All Forum Posts by: Jill DeWit

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@Jeffrey Mathurin

EXCELLENT question! We never use "assessed" value. We use current/"for sale" comps and base our offers off those. 

Rural vacant land - we offer around 25-30% of the average, lowest available (It's easier to double your money in vacant land.)

SFRs - figure out how much you want to make (we don't get greedy, we aim to quickly resell) and work it backwards into your offer price. (We are happy to make $30-50k and flip with no renovation in only days...)

There is a bit of work that goes into strategic pricing, but you are clearly "getting it". 

It is all about great data and good pricing. 

And don't round up your offer price. When you mail an offer that reads "Dear Mr. Mathurin, We are interested in buying your house at 123 Main Street for $297,223.16.." they pay attention!

Happy to help!

@Jeffrey Mathurin Hi Jeffrey, 

I pull property/ownership data directly from the county assessor and mass price (based on $x per acre for land, or by sq ft for houses) the whole batch/list. (Data from RealQuestPro for land and DataTree for houses)

Then I do a simple mail merge of that data (excel) into my pre-written letter (word) & offer template that makes it personal to them. (Once my data is ready and priced, the 3,000 unit mail merge only takes a few minutes.)

At the end, I have a pdf file with 6,000 pages (since it's a two-pages per owner) and that gets printed & mailed.

That make sense?

Hi @Jalisha Oracius,

Great questions! 

For houses, I use DataTree which is First American Title's data company and gives me direct access to all the assessor information about the property, who owns it, mortgage details (if any), & much more. It's public information and legal to mail someone. 

How do I know they are motivated? I mail them ALL a real specific cash offer and wait for them to contact me. Typically every 3,000 offers mailed will yield me 1 house. (I am being conservative & there is a bit of research that goes into my offers.)

So that costs me about $1,950 for data/mail total to make $20+k profit on a house flip. (I won't buy if the spread is not good & being conservative again.)

I buy the house outright for cash (not an assignment) and mark them up a little and re-sell fast to a flipper.

*The main point of this whole process* is that I can do this all in 4 hours on a Sunday afternoon and sit back and wait for the motivated sellers to contact me.

Great discussion. Glad you brought this up.

I tackle this by having a long list of due diligence items I review before I pull the trigger on an acquisition. Not only do I spend time making sure the property is great and priced right, I will pay for my own $400 inspection and review deeds back as far as I can go. 

I'd rather spend some cash now on an inspection than be stuck with a property that had a flaw I missed. I also put on my title agent hat and make sure ownership and prior transfers check out before I send it to an escrow agent. (Again, no need to waste anyone's time.)

Over the years, my checklist has grown and if I am not feeling great about a deal, I will pass. There is always another one right around the corner.

Join us tomorrow, March 14th, 2019, for our weekly Land Academy member webinar. We go in-depth with our members on current deals that they are working on and answering all member questions.

Good new's for you is that we offer non- members one free call to everyone that is interested in joining our community.

Please email support@landacademy to register for the webinar!

@Mike Flora

Since you are spending time/$ anyway, maybe test/consider a personalized approach? 

We send professional offers in the mail to property owners that we pre-selected based on our criteria and wait for them to contact us back. They typically call, or sign & return our offer. The sellers *often* state they have received generic offers - but NOTHING personalized with a specific price like we send. 

It really gets their attention AND a great way to smoke out who is interested in selling and if your price works. 

@Tevin Culbert

Great question! For houses, we use DataTree (First American Title's data company). You can get very specific to what data you pull for example, 3-4 bedrooms, built after x date, no mortgage, min/max sq footage, zoning... There are over 100 characteristics you can select from as you are pulling the data (aka leads).

We find that 3,000 offers to owners will consistently yield 1+ houses. We recently sent 10,000 offers to Mesa, AZ and bought 4 houses. And more are still coming back but I pass on the ones that aren't real bargins, or have title/other issues. 

You will want to spent a lot of time on picking an area, downloading/scrubbing the data, and strategic pricing. Worth the time invested.

@Andrew Caldieraro

No price range, but a specific offer price. Like this: $289,421.24. Trust me, having a very specific price really gets their attention. Wouldn't you want to call back someone and find out exactly how they arrived at that offer?

(And isn't getting a professional offer in the mail better than some stranger knocking on your door?)