All Forum Posts by: Tim Herndon

@Dom Allen

@Stuart Birdsong is correct. Equity%, Household, All Mortgages

@Rikesh Zala

I am only posting 6 ways but there are a lot more! These will be a great way to start.

1) Craigslist: Go to Craigslist and look under the “apartment/housing” category. This is the section that shows rentals. Anyone who has a home for rent, rent to own or “lease purchase is an investor. Contact them. If they have homes for rent, they may need other rental properties to add to their portfolio. Look for terms like “completely renovated” You can also place ads for properties you have for sale as well as “Ghost Ads” to build your buyers list.

2) Google Search: Google is my secret weapon. Really. If I can’t figure it out, find it or just need more information, I almost always just “ask Google”. And, I do the same thing to find buyers for my wholesale houses. You can just type in, “we buy houses” or “cash for houses” in your area or city and you’ll find plenty of A-plus buyers. I’ve flipped many houses to buyers in under 3 hours using this simple search alone.

3) ListSource: Probably one of my favorite (paid) sources online. Finding the correct filter is the key to getting cash buyers from ListSource. These records cost approximately .08-.10 each. You can search for free until you get the list tweaked, then purchase with a credit card and download the list. If I were just starting I would buy a list from here and mail them a postcard right away!

4) MLS Cash Sales: You can also have an agent pull all cash transactions where no mortgage was recorded. Most MLS systems have this filter but you'll need to establish a relationship with an investor friendly agent to get this information emailed to you in a spreadsheet. You'll have to sort through the data and there are paid alternatives to this that will save a lot of time.

5) Other Wholesalers: This is a little trick I use to find investors. Many wholesalers list the homes they’ve recently sold. Guess what, many of these homes are sold to investors. So simply copy and paste the address and then see who bought it. And Viola! You’ve got a new investor you can contact. And you know how much this investor paid for the property and where he’s buying.

6) Bandit Signs: Put up bandit signs in the neighborhood’s you want to sell homes in. And here’s the key, don’t make them all fancy. I use black magic marker and hand write all my signs. Actually, I hire people to do it, but you get the idea. Make it look like you’re an individual, not some fancy company. Buyers pay attention to these signs. Do this every time you have a property for sale. If you don’t still do it with a “ghost” property or another wholesalers property until you have your own inventory.

@Karen Musselman

I would not advertise "wholesale" in my domain name unless you were just targeting cash buyers, then it's ok. Sellers aren't going to be very receptive to that word as they are tring to get retail (in their minds).

In regard to using your last name,  the city name would be much better because that's what people are typing into the search box i.e sell home in reading, sell house reading, pa etc. It will also help you rank your site a little easier. I noticed your city only has a population of about 383 so I would personally target the biggest city in the county like Reading or another city with some population. Separate the websites too - one to buy and one to sell. Example: readinghomebuyers.com / readingwholesalers.com. I would NOT put everything on one site like sell a house, buy a house, become a private lender. If you do this you will lose A LOT of potential leads. 

A Squeeze page would be a lot better than a brochure website to capture leads. Your conversion rates will be a lot higher. you can always send potential prospects to your main website after you have captured their information. otherwise people will just come to your site, leave and you will never know who they are. I did a quick screenshot of a cash buyer squeeze page to show you the important elements. If they want to get wholesale deals their only option is to enter their name and email! I hope this makes sense.

If you have questions please feel free to ask. I'll try to get back to you ASAP.

@Corrinne Yap

You have a few options for this. This list is one of the lists that is NOT sold by most list brokers. 

Option 1 - Go to the county courthouse "Probate Dept" and ask to see the files. You can get all of the information and put in in a spredsheet or write it down. You are looking for the "personal representative" and their mailing address. 

Option 2 - Ask the Probate dept clerk if there is an online "legal newspaer where the probates are published. If their is you can subsribe to it and save a lot of time, especially if they have it online.

Option 3 - Maybe another investor sells that list in your area. In some big cities this is the case but I'm noy sure about Des Moines.

@Cassandra Ramirez

You can do just about anything with Podio but for the more advanced workflows you will need a product called Globiflow. This will allow you to send direct mail through Click2Mail like you are requesting. This will prevent you from having to do things manually.

If you have any other question about Podio just let me know. Good Luck!

I'm not sure what you question is? Those filters are good.

My advice is to make sure you use an call tracking phone number to gauge the results of the campaign. If you're spending money like that you need to know if it's working or not. 

Each campaign needs it's own tracking number with analytics and reports. I have about 30 different numbers for all of my marketing campaigns. See the image below as these are the results of an an actual Absentee Owner campaign I ran in July.

A lot of investors send all calls to one main number but never know if one of the campaigns is bad, therefore wasting tons of money! I hope this helps.

@David Grimm

That's great advice from both other responses before me. i.e. Property Appraiser and Google. I'd like to add that if those options fail for whatever reason, you can easily skip trace the owner. We use an inexpensive service and primarily if the owner has already moved. I can even get their mobile number sometimes. Good luck!

@Account Closed

I am not familiar with VOIP.MS but I have used Google Voice. We found a much better solution for local numbers that allows us to block/blacklist all numbers from Code Enforcement a.k.a. "the sign police". They called us using a robo-dialer with approximately 15 different phone numbers and we needed more advanced features than Google voice offered.  Anyway - WE BLOCKED THEM!!! Check out the attached screenshot to get a better idea. Good luck!

@John Hyatt

I know exactly what you are going through! We used Google voice and vumber but both of them have problems or they are too expensive. 

Why are you looking for apps? Just curious

We ended up using Twilio for the analytic phone numbers. This solved all of the problem and you can get local numbers for $1.00 per month each and .02 per minute! CallRail and most of those services charges $3.00 per number and .05 per minute which can add up fast, especially if you have 20-30 campaigns like we do.

Let me know if you have any questions or PM me and I'll be glad to help you solve this problem.

@James E.

Sorry I missed question #2. Here's the answer:

2. Website over squeeze page... what's your thinking on the main advantages / disadvantages of one over the other?

A website is to tell people about your company and a squeeze page is to collect their information. I would start with a squeeze page becasue if you start with a website, sometimes it's too much information and they don't take any action at all. I wouldn't recommend having Sellers, Cash Buyers and Private Lenders all on the same site if you decide to go that route.