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All Forum Posts by: Johnny Kang

Johnny Kang has started 7 posts and replied 264 times.

Post: Is a fire damaged house worth pursuing?

Johnny KangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 277
  • Votes 223

Hey @Thomas Kim

Yes, I remember our conversation. Thanks for reaching out.

To answer your questions:

1) I'd say about 1 in 50 leads will end up doing something with you. Ratio should increase as you get more familiarized with the restoration process of fire damaged properties and owners see you as the expert (i.e. addressing fire, soot, smoke & water damage)

2)  Yeah, I wouldn't recommend calling them right away. They'll need some time to gather their thoughts, find temporary housing, deal with the insurance company, etc. 

So wait a few days after the incident, but definitely call within 7 days. 

3) We can provide a script that's worked for us when we were testing out this list to see what the ratios would be, before we made it available for ppl in NYC. But this is only for subscribers. (we'll be expanding into other cities soon).  

You can call our office # on our site to get the promo rate. 

Johnny

Post: Is a fire damaged house worth pursuing?

Johnny KangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 277
  • Votes 223

@Patrick Goebel

Actually, if you can teach yourself how to consistently get fire damaged properties, it's one of the best lead sources to target. Probably even better than probate, because there are so many more exit strategies available on fire damaged properties.

I know quite a bit about it, because that's exactly what I did. 

I spent about a year honing down on data mining, aggregation, cross-referencing, and skip tracing. (that was just the data collection part). It took me another 2 months or so to figure out how to monetize this list I learned to compile. 

I'm sure you can start networking with adjusters and various fire departments to get consistent leads. 

Monetizing

1) Rehab Jobs

90% of owners will want to rehab it and get on with their lives. But a lot of these renovation jobs are well over $100,000~$150,000 and sometimes more (at least in NYC). If you're a rehabber, you can still pick up renovation jobs and make a decent profit. Hey, money is money.

If you're not a contractor, you can refer that business & get a referral fee, which is what I did with one of my 1st appointments. I referred it to a contractor, where the cost to renovate was $150,000. 

All boarded up

2) Acquisition

A small portion of those owners (10%) will want to sell, and often As-Is. Now, my personal experience is that due to the fact it's a seller's market, even owners who have had fire damage is asking way too much, given how the house needs to be fixed. But it's a numbers game, and you'll find people who'll let it go at a price that makes sense for everybody. 

In NYC, on average, there are about 60-80 fire damaged properties per month. 75% are 1-4 Residential Properties. 25% Commercial. I taught myself how to get EVERY SINGLE PROPERTY, every month. Now, again, it took me about a year to do this, and I just started learning how to monetize it but my ratios are:

  • Of the 50 owners I talked to
  • 14 Will be open minded to discuss renovating or selling
  • 7 Will set an appointment with me that week; often next day or 2 days
  • 5 Will keep the appointment (the other 2 will have had legitimate reasons, but will reschedule)
  • 1 Renovation/Acquisition transaction

If the #s make sense to acquire the property, you can either fix & flip, assign the contract, or fix & hold, depending on how everything works out in your market.  

Post: "It's 2018. Whatcha Gonna Do About It?" - February Recap

Johnny KangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 277
  • Votes 223

I'm jumping onto this thread!~~

I love accountability groups, cause it pushes everybody to do more. Thanks @Michael Ehmann!

February: 

- Started a data services business related to RE.

- Went to see 3 off market properties (all wanted too much to make the #s work). 

- Set up 2 contracting job appointments for a GC I know who pays referral fees.

Where I fell short: (Unclog bottlenecks)

- Did not tighten up the process of handling my lead verticals to flow automatically, in volume. (current goal is create & convert 1000 leads/mth and close at least 1 transaction/mth).

- Have not been able to find the right telemarketer to call the leads I'm currently generating.  

Goals for March:

- Acquire clients for data service business. 

- Today, we bid on 6 NPNs (1st liens), waiting on copies of collateral to perform due diligence. 

- Consistently go see 2 off market properties/wk for acquisition. 

- Consistently set 2 renovation jobs/wk for the GC. 

- Revamp my 2 web sites.     

Post: Why hasn't BP helped with this question?

Johnny KangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 277
  • Votes 223

Hey @Michael Guzik (can't tag you using my phone), skip tracing is talked about quite frequently. Just do a search & you'll see all the posts. 

Anyway, I have VAs overseas who have access to Lexis Nexis, and TLO. Both services IMO, are the best in the industry. "Hit Rate" (phone #s found) is about 98% and usually they'll find multiple phone #s of the owner; accuracy is I'd say about 70%

Post: Reduce Direct Mailing Costs??

Johnny KangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 277
  • Votes 223

@Scott Graham, I would have to agree with what @Jerry Puckett said. 

I've done both; Did it in-house, as well as farm it out. Calculating the cost of everything (Regarding your ink toner, if you're using a laser jet, it should tell you the estimated yield, so you just divide that by however many pages you're printing), downloading handwritten fonts to Word, even getting my Bulk Mail Permit, etc., but it's just not worth the time & the headache doing it yourself. (and this is all even before taking into account all the returned letters you're dealing with currently sending out 500/mth) ; 

The convenience of sending a list to another company to handle all the outbound letters, far outweighs the extra added expense. The quality of those letters doesn't compare to the ones you print yourself. They use heavy duty, high speed special printers that cost anywhere between $15,000~$30,000 depending on the model (which I've considered buying), not to mention the type of font they use, as well as how the ink prints on the paper they use, also being different than the ones retail buyers have access to. 

One thing you might want to think about is, the type of leads you're sending letters to. If you can refine your target list, so there's higher motivation, you can reduce the # of letters you send out for a higher closing ratio, and increase your overall ROI.

