All Forum Posts by: Lou Metore

Also, some cities have ordinances that a dog must have shelter & water. 

Perhaps you could get in touch with an animal rescue organization & they could get involved or at least give you some direction on what to do. 

That dog is probably miserable. Imagine if that was you chained up all day & night. That is no kind of a way for that dog to live. Does it even have room on that chain to move around?  Does the chain weigh more than the dog?  Do not just sit by & not do anything. Do everything you can to help this dog. Your conscience will always bother you if you don’t. 

I had a situation just like this once & I wished I would have done more to help that dog. It was a little dog & he was chained to the fence with a heavy chain & the poor thing barely had 2 feet of room on that chain. I spoke to the tenants about it, but they couldn’t even take care of themselves, much less a dog. They said that the let him loose sometimes, but I never saw it.  I inherited these tenants & didn’t have them very long, maybe a month or so. The day they moved out, they just let the dog run loose & I really don’t know whatever happened to that dog. This was years ago before Facebook & all the lost pet groups were around. But I always wonder whatever happened to that dog. I hope he found a good home some kind of a way. The tenants moved down the street. I hope that they didn’t take the dog & chain him to the fence again.  If I had it to do over, I would have called Animal Control & reported them. Some people just don’t deserve animals. So do your best & try to help that dog find a new home. You’ll never know how much good you are doing & you will sleep better at night knowing that you helped an animal that couldn’t help himself. 
 

There is an app you can download called EZ Calculators that may help you somewhat.  There are also many online calculators you can use if you do a search for them. Depending on what you are trying to do, you may just have to do trial & error.

An outstanding source for laminate floors is bestlaminate.com.  Their prices are excellent & they will ship right to your door.  The quality for both the laminate floors & underlayment is outstanding.  My guys like using floors from there because they said that the floors are easy to install.  

Their prices for underlayment are very reasonable.  I use the Sound Muffler underlayment which is only $36 per 100 sq. ft. roll.  It's comparable to what you would spend $60 for at Home Depot.  

The shipping fee is $100, but if you order enough & ask very nicely they might waive it for you.  If you want to see the quality of their floors or underlayment, just go to their website or call them & you can order free samples.

The best person I have dealt with over there is Brittany.  I really like her.  More than once, she has gone out of her way to help me with things.  Very good person to deal with there.

Now if I could just find a good place to order porcelain floors from that is reasonable & delivers, I'd be all set. 

This is going to depend on the municipality.  It varies a lot from one water company to another.  In one are, I just recently had a meter installed & the city only charged $174 (or so) plus the cost to run the water line to the main valve for the house.  That was about another $325 or so.  So I had the whole thing done for about $500.  That included digging up the ground & installing a whole new meter.  This property is a triplex, but it only had 2 meters, so I just added a 3rd meter.

Now, if I was attempting to do that in the big city, 5 miles away, the cost of the meter alone is over $1000 plus whatever the cost would have been to run the line to the house.

Best thing to do is call the municipality & ask them what they would charge & then get an estimate to run the line.

Hard money lenders should probably be your very last resort.  Most of them aren't even worth the trouble to contact.  

They have ridiculous terms, charge ridiculous interest rates & ridiculous points & all kinds of other ridiculous things that they dream up.  Then on top of that, their application process is a total joke.  

They will ask you for millions of details, that you probably don't have & even if you did, would take dozens of hours to gather up.

Then when you ask them to provide that same information to you, so that you can vette them, they will say things like,  "Oh, if you are barking at all of these ridiculous requirements this early, then you probably aren't loan wothy, blah blah blah. Of course all of which is nothing but BS.

If you don't believe me, just ask them to provide you with the answers to the same questions they are asking you.  Watch how fast they start to throw out all this BS. 

I'd even go so far as to question how much money they even have to lend out.  Some of them probably don't even have the money to loan in the first place.  Some of them that have no money are just looking to broker the loan & you have no idea if their source is even legit.  You may get all the way to the closing only to find out that there's no money to close the deal.

Most of them will also try to box you in with short repayment periods that are difficult to achieve & if you dont repay within that time will charge you ridiculous penaties or want a large percentage of the deal. 

For the record, I've never once borrowed money from a hard money lender, but I do know some & I did look yinto it a while ago & can tell you that you are better off not dealing with them. 

If I was you, I would seek out a small local bank & try to obtain a commercial loan for each property you want to buy  .

If you can't do that then I would seek out private money from somebody that you know or know of.

I would also strongly suggest trying to get the owner to finance if you can.

There are lots of ways to get money, but hard money lenders should probably be your last choice.  At least, the majority of them.

Good luck!

@Sean Dolan That was an excellent explanation about lead quality.  I never really gave a whole lot of thought to keywords. But the way you described it with the motivation makes a lot of sense. 

