All Forum Posts by: Max M.

@Crystal Smithby any chance do you know any creative investor friendly brokers?

@Senica EvansI'm on the opposite side of town up north but I'm wondering, in addition to traditional brokering and buy and holds, are you interested in investing for quick paydays as well, such as getting properties under contract and then reselling them within a few months? 

That's what they're there for ;)

I'm in the NW burbz as well. I'll be getting started with lease options soon, which should work nicely in this area, since the north/northwest suburbs are full of pretty houses. Are you just into buy and hold or do you like making profits on a per-deal basis too?

Looks like you're big into IT. You're probably a lot more qualified than I am to complete my latest project, which is creating an ad hoc CRM database system for my real estate shenanigans. Fortunately it's turning out to be much easier than I thought. The hardest part (but also most fun) is deciding exactly how I'll be structuring the database and its forms/queries. It's fun because it gets me imagining all of what happens from beginning to end with marketing (1000), leads(100), suspects (90), prospects (10), properties/contracts (3) and deals (1). Adjust numbers depending on skill and level of masochism. ;)

I wouldn't do anything differently than I'm doing now except:

1. See about hiring someone to help put together my database, mainly so it would be more functional than the primitive one I'm creating

2. As part of my overall marketing strategy I would be on the lookout for a house that I would like to live in to buy on terms, very good terms.

3. If I found and obtained such a house, which would of course still leave me with almost all of my 100k, I would set up an office in there first thing, with a land line or two. But I wouldn't put much focus on making the office just-so until later on.

4. Get some kind of smart phone so I can maintain communications on the go and record pics/videos and such of houses

5. If I come across any good car deals for a few hundred or a few thousand (if it's a really good deal) then I'll nab it so I don't have to worry about when my mom's using her car.

6. Continue doing exactly what I'm doing which is learning this business from the ground up, one angle at a time. The 100k will help me do things faster without worrying about destitution and homelessness, but won't do me much good until I actually learn to do stuff, so its main function is getting me into my own place and sitting around for potential expenses, while I learn to actually bring in amounts of money that would make that 100k trivial.

Pre first deal free strategies

1. Craigslist/etc. sites, e-mailing, calling, voicemailing, replying to FSBO/rental ads, my goal is to smoothly contact hundreds of people per day efficiently

2. Having wholesalers that don't work with no/low/negative equity situations pass me those garbage leads in return for fees or JV if they lead to closed deals. The goal is to build up dozens or hundreds of such contacts.

3. Building up a list of qualified retail buyers in various areas, though mostly local, qualified as being the type of buyer i'm looking for to buy these properties. They can actually find properties for me in the places they want to live (and I can help them get into them). Also having a qualified retail buyers list in a specific area means I have more leverage to be the optimal choice to deal with for certain people looking to sell in that area.

At first I tried doing this stuff immediately. I quickly realized I was completely overwhelmed with the disorder and chaos, especially when I imagined doing this hot and heavy for months at a super high rate, and trying to avoid accidentally contacting the same people 20 times. I actually became afraid of what would happen if I started getting callbacks and interest, because I couldn't even handle basic operations without wanting to put a bullet in my head, it was so much to deal with.

How would I organize it all? How would I organize my property info sheets? How would I keep track of every single relationship I built, what happened last time I talked with someone? When's the last time I talked to someone?

The bigger I get with this, the worse it will get.

Craigslist is a lot more sophisticated a marketing strategy than it seems. I had my e-mail address with gmail "permanently" blocked from sending emails after only 8 e-mails sent per day. This means now I have to potentially keep track of many e-mail addresses, maybe proxy servers, etc, and standardize a way to send lots of e-mails without getting my e-mail addresses screwed up.

And let's not forget, the real meat of this business is how I deal with people I get in contact with. How can I concentrate on these things when I'm bogged down with administrative disaster? Especially when I can't even remember anything about someone I contacted say 5 days ago, or 5 weeks ago?

The goal of my systems is to take all this mess and put it somewhere so I don't have to remember it all, I can just pull up anyone at any time with ease. I recently learned this database stuff is much easier than I thought. As I learn more stuff about it I'm positively dripping with anticipation with just how easy it will be for me to punch in and keep track of everyone I market to and deal with.

It's a people and marketing business, and when you're talking about tons of people and tons of marketing, it becomes an information business too. Some personality types may be okay with doing that helter skelter but not me. I need to market much heavier on these methods than most newbies, due to my situation.

@J Scott 

A hearty barb my good sir! Your name has been locked in to the challenge manifest!

Btw what's the hard stuff you speak of? For me every single detail of this business is hard, I don't have basic life skills

 Two people who saw my introductory thread here gave me some dough. @Raj Gandhi hired me to do a writing job which I completed partially and was paid partially for (the nature of the job was that it could still be useful part way done). Another anonymous party found me very entertaining and helped me out a bit :)

This may seem like a trivial amount of dough, but I can assure you that this small cash advantage will probably take months or years off my poverty timetable.

I have no doubt that in the future my BiggerPockets shenanigans can lead to a lot more commas and 0's in that figure!!!

$120.00 exactly

@J Scott 

I will check back with you in June of 2015 and we shall review two things:

1. My progress in closing deals including total profits

2. Whether my organizational finickiness helped, hurt, or "didn't really affect things either way"

If it turns out my obsession with organization hurt or was irrelevant, you win. If I do not get back to you, you win. If it turns out my organizational system worked wonders for me and I just pumped pumped pumped, I win.

Hey what's up. Also from the burbz here. Sounds like our life situations are the exact opposite, but it would appear from what I've learned, if you're looking for a place to get a higher/faster hands-off rate of return on your money that's far more reliable and safe than the stock market, being a private money lender for real estate stuff is where it's at.

In this video some old real estate/money vets talk about how private money is like "driving a Mercedes"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYbrB9kGlTI

@J ScottGud vun!!!! Would you like to be part of the June challenge as well?

We must keep in mind that my goal is maximum throughput on a 6.5 month timetable. If my goal was maximum throughput on a 1-2 month timetable, what I'm doing now would probably be a waste of time, since taking 2-3 weeks to systematize would eat too much of that time. However on a half year timetable I would lose throughput without proper systematization. Keep in mind my goal isn't to make every little thing perfect, but to take the biggest snags involved in repetitive tasks that I'll be doing 100,000 times and removing them. Essentially I want to put the 20% of effort that gets rid of 80% of the snags. The 20% of the snags that would take 80% of the effort I will skip.

Probably the best benefit of this is that after closing 1-2 deals 80% of the work is already done for organizing paid marketing methods like mailings, since I will already be well versed in creating databases from spreadsheets, and importing/exporting spreadsheets to/from my database.

I certainly can't afford to take a big chunk of time off because it takes a lot to get these systems set up and the kinks worked out. Procedures will also be worked out in tandem with the systems for 3+ free marketing methods. This takes time and testing. It might be a month or two before I can hit full stride on these systems and achieve a high level of marketing saturation. If I'm lucky and a deal gets closed quickly, that's a whole 'nother can of worms because now I have new marketing systems to implement, procedures to define and refine, and V.A.'s to hire and train. That will easily take another 1-2 months to get running smoothly. That's already 4 months gone before I can hopefully achieve a high level of saturation/smoothness with various paid/free marketing methods given my experience/resources/time.

That only leaves 2.5 months to hopefully hit enough traction with all these methods that I'm getting enough deal throughput to make my transition out of my mom's place an awesome one instead of a really rough one.

Then we must remember Mr. Murphy. He will likely come to visit many times. Who knows how far he will push back the timetable.

Therefore, according to my calculations, 6.5 months is BARELY ENOUGH!!!