All Forum Posts by: Michael Nicholson

Congrats! Great story!

Well the price doesn't sound that bad when you consider that eddm through the post office is 15 cents per mail piece and you still have to provide your own mail piece. However, as others will point out, eddm is a shotgun approach, and may or may not be effective. Direct mail's goal is always to get to a motivated seller and motivated sellers are a small bunch, so in order to reach them in an effective manner, targeted leads are the best approach (probate, delinquent taxes, military, absentee landlords that are doing a bad job and hate being landlords, etc.). Good luck!

Have you tried to talk to any wholesalers in your market? They might be able to offer you some properties at discount prices that are good investments.

Are you talking about finding properties that you can owner finance and then do lease options with or do you have some properties that you are wanting to provide lease options on? The most recent podcast #185 dealt with lease options as a business model and the guy talked about what he does to find people to sign up for his lease option program. Now if you are wanting to lease with an option to buy, while you are also leasing out to people with an option to buy, I would go for out of state absentee owners because those tend to be a gamut of investors and you never know when someone is either wanting to get out of the game or was no good at the game to begin with.

It always depends on your market, but 3 calls off of 1000 post cards is not so bad. In my market, I know a wholesaler that sends our 6000 post cards a month and only closes 3 to 4 deals a month. I know another guy who sends 2000 yellow letter per month and gets the same amount of leads. Also, where did you get your list and what were your criteria? Only 5% of the population of homeowners can really be slotted to the motivated seller category and direct mail doesn't work if the seller is not motivated or curious. Don't give up! Keep digging. It takes multiple tries.

I saw that you're interested in investing in tax liens in sc. In the counties near me, Greenville county and oconnee county, they do not offer the opportunity to invest in tax liens. They only do a tax sales auction one time a year. The homeowner has a year and a day to pay back the taxes. If they pay it back, you get the 3% a quarter on the amount of your winning bid on the property. If they don't then you will have to go through the process of getting a tax deed and then foreclosing on the owner of the property. Like someone else said, Florida is a much easier state to do business with because everything is online and investor friendly. I found a few books for 3.95$ on my kindle that were state specific treatises on tax lien investing. Very basic but informative. And don't feel bad about getting duped into one of those tax lien clubs, I got duped into a 3 day seminar for 2000$ that ended up having bread crumbs of information and became more of an expensive advertisement that I paid to go see. All of that information I could have easily found on this site or through YouTube. Good luck! I live in SC, so if I can be of any help, just let me know.

Just set up keyword alerts for the topics that are you are most interested in and it makes for good weekly reading. Also, if you go to the search function of the website, you can search any topic that pertains to real estate investing and come up with all kinds of info.

John Vo I agree with Charlie Fitzgerald. Sounds like you have run into some wholesalers who are not leaving enough meat on the bone or who are trying make a deal out of a bad deal. Stick to your guns and let them know what you would pay for it based on what you see. I always hear this and believe it to be true, better to walk away from a good deal than to get stuck with a bad one

@Steven J. nevermind...I did some poking around...I guess once you find the legal notice in the classifieds, you can use the name or case number to go to the probate court in your county and pull up the information, which gives you who the Probate Representative is and what address is listed etc. I think I will start using this to get some leads.

Any tips on finding divorce leads?

Originally posted by @Steven J.:

I get my leads from the local newspapers. Every Monday they send out new legals in the classifieds and I get the information into my spread sheet, mail merge to my letters, and voila. Off the letters go.

 How the heck do you read those legal announcements? I just looked it up on the classified section of my county's newspaper and I found the probates...

Do you just look under the names of the people there to find out what the address was they were living at?

I see a few different notices...one that says "notice to creditors of estates"

"Notice for last will and testament" of some estates

What do you look for?