Justin B. McClelland

I’ve been slipping up on my blogging lately.  A once a week frequency, isn’t really blogging.  But I’m still out here in these streets making things happen.  I’ve got two closings that are of utmost priority at this point.  I’ll have tons of stuff to write about once those happen.  I mean I have some things to write about that you could learn from…even from a rookie like me.  So with that said, doing all of this blogging with no deals to talk about is getting old.  I know this is supposed to document my journey and all, but it feels like I’ve been writing for the last year about a cake that hasn’t finished baking.  I mean…I already told you the recipe I used, I don’t know what else to tell you besides it’s still in the oven.

Accountability Week:
I didn’t accomplish any of my weekly advertising tasks.  I have put a lower priority on those for now.  Priority #1, get to closing.  However, I did organize my home office last weekend.  That may not sound like alot, but trust me…it was.  I had receipts all over my desk, contracts all over the floor, envelopes, etc.  One thing about me though is that I’m very organized, even when I have an “organized mess”.  I just enjoy the organization without the mess much better.  Now I have my papers filed in the correct folders, my receipts in the correct boxes, I even performed a backup of my laptop to my external hard-drive (much overdue and takes forever).  By the way, I need to get with the program and start backing-up online.  What services do you guys use out there?  I just realized that if something happened to my laptop ‘and’ my external hard-drive….I’d be S-O-L.

I haven’t hit yall with a video update in a minute.  I take my flip camera almost everywhere I go and have beaucoup footage.  I’m usually just too lazy to go through the motions with Windows Movie Maker and YouTube.  But, I was feeling extra today.  So here’s a lil snippet of what I’ve been up to.

Marketing, Wholesale Accountability, courthouse, Hard disk drive, Windows Movie Maker, YouTube

So it’s late Saturday night.  And I’m contemplating hitting the streets to “advertise”, because late at night is the best time to do it.  But the bad part is that it just snowed today and I know my white advertisements do so well against a white background when stuck in a frozen ground (I’m being kinda subliminal for a reason that I can’t explain here), I need to order yellow ones.  So anyway, I think I may do something else with my time tonight.

The booty-butt cheeks deal is likely to fall through.  And I don’t even give a sh!t anymore.  I just spoke with the sellers today and they said.  We feel like we should get 9K regardless of the amount of liens on the property.  Uhm….okay lady…that’s not how it works.  Especially since, they’re not going to get sh!t for that house any way that they look at it.  But oh well, I don’t even feel like going into detail anymore about it.  I’m passed being pissed-off about it.  I’m not even going to blog about it anymore (maybe).  But I don’t think I’m going to let this go.  After all of the work, that I put into this thing…aw HELL NAW!  They haven’t seen the end of Justin…AKA “J. Stacks”…AKA “I work harder than hard-working”…AKA “Mr. Who put this Sh!t together? Me! That’s WHO!”

I’ve got other deals in the pipeline so, it’s all to the goodie.  I’m not superstitious…but I think I’m about to stop blogging about deals before they close.  Big-ass waste of time.  I’ll either wait until after they close or don’t close to give details.  I think that’s the route I’ll take from now on.

On another note, “nonchalant Justin” is slowly dieing from the self-inflicted stab wounds of being “too nice”.  And Type-A Justin is slowly emerging.  I remember being a kid and listening to my Dad on business-calls with the last words being “f*** you” before he hung-up on them.  And I also remember as a kid, running to my Mom and whining about how some kid on the playground didn’t like me.  And she said then what she says now, “Boy, everyone CAN’T be your friend”.  So with that said, things ’bout to change ’round these here parts (don’t think I’ll ever take it to the “edge” like my Dad did though).  I can only be Type-A Justin while I have to though…I do realize “Type-A”-ness and the side-effects can kill.

I’ve got BIG plans, that only I can vision and the naysayers are coming out of the woodwork, like I care what they have to say.  I know what I’m capable of, so I don’t need you to tell me what I “can’t do”.  This must be how Kanye West felt before anyone would sign him.  He didn’t fit the mold of a typical “rapper” and many wouldn’t give him the time of day.  As Kanye stated, he played the song “Jesus Walks” for a label and they didn’t sign him!  This “Jesus Walks” music video is one of the best videos of all time.  I’ve gotta remind myself sometimes that Jesus has got my back.

