All Forum Posts by: Nathaniel Hovsepian

@Natalie Caprano My best suggestion would be to forego all of the ways that you mentioned. The best way to get leads in this digital age is through PPC advertising. 

When you advertise on google, the leads come to you, and not the other way around. You will have motivated sellers calling you or filling out your forms online. I say that these people are motivated, because they actively went out and searched for the terms on google that you are advertising for. 

Gone are the days of cold calling, sending thousands of mailers, or driving for dollars. We are in an era where everyone walks around looking down at their cell phones, so why not take advantage of that fact?

Back in October, we ran one month's worth of PPC advertising on google and had great success getting motivated leads calling in and filling out our form online. We negotiated the price of this home and closed the deal. At the time, we were looking at it as a fix and flip, but it needed a lot of work and we had no contacts in the area to get the work done in a timely and cost effective manner.

We spent about a month doing research on local contractors and coming up with a budget and time frame for the project.

Feeling confident, we began demolition on the home and quickly realized we were in over our head. The drywall was falling apart, had stains that wouldn't be covered with a couple coats of paint, and stunk after years of neglect to the home. After ripping the drywall down, the true horror unfolded. TERMITE DAMAGE TO HELL!

I knew instantly that we were going to need to replace every stud in the home and basically start from scratch. 

Being the optimistic person that I am, I saw this as an opportunity to turn this 3/1 into a 3/2 as we were going to be reframing the home anyway, and the bedrooms currently were wayyyyy larger than they needed to be. 

I found some companies that could do the type of work that we needed done, and were willing to come out and give the place a look and quote me for the job. 

I went to work designing the new layout for the 3/2 to come!

After doing a bunch of this legwork on my own I finally decided to follow my own advice and reach out to some more seasoned investors in the area to come and take a look at it and give me their opinion.

It was at this time that reality set in that maybe this was not a project that was the best use of my time, money and willpower. My local REIA president was gracious enough to come and take a look at the house and recommended that I sell it, get my money back out and move on to other projects that I could get in and out of quicker.

I went back and forth about this and finally decided it was time to get it sold and move on to the next deal that we found and start to snowball the leads coming in by putting our money back into advertising and getting more leads.

We got the house sold within 2 weeks, have since purchased and sold another house and have 2 more deals in the works!

In my opinion, you should always be investing. I actually just finished writing an article on here that hasn't released yet about this very subject. 

I am a big proponent of dollar cost averaging and not trying to "time the market". 

If you are unaware of what that is, it is essentially creating a plan where you invest a specific amount of money on a regular basis (month, quarter, whatever) in a stock, index fund, or combination of your choosing. 

With dollar cost averaging you will sometimes buy at a higher price, and other times at a lower price. Over the long duration that you are invested though, you will reap the long term benefits of being in the market, as historically it gains about 10% per year. That is accounting for the years in which in had great downturns. 

You are going to hear a lot of noise about being at a market top and that we are about to have a recession. This noise is always around. Don't get me wrong, we will have a downturn at some point, it is inevitable, but NOBODY knows when that is going to happen. 

@Melanie Hartmann I hate to hear about all of these things, but thank you so much for sharing. You have learned a lot already from this project and have so much valuable insights to give all of us investors. 

I hope that everything goes smoothly with your wholesale deals and you are able to turn those over into this project and get it done and over with as speedy as possible.

Let us know how it all is going as you get updates and make changes to this house. I am excited to see how it is all going to turn out positively for you!

I haven't kept any for myself yet. The homes that I have been getting have been very large projects, which I wasn't completely comfortable taking on myself at the moment. I am just trying to grow my marketing budget at this point and create a constant stream of leads coming in that I can scale. 

My biggest challenge so far has been making accurate offers. I purchased one home too high and had to take a small loss on it, and have made quite a few offers that were too low and other investors came in and offered more (no a terrible thing though).

I am fine tuning my process with answering calls and emails for my inbound leads and trying to make more offers over the phone before even seeing the place. This gets me in the door so to speak, and then I can do due diligence and adjust offer if needed. I am very upfront with sellers about this process. Will see how it works over time and continue to tweak.

@Mike S. you are welcome to DM, but I always like to keep conversations running in posts that way others can get involved, inspired and learn if they want to. 

Up to you!

@Melanie Hartmann we are going to get some solid rentals going and then about 5 years from now we will 1031 them into a huge apartment complex and retire! You in?

@Mike S. I currently have a $4000 per month budget, up from $2000 for my first couple of months. I have spent a total of $4000 so far advertising on google adwords, which has generated 37 motivated seller leads. Out of the 37, 29 have been really good fits for me making cash offers on. I have closed 2 deals from those leads, which I have wholesaled. 

I have also gotten about 15 calls from my ads, which didn't go into those 37 leads (those are just people that I have actually had to pay for). 

I am very confident that from those first couple months of leads I will generate at least 2 more deals. 

Let me know what other questions you might have. 

@Jaren Barnes That is the advice that I got from one of my local investor friends. He has never done a deal of this type himself, so I was throwing it out there for anyone that may have had experience in this type of deal. 

We were thinking the same thing, but the numbers looked so good on paper. 

Paper doesn't show you the risks that are involved though. Stupid paper!

@Melanie Hartmann the case study has been closed. We had to back out of the deal due to some repairs that the inspector uncovered that I did not notice. It had a foundation concern, and at the very top of the roof, that I couldn't see, the shingles were all jacked up and it was recommended to go ahead and replace the whole roof. 

The seller was selling the property to me as is because we were pretty far under their "asking price". Oh well, on to the next one. I still plan on getting 2 by April 3rd!