 In a way it's the reverse of direct mail.  Instead of us looking for motivated sellers that fit a certain profile , those same sellers fitting that same profile are searching us out.  But the criteria of the seller is still the same either way.

At this point, I've pretty much decided to go the custom route because I just do not like the idea of not being fully in control of my own website & I really do not like the idea of having to always pay a 3rd party.  I really don't mind paying a little extra to have full control.  

Like you said, it's kind of like renting vs buying. That is so true. Where possible, I will always be a buyer as opposed to a tenant. 

You mentioned several times about having the website designed by professionals. How can I tell if somebody knows what they're doing?  What are some things I should be on the lookout for?  What specifically, should I be asking my Word Press designer to do for me?

Also, what about mobile?  Will a Word Press site automatically scale & look good on a mobile device?  Or is that a totally separate issue that I'll need to hire somebody to do?  If so, who would I be looking for?

Lastly, what steps should I look to implement to help get the website ranking?  I know I've heard you should add regular content, but what else should you be doing?  How often should you add content & do you need to keep adding content forever, or do you stop at some point?  I will hire all of this out, so if you have any specific recommendations, please let me know. 

By the way, one thing I'm curious about is what happens if somebody was to start out with a site like IC or LP & then later decide that they want to stop using the IC or LP website & instead swap it out & start using a customized website. Would they then lose their ranking on Google & have to start all over again?

If you have any other suggestions, please feel free to add them. 

I don't mean to bombard you with so many questions but I can tell you know what you're talking about & can point me in the right direction.  

So Thanks again for taking the time to answer. And who knows, once I have a better understanding of some of the basics, we may be able to do a little business together. 

@Sean Dolan  For whatever reason, my original post didn't tag you, so I'm sending this one.

@Sean Dolan.  Sean, you may have just answered my question in your last post on how to go about setting up your own website.

But if someone does it the way you described, how much time would be involved in maintaining everything?  I would like to have my own site & not be beholden to someone else like IC or LP, but at the same time, I don't want to have to spend hours & hours trying to reinvent everything that they have already done.  In other words, if it's already been done for me, why go out & try to recreate it all again?  I don't even know what all the pieces are that I would need in the first place.  And even if I did, I would still have to take the time to sort through everything & hire someone.  Then I have to manage that person as well too & then keep up with everything & so on.  Am I missing something here?

Don't get me wrong.  I absolutely would like my own website without using anybody such as IC or LP, but for someone that's never set up a website I'm worried I might be buying myself a webmaster job, sort of speak.  Do you have any simpler ways to handle this, other than taking the time to put it all together piece by piece? 

Also as for my situation, up until I read your last post, I wasn't even sure how much it would cost.  So I didn't even have a number in mind.  Although, I probably would have guessed somewhere around $1500 or so.

Also, I only do deals where there is a high profit potential.  So I pass up a lot of lower profit deals that many newer people would be delighted to get.  I've been around too long to know that it's not a good idea to waste a whole lot of time on a possible 5K or 6K profit, that may or may not ever materialize.  So it is for that reason that it takes me so many leads.  

Closing 1 out of every 10 leads sounds very high to me.  Somebody that is getting that many deals out of those few leads is probably doing very skinny deals that only result in 3 or 4K, or less, of profit.  I am more about fewer deals, higher profit than more deals with less profit.  

As far as monthly maintenance goes, I'm kind of open on that too.  I was thinking of paying IC $100/mo but if there's a better, cheaper way, I obviously would move in that direction. 

And as far as monthly expense for online marketing, I honestly don't know on that either.  I guess I would start small & then maybe ramp it up if I see that it's working.  I don't mind spending the money as long as I'm getting a return on it.  I know that's not a specific answer, but I don't really know the answer.

So based on all of this, what would you suggest?

Thanks & I appreciate you taking the time to answer all of these question on this thread.

@Sean 

@Sean Dolan Sean, Hey @ Thanks for getting back to me on this. 

Yes the site would be used primarily to generate leads from sellers. 

Right now, I mainly use direct mail to generate seller leads & to a much lesser extent, the MLS.

I am not really a wholesaler. I double close on every one I buy, which means I actually buy the house in my name, then I either renovate it, if need be, or I just resell it as is.  I pay cash for every one I buy.

Currently, I limit myself to a max of 3 or 4 at a time.

As for the margins, it really depends on the price range of the house & what I have to do to the house.  If it's a lot of work I'll look for much higher margins. An example, might be a house that sells for 150k in good condition, but maybe needs 25k in work, i would typically look for 30k or more in profit on that. Again, it depends on how much I had to do to it.  If that same house required 50k in rehab, I'd probably look to make 40k-50k on it.  Sometimes I don't do anything to them & on those, I usually look for about 20k, if it's a relatively routine sale. 

On average, it probably takes me 35-50 good, solid leads to generate these deals that have this kind of margin. 

Thanks for the suggestion on rightpathradio. I'll take a look at that.