It’s been a while since my last post and a lot has gone down.  I’m going to change my Accountability Mondays to Accountability Tuesdays.  Mondays are just way too busy for me.

So to address the “40 offer/week” goal that I’ve had for the past 4 weeks.  I still haven’t reached it.  HOWEVER, next week it should be reached.  This is quite a lofty goal that is definitely obtainable, but not easily however.  I’ve almost perfected the process that I have in place to efficiently make these offers.  I definitely could’ve made the 40 offers in a manual fashion, but that’s just not my style.  I HATE to work HARD and NOT SMART.  That’s just plain dumb!  I’m sure you’ve heard the Abe Lincoln quote:

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

I couldn’t agree more.  Spend the first four hours sharpening the axe and you could probably chop down 3 additional trees with the last two hours that you have to work.

I spoke once before about the system I’m creating for my offers to expired MLS listings.  I got hung-up for about a total of 8 hours on an Excel spreadsheet that would recognize my VLOOKUP function (if you’re an Excel pro, get at me, I’ll pay you).  I think there’s a bug in Excel that’s preventing me from doing what I want, so I’m transitioning towards the use of a SQL database.  I’ll then be able to write some queries that will spit out my data to a spreadsheet and then, I’ll get my mail-merge on.  *The geeks that are reading this, know what I’m talking about.*  If you don’t know, I suggest finding someone who does so you can work smart too.  So anyway, I say all of that to say, “I haven’t reached my 40 offer goal yet, keeping the same goal for next Tuesday”. Broken record I know.  But if you’re meeting ALL of your goals everytime, their not set HIGH enough.  There, I just made myself feel better.

Onward an upward. So on a positive note, I’ve progressed quite a bit in other facets of my business.  I’ve acquired an additional Realtor to include in my inner-circle.  This is actually a big-deal, because she is a Realtor that has numerous ties to investors in California.  I mentioned a while ago, my efforts to obtain cash-buyers that invested in a new condo construction near the U of I campus.  Well, this Realtor actually sold about half of the units in the complex and still corresponds with many of the out of state investors she sold to.  Her and her brokerage has a working relationship with the Marshall Reddick Real Estate Network in California.  We met on Saturday and discussed ways that we can work together in the future.  Basically, if she can bring me a cash buyer from her network, we’ll split deals down the center.  This is good.

Also, I met with one of the sellers from the everlasting wholesale deal #1.  I could tell that he was beginning to avoid my phone calls, so I got him to agree to a meeting with me.  Preparing for this meeting took an entire Saturday morning and the meeting went down Monday evening.  It turns out, he was just severely confused about the entire situation.  Confusion leads to frustration and  speculation.  Not good.  I explained all of the details with his liens and all of the options that he (doesn’t) have with this property.  I inundated him with information and had an answer to each of his rebuttals.  Following the meeting, I could see the defeat in his face.  He now really realizes he’s not going to see any money from this deal because it’s essentially a short-sale.  I meet with his Sister Wednesday night.  Once I explain everything to her, I should be able to speed this thang up and avoid any possibilities of legal action (specific performance suits, i.e. more time sans check).  By the way, I feel like a Realtor with all of this hand-holding.  It SUCKS to be one of them! I’m not holding your hand, I don’t know you like that!  In the future, I’m going to avoid these types of small, complex deals like people with halitosis (you thought I was going to say the plague, right).

And lastly, I met with the distressed landlord who wants to short-sale his rental.  I picked up 90% of the paperwork today and will return on Thursday to get the rest.  This guy is the epitome of a distressed seller.  And since he is an investor, I barely had to explain anything to him.  He pretty much knows how it works and is educated about what a foreclosure can do to his FICO.  His main motivation is to preserve his credit.  I wish all sellers could be like this.  Hopefully, I can get many more short-sales in the pipeline.  This is the second short-sale lead that I “stumbled upon”.  I can’t wait to start marketing to pre-foreclosures with a REAL effort.

And lastly (for real this time), I had my second meeting with a future business partner for a Tax Lien investing company.  I’ll reiterate that the Tax Lien/Tax Deed investing game is supremely slept-on.  Most investors who invest in these most likely don’t tell anyone and keep it a secret.  But, I don’t care, I’m going to start sharing it all.  After watching a fellow Champaign investor write a check for $560,000 at last years lien sale, I know this is something worth exploiting.  Me and my biz partner are going to create money out of air.  The plan is to borrow money and invest the borrowed money into Tax Liens.  We’ll profit the spread between the cost of the money borrowed and the net proceeds from the lien penalties whether redeemed or foreclosed.  Simple as that!

