All Forum Posts by: Lucas Machado

@Ian Hamer - I prefer to be more granular and try to estimate insurance, taxes, utilities, maintenance/upkeep, management, and vacancy separately on each deal...Seemingly small changes can make a big difference on the return. But I think when doing something quick and dirty like you are asking, 50% is the number people use...

Welcome @Mauricio Perez! Tons of active members in the South Florida area. I suggest you also check out some local meetups and REIAs. I'm always at the Dade REIA meeting on the 3rd Wednesday of the month at the Miami Shores Country Club (www.dreia.org). Hope to see you around!

Welcome @Corey O'Brien! Wish I had gotten started at your age!

Welcome @Glenn Bennett!

@Denisha S. - The framework of the site is provided by InvestorCarrot (http://oncarrot.com)...We've spent significant time customizing it though.

FYI, to properly tag people in a post, type the '@' symbol, then start typing their name and when the tooltip with a list of possible BP members shows up, click the name of the person you want to tag. If when the post gets published, the person's name is not a hyperlink, it didn't tag them correctly. :)

Individuals have various reasons to sell. Many people do not wish to do showings, pay commission, dislike realtors, they want fast closings all cash with a buyer they know can perform. The houses are usually disasters and delay can mean loss of value. I had just had a complete knock down project that it turned out the city found out within 7-days of the my walkthrough and began issuing fines to the seller. Even houses in good condition, individuals will sell for less to friends/relatives, or FSBO on Trulia/Zillow without the MLS. All depends.

And as a matter of maximizing value, when I've sold my "as-is" properties on the MLS and concurrently through my investment network, I've made higher proceeds by reaching out to local investor in the area.

@Carl Fordyce You may already be on this: but make sure to check the city/county zoning code.  Zoning code is extremely specific (though sometimes difficult to decipher) about the number of units and size of units that are permitted on a specific lot.  Usually, it's X amount of units per net acre in my geography.

@Joe Yobaccio @Trevor Mauch InvestorCarrot can help you set up SEO, Facebook, PPC. There are many tutorials that can walk you through those processes.

I have first hand experience with Jake, Andre, and Alex. The staff is incredible and they are NEVER too busy to help you. They have helped me solve many problems. Most recently, within 1 hour of requested assistance, they helped me resolve a Youtube issue with associating my site, and also a Facebook conversion tracking problem. One of their programmers also made some on the spot coding to modify a landing page I was working to get the colors right. I don't imagine you are going to get that immediate service with a custom site with a programmer that is charging you hourly. It does also help they have real estate background, so they can understand problems you face. I also recently sat in on a mastermind, gave me some new perspectives, and I was able to create new Facebook ads with relevance scores 8+.

Just to be clear, I have no financial stake or any gain by making this post. I just think, if you are not experienced with web design and new to the online marketing game, it's very possible to get in over your head. InvestorCarrot will keep that in check. Of course, the trade off is you need to work within the InvestorCarrot framework.

That said, although InvestorCarrot can help you, you're not going to get anyone to manage SEO, PPC, Facebook without paying alot more than $50 to $100 per month. If you look at the "gurus" out there, they'd probably charge you hundreds per month just to manage one of those. Also, the budgeting aspects, really, that's up to you, your market, how you approach your advertising.

@Kristopher Gomez Grats on the deals! DMM can definitely feel discouraging because you either may not get a deal right away, but leads often come back months (in some cases years) later, and then sooner or later you hit on a great deal right away.

Welcome!