All Forum Posts by: Pavel Sakurets

 Go to MN Real Estate Investment club if you are starting out. They meet every first Tuesday of the month in Mpls at 7pm.

I was approached last week by a Co from UK "Business Area Limited" about financing a land development project in MN (large project)

Tim Robert George Co's rep contacted me with a proposition to provide financing for the the project. The terms seemed very-very attractive, 10% down, 15 years AMO, 3% APR and requested internal financials. I requested refferences of previous projects which they ''financed''

in the US.

I was given a name of the person from CA, with a copy of the financial offer and a copy of his driver's license, but no emails or phone numbers were provided (for privacy reasons :) )

My team has found this person from CA and I called him today.

This is what he said: "the deal never went through. Because he was invited to sign some docs in Amsterdam and was required to bring a substantial amount with him to closing in Amsterdam'. And I decided not to go there because I didn't know if I bring the money I would never come back home'.

Obviously, this is a scam. Never pay anybody any fees for financing up front. Sorry, something happened with my keyboard, and when i'm trying to type a letter that is between ''d'' and ''g'' on a keyboard I get this ''f''.

But felt that I needed to share it today with BPs, so nobody else get coned

I always vote for the cash flow, because if you invest your cash flow at higher rate than interest rate on your loan, you make money on it. Thus I would choose 30 year note if you are an active investor and always seek for capital to do more deals.

But if you are inactive investor (because this is your first rental) and you still would receive positive cash flow on a 15 year note, I would choose 15 year loan. Peace of mind, to know that in 15 years you will owe $0, rather than wait another 15 years. Who knows what could happen in next 15 years after first 15 years pass you by. Yes ROI is very low on free and clear properties 5-6%, but still better than MMA

Invest in your own back yard (that is my advise). I owned over 50 SFH in good areas and now I'm down to 30, very low ROI. There are better opportunities out there. The best are duplexes, triplexes (with 3 bedrooms) and quads. SF houses are for newbies (unless you own 100 out right and enjoy being a landlord).

We have purchased a probate list from USleadlist a month ago, mailed letters, 82% returned as undeliverable.

Can anybody recommend other services that have better results?

David, usually you will need 25% down to get a commercial loan, plus closing costs need to be covered. Thus if you only have 100k, you can probably buy a building worth 400k or less. You can put less down if you buy a property on Contract for Deed if you negotiate this with the seller

We post ads on CL that we buy houses and sellers contact us.

I have never purchased a property from CL where I called and asked a seller to sell. (In my opinion, its a waste of time). When sellers call you of your ads, this means that they are motivated to sell.

Voice message is too long, nobody would listen to it.

Our phones are answered by a live person, he/she gets the phone number, address and name and patches the call to us. If we don't answer, we get a text message and email.

My statistic is that we spend 6-8k on yellow letters to close one deal.

The best YL that we have the highest response for is preforeclosures, we scrub the list ourselves through ''Finance and Commerce'' publication (legal paper required in MN for foreclosure notices).

I found that buying lists from other sources has a lot of letters that return to us (8-9%)

To summarize this discussion here are the statistics for the best way to get deals from this feed.

#1 Networking (with wholesalers, agents and bird dogs)

#2 Yellow letters (What kind? Absentee? Probates? High Equity? Delinquent in property taxes? Preforeclosures? Vacant? Divorced? Bankruptcy? Code Violations? Evictions?)

#3 Expired listings on MLS

#4 Well optimized website

#5 CL

#6 FSBOs

#7 Driving for dollars.

Hi Mark, I contacted atchuNeelam 4 times via his site and received several emails from him to confirm my subscription but have not heard anything back.

Is there anyone else that you would recommend?