All Forum Posts by: Ryan Whitcher

@Miriam Levitz I have done my best to stay away from ListSource as much as I can - they have good data  -it's just EVERYONE knows about them and uses them so you wind up contacting people who have been contacted many times before.

If you're looking for a more niche list of properties that not many people know about - go driving for dollars! It takes time and gas, but well worth it. I'd rather have 100 solid D4D leads than 1000 ListSource or other paid-lead. 

Just my 2 cents!

@Dennis M.  I know nothing about Toronto BUT I easily found good recommendations on my local Real Estate Investing groups on FaceBook. 

Just type in Real Estate Investors Toronto and I'm sure plenty will pop up. Hope this helps!

@Chuks Erinne that's ridiculous man - people can be so ignorant. You should have just kept quiet and taken the $20,000 - that would've been a slap to the face when he closed and saw that on the HUD lol - I guess foreclosure sucks too *shrugs*.

Keep up the hustle my man, sounds like you are doing well!

@Matt Bodnar - I'm 1000% with @Troy Sheets in that I would advise you spend that money towards one marketing effort - just pick one  main channel and be consistent for the first 4-6 months. Of course, get yourself educated first through podcasts, books, forums, YT videos. 

There aren't any secret strategies in this business and all the information you need can all be found with a google search.

I quit my job with Amazon almost a year ago and hopped in this full time and have been pretty successful - I never took a course, just used my free time wisely before I quit my job to educate, educate, educate! 

@Dusty Lewis ahh the struggle! I was there about a year ago - working at Amazon, sending out (very little) mailers, getting some harsh or no responses....

There are definitely more ways to market to sellers than just calling and as I'm sure you know - some you can do for free and little time (CL ads), some you can do with money (mailers, signs, paying a cold caller, etc). It just depends on how much free time you have and how much you are willing to put towards getting out of the rat race - which I did about 6 months ago to go full time in wholesaling and it has paid off! I do have more freedom, but obviously I'm still at a point in my business where I don't get paid if I don't work. I also had a good savings cushion (15-20K) and zero debt so that helped immensely

ANYWAYS - if you're really content on flipping and figuring out how to do it, you should check out J Scott's new book on how to flip houses. Once you get a good baseline - I would focus on marketing to get a good deal (baseline knowledge) and connecting with local flipper via FaceBook groups, BP, CL, REIA Meetups, etc and present him/her the deal and ask them if you can shadow them throughout the deal and I'm sure they'd be happy to if you brought them the deal. You will learn incredible amounts once you get out there!

Hope this helps in some way!

Ryan 

@Ryan Mancuso congrats on the success! It's rare that you cash flow out of house hacking a SF so that is awesome. I wish sometimes I had done the house hacking thing - but the bachelor pad-ish Uptown apartment was just too enticing for my early 20's. The sacrifices you make *shrugs* 

@David Polk JrI would definitely get it under contract first! In order to do that, first its best to be sure about the numbers of the deal and for that, you can connect with a good, local realtor who knows about investments and a contractor to help you get rehab estimates. OR even better, connect with a local trustworthy buyer that will hopefully be able to help you with both of these and get you a price which makes it a deal. That's what I did on a couple of my first deals and it worked out great! Even if it doesn't work for that buyer, assuming he knows what he is doing, can guide you to get it under contract and then from there, you can send it to your other buyers.

Don't get in the habit of sending out deals that you don't have under contract. You can lose your trust with your buyers that way which is never good!

Hi @Matthew Sloan

All these answers are good! I use Realtor.com for most of my comps - this and Redfin are the best and most accurate public sites with this type of information. 

If you are really striking out on finding a good comp, you can also look at active listings on this site as well to see what your competition is. These are to be taken with a grain of salt as they have not closed yet - but it can give you a fairly good idea if you are in the right range. 

I bookmark the tab after I have put all the filter on (for both sold & active) this makes it a lot quicker.

Hope this helps!

Hi Travis,

Get your base knowledge and terminology down first so you look professional to lenders when you get to that point. Do this by reading forum posts, books, youtube videos, etc. Listen to podcasts while you are driving, cooking, working out, etc. 

I would start to build relationships with realtors right away, try to find an investor friendly one. 

As far as lending, Private money is generally about half asset based and half about your credit, experience, and capital. Hard money is almost all asset based and can help you to assure that you have a good deal. They won't lend on a bad deal. 

There is TONS of info on just this site alone, figure out what route you want to take, focus on it, make specific goals and how exactly how to achieve them.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Hi Zach,

You can either cold call lists that you purchase or leads that are generated through D4D (if you can find a property scout/bird dog situation), hire someone to place signs for you. I've paid $1.10/sign to have someone put them out before and they were great. I used SimpleCrew to keep track of where the signs were. Just make sure that you are staying out of legal trouble with the signs :) 

A free and easy option is to market via Craigslist, or even BackPages too, by making ads stating that you are looking for distressed houses.

Pay someone place business cards, door hangers, etc around the area you're looking.

Many, many options, just be creative!