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.
Over the weekend, created a tutorial video in which I performed a screen-scrape of the Broward County, Florida website. The objective was to find the absentee owners of property in that county. Shae Bynes, A fellow investor out of that area targets those who are absentee owners, so she was the beneficiary of this process. Hopefully she’ll find some use of the list that was created.
The Broward County website was odd because it doesn’t let one view all of the properties within the county at once (no filters). You are forced to select a filter to view anything. So the most logical process that I could think of was to search via the owner “Name” field and by vowels. Almost everyone has at least one vowel in their full name right? Right. So, I basically had 5 different lists one for A-E-I-O-and-U. I then took those 5 different lists and pulled records out where the property PIN or “Folio” as BCPA calls it was unique. Then lastly, I then took only the records where the “Mailing Address” field didn’t contain the letters “FL”, as in Florida. Now that, I’m sure filtered out some legitimate leads as some street names contained FL and such, but I had to work with what that website would give me.
So check out the tutorial videos below and tell me what you think. Soon, I’ll post another tutorial video of how I compiled a list of properties for the Tax Lien investor in preparation for the tax sale last month.
This past weekend, I spent alot of time behind the computer. I mentioned a while back that I was going to create another tutorial/video about how to use Mozenda with CraigsList (at least I think I did). I took a few hours on Sunday and came up with a screen-scrape for CraigsList. I would’ve created the video then, except I was having an issue with my account. Stay tuned for this as it might just be something that can replace a virtual assistant of yours. You know I’m all about that. I’m a firm believer in the adage, “if you want something done right, you do it yourself”. Yeah, I know about delegation, time-maximization, blah blah blah. But if you can get a computer to do what you’d normally have to hire a person to do, you’ve just eliminated a liability from your operation.
Marketing: I’m still working on calling people back who originally responded to my last mailing. The game of phone tag is on. I feel like this may be a waste of time as I’m following-up with luke-warm leads. The Realtor that I had answering my phone calls didn’t have any lead sheets that were fully completed. Part of this is probably because I just didn’t have any motivated sellers and the other part is that as a Realtor he is pre-occupied with what Realtors do on a daily basis.
Last week, I mentioned an investor who has about 60 properties in town and whom also invests in tax liens. Well check this out. He said that he was looking for someone to do some busy work for him to aid in preparation for the Tax Sale next week. He was offering to pay $15 an hour for someone to manually go through the tax delinquent list and check to see if the tax delinquent parcel numbers have a building attached (he accidentally bought a lien on a pond before). It’s 2am and I’m too lazy/sleepy to break down the exact detail. So I’ll just say that I will be able to do exactly what he is looking for with a screen-scrape of the tax assessors website. Perhaps, I’ll make a video about that too. So instead of sifting through 2,000 records at a one minute/record pace of 2,000 minutes (33 hours * $15) or $495. I’ll be able to get him squared away with everything he needs with about 18 hours of labor using Mozenda. Uhmmmm….yeah, I’ll just have to post again about it when I complete it. I’m not sure this paragraph makes sense in it’s brief form. Anyway, my eyelids are heavy. Peace Out.
P.S.
I’m posting this just cuz. One of the funniest comedies of all time.
I’m falling into bad habits again. It seems like every time I go to make a blog post another week has past. That’s bad for both you and me. More so for me as a lot of things take place during any given week that I’d love to read and reflect on in my blog (business diary). I think I just need to stop obligating myself to 400+ word posts every time. Then, I may not be reluctant to blog when time is sparse. Anyway, here is the cliff notes of what has been going on since last Sunday:
- Lawyer finally got back in touch with me, says it will take $5K for him to compose a legal model for me to follow regarding buyer/seller side birddogs. I’m going to consider this after I get some more capital established.
- I got the local broker squared away with his website. Hopefully, he’ll think of me when he wants to upgrade it.
- I submitted a bid to develop the new City of Champaign website. That damn bid application took alot of time, I didn’t expect it to. If I get that bid, I will be a very happy camper.