Marketing, Real Estate, Wholesale Jesus, naysayers, Wholesale

Okay, this whole consistent blogging thing isn’t working out.  Clearly, I was supposed to keep with the “Accountability Tuesday” theme as of last week.  It’s of course now Wednesday.  So anyway, new rules.  Once a week, I’ll just have an “Accountability Day”.  How about that.

So, I’ve technically accomplished my 40-offer-a-week goal, but I haven’t.  90% of the issue was getting my system setup, and now that I do, I’m waiting on my lawyer to get my custom Option-Contract back to me.  It sucks to be stuck at idle…so I’m moving on.

New Weekly Goals:
1. Make at least one MLS offer each day, direct to listing agent
2. Deliver at least 50 brochures to houses in Urbana
3. Post 5 flyers

That’s it for now, I’m kinda stuck at the moment, to be honest.  My cash-flow is non-existent right now and I have no funds to do any extra advertising (direct mail, newspaper, etc).  So I’m sticking with multiple offers and the advertising materials that I already have for now.

- Peace Out

Accountability, Marketing, Real Estate Accountability, Advertising, Cash flow

Another week has passed and I spent about 15 hours working on my offer-making machine.  Good news; I’ve got it done and it’s ready to kick-out offers (on expired MLS listings).  Bad news; the Option-Contract that I was planning to enclose as part of my offer is garbage.

Originally, I was thinking of just mailing a short letter with a complete standard MLS contract.  Then I had a change of heart and felt the Keep-It-Simple-Stupid principle would be best.  So, I’m opting to send a short letter with an option-contract, perhaps the simplified approach will be better.  I had found this very simple Option-Contract on a forum about two weeks ago and I made some tweaks to it to fit my preferences.  I setup the mail-merge with it and my cover letter, I was feeling like the best thing that ever happened to real estate.  The best that ever did it.  So my gut told me just to shoot over the option-contract to my lawyer just to cover my bases…and I’m glad I did.  I received an email response that was about 5 paragraphs long, the cliff-notes basically explaining that the document was trash.  So…I’ll be stalled on the 40 offers until I get my shiny new option contract back from my lawyer.

The beautiful thing is that I have about 500 expireds to choose from.  I could just pace the offers at 40 each week or maybe just push out more per week to make up for lost time.  This has been a weekly goal for about a month now.

Once I have my new option-contract, perhaps I’ll post in detail of how I created this automated system I now have.  Surely at least one person may learn from it or get an idea for something better.

P.S.
I’m going to step-up my fitness regimen a bit.  I was looking at a measurement that I made back in January of 2009, and back then I had a weight of 210 lbs and percent body fat of 19%.  I then measured myself again about a week ago and now have a weight of 200 lbs and a percent body fat of 17.2%.  Not much of a change.  However, I haven’t really been pushing that hard with workouts.  It’s kind of hard to do so when you’re not specifically training for something.  Very hard.  I can’t wait until I have time for triathlons and such.

- Peace Out

Marketing, Real Estate Contract, Investing, Lawyer, Option contract, Real Estate

Sooo, it’s Tuesday evening and I’ve been working hard the past week to meet my “guaranteed” goal of 40 offers from last weeks’ Accountability Monday.  Let’s just say, I won’t give any more “guarantees”.  That 40 offer business is kicking my ass, I’m not going to lie to you.  That’s a lot!  I don’t give excuses, however I will say that I had some hindrances outside of my control which held me back a bit.

These hindrances were primarily related to only making offers on MLS properties and using an agent.  The agent I was using became reluctant to represent me as a buyer due to my wholesale strategies, he feared that he would become stigmatized due to the low nature of my offers.  Honestly, I can’t blame him and if I was strictly a retail-Realtor, I’d probably feel the same way.  I’m sure black-balling occurs amongst Realtors when one goes against the grain. I actually heard that this happens to Realtors that offer flat-fee MLS listings in town.  But it looks like using an agent isn’t going to be the best route for me and what I’m doing, so from now on I’m going to make offers directly to the listing-Realtor.

