All Forum Posts by: Wane Tango

@Mark Marinaccio Lol, I wish I had that as an option. The only printer I can hijack is the one that I use for my other business. Which would be all and well except that I pay for that toner as well. 

@Mark Marinaccio I am using a Heavy gel pen and then using a laser printer set to economy to print. I am trying to save money anywhere I can. My ink jet I know would look better and the ink would be thicker and match, but it would also double my print cost. I am trying to pinch my pennies on anything that I am doing in mass quantities.  

Since I posted this I started looking into plotters I seen a few on amazon in the $300 range. I know that with some slight modifications you could add a pen or sharpie to the arm and then you would have all of your letter written by pen. Does anyone here have any experience with this?

Sorry for the delayed response to this. I have been following this and actually taking the advice mentioned above. 

@Chad Clanton I would love to call you sometime and pick your brain about some of this stuff. I have not got to talk with many investors. As far as I can tell their is only a small handfull in my area (which Im hoping will work in my favor when I become competent enough to make some deals). My number is in me siginature as well, call me anytime that is convenient with you, I always answer unless Im talking with my wife or client. Or let me know when would be good for a call. 

@Mark 

@Mark Marinaccio You sir are a genius!! You saved me hours of frustration and countless hand cramps. I do graphic design for fun on the side and I have no idea why I did not think about photocopying a letter. So it took a few hours of experimenting and editing the photocopy of the letter in photoshop but I have it working like gangbusters now. My printer does not really like the thin yellow pad paper but it works. The time I spend fixing the occasional paper jam vs handwriting each letter is well worth the effort. Going to get a stamp for the return address this week to speed that part up as well. Im still experimenting with pens that match the printed letter a bit better. On first glance its hard to tell but the gel pen is too dark and the standard pens are a bit too thin. So far the standard black ink disposable pens seem to work, but I think I can get it better. I am a bit of a perfectionist. I will report back what works best if anyone else is interested. 

@Mark Marinaccio I am a day jobber doing home inspections and I have a fantastic app called road warrior on my driod phone. I have a few friends that work with FedEx and UPS and this is the app that they use to plan routes. It looks for efficiency in mileage vs time travling. It even considers school zones during busy times. Its a pretty impressive app and works great for my business. Their is a free version on the marketplace but I think it limits you to 10 stops. I pay the monthly service because of my job. And yes I do plan on doing some door knocking in the next couple of weeks with some of the pre forclousers that I have came across. 

@Matt V. Do you have a website for those post it notes? That definitely sounds like something that I could use. I have heard that a post it note on a door is very effective and even the pros like Anson Young have talked about doing this during slow times. 

Thanks everyone for the great responses!

Another question: So I am able to get about 15-20 letters a day ready for mail, would you guys wait to make it a larger mailing or just send em out as they are ready to go?

Ok so I have virtually no budget to speak of and with some help the collective advice of bigger pockets I narrowed my mailing list to an extremely specific 200 people to mail to. So here is the break down of my mailing criteria:

With-in city limits

35 to 100% equity

950 -1800 sqft

Owned property 4+ years

Built between 1965-2011

Absentee Owner 

Exclude trustee/corporate

So my total budget to get my marketing off the ground is a mere $200 but I plan on putting in a ton of sweat equity to help make up the lack of capitol. The above list cost roughly $50 and I went and bought enough supplies to mail to each 6 times. Including yellow pads, pens, and envelopes. Bringing my total cost before postage to around $85. 

Now I am currently handwriting and addressing all of these letters. I am currently trying to find the zen real estate investor through the small tasks. Think Daniel-son in Karate Kid where he is waxing the car. I am doing this because I dont really have an alternative but at the same time, I want to do every step of the entire process of wholeselling to have a better appreciation of the entire process.  Currently  I am shooting to write, label, stuff and mail about 14 letters a day. That will give me roughly 14 days worth of work and should keep the calls at a low enough volume that I will not get overwhelmed. That and I will have a couple of days where I wont have to write more letters for follow up. 

Hand writing everything is a painfully slow process but it has left me with plenty of time to ponder things I would have not thought about until I was here. So this leaves me with a couple of questions that maybe others have some opinions on. 

1. Do you use your personal home address as return address when mailing yellow letters or PO box? Pros & Cons?

2. I am using Google Voice and the phone number listed on my biz cards and mailers, the number is the same area code but not the same city as I live and market to. Do you think this would have a positive/negative impact or non at all?

Thanks everyone and I hope everyone out there is on the path to hitting their REI goals!

@Bryan L. Is a investor and a Realtor. He would probably be a good fit. 

I get started with BP and REI because of craigslist ad on Renaluts. Always had an interest but I have to admit they are the company that got me on the tracks.

