All Forum Posts by: Scott Pigman

Sure, if I can buy that ranch first before the developers turn it into 500 cookie cutter houses I'll do well :-) I'm not sure it'll work out so great if I own a couple of last year's houses when all those new builds show up next door.

I'm in a different hot market (Austin). I can go just a bit out of town and the prices are much better, but there's a lot open land around and that makes me nervous about having developments come in and overbuild the market.

I've never tried it, but one of the strategies that Brandon discusses in his book is to use hard money to acquire the property and cover at least some of the repairs, and then refi into a conventional mortgage after a six month seasoning period.

It's an interesting question and one I've been pondering myself.

Gas is expensive. Traffic sucks. And thanks to the drought my lawn looks like crap. So why wouldn't I want to live close to downtown?

(Answer: I hate crowds and I work from home so I'm not overly concerned about traffic. But a trend I do not make.)

Another aspect of this tend would be these new shopping centers that are designed to look like fashionable, graffiti free, downtown areas instead of the malls we grew up with. Several of them include residential space so you can walk to your shops and restaurants even though you're really out in suburbia.

I have to ask, is asking a group of sales people if their product will go up or down in value a terribly useful survey?

And BTW, Texas and New Hampshire are also zero income tax states (and NH has no sales tax either).

ha, I was at the same meeting.

I don't know anything about him except what I've googled, but the thing that was funny to me was that his presentation was almost identical to one I attended in Baltimore a few months ago, called "Winning the Property Wars", which was supposedly run, but not attended, by a guy from that Property Wars TV show. Instead the pitch man was a guy who, according to LinkedIn, used to work for Phill's company.

The bit about driving for dollars and identifying a motivated seller by the tarp on his roof...

The homeowner facing foreclosure who answers every question by screeching, "I know! I know!"...

The story of the college girl who wholesale a house for $17k on the day she graduates...

The 12 strategies for closing...

..I had heard all of them in Baltimore.

And I'm pretty sure they both cited the same property as their first deal.

Interestingly, at the other presentation they were only offering 30 ways to find leads, not 65. So clearly Phill Grove's program is more than twice as good!

None of this answers your question in any way. There may be done sort of link between the two programs. Or one may be plagiarizing the other. But I thought it was funny. It felt a bit like when you only ever watch a show twice and the second time it's the same episode you've already seen.

If they're here legally then they should at least have an "A Number". I don't know if the background check outfits can research those or not but it's worth asking. If they can't provide a SSN or an A number then I'd have to conclude they're here illegally and you'd have to decide how you feel about working with them.

i think it's the BP version of a "like" or a +1.

i have no idea how well it's sourced but there was one of those infographic/ meme things that people like to share on Facebook floating around a couple of months ago that claimed that the majority of deals are made after the seventh contact.

I have a niche non-real estate blog, related to my day job, that has done pretty well for me, at least considering the lack of attention I've been giving it lately. My advice:

1) Be excellent. Yeah, I know that sounds flippant, but you can't just write frothy keyword laden articles and expect anyone to care what you have to say. Provide value. When I write an article for my site I try to write something I wish I could have read when I was starting out.

2) Be patient. It takes time to build an audience and get Google to notice you. That ties into the next suggestion, 

3) Be consistent. Readers and web crawler bots like sites that are updated regularly. This is my personal biggest falling with my web site.

The rest is window dressing, in my somewhat humble opinion. But, that said, one method I've used to drive traffic to my site is to share links to my posts on various linkedin forums. It really bumps up the traffic. Assuming that the C in CRE stands for Commercial that would probably work well for you too.