All Forum Posts by: Liam McGoldrick

Hello! 

I am a real estate investor with a rental property in Wisconsin who recently moved to Florida. Me and a friend of mine decided to start a business doing real estate websites as we both have careers in software. We are focusing on both property management websites as well as agent sites. 

To start, I did some work for my own property manager for free, so we could showcase our abilities. Now we are trying to get our first sale.

We both have a pretty extensive technical background. I have written software my entire career and have a degree in electrical engineering and he has similar credentials. The technical part comes easily to us. We are however struggling to get up and running on the sales side. 

So that brings me to my question: 

What do you look for when hiring someone to build a website for your real estate business? What advice do you have for us? 

Thanks! 

Obligatory website plug: https://goldenbayindustries.co...

Hello,

Currently I am running a rooming house and have found thus far the biggest challenge has been marketing. Very often I give tours to people who are surprised there is shared space, despite it being really explicit on the apartments.com listing. I make sure to explain it as clearly as I can before scheduling a tour, but I still am seeing roughly 50% of people I give tours to are unaware some how. 

With rooming houses being so uncommon, does anyone have any advice as to how I can market to the proper clientele? Right now my units are the cheapest in the area, so I get a lot of interest. Essentially I just want to weed out those who are uninterested earlier on to avoid doing so many tours. 

For reference my process typically goes as follows: 

1) Lead comes to me from aparments.com 

2) I send out a template I have been refining, outlining the specifics of the rooming house and some FAQs I get a lot. I also answer any specific questions they may has asked in the lead I received. Give them opportunity to schedule tour. 

3) Tour

4) Application

5) Signing

Hello all,

I am currently in the process of acquiring a rental property, and hope to have one within the next 6 months. With this, I have been thinking a lot about costs, especially capex. Costs that come up unexpectedly really make cashflow estimates messy, and I wonder if it is possible to convert them to more regular costs via insurance. I know this is already something that is required and common, but I wonder what the limitations are to this. In essence, how far could this be taken to the extreme?

When I think of capex, I think of the roof, appliances, plumbing, electrical, water heater, HVAC and other big ticket items that could have issues and rack up a big bill. Is there any reason I could not simply insure everything that could possibly lead to capex? I imagine this would be costly, but is there reason to believe it would be more costly than the capex itself? 

I know there will still be unknowns that cause fluctuations in income, but taking out the largest spikes seems to me a really appealing idea. 

Any thoughts?

I would not call myself a wholesaler but I am interested in venturing into it. My background is in data science so the lead generation side of things is very interesting to me. I am just wondering if these lead generation sites have some silver bullet like data that is not public or anything like that. You mentioned creative lead compiling methods, do you have any resources you can point me towards to find out more about this? Sounds exciting. 

I see a lot of websites selling leads for wholesaling. I am wondering what methods those websites use to generate the lists they sell. Are they scraping data from the web somewhere? I would like to try to generate some of these leads myself as an exercise. It may not be worth the time but I am really interested in how its done. 

Does anyone have any insight into how this is done? 

@Marlen Weber Thank you, I am eager to get started.

@Gray Hall That is an interesting angle. Madison is a college town so perhaps this could work there.

@Chris Coleman sorry for so many questions, but what would happen if that were to occur?

@Chris Coleman I’m assuming by upside down you mean worth less than I owe?

@Chris Coleman Wow, that is a powerful tool!

I am wondering though, what is the worst case scenario for me if I carry o a plan like this? If the investment goes under that was paid for with HELOC, how will it affect my other investment property that was used to obtain the HELOC? I'm just trying to understand what the risks are here so I can manage them properly.