Justin B. McClelland

I’ve got an action packed 7 days approaching:

Tomorrow I meet with the lady I mentioned in my last post whose house I targeted with one of my direct mail letters.  My Realtor/Investor colleague and I took a look at the property last Friday.  Man was that thang tore-up.  It will need a new roof, new windows, new kitchen, a new whole bunch of stuff.  But the good thing is that this is the worst house on the street.  All of the neighboring houses look great.  I have some comps, a CMA, and an estimate of repairs to accompany my offer.  So this should take the shell-shock out of the offer.  I think she is expecting an offer close to retail minus just a few thousand in repairs…I hope not.

Tomorrow evening, I’m meeting with the Tax Lien investor who I created the screen-scrape for of the County Assessors’ website.  The scrape just referenced each property by parcel number and extracted the homeowner name, property address, mailing address, market value of land, market value of building.  He mainly wanted this done so that he’d know going into the tax sale which properties have a building attached.  In the past he had inadvertently purchased the tax liens on ponds and vacant land.  I even went a step further and computed some ratios for him in excel, a tax/value ratio.  The lower the ratio the better as in a small amount tax lien could possibly result in a high dollar property.  There’s also some other stuff that I hooked up too.  I think I’ll do a BiggerPockets.com post about Tax Lien research and such on Thursday.  The sale is this Wednesday morning and I’m going to check it out.  I’m interested to see how this goes down. I’ve heard of the fast pace of these things.  I’ll get some video footage if I can.

I now have 5 different classified ads out and because of my nifty tracking methods, I know which paper is yielding the best results thus far.  And that is the American Classifieds/Thrifty Nickel.  My phone is blowing up with people calling from this paper.  And I must say, I love the ad that I placed.  I took the idea from a Preston Ely ebook I purchased a while back.  The ad says:

I Buy Houses CA$H, Quick Close, All These Other Ads Are Jokes! Call Justin @ 217.123.1234

The bad thing is that alot of the people who are calling on this ad, have properties way out in the sticks.  I wasn’t expecting that.  I can’t spread myself all over central Illinois researching different areas and trying to become an expert in them, just not feasible.

I had this one guy who owns a rental in the boonies call me 7 times today.  That’s right SEVEN times.   He left a message the first time and couldn’t wait for me to get back in touch with him.  I was thinking I had a really motivated seller on my hands.  I call him back and this kid wants 3k less than full retail!?  I told him that he may be better suited for a Realtor (I don’t have time to waste), but then he started rebutting and says maybe we can work something out.  I really think that this guy is desperate but just doesn’t want to show his hand.  He kinda already did by calling me SEVEN times in an 8 hour time span.  We’ll see about this one.  I honestly couldn’t care less (for some reason very positive things happen for me when I don’t try too hard).

Next Monday, I’m going to the REBarCamp in Indianapolis.  This event is basically a conference where real estate professionals come together and exchange ideas and techniques for implementing web 2.0/3.0 into their business.  I see it as a marketing workshop.  Should be enlightening.

It’s 10:35pm and I’ve still got a gang of stuff to do before I call it a night.  I burn so much midnight oil, I should buy stock in this s**t. Peace Out

Internet Marketing, Marketing, Random, Real Estate, Tutorials, Uncategorized, Web Development american classifieds, Real Estate, rebarcamp, Tax lien

I met with the broker today to discuss the possibilities about his new website.  The meeting went fairly well overall.  However, it seemed to lack focus, we were all over the place with our meeting topics.  I like structure and agenda, I’m organized like that.  So when we were discussing things at random, I felt like we were wasting effort that would be better spent focused.  But despite that fact, I think we were able to gain an understanding of each other.  He basically wants a website that has all of the bells and whistles a site that the largest Champaign Property Management company should have.  And I think I was able to successfully convey that I could provide that for him.  I didn’t sleep last-night as the hours were spent drafting a plan for his new website complete with new ideas, comparisons of the competition, etc. Now, I just need to submit a formal bid to get the gig.  I need that gig for mo’ marketing money!

I’m starting to doubt my original plan concerning diversification.  Because I don’t think any of my non-related real estate ventures have even close to the ROI that real estate wholesaling does.  I may be focusing too much of my time in other areas.  However, I need marketing money so that I can focus on real estate.  Kind of a catch-22 I guess.

After the meeting I slept from 10am to 3pm (some of the best sleep I ever had), I had a meeting with my assistant at 3:30pm at the library to pick-up my yellow letters.  On a side-note, what’s with assistants and tardiness!?  We clearly discussed in an email last night that we were to meet at 3:30pm today, apparently somehow she interpreted that as 4:00pm.  But even if she did, she was late for that too as she showed at about 4:15pm!  Stee-rike ONE!

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Hopefully, it was just a mixup on her part.  But if it happens again…”on to the next one”.

I got the letters now, there all stuffed and hand-addressed and ready to go.  All I need to do is buy the stamps for them and send them off.  And wait for the flood of calls.  In a box of 900 letters, surely there is at least 10k floating around in there somewhere.

- Justin

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