All Forum Posts by: Mike Flora

I have never covered anything up on our rehab properties and if its something that has to be fixed we fix it. Take what's going on in your instance, anyone who comes to the property can see the condition of the driveway now and you might find a buyer who does not care about it that much and still purchase the property and nothing is hidden from the buyer and you spent nothing. 

Next thing that could happen would be it is a problem and you offer to pay for half of the driveway cost for the buyer at close of escrow. Then you saved half of what it would have cost you if you just did the whole thing.

Last is you just pay for the whole thing. 

We have found that sometimes certain things don't have to be paid for in full all up front to sell the property. We do this with roofs as well with buyers and split costs in the end saving us a couple thousand dollars. Nothing is covered up or hidden though. Some buyers just won't care if everything except the driveway looks good and you might save some money that way. We are doing that with a property we have in escrow now with the AC unit. Its really old but had an AC guy sign off on it as working and we agreed to extend the warranty on the unit for the buyers. Beats paying $5,500 for a whole new system and nothing is hidden. Just my 2 cents on it. Look at other properties in the area that have sold and are up for sale.......do they all have new driveways? Do you think the types of buyers coming through there are for sure gonna need a brand new driveway?? @Angela Vargas

Navy Federal gives you 90% of your equity in your personal home.

@Jill DeWit I hear you and I have targeted mail lists just like you and I send personal letters to them with offers etc etc, but I also have very large targeted lists of properties that I send mail to. So currently after I get my targeted property list in an excel sheet with property I want to purchase, owners name and mail address I send this off to a company who puts it on a postcard and mails it off for us. Lets say a list of 20,000 takes 2 min to get done and sent off for the corporation to mail for us at a pretty good price. Now what if I take that same large list on my excel sheet of say 100,000 targeted homes to a computer guy and I get back 100,000 emails of the owners of the targeted properties and then I click a button with my personal message/pictures etc etc in the email company I use to deliver all 100,000 emails that lets say 70,000 make it to their actual inbox and not spam for only $1,000. Data will show on how many responses you get etc etc but if it works then you do the math on how much you will be saving in marketing!!! Im trying to get around bad email scrubbed lists and figuring out how many mails go to spam or inbox. Hey, at least im trying something new in real estate investing, which pretty much is a marketing and sales business. If you want to have a real estate business that is.

I have done mass emails before and the problem is bad email scrubbed lists and not knowing what is going into spam email or actual inbox. We pay a company to send out all the emails and as long as you have an unsubscribe button there is nothing wrong with sending emails to people. The idea is good just the finding of the good lists and going to the owners actual inbox is the problem. These are huge lists I'm talking about here so takes too much time to find one by one and with a click of a button with all the emails you can deliver 100,000 emails. 

@Jill DeWit @Josue Vargas

I have used a private investigator a couple times when all else fails. I have TLO as well and if nothing come from that with family members, social media, etc etc and things are adding up to be a possible deal I have used a PI and it paid off big time. Make sure it makes sense to do so as well. Highly distressed, vacant, few years of unpaid property taxes and any other info that makes it seem more possible to be a deal. You don't want to waste a lot of time on these and money if things are not adding up to be a deal. Before you hire a PI go to the property and speak to all neighbors for info as well and what I have done before is put the biggest sign I can in the front yard with my phone number on it stating I want to buy your house. IT WORKED and the son called me and after probate finished we purchased the property. It was good cause no one else could contact him cause he was so hard to find. The PI we used worked and it took some time but we got the property for 66K, put 45K into it and sold for 230K last summer. Hired a PI on another one that made sense but we could never find the guy, he was homeless and drug user and no one had seen him in like 3 years. Sucks cause he had a free and clear property but its gone now at tax auction this month. Anyways, hope this helps, the harder they are to find on these vacant properties, the better in my mind because of less competition. Might take a bit but your the one talking to these owners or heirs and no one else is.

@Jennifer Winans don't waste your time getting your license. We sell all of our rehab flip ourself using a flat fee broker service. $100 fee and it's put on the MLS for us and we run the show! All the buyers agents call us directly like we are the listing agent. So $100 or 2.5-3% of the sale price. YOU CHOOSE. Look up flat fee listing.

@Sinil Kim I’m in California and I’m looking to buy single family residences in riverside county. The owners primary mailing addresses are all over the place but some are owner occupied houses as well. The excel list has the property owners primary mailing address and their property address I want to purchase so maybe there could still be a way to link all this in an area to find their email address.

@Sinil Kim I would want to send you a excel list of 100,000 people and their primary mailing address. Then I would want you to scrub that list somehow through a program that would give me their primary email address. Obviously you would not go through each name individually but maybe there is public information floating around on the internet/websites of these people/mailing address a program could find and link it to their email address.

You get the list

You type in or do whatever and hit enter or run or whatever computer stuff you do.

Then in a few hours or however long it would take for the program to scrub the list it gives you these peoples emails.

@David M. @Sinil Kim just like David said, I’m not skilled in your line of work with programming, computers and putting programs to collect and find data. Not sure how all that works and I have very large direct mail lists that are targeted to specific properties. I don’t have time to look up one individual at a time to try and find the right email address. So if I could find a way to send a huge excel sheet with owners names and mailing addresses to a guy like you to figure out how to process that info and get good email address I could save possibly save thousands of dollars in marketing. Have tried this before but too many hurdles with bad lists and not knowing what is going into spam and actual inbox. David grasps what I’m saying. Imagine paying for a huge target list only once and sending tens of thousands of emails every week for a small monthly fee from a email delivery company. Of course data comes into play but a good email list seems to be the hardest thing to get first.

@Sinil Kim I could be way off here on how your computer programming skills work, but if you could put a program together or know how to gather data to find homeowners email addresses then I would say you have an amazing spot in REI. Example of what I'm talking about.......

I give you a persons first and last name

And I give you their primary home mailing address

Then you do your computer magic and get me their primary email address.

Can you do this?