All Forum Posts by: Nicholas .

Sorry...I missed that part of your first question. I started listening to his materials last June. Since then, I started mailing out letters (about 200 per month). I usually get about a 10% response, sometimes up to 30%. Sellers call into my answering service and they ask them the questions I need to prescreen them. Out of the 20 callers I get per month, I usually call 3 to 5 of them back. The rest aren't what I consider motivated sellers.

I make offers on those, and I get hung up on by most. But I probably get one deal out of every 10 offers I make. So I get one deal about every 2 months.

Now I send letters out to absentee homeowners, not necessarily houses that need to be rehabbed. And if the person who calls me has a junker, I look at wholesaling it. If they have a pretty house, I look at getting the deed.

Pretty house deals come to me way more than ugly house deals. I've only had 2 wholesale deals. My first one I made some mistakes and only walked away with about $3500. The second one netted me a little over $12K.

I haven't tried calculating how many hours I put in. I've got a company automatically sending the letters out for me every month. I'm thinking about having them send out more, but I'm content with what I'm getting now.

The answering service takes the calls and sends me an e-mail for each lead. I look at the numbers, and if it looks good, I call them. For wholesale deals, I ask them what all is wrong with the house, estimate repairs and ask what they'll take for it. If it's low enough, I go out to meet them at the house to sign the purchase/sale agreement. As long as everything was the same as what they told me, I go ahead and give them a small deposit ($10) and sign the agreement. I get the title checked.

Then I place an ad on craigslist for an investment property that will net me around $10K. I never get greedy. Just leave plenty of room for the investor to make money when they rehab it. They call into my voicemail with info on the house. They take a look at it and call me if they want it.

I have my attorney handle the closing part of it. He basically assigns my contract to buy to the investor, and I get the check for the difference.

The whole process takes around 2-3 weeks, but I personally only do about 3-4 hours of work for each deal, including the time it takes to go through all the bad leads and call and make the offers.

I hope that answers your question.

I have attended his trainings and listened to his materials. And you're right. The gurus and what I just put up there do make it sound a lot easier than it is. It would take too long for me to type out every little step. That's what the CDs and boot camps are for.

I've noticed that people often complain (and I'm not saying you're complaining) that the gurus give them just enough information to get people excited, but not enough information to do anything. And this is true, but not for the reasons people think.

When I hear Ron speak, he gives all the information he can possibly cram into an hour and a half webinar or tele-seminar or lecture. But it's a couple days or hours of CDs worth of training to get all the details.

I just look at it this way. You have to pay for your education one way or another. You'll pay for it many times over by not getting it.

This stuff really works.

Well, your goal is not to deed it back. If you have to deed it back, that means you're out all the marketing costs you incurred trying to sell the house.

And you can most certainly get sellers to make the next 2 or 3 mortgage payments. Reasons for needing to sell vary. They're not always related to being behind or unable to make payments.

Maybe they're moving into another house, or they have it as a second property they want to get rid of. They need someone who can take it off their hands.

It's not too much to ask for them to make the next few payments. Think about it this way. If they listed it with a real estate agent, would the agent make their payments? Nope.

The majority of folks aren't going to deed there house over to you. We're not dealing with the majority, though. We're dealing with the minority that NEED to sell.

The owner of the property can sign over the deed anytime they want. The mortgage is nothing more than a lien on the property.

I wouldn't recommend listing it with an agent...if that would work, don't you think it would have already worked for the original owner? You need to get creative. Sell the property using a lease option or owner financing. You make the property easy to sell by making it easy to buy.

As long as you get enough money in monthly to cover the original owner's mortgage, you're good. You get a nice deposit from the buyer, and you get the difference monthly.

And if your seller needs to get out that badly, they're usually willing to pay for the next 3 mortgage payments. This gives you time to find a buyer. If you can't find a buyer in that amount of time, you may need to consider signing the house back over so you're not making a big monthly payment.

Let your buyer name the down payment and the monthly payment. Never name the price first.

You, of course, will have some minimums in your head. I'd get at least 10% down, but if they say they can come up with 20%, 20% is the newly required minimum down payment. I would get a payment of at least 20% higher than your current PITI, but again, if they offer higher than that, you take that.

Ron LeGrand's owner financing boot camp is incredibly informative.

I know courses have worked for me. Sure, you can find all the information here on the forum, but you have to go through thousands of pages of stuff. You also have to be able to see through all the bad information.

If you can find a reputable company or "guru" to learn from, someone with plenty of positive reviews and proven success, you'll be able to get started a lot sooner, and you won't have to repeat other people's mistakes.

You need education for everything. You can't use forums. Could you imagine if you used an attorney or CPA who became an expert from a forum?

You need to at least get a system to study, and even better, attend live training.

If you've got the money to invest, then great. Otherwise, I'd focus on cash flow now.

Do some quick wholesale deals or some easy subject-to deals. Don't risk any money or credit on real estate when there's so many ways to get free houses and free equity.

Wholesaling is definitely the fastest, easiest way to make money in real estate. And you can do it without risking any money or credit.

Just drive around (or have a family member who could use some extra money drive around), and find houses in good neighborhoods that need repairs. Have them bring you back the address and some pictures of the place (whether it says it's for sale or not).

Find the phone number through online tax records or white pages or whatever. Call them and find out what they want for it. Never name a price. Let them name theirs. When they tell you, say something like "is that the best you can do?" You'll usually get them to come down several thousand with that question alone.

Do some due dilligence and make sure their's enough room in the deal for you and someone who wants to rehab to make some profit. I recommend 70% of the after repaired value minus the cost of repairs minus about 10K for your profit.

So if the house is worth 100K fixed up, and needed about 15K in repairs, I wouldn't pay more than 45K. And that shouldn't be hard to find in this market.

So you take out a contract on the house (with around a $10 earnest money deposit just to make it binding). Then you put an ad on craigslist or the newspaper for a handyman special. You name the price (about $55K). That's a great deal for the person who wants to fix it up, and you've left plenty of profit in the deal for them, and you walk away with $10K.

Easy.

Why would anyone risk their own money (or credit for that matter)?

It's so easy to just take a house under contract or just have it deeded to you.

If you're wholesaling a house that needs repairs, just get a contract to buy the property with a small deposit (less than $100), and then run an ad for the house in the real estate investment section of the newspaper or craigslist. Assign the contract to the rehabber and walk away with $10-$20K.

If you're flipping a nice house in good repair, either get the deed and sell it or owner finance it, or get an option to buy the house (if it's really nice, worth $700K or more value) for a low price and sell the option for a higher price.

Never risk your own money except for small deposits and marketing.

You definitely should have a live person answer, but you definitely should NOT answer them yourself. Are you a real estate investor or a call center?

Most of your calls aren't going to be prospects. They're going to be suspects. Let your answering service prescreen out the suspects, and you call back the handful of prospects.

As an investor, you're looking for the people who NEED to sell, not just WANT to sell. Those people will not have a problem talking to your answering service.

I use PATLive. And they're already set up with scripts from Ron LeGrand. You can get a discounted account at www.patlive.com/ronlegrand