All Forum Posts by: Jeff Fairchild

That seems like a pretty good strategy. The main book I had been going off of said that they look for motivation and situation, on the phone, and if there are those two, they set and appt to go see the house. Then they spend 40 minutes building their motivation levels and establishing rapport, and doing consultative negotiating.

I suppose I could do a lot of that over the phone though, more than they do in that book, which would save time.

I'm talking about heavily marketing the home for a fast sale using many different sources. So I dont see the foot traffic making a huge difference, or the paint. Though, maybe you could put in laminate floors instead of carpet, would that hold up better? I suppose you only do the staging part of it if it was a vacant house. Or I could get good at staging myself and just relocate their furniture to show better.

Still, with a risk/reward ratio of about 7, it is still looking good to me. Maybe there would be a way to convince the sellers to pay part of the $5,500 to lessen risk.

Since I'm a new investor, I'm obviously trying to figure out as many ways as possible to not lose deals. One crazy idea that I came up with is:

Arv 210000
Asking 200000
Use option - purchase price 170000 (85%)


Repairs 2000
Staging 2000
Option Cost 10
Marketing 1500

Gross Profit 210000
-170000
40000

Net Profit 34490

So, as you can see, I would negotiate a very small option cost of $10 because I was basically doing 2k of repairs and 2k of staging and money marketing their home, all at my expense. I avoid all of the hard money loan costs, and all closing costs (i think). So investment of 5510 turns into 34490.

So what is wrong with this picture?

I've never heard of 4 people all deciding on a place at the same time. Are they usually just college friends or what?

So it seems like a 3 bedroom and just putting in one family would be less hassle then. So in this situation I'm guessing you'd require them to give you notice and then you start advertising for a new renter right away so you don't have much of a lapse in rental income?

What questions do you ask them on the phone in order to determine how much you tell them is the most that you could pay? Are you looking up comps on the phone or anything like that?

So I'm guessing that you first ask them if any repairs are needed and then subtract that to come up with how much you could pay. Do you try to be on your computer and type in their address into a website to get comps while you're on the phone before you make the offer?

I just read in a book that sellers won't believe that you can get the cash within a week unless you have a preapproval letter from a hml. How are they supposed to preapprove you if mainly what they are looking at is the specs of the property?

Yea I can definitely see how spending too much time on a site could be a waste of time. I think I'll just use it to tell a bit about who I am and what I'm looking for. Maybe I'll have a form for people to fill out property info and have it mailed. That's about it.

Ok, thanks for the help.

Jeff

Im in Vancouver, WA, just north of Portland, OR. It's a buyers market but homes are still appreciating 3% per year here. So I'm guessing that it would be a little harder to find homes than in some areas of the country where they aren't going up, maybe even down.

It almost seems as if some of you guys are saying that you do a lot of your negotiating on the phone before you even visit the sellers in person. Now that I think about it, its probably because you have 10 different lead sources sending you tons of leads and you can't waste any time. But for me, I haven't even started yet and don't have any money for advertising. So I'm thinking of calling sellers out of the classified ads and using realtors as my two main strategies at this point for my first deal. I've been told to find some 3 month old newspapers or something and look for sellers there. Where would I find newspapers that old? Is this a good thing to do?

I also read about a strategy of having your real estate agent make a bunch of lowball offers for you. What about that one?

Thanks,
Jeff