- Fired my local assistant that I had working on my envelopes and picked up what she had completed. I had to get rid of her not due to performance but due to her undependable nature.
- Found two new assistants. One that’s local and one non-local.
- Contributed my first guest-blog post to the BiggerPockets.com blog. I was inspired by Steph’s activity as a guest blogger on that site. And then I happened to receive a subscriber email stating that they were looking for more guest-bloggers and that they needed someone to blog about the usage of Technology and Real Estate. I thought to myself, “I can do that”. I emailed Joshua Dorkin about it, sent him a sample (Yellow Letter tutorial), he liked it, had a few phone convo’s with him, and now I am to post there every Thursday. I think nothing but good can come from this opportunity. I just hope I don’t fall victim to the 4 hour writer’s block that I did during the first post.
- Starting to make money as an affiliate of Mozenda, so that’s encouraging. I spent a lot of time last weekend getting some how-to videos posted to YouTube and I also have starting to target the Data Mining niche of Twitter Users via my additional Twitter Account. Still have some ground to cover here with the marketing of this product.
- Took on a project to create a video for the Youth Illini Hockey program
- Took another project to create a marketing video for a homeowner in Mahomet, Illinois (10 mi from Champaign). He’s getting a video and other internet exposure to sell his house, car, and some furniture. By the way, this guy who is selling his house is my new role model. He started a construction company about 5 years ago and now is doing extremely well. He has properties in Illinois and Florida, a sports-car collection, etc…talk about inspiration. Very soon, I’ll have some toys too.
It’s another Sunday and I’m a bit frustrated. I have an assistant that is avoiding my calls and a lawyer who is under-delivering.
My new local assistant who was given the task of hand-addressing and stuffing my envelopes let me know on Saturday that she needed more time. This isn’t the issue. The issue is that she now is avoiding my text messages and phone calls. I’m a bit worried about this situation because she has over $200 worth of my stationary. However, the beauty of her being local is that I have her home address. So she can’t completely just dissapear on me. Now that I think of it, I should’ve held some type of performance-guarantee deposit. Which would’ve basically been a $200 deposit collected and refunded in addition to payment once the project was completed. However, even if I was an assistant I wouldn’t go for that policy. Hmm, I’d love to hear some ideas in the comments about this. *Update* As I type, I just received a return text from her. This is a plus, but she’s not completely off the shit list yet.
My lawyer that I was once so ecstatic about, is starting to let me down. It was clearly stated during our initial consultation, that I was choosing a ‘new’ lawyer due to the lack of responsiveness of the one prior. He explained that he realized that was an issue amongst many attorneys and that he was different. I’m beginning to believe that in Champaign, maybe I’ll just have to lower my expectations a bit, possibly I’m dealing with the best-of-the-worst? I’m not asking for my attorney to respond to my emails within 5 minutes and always be available via phone, or anything like that. I just need someone who will deliver upon their promises. A huge pet-peeve of mine is when a ‘professional’ states that they’re going to do something and they don’t follow-through. Don’t tell me you’re going to do something just because you think it sounds good or that it’s something that I want to hear. Here is what I’m talking about:
8-20-09
Justin, I’m out of the office until next week. I’ll get back to you then.
- Lawyer
8-19-09
Update please. Also, I have yet to receive an invoice from you. I believe it’s been over a month since our initial consultation.
- Justin
This was an email that was sent to my lawyer and the reply. And I haven’t heard shit since. I guess on the bright side, I still haven’t been billed for that consultation and following email correspondences. So at this point it’s like interest-free financing; that’s my optimism working.
Oh well, on a brighter note, my internet marketing operation is coming along. I’ve setup a 2nd account on twitter, just to target the demographic that could make use of the Mozenda software. I also have some automation in place with that account. In a nutshell, I have implemented Yahoo Pipes, RSS feeds, and HootSuite to automatically @Tweet people who match my demographic criteria. Maybe I’ll do a tutorial on this later, hmm. Also, I spent damn-near all of today making videos about the Mozenda software and posting them to YouTube. This should drive more people to my affiliate link.
Well, that’s it for now, I’m about to head to the gym.
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