All Forum Posts by: Saim Chaudhry

Just realized I spelled absentee wrong! Not sure if I can change it now. I would appreciate if a moderator could fix it. Thanks and sorry about that!

Hey BP,

I am looking to branch out my marketing to target absentee owners both in and out of state. I wish to target the entire county of Sacramento and not just specific area codes. My question is, what are some specific criteria that is a must to filter out from your lists. I feel like everybody and their mothers have probably already bombarded absentee owners with letters. I thought I will give it a try anyhow.

So far my criteria that I have used to narrow down, is this:

-County of Sacramento

-SFR

-3-5 Bed

-2-5 Bath

-Original Mortgage Type: FHA & Conventional

-70-100% Equity

-100k-400k Assessed Value

-Absentee In State and Out Of State, No preference Trustee owned

-Excluding Corporations

I am generating my list from listsource. A few questions: Does this criteria look good? Is there anything I may be missing or that I should include. I will be doing typed white letters with a handwritten signature. Also, are their specific types of mortgages I should target, such as FHA over conventional? Or does this not matter. Trying to get my criteria to find owners that would be the most motivated to sell. My budget is not too high at this moment. With this criteria I have listed, I have about 750 leads. I will be mailing to these same leads once a month, so you can understand why I want a quality list.

My goal with these properties will be to either flip them myself or wholesale them to local investors. Thanks in advance!

Great response. Thanks!

Thank you for providing your experience.

I have contacted a local investor who does rehab projects for flips, homeowners looking to sell, etc.

Speaking with him, they do the full rehab from start to finish, paint outside, inside, kitchen, flooring, etc. He kept giving me a 50k estimate. I am wondering how he could keep using 50k as a general estimate since it should vary from property to property how much a rehab would cost.

His proposal was a 50/50 split of the profit. Does this seem like too much? I understand they will be doing the work from start to finish, but shouldn't the other investor funding the purchase price of my project get a larger chunk of the profit? Or is it the other way around since this guy will be doing all the work.

This is using a scenario where I have investor A fund the entire purchase, and investor B fund and do the entire rehab, and me in the middle conducting and finding the deal.

Thanks

Hello,

A local real estate investor who has taken me under his wing and is helping me learn told me something that interested me. He said one of his friends flipped houses with no money out of his own pocket. I am still fairly new and learning, but this was an interesting concept to me.

He funded the purchase price of a deal with an investor, and funded the rehab with another investor partner, and they would split the profits.

My question is, how hard is this? I have never dealt with private funding, so I am not really sure as to what it entails. Do private funders give you the money in your bank account and sign a contract with you? What if a deal goes bad, and money is lost, who is taking the loss? What kind of protections should I have in place for myself, and what kind of precautions and protections will the lenders be taking. Also, what is a good split as far as percentage if you have someone funding the purchase price, and someone else funding the complete rehab. Would it be worth it to market the property on the MLS through an agent after or would the commission split be too high, seeing as the profits will also need to be split 3 ways somehow. Thanks!

Hello all,

Thinking about branching out to marketing to owners of vacant houses/code violation properties since our county has a website with a list of open cases / code violations. It also provides a list of vacant property cases.

How do i go about this? Should I pay particular attention to the cases that were started years ago, or the ones that are just a few months old? Which ones are more successful as far as leads go. On one hand the owners of the vacant houses with code violations are being hammered with administrative fees and code fees from the city, on the other hand if they have been vacant for so long I am sure many other investors have already gotten their hands on the owner or something is wrong with the property to not have been sold and rehabbed by now.

And my big question, finding the owners of the vacant code violating properties. What is an efficient way to find the owners' contact information for 2-300 properties since I have a large list. That might get really expensive as well as time consuming to skip trace all these properties. Is there something I can do to filter out these cases so I have a more concentrated list in my hands of real potential leads and not just garbage. What I mean by that is, in this list there are categories of vacant properties.

Vacant Building

FOCIS Case

Substandard Vacant Building

Dangerous Vacant Building

HSG Boarded

Penalty Waiver Agreement

most of these have combinations of these categories, but their are a few that are JUST categorized as "vacant building" ... Should I focus on those ones or does it not matter?

Or am I just wasting my time with this niche since these lists of vacant properties with code violations is all public information and higher level investors have already gotten their hands on these lists and marketed to the owners the minute they become available.

Thanks, and Merry Christmas!

Thank you guys for your insight

@Ronnie Boyd I figured since I will only have a handful of leads I am contacting, to take care of the letter writing myself instead of sending out postcards or yellow letters, which I may do in the future if I market outside of probate when I might be marketing to more people than I can handle by myself personally. And I welcome any resource I can get my hands on, thank you for sharing. My email is [REMOVED]

Thanks!

Hello everyone,

Love this forums, I have been lurking on here for a while and reading as much as I can and listening to podcasts. I am completely new to the real estate biz. I feel like I have found my niche that I want to focus on, Wholesaling, and within that, probate wholesaling.

I live in Sacramento county, and through this website, have actually found and contacted a few investors in my area. I have started the networking process by calling them, and meeting them over coffee and learning a few things from them, surprisingly they have been very kind to offer me their time and knowledge. The 2 that I have met are rehabbers, and have wholesaled a few properties on the side, but mainly rehab as well as rent out properties. One of them told me that if I can lead him to a property, he would pay me a bird dog fee. I am very excited about this because I feel like I could learn a lot about real estate through these guys if I put in the time and effort to find them properties, while getting paid. Wholesaling is a bit more complicated and perhaps after bird dogging a few deals I may be competent enough to wholesale a property.

So far, I have been going through probate cases and have made an excel spreadsheet. I have been going through the documents, reading wills, sifting through probate notes and orders, filtering out cases where they have real property, that might be a good lead. I then, put all the info I need into the spreadsheet, all the way from the name of the decedent, to specifics of the property such as APN number, address, appraised value, executors name, contact info, phone or email of executor and address of residence of the executor.

I have spent a good 10 hours going through cases and only filtered 8 leads out of it. The ones with phone numbers of the executors, I called. I have left a few voicemails and was able to speak to one of the executors on the phone. I also have sent out emails to the executors if I found their email address in the documents. So far, no luck with any replies of emails or voicemails. I have yet to send out physical letters to executors.

I have found odesk.com and am trialing a virtual assistant who has experience in probate and real estate as well as data entry, to have him filter through the cases and fill out the excel spreadsheet for me. I find it may make me life easier and free up my time to do other things such as writing letters.

My question is, I have looked all around on how to write letters for probate cases. I havent found much info except for a few general tips such as be sensitive to their loss, etc. I am looking for specifics. I know you only get one shot at a first impression. My deal is I would like to come off as personable, not someone who is 'automated' or works for some company that buys up real estate in these situations. I want to show them that I am just an everyday guy with an interest in buying their property. I don't want to turn them off by saying the wrong thing and making them feel like it is just some letter sent by a we buy houses company. One of the executors I called specifically asked me how I got the number, if I was some sort of telemarketer or worked for a company. She was uncomfortable with the fact that I had gotten her number from public records. Should I address this in the letters I send out?

I was going to type the letters, do a hand written signature, and hand write the address on the envelope. I just get frozen up trying to make sure I write the right things on the letters. Also, I am not sending out 3-500 postcards or yellow letters. Since I am doing probate, out of 3-4 months worth of probate cases and after really filtering out the garbage I will probably be left with a max 25-30 decent leads.

Looking for feedback on what I have been doing, what I need to do. If I am headed in the right direction, what I can do to improve.

Thanks!