I've switched over to using the phone as my primary method of reaching sellers. The 2 lead sources I mail & call are super targeted, so I might send out about 50~100 letters/mth depending on the month.   

Post: Getting paid for birddogging

Johnny KangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 277
  • Votes 223

@Jessica G., yes what you're talking about is becoming a Lead Generation provider. 

I actually found a way to do this by accident. Several months ago, when I decided I was going to stop doing direct mail for several reasons (cost, management of all the returned letters, time lag between sending them out to hearing from people, etc.), instead I decided to start building my own lead category verticals, comprising of Probate, Pre-foreclosures, Evictions, Violations and so forth; get them skip traced and call owners, instead of mailing them. 

It took me about 6 months to build this operation from scratch, because I had to make adjustments on the criteria I wanted apply in each of the verticals (I ended up with 9 channels), figure out how to get this info in the first place, then put in procedures to automate this process somehow (I started off with hiring VAs overseas, which in itself is a learning process, and now with the help of my IT friend who has partnered up with me, is in the process of automating the data extraction process using AI/machine learning). 

I started getting appointments, but one thing I noticed when I would go on these appointments were, that: 

A) when I would get an appt, I would be excited. 

B) The day of the appointment, I found myself saying to myself how much I didn't wanna go on this appointment. Ever been there? 

C) Being that this is a seller's market, every seller was (as it has been the last several years) asking wayyyy too much. 

But one of my verticals is not a lead source you can just Google, go to their website and purchase, like you can with, say Probate, Tax Delinquent, or Pre-foreclosures. And the prospect to appointment setting ratio is very high, and it's something I can scale nationwide. So it just dawned on me; why don't I sell this data? 

So if you're wanting to sell data, you would need to know; what your customers want, if you can gather the data they want, if you can try to automate it, and find a pricing structure that works. I'm not sure what type of lead categories you're working on, but regarding vacant properties, you might want to check out Vacant Houses. I haven't bought their list, but you can see what's available in your area to be more efficient.  

Hope that helped. 

Post: How to Start a MASTERMIND Group

Johnny KangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 277
  • Votes 223
Originally posted by @Shiloh Lundahl:

@Johnny Kang What is the structure of the weekly phone calls?

To be honest with you, we're still a new group so we are getting to know each other. We've done 3 video chats so far, and some private messaging back & forth with the organizer of the group before that. We have shared what deals we've done since starting in RE (I think most of us are 1st full year, and some, 2nd year investors), and what we want to get accomplished in the coming weeks and near future. 

Like I've mentioned in an earlier post, the organizer of our group has been doing another online group for his business for about a year, which he mentioned was instrumental in seeing substantial growth in his business, hence why he wanted to start one for RE. 

So, although there's no formalized structure when it comes to our weekly calls, per se, our organizer has done an awesome job facilitating our conversations by, either initiating great topics to delve into, changing gears, or simply letting the group banter back & forth so we can dig deeper into any topic of discussion that might arise.  

What's been great is, although we're all there to discuss RE and business in general, everyone's RE path is different, so it's been very interesting to interact more in-depth in a smaller group setting, about what someone in particular is/has done. 

I.e. in our 1st week, we ended up spending a majority of our time (just happened organically) asking one of our members who's focused on working probate leads. He talked about all the little nuances of working those leads, which helped me greatly because although I did do one deal involving probate, but I didn't acquire that deal because I was systematically working that lead source like this member was, so it helped formulate what I would need to do on a consistent basis. 

2nd week, something similar happened where the discussion organically revolved around a different member who's primary portion of his deals have been to invest in out of state turnkey rental properties. This is not something I really gave too much thought about, until he started to explain why he chose that route.  

I hope that helped draw a picture of what our meetings have been like, and how you might want to run yours.   :)

Post: How to Start a MASTERMIND Group

Johnny KangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 277
  • Votes 223
Originally posted by @Shiloh Lundahl:

Are there any BP members that are members of mastermind groups that could share a little about what it is like and what the benefit are to being in such a group?

A few weeks ago I joined a Mastermind/Accountability group started by a member here on BP. We are all from different states (WA, NC, VA, NY, TX). We video chat once a week for an hour and talk about some of our wins, what we think we need to work on, our long term goals, tips on what's been working for each of us, some of our mistakes and whatever else comes to mind. Almost everyone's done a few deals, I believe with the exception of a few; but like Joe Splitrock mentioned these are people who are already on their path to success, having made self-improvement a way of life for them for some time.

The person who started the group has been doing this with another online group for his business, so he's been great at keeping our conversations flowing, and really, the hour we spend flies by. 

Even though it's only been a few weeks, great thing about collaborating with like minded peers is, having group synergy that helps push everyone to do more than they could, operating alone (kinda like the peloton in a bike race). 

I've been to a handful of REIA meetings, but I've never been a fan of them. Like Jay Hinrichs alluded to earlier, it's either a social gathering, or a presentation of sorts. By being selective on who joins your group prior to officially launching one, it helps to have productive meetings where everyone walks away feeling like it's helping them move closer to reaching their goals. 

And I think meeting once a week aids in keeping everyone focused & momentum moving, on what they personally need to before the next meeting, as opposed to meeting once a month.   

Post: Using A Virtual Assistant to Generate Buyer Leads

Johnny KangPosted
  • Investor
  • New York, NY
  • Posts 277
  • Votes 223

@Michael Hayes

The VA who makes calls for you, how many total hours are they working/week? Do you have them do other admin work to keep them busy full time? I'm asking this, because I've gone through several VAs to cold call, but they were all PT, since there's a finite amount of leads they can call every week.