I love this baby.

What do I think of the economy in 2008? blech...

Funny stuff. I hope you chuckle at this one.



Cheers,
Taylor

California Contract A First For 2009

FINALLY!

Picked up my first contract in what seems like years! Whew! It's a great house in a great neighborhood in Paso Robles.
Here's the stats:
4BR,
3Bth,
1900 sq ft,
Built 1995.
It's a single story classic CA home... stucco with a tile roof.
Estimated retail is $420k and I picked it up below $300k. Not a bad deal right? We'll see how fast it gets snapped up in this market. The better the deal, the quicker it'll go... I should be able to pay a couple bills with this one.

It is in immaculate condition and I was able to pick it up at a pretty good price. Now it comes down to finding my buyer.

It's going up on my website tonight! www.11daysale.com. I've also started a blog at www.11dayproperties.com. Be sure to get on my mailing list to be notified of upcoming deals as the blog is updated.

Go team!-
Taylor

Check it out!
=Taylor

Back in the Wholesaling Game - CA

I got a call last night from the only other real estate wholesaler I know in this area. He has stumbled upon a nice strategy for picking up REO(bank owned) properties. He has gotten in with the code enforcement office in one of the cities we work in and got leads for 4 bank-owned properties last week. Apparently, when there are code violations on a house, the banks will take even greater discounts because of the limited pool of buyers and the added expense of continual fines from the city.

He called me to see how I was coming along building my buyers' list and to see if I was interested in finding a buyers for these properties. Yep, I'm interested.

This guy has access to millions of hard-money through some he's part of. He is also a licensed contractor. So he makes offers to the bank with his lic'd contractor estimate of repairs and copies of the city ordinance violations and estimated compliance costs and plans on having his agent friend make repeated offers to the banks and over time wear them down to the price-range where they will cash flow. Cash flow properties in California... Who would have thought we'd ever see that!?

Our plan is for him to get these under contract and put together an estimate of repairs (he is a licensed contractor.) I will have a chance to wholesale them on my websites and send out to my buyers list.

It could be a great thing for me to get back on the wholesaling train again. One thing that wholesale deals do is keep you motivated and moving forward quickly every day. It's like the slot machine approach to real estate investing. Lots of wins, lots of clanging and flashing lights (in a manner of speaking,) but smaller payoffs, and not much wealth building.

At this point though, it's all about the cash flow. I need to keep the machine going if we hope to do any of that wealth-building stuff.

Keep your fingers crossed!
-Taylor

Fine Tuning Your Conversations- Intro to Core Influence

It is interesting how information comes to you when you are ready for it.

Earlier this week I registered for a free call with Gary Boomershine over at Sales Team Live. He puts on a free monthly call and Feb's call was on talking with sellers. (Link to call here.) I wasn't expecting anything groundbreaking and actually just logged into the call intending to listen for a few minutes before breaking for dinner with the family.

It was some pretty philosophical stuff and I'm sure some of the call-in attendees missed the potential in the content, but it hit me right between the eyes. I tracked down more of the info from one of the authors he mentioned on the call (Frank Kern, internet marketing genius) about the core influence methods.

In sales, we all operate at two levels of influence.

1. Our Shell Influence: scripting, sales/work procerdure.
   
2. And our Core Influence: Frank’s explanation for how to truly connect with your constituents - your customers and potential customers. It’s about understanding their needs and wants and the emotions driving their decision making process. You must be congruent with your motivation for doing something - for selling something to your customers - in order to truly connect with them. Once you get congruency of purpose and you know what you want, then you can find the type of customer and determine the type of relationship you want to have with them.

I spent a lot of time at the Roop Doran bootcamp tracking down successful real estate investors and getting them to open up about how they talk with sellers, how they get past some of the hurdles I have been dealing with in my business. There was a consistent pattern that each would go through.

• Struggle on their own for a while, then create a basic script for talking to sellers.
• Most found their way to a sales mastery type of script that they memorized.
• Next was a stage where they got comfortable enough with the script where it actually became part of them and their personality was able to come through in client meetings. This is the level where your core influence can come through. It is here where your ability to create transactions can meet up with sellers' needs.
• The next step is getting better and better at helping sellers determine what their true needs are and creating solutions that get them away from their pain/problem and into the pleasure of what they want to go to next.
  

It caught me by surprise since I wasn't expecting much more than a few scripts or ideas I could use to improve my phone and in person discussions with sellers. What I got was a conceptual shift in how I need to approach client meetings.

More on Frank's info in the next post.

Lots of good stuff coming up this week.

-Taylor

Heaven Help Our Future...

Transparency? What?

Let the people decide? Who?

You're all fired.

What a waste of current and future dollars. Trillions taken from our future economy to bail out our bloated auto industry, banks and any other industry or tycoon with their hand out. Makes me SICK.

Screw you guys, I'm going home.

Cal Poly Student Housing - SLO Hood?

San Luis Obispo and Hood don't normally go together. Actually, the closest thing you'll see in SLO to a 'hood' is college housing.

I got a call from an Asian gentleman this morning in the SF Bay Area about the house he bought when his son started college 8 years ago. Now that he has graduated, dad wants the kid to cut the freeloading and move out already... Dad says to "drive by the house and send me what your offer would be. I'll think about it."

Check out the house.

Here's the numbers.
Zillow says $553-590k
Cyberhomes: $495k
Realquest: $584k

The house needs:
Exterior paint
Roof update
Upstairs balcony repaired (hammered. dry rot, leaning to the ground.)
New windows throughout
Interior paint (guessing here, but with college students in there for 8 years?... plan on it.)
Interior flooring - carpet likely to need replacing.
Ceiling scraped (likely cottage cheese ceiling.)
Bathrooms redone (again, with the college students & 8 yrs...)

My likely offer is going to be in the $408 range for an 11 Day Sale auction and would be even lower for a wholesale deal. Since he owes $400k, I'm not likely to get my wholesale offer accepted, but I'll throw it out there just in case he wants to bring $$ to closing.

Walking distance to Cal Poly and a retail value just a hair under $600k. Unreal.