In these days of the real estate sites like Zillow and Trulia, the marketing and lead generation tools on these sites draw millions of page views every month. What you shouldn’t be doing as an investor, home buyer or seller is using the value estimates on these sites to make decisions.

Truly good real estate investors know the valuation of their deals is key to insuring success and protecting projected profits. To effectively determine if a deal is a rental building wealth or flip to make some much needed cash, you have to analyze a deal fully. All the market areas covered by REIAComps, insure you easily know which way an investor should go.

Even Zillow will tell you that they aren’t always on the money. They have a chart of median error percentages in estimates in major cities, and they run mostly between around 7% and 9%. That’s around $16,000 on a $200,000 house, so you don’t want that kind of number in your research for a wholesale or flip deal for sure. Feel free to use a Zestimate for a quick idea of approximate value, but what you want to do to arrive at an accurate market value is what real estate agents do; develop a CMA, Comparative Market Analysis. Read More→

In many past articles I have stressed the importance of knowing the current real estate market. You should take note when property prices are rising, falling or plateauing. If you are a flipper, is your inventory selling faster or sitting on the market longer? If you are a wholesaler, are you having to work harder to find deals or have you suddenly found an abundance of deals? Are the deals you are finding getting easier or harder to sell? If you are a real estate agent or work closely with one, is his/her listing receiving multiple offers and flying off the board? Or are they sitting on the MLS with a few showings here and there? These are questions you should always be asking as a real estate investor.

One can always pick up an article or see a news report about what is going on in real estate but it is usually a report of real estate as a nation not just your market place. Most realtor associations have monthly reports that are helpful but they are not out until the middle of the following month. As an investor, even these reports may be too late in providing the information. If you are in real estate or plan on being in real estate you must keep your finger on the pulse. If you are doing plenty of business you will feel the change in the market and can begin to prepare for it immediately. However, if you only dabble in real estate, you might not know what is coming around the bend. If you dabble or are just getting started make sure to network with people that are full-timers. If you find a deal you plan on flipping or holding on to for a rental, discuss it with a veteran investor. They can mentor you on the best option and possibly keep you from making a mistake. Read More→

Finding ways to attract motivated sellers to your Real Estate Investing business is probably the most important element in your business, since without the motivated sellers, there are no deals to be made.

There are several different ways to find motivated sellers for your real estate investing business using a shot gun type of approach to locate as many sellers as you can. A shot gun approach is where you “blast” your message out to your market and hope that there are motivated sellers among the bunch. Some of these techniques include yard or vehicle signage, business cards, t-shirts and hats, door hangers, pens, buttons, business card magnets, flyers and auto shades. What I really want to focus on today though, is using business cards to locate motivated sellers.

When having business cards printed, there are a couple of things you want to keep in mind. One is that your business card needs to have a grabber headline and it needs to catch people’s attention by looking different from every other business card out there.

Use bright colors and a benefit driven message on your business cards. List the reasons on your card why that seller should work with you and how you can help them. Remember business cards are a highly effective inexpensive lead generating tool for your business. On your business card, you want to provide your potential seller with a couple of different ways to contact you so they can contact you in the way that is most comfortable for them. So for example your card might include your phone number, your email address and a website for them to check out. The more ways you give a potential seller to contact you, the more of them will. Read More→

We’ve all been there. We go through and estimate repairs on a property and miss something. Sometimes, that something may be minor however it could be quite significant. This tends to happen when the rehabs are larger in scope or have a structural or foundation issue that needs addressing. I don’t usually see wholesale courses that teach how to address these sorts of things when dealing with these points beyond generalities. However, generalities is usually not going to get this done right and does little to build confidence in Buyers.

While Buyers of course are expected to do their own due diligence, it has more than frustrated countless Buyers when wholesaler numbers end up being way off due to this common ignorance. I thought I would take some time to outline some common figures for our market for a variety of these often overlooked items. Take this and adapt it to your area and this will give you a solid starting point. Read More→