I did get in 15 offers over the past week, so I wasn’t a complete failure.  However, I just couldn’t come up with another 35 worth offering on and I was sort of road-blocked by my Realtor.  Now that I’ve cleared that hurdle, this shouldn’t be an issue any longer.  And I literally just came-up with a new idea that will help me dramatically in my quantity of offers.  And that is….drum roll….the submission of offers on expired MLS listings.  I already have it figured out in my head, how I can make this happen with a MS-Word mail-merge and a MS-Excel spreadsheet.  Since the properties aren’t listed, no need for complete contracts, I’ll just send a detailed “Letter of Intent”.  This will save beaucoup time by allowing for some automization.  I’ll hand-address the envelopes, send them off, and it’s a done-deallie.  I should get some interesting results from this approach.  Just the other day I was scouring CraigsList for some old ads to make offers on.  I saw that another local investor picked up a property for 16K when it was listed and expired just a month earlier at 35K.  So the proof is in the puddin’.

So I say all of that to say, “I’m keeping the goal of 40 offers/week”.  No more guarantee’s, no more roadblocks that won’t get demolished in a matter of minutes.  I’m getting to that goal and once I do, I’m going to double it.

On another front, the wholesale deal is back in the ICU.  I informed the heirs that they’re not going to receive any proceeds from this house due to all of the liens that were on it, yesterday.  I have a feeling that they won’t want to sell it now, despite being contractually bound.  The phone conversation didn’t go so well.  However, since the property is in pre-probate and they’re not the owners on title, I’m not certain that they don’t have an “out” of this contract.  I’ve brainstormed for a while and put myself in their shoes, either way they look at it (sell to me, or keep it) there is absolutely no money in this house for them (I may go into details later when the deal is officially closed or dead).  I plan on having a meeting with them as soon as we can schedule one, at that time I’ll make the numbers really clear and at that time they better trash any slick ideas that they’re brewing.

On yet another front, I received a short-sale lead today.  An extremely hot one at that!  Long-story short, this guy is a retiree and is extremely frustrated with being a landlord.  He has a property that he initially put Section-8 tenants in and they “tore it up”.  He then put non-Section-8 tenants in it and they “tore it up” too.  But not only that, they also aren’t making their rent payments and instead of ‘eating’ the mortgage costs for the last 5 months, this landlord is now in pre-foreclosure.  Since he’s a landlord, he knows the rules of the short-sale game, so this should make things easier for me.  We meet this Saturday, I plan on getting the entire short-sale package completed on-the-spot, so hopefully John Michailidis and I can have a go at a JV again.

Damn, this was a long-ass post.

- Peace Out

Marketing, Real Estate CraigsList, John Michailidis, MLS, Short Sale

I’m running into a bit of a hiccup.  This 40 offer a week thing is quite the task.  I’ve got 10 down and 30 to go.  However, I’m kind of running out of properties to offer on that fit the category for which I have buyers for.   Thus far, I’ve been targeting some properties that are listed on the MLS and others where the owners respond to my ads.

I need more…I’ve got to find more properties that are “below radar”, that’s where the deals are, I think.  I’m talking about properties that are in pre-foreclosure, probate, tax delinquent, etcetera.  The catch is, it takes some capital to target these types of properties.  So until I have that capital, I’ll just have to go after the above-radar properties and see if I come across some motivated sellers.

What are you all doing out there as far as mass offers?  I need some more ideas…

Marketing offers, probate, tax delinquent

I’ve started receiving responses from the Capstone Condo owner direct-mail campaign.  These letters went out last Tuesday so it’s still a bit early yet to tabulate all of the results.  Using this yellow-letter method, I was hoping to get a higher than normal (3-4%) response rate.  Yellow-letters typically get a 10-15% response rate.  I’ve only received 4 responses thus far, so that’s about 2% of a response rate since approximately 200 pieces were sent out.  And all 4 of those responses are owners from Illinois.  I need for some of those Cali buyers to give me a call!

