the right type of seller and you can truly understand the problem that you are solving and they understand the value that you can bring, the price is never going to be an issue because they already see the value you bring besides the price. The family that sold us this house was very grateful for everything we did for them to help them out of this situation and because of that, they had no problem selling the property to us at a lower price because of the service that we provided them.

If anything, hopefully, this can inspire some other people to pursue some properties that might have a little bit more "hair" on them so they can reap some of the benefits.

If you were ever interested in finding out how you could work a little bit closer with my company, feel free to reach out and we can talk about some potential options on working together on a more passive side.

@Doug Pintarch Thank you !

I agree with you Nate!

I recently had a wholesale deal get quite interesting a few weeks ago so I figured I would try and are with everyone the backstory and the mistakes and lessons I learned so you can try and avoid them in the future.

I got a good call from a prospect in Westchester County, NY and I contracted the house sight unseen from my house in California.

On the surface, it looks like a pretty good deal. So when I was back in New York a few weeks later, I decided to go check out the house in person.

After looking at the house, I decided that based on my situation, this would have been a very good property to just sell to another investor (wholesale)

I immediately knew I was in trouble once I started to market the property out to other investors because I had the it listed way too high and no offers right away.

After a few days, I finally found an investor to buy the property and we agreed on a specific price.

One week before the closing we all realized there was no way that we could have moved forward with the transaction because it was too risky.

We had no choice but to go back to the seller and renegotiate the purchase price. (Something I HATE doing)

The main issue we had on this transaction was that I did not know that the city was a " block to block" city.

This just means that it's a lot tougher to value properties because one street could be extremely nice and then you can go down the road and be in a war zone.

After we got all of the mess sorted out, we ended up getting a price reduction and we are going to move the deal forward.

Here are my top three mistakes.

1. On this deal, I was only banking on one exit strategy ( wholesale) and because I had all my eggs in one basket, I almost dropped the basket. Because I only had one exit strategy, I had no leverage when trying to sell this property because I really need to sell it.

2. When buying a house that's expensive, always try to get somebody to take a look at it before you make a final agreement on the phone. I got too excited to buy this house and because I did not physically see it or have someone on my team physically see it, I ended up spinning the seller's wheels and had to come back in for a price reduction.

3. I did not fully understand this market and that screwed up all the numbers that I was basing my investment on. Next time, I will understand the market much better so I can avoid this mistake in the future.

If you ever interested in finding out how you could work with my company from a few different angles, feel free to reach out to me and we can see if there's some potential to work together.

Greg

Yes. There are always ways to get around this. I like the ways that you handle this situation. 

I wanted to share with everybody a few lessons that I learned on one of our best properties this year.

My partner and I ended up buying a property with a very unique situation.

The seller's main concern was that he did not want to deal with his brother who was squatting in the house so he said he would sell to us at a discount if we can deal with the brother.

We decided to take the leap of faith and get the property under contract. Once we had it under contract, we realized that it was going to be very tough to wholesale this property because there was a squatter occupying the house and none of our buyers were interested in buying anything like that.

Because of the price we had the house for, we decided to take a risk and by the house ourselves with the squatter in the property.

As it turned out, once we bought the house, the squatter voluntarily left the property.

Now, this could have easily gone the other way and we could have been stuck fighting to get this squatter out for months. Sometimes stuff will go your way and in this case, it did.

Once the squatter left, we were able to do some quick value-add stuff like a good cleaning and changing doors and then we listed the property on the market for a substantial profit.

Here are my 3 biggest lessons on this deal.

#1. Always have more than one exit strategy. If we were only able to wholesale this property, we would have been out of luck because we had to buy this property based on the situation.

#2. Sometimes you have to take a risk to make bigger profits. We knew that the risk was limited and the upside was big so we decided to take a leap of faith and by this property with an active squatter. It ended up working out in our favor. I very well could have gone the other way if the squatter did not want to play nice!

#3. Sometimes things will go your way, and sometimes things will go south. This deal could have very well gone the other way if the squatter wanted to give us a tough time. We took that at face value and still decided to proceed forward which ended up being a good decision on our part.

I hope you got a few takeaways from these lessons. If you were ever interested in finding out how you could work closer with our company feel free to reach out and we can talk about some ways we can work together potentially.

Has anyone ever heard of "Vacant House Data Feed" software ?? Im doing my due dillegence on it at the moment and I want to see if anyone has used it and got a great ROI.

it seems like find motivated sellers now. Im not sure what the difference is 

Progress, Not Perfection. You said it right. Tenacity and persistence is the major key @Shawn Ackerman

congrats! what a feeling that is @Shawn Ackerman. hard work pays off.