All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

That was actually something I had originally planned before seeing the necessity of having to learn to assess and value it on my own. When bringing in a contractor I was gonna get a bid for fixing up to renting standards and fixing up to sell and then shop him in with the whole deal letting the end buyers know if they were interested the particular contractor was already familiar with the property and was ready to go if they were interested in him doing the work.

Seemed like a good way to learn more and attempt to give back at the same time should the end buyer decide they would use their services. All great feedback thank you.

So basically when assessing you should start out by looking for the sore thumbs and the little things will come over time?

I got a question. You stated in your answer to go through REO's with the realtors and practice assessing the damages to get better handles as to what the rehabbing cost will be. Without bringing an actual contractor or inspector with me, how will I know if what I see are actually problems that need replacing or touch ups? How will I know if I found everything or missed very important segments that are primary areas needing rehabs? Coming from very little to no experience with carpentry or any acual rehabbing how do you get better if you could be missing half the things that are wrong.

I know you also stated to see if you could find a contractor who would take you through with him on his jobs, but is there a way to make the REO visits work without anyone to point out the areas you missed or may be in error? Thanks!

Great post Will thanks. After reading it I went to look for one of the spreadsheets you referred to on Google. Typed in "property rehab costs spreadsheet" and right on the 1st SERP of Google was a BP thread by J Scott where he provides one. Here's the BP thread url http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/67/topics/51045-basic-rehab-analysis-spreadsheet

There's a certain way around it. Rentacoder.com was a huge site and changed their name to vworker and redirected it without losing ranking or traffic. I'd just have to get with a web designer and SEO consultant to figure out what needs to be done. You might lose it for a month or two but then it adjust.

Agreed Bryan. Sometime in the future I'll most likely create a better domain name and just use a redirect page to direct old site traffic to new.

This is probably common knowledge for most people, I just wish I had thought about it at the time. When I first created my domain name I couldn't find anything that had not yet been taken already in line with the industry I was creating it for, so I made up a name. Probably dumb because you get better search engine ranking when your market name is in the domain. I figured I would just try to brand name it over the long haul.

A couple of problems I have learned since then (not big issues but still), you want an easy to remember name: short and sweet. You want to check it in Google to see what else might be close to it out there. I figured since mine was a mdae up word this wouldn't be an issue until I was speaking with a colleague of mine that was like "Isn't that a face cream or something?" I googled and sure enough theres a big company called Sephora lol.

The reason it's not a terribly big issue is because I am not depending on people to search my name as much as particular keywords/ other marketing techniques to bring them to my site, but still. If you can create a domain name even like "Aceflipshouses.com" or something with your industry name within it that is easy to remember then you will be much better off in the long run then trying to brand your own.

Like I said, this is probably common knowledge to most, just figured I'd share my mistake that some might learn from it.

Theres a wealth of knowledge here on BP between the articles, member blogs, and the forum discussions. There's a lot of poison on the internet so I've pretty much lined my thinking like the bible (metaphorically speaking) if what you see out there doesn't line up with what you see in here then question it.

If I'm not mistaken, if you want to use your car as a business expense it needs to be a company vehicle under whatever tax shelter you have it (ie inc. etc) You then have to keep records on mileage, gas, etc. labeling what you were doing when you drove those miles. The car magnet would also be a business expense. Just like business bank accounts when doing your taxxes, they like it kept separate from personal. Don't quote me on that though.

In the search engines their algorithms have specific formulas they look for in declaring what page rank they will assign to each site based on their relevance and the relevance others feel they contribute. If people link to your site without you linking back to them, then this will drive you up in the search engines. Particularly, if people of the same industry, in our case real estate websites, link to you then this is given even more weight with the search engines. The higher ranked the web site the more weight.

Now if every link, or backlink as it is more commonly referred to, all goes to the same page on your website you will not get as much weight with the search engines. They will feel your site has very little relevant information to contribute to the world wide web. If however, you are getting links to your site for example:

then the search engines will give this more weight because various parts of your site are shown through backlinks to be interesting to someone else.

If they are just leaving links to their site, however, your site will become watered down in the search engines eyes. You know those million sites on the web "link directories" right? Well the search engines see these as sites that are used to try and cheat their algorithm formula and give them as much weight as they deserve, which is basically 0, and in some case negative points. So when people use your site as a link directory constantly dropping their follow links back to their site, your site become less and less weighted for backlinks to others sites.

Thats why I am very stingy with who I allow to use as a backlink ofrom my site. I've allowed one person to leave their link, but only because he added the nofollow tag to his link making the search engines completely disregard it.

Hope that helped.

I think it is more some of the backlinks to their sites that can also cause me to question their motives. This one in particular was merely an auto insurance backlink, but I get them from the adult industry and a variety of others as well.

This could mean nothing except for the fact that people from any and all industries have a love and genuine interest for the real estate industry, but when they leave their name as their industry instead of a name or just first name I think it is all just for their benefit, and not to contribute to my blog.