Here is the letter that I sent.  I used the same process that I wrote in detail about a few months ago.

Marketing Advertising, Advertising mail, Marketing

I spent the majority of today refining my MS-Excel list of condo buyers.  I’ve just decided that I’m going to send them all a (yellow) letters.

Marketing, Real Estate cali, California, Illinois

So I celebrated the brand-new day by spending it behind this computer.  I watched the parade in cali a bit and a few bowl games played in the background, but primarily I was focused on this laptop in my lap and I was working away.  I primarily worked on pulling the contact information of investors that invested in a condo development in town.  The condo development is Captstone Quarters, there are 208 units and according to my research all of them are non-owner occupied…translation = they’re being leased out.  And primarily leased out to college students as campus is a little less than a mile away from the development.

I got on the Champaign County Assessor’s website and pulled up the addresses of the condo buildings.  I then setup a scrape using the good ole’ trusty Mozenda software that I’ve relied upon multiple times here recently.  I even created a little video of getting this done.  Once again, I saved hours of manual labor by using this software.

Marketing, Real Estate Bowl game, College, Mozenda, new year

Last Weeks’ goals:

1. Submit a total of 20 offers on MLS properties FAIL
2. Submit an offer on at least one REO property FAIL
3. Make at least one offer on a FSBO FAIL

Okay, so I failed all of the tasks again.  I’m going to keep these goals again for next week, just as I did last week.  However, this week I should be able to focus a lot of time on getting this done.  I’ve got the week off from the 9-5, so I can dedicate a lot more time to these goals.

And also, I think I have the wholesale property sold, so then I can get that burden off of my back and focus on getting some more deals closed.  I met with a buyer today, that I met with before Christmas.  He wanted to take a second look and we are to meet up tomorrow to complete the paper work.  So we’ll see about this, hopefully it’s a done-deal.  But in the back of my mind, I’m prepared to keep looking for another buyer if this guy flakes out.

I meet tomorrow with a lender that my Realtor referred me to for a discussion regarding the 203K HUD rehab loan and also the loans available that don’t require seasoning like FHA.  I need to learn more about loans that don’t require seasoning for my short-sale efforts to sell to an end-buyer with financing.

Also, despite the fact that I haven’t submitted the REO offer that I had planned on.  I went through all of my REO Rockstar material again during the past week.  I think I’m going to stop-in and speak with one of the top REO agents in town and just make an impromptu introduction.  I think I have the REO game down, now it’s just time to put knowledge into action and close some deals.

Lastly, I am going to get a bit more aggressive regarding my cash-buyer search.  I’m going to perform two additional tasks to get more buyers.  One, I’m going to direct-mail all of the investor owned condo units at a new condominium complex that was built close to campus.  Many of these investors are located on the west-coast and east-coast, with the higher cost-of-living on either coast, I know I shouldn’t have a problem adding some cash buyers to my list.  As 100K in cash to someone in LA or NYC is a lot less than to someone who lives in Kentucky.  Two, I found that there is one landlord in town who is one of the largest, if not the largest.  I posted on Facebook and Twitter that I was looking for someone to assist me with a skip-trace.  I needed a skip-trace done, because this guy has like 20 different LLC’s and I didn’t want to mail to his LLC PO Boxes (as I have before with no result), I wanted his home address.  Steven Washington, an investor out of Philadelphia helped me out and hooked me up with the address/phone number information that I was looking for.  This investor purchases like 2-3 houses CASH monthly!  One of the very few in this small town that do so. I definitely NEED to make his acquaintance. I am thinking of doing something ‘extremely’ creative to provoke a response.  Something like a FedEx Next-Day envelope with an introduction letter and a high-value gift-card maybe?  I don’t know…I’m taking all ideas…let me hear them in the comments…

- Peace Out

Marketing, Real Estate Cash Buyer, FHA, REO