- Peace Out

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Liens, Real Estate, Short Sale cali, excel, Short Sale, Tax lien

I’ve got good news and that is the latest wholesale deal is coming together like butt cheeks.  I received the completed appraisal today from my appraiser via email, I then forwarded it on to the head guy at the DHFS. I waited about 3 hours and I gave him a call.  I didn’t expect it, but he was ready to wheel and deal right-then.  He saw the CMA that I had submitted to him in my short-sale package came in at about 9K and the appraisal came in at 11K, he offered to split the difference at 10K.  I countered and asked if he could knock 1K off and take 9K, he agreed to only if I ate the cost of the appraisal (which initially he offered to cover).  We had a deal.

So long story-short.  I now have the 65K DHFS lien, with other Champaign city liens, reduced to the sum of 9K!  The pros are that it looks like this deal will close after all and all of this learning will come with an added bonus in the form of a check.  The cons are that I’ll have to eat the tax lien, appraisal fee, title work fee, and seller lawyer fees.  So instead of the planned 6K, it looks like I’ll net around 5K.  That’s better than zero.

All I need now is to get the seller to an attorney so that an “Affidavit of heirship” and a “Personal Undertaking” can be composed.  These documents are needed in addition to copies of the owners on title death certificates, to close.  Since the owners of the property passed away without wills, probate can be avoided since their are only 3 members of the family left and they are all in agreeance with selling the property.

So, I’m not going to consider it a done-deal until I have my check…but this one’s pretty much in the bag.  So, I’ll part with this video for your viewing enjoyment.  I think I’ll feel like Bill Cosby in this video when I get my check, but I won’t make it rain on ‘em yet…5K ain’t enough, that’s just a drizzle.

P.S.
If you are not laughing at the video above, you have absolutely no sense of humor!  I can’t stop laughing at it, just focus on Cosby, not the booty.  Let the booty stay in your peripheral view and enjoy.

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Liens, Real Estate, Short Sale cali, excel, Short Sale, Tax lien

The latest wholesale deal is still kicking, I haven’t lost it yet.  Let’s just say it moved off of life-support but it’s still in the ICU.  During this week among other things, I spent some time wrapping up the details for getting this thing closed.  I now have a CMA from my Realtor, plenty pictures, and a rehab cost estimate.  These documents, along with a letter describing my motives for wanting to purchase this property (assign) and revitalize the neighborhood starting with this house, will be sent to the appropriate parties.  The appropriate parties being the 3 parties that have liens on the property.  There are a total of 4 liens on the house.  One being a tax lien.  The others by DHFS, the city of Champaign, and Champaign sewage.

Let me state a few facts so you can see how my deal came back to life.  Originally, I was very concerned about the 65K DHFS lien.  I’m not anymore.

Here are the facts:
1. The property has been vacant for about a year the two owners on title are now deceased. It will continue to be vacant as the heirs want nothing to do with the property
2. The property is tax delinquent and the taxes were sold to an investment company in October 2009.

Cover via Amazon

*Tangent*  Buy the book “Profit by Investing in Real Estate Tax Liens” by Larry B. Loftis.  This is the one of the most slept-on real estate hustles in existence.  You can thank me later.

With the facts being what they are, let me tell you how “I have the juice”.  In Illinois tax liens are by default 1st position liens.  This means that all other liens are subordinate and if the property goes through a tax foreclosure ALL SUBSEQUENT LIENS ARE WIPED!  Granted that it takes approximately 3 years of real estate tax delinquency to be foreclosed on, this means in the inevitable will happen in 2 more years.  After which, the DHFS, City of Champaign, and Champaign Sewage will walk away with ZERO!

So, now do you see where I’m going with this?  When I lay out the facts and the probabilities of events to the subsequent lien holders, it would be in their best interest to drastically reduce their note and get SOME money this today versus NO money in two years!

So the mission at hand is to develop a “no-brainer” (short-sale) package that even a 4th grader could understand.  This way, I’ll hopefully post again soon about how I got the deal closed.  However there are no guarantees in this crazy real estate world.  I’ve heard of some just-plain dumb decisions being made by mortgagors before, so we shall see.
- Peace Out

All of this work for a measly lil check.  But either way this deal goes, I’ll just consider the lack in compensation as a tuition fee.  It’s coming down to the wire now, I feel like Eminem in 8-mile.

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Liens, Real Estate, Short Sale cali, excel, Short Sale, Tax lien

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.

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Liens, Real Estate, Short Sale cali, excel, Short Sale, Tax lien

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

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Liens, Real Estate, Short Sale cali, excel, Short Sale, Tax lien

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.

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Liens, Real Estate, Short Sale cali, excel, Short Sale, Tax lien