My experience: So I will try to keep this brief and spare the details unless someone wants me to elaborate further. So I found a craigslist ad in the job posting section that said real estate investor apprentice wanted. I thought "ding" dream job.  After exchanging emails a few times with the guy that  posted I went to an intro webinar that was prerecorded. That basically outlined 4 most popular ways to make money in RE (wholesale, retail, flipping, and renting). The speaker I will admit was fantastic at getting people motivated and lighting that fire. I attended the follow up a few days later that was live and then I was assigned a mentor via the person that I originally contacted. This was where the hard sell came in and the last time I heard anything about doing real estate deals. At this point I spent several hours talking on the phone between my assigned mentor and the original point of contact. All they talked about was how they was making money selling the courses and I would have to take the courses to start making money myself selling the courses. It was a traditional MLM where the person that made first contact got some money and the person above got some and continued up the chain. The first point of contact had been in for a few months and had not even considered doing real estate deals yet. The "mentor" who had been in the company for a 18 months at the time of us talking had done 1 RE deal and was considered very successful by their standards of business. Now I am not running this company through the mud this is just my personal experience, but I seen little to no interest in actually doing real estate transactions from the people that was going to be my coaches and mentor. That is when I decided to walk away and find someone who actually wanted to do real estate and thank god that I came across BP while trying to research that company. I have had more conversations with people who were successful and did not have an agenda beyond doing more RE deals on here than I would have ever found on my own. 

Since then I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge and a handful of contacts that specialize in all four of those aforementioned types of REI and many other things that I did not even know was possible. I love the idea that BP stands by that their is NO SECRETS. There is only time, patience, knowledge, and experience. BP has been helping me fast track to all of those things without charging 1497.99 or 14,999, or whatever the magic real estate number is.

I believe that education is vital in this bushiness but will do nothing for you with out action no matter where or how you get your education. Does not matter if you got it through a friend/family, a college, a paid coach/mentor, a boot camp, an infomercial ad, or through a website like BP. You have to put to use whatever method you feel the most comfortable with. That is the point to all of these things, to go from where ever you are in your RE career to making your first or more deals. 

I would personally love to be able to go to the school of Jscott or any other person in this thread that real estate is their business and mentoring/education is not part of their business model but a hobby or simply a byproduct of their success. Thank you for taking the time to help make a place like BP work. 

@Bryan L. He is a Realtor and and investor in this market. He has helped me a lot since I have gotten started in my market. 

@Christopher Leon I am not apposed to driving for dollars and cold calling/door knocking. There is time costs and actual costs associated with that. For example, if I did that in my neighborhood it would be another chance to get to know my neighbors a bit better (im still new in my subdivision 2yrs here) but I would have to schedule a babysitter to come watch my son (19 months old) while I door knocked. This would give me a chance to work on my elevator pitch but it seems that I would be better to focus my time cold knocking on doors that made more sense, like with where FSBO signs are posted or distressed/vacant properties. My particular neighborhood probably would yield little results I would imagine. Although I like the angle that you are coming from. I will try to think outside the box in lead generation.

@John Horner Having more buying options in my tool belt are definitely part of my game plan with leaning more towards contract assignments, or owner financing and sub-to being my main focus with cash purchase as a last option for me to buy. At least just from talking this through with you I have had to really analyze  the numbers and I know what my break even conversion rate needs to be profitable. Im going to look into other areas that I can reduce my marketing expense like cutting mailer costs or going to the tax assessors office to see if I can get the list cheaper or for free.  

Ok so here is what my numbers look like (being conservative). 

I will try to keep my math here simple. Each prospect costs .20 to generate from listsource. I plan to mail 6 letters over the course of 6 months to each costing .75 per letter (stationary, stamp, envelope, ect). That is a total cost of $4.70 per prospect over 6 months, I have 1800 prospects and that is a total of $8,460 if I mail all 6 letters to all prospects. Being conservative I will assume that any lead that converts will be on the 6th touch. 

If I am converting .25% of the 1800 from prospects to a signed contract I get 4.5 deals. Being conservative I would round down and say 4 signed deals. My break even price on each deal would be $2115. 

Now I know I can count on $1500 per deal but was hoping to average $2500 with a best case of making $5000 (again being very conservative). 

So my take away on this is that in a worse case deal I loose 615, I average making 385, or best case make 2885 after marketing expenses included. This is me assigning contracts mind you nothing else. 

Those numbers seem very grim. This does not include any expenses outside of marketing. At these numbers by the time I added in earned wage taxes, gas, supplies, phone bill, unknown cost, and the time it takes to sort through all of the information, talk to sellers, and closing the deal I think I would still be upside down averaging 4k a deal. 

If my numbers are off please correct me. 

@John Horner 

So should I push my projections down to .25-.50% percent to go from prospect to signed contract?