REI Marketing Tips

However please don’t call me a liar! I know that I posted a few weeks ago about how I was going to be way more active on this blog, and I know that I haven’t been.

However, since leaving Vancouver, things have been super hectic, to say the least.

The first stop Atlanta for an Internet Marketing Seminar, hosted by Matt Bacak.
As usual, we learned a ton, and got to do some really great networking.
We met some really great people throughout our trip. The first of whom was Richard Stocks.
He is our local representative for Gwinett County in Georgia.

We had a great time catching up, and hearing how we could better help him and his business partner do more deals in the northern Atlanta suburbs.

Throughout the weekend we met some more really great people , including Marc Fordam, who owns SMART, a Georgia REIA group.
I also got to meet Alex Nghiem for the first time, and we had many great conversations about both real estate and the Internet, and their convergence (more on that subject later).

I was also really happy to reconnect with two great people who I had not seen in months: the first was Mr. Sam Bell. Sam is Colin’s partner at RealEstateInvestor.com on their Web 2.0 service. We sat next to each other during the entire seminar, shared a lot of secrets, and really got know one another better, and had a great time.

The other person who I got to catch up with was Mark Jackson from Investor Comps Online. Mark and his wife, Sam and his girlfriend, and Dreama and I all went out for dinner on the Sunday night after the seminar ended. We had a great meal in Atlanta, and Alex joined us as well. It was so great to catch up with everyone and talk about not just business (real estate and the Internet) but all aspects of our lives as entrepreneurs.

Many times I don’t get to speak to other entrepreneurs at home, which I why I love going to seminars and events so much: I get to connect with like-minded people and share ideas, techniques, strategies and business plans.

On the Monday was the best part of the entire Seminar. Matt has a “Get’R’Done” workshop, where everyone brings in their laptops, and we spend all day implementing the strategies that we learned the past weekend. He taught us some great traffic strategies, as well as some other techniques that we have just implemented into our business model.

Then Tuesday it was off to the airport to fly out England. The flight with Stella was fairly smooth, and everything in England was going great until Thursday.

that’s when “IT” happened:
I was catching up on email, and my laptop went “bzzz”.
The screen went dead.

I tried to restart it, but no luck.
Couldn’t get power to it.
After time on hold with Sony in the USA, Sony in Europe, I finally found someone in Hammersmith, London, who seemed confident that he could fix my problem. I had to rent a car to drive 25 miles to him (I’m staying in Marlow, England right now)

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- Please don’t complain about the price of gas. It’s approximately $9/Gallon here.

He tells me that my graphics card was fried- apparently a common occurrence with Sony Vaio laptops. He needed to order the part from the Far East, and that I won’t have my laptop back until Thursday. Naturally, this has been quite frustrating, making my effort to work while here next to impossible.

Apart from that, however, the trip so far has been great. Stay tuned, as I actually do plan to keep more frequent updates on the blog.

If you are looking for the most frequent updates from me, however, then head on over to twitter and check out my profile, and “follow” me. It’s a very cool (and addictive) application where I can “micro blog” and it’s a lot less effort than typical blogging. Create a profile, follow me, and we can “talk” on twitter!

That’s all for now, but I’ll be posting again soon!
This time, I promise!

:)-

I haven’t posted for a while because we’ve been crazy busy here getting ready for our trip. Now I know what you’re thinking:

“How much packing can someone really do just to go to Atlanta for a few days for an Internet Marketing Seminar”?

Well, we leave today, but it isn’t just to head off to Atlanta.
Dreama and I have decided to take Stella on a little trip, and we’re off to Europe for a few months.

Now I know what you’re thinking already: is this guy really just going to drop both of businesses to bum around Europe?

But that’s not the case.
More on that in a second.

For now, I’ll let you know that after Atlanta, we fly straight to England. After that, it’s off to Greece (the island of Rhodes), Munich (for Oktoberfest), Croatia, back to England, then back to the USA.

We’ve rented our townhouse here in Vancouver (nice cashflow too I might add) and fully automated our preforeclosure investing business (more on that later) by bringing in a deal partner.

We’ll continue to work on our online efforts, and by me FINALLY finding the right person to handle all of our buyers and sellers here in Whatcom County, WA, our business is on the autopilot that we all talk about wanting, but find it difficult to achieve.

Don’t get me wrong, this hasn’t been easy. It’s taken a LOT of hard work, and time. Finding the right contractors to build your team, and your business, isn’t as easy sometimes as a look of “Gurus” and “Authors” make it seem to be. I’ve found that we’ve had to kiss a lot of toads to finally find some princes and princesses.

But we have some excellent contractors, VAs, and real estate partners who are really helping us grow our business.
They aren’t the cheapest game in town, but for what we pay them they provide excellent value in return.

I’ll be blogging often on this trip (hopefully, if the high speed access works out like it’s supposed to), so subscribe to the feed and put your email on the right hand side of page here.

I’m also loving twitter right now. Go and check it out, create a profile, and make sure to “follow” me and tons of other people on there. It’s really a growing community, and is PERFECT for the person who is not into blogging but wants to share. Oh yes, and did I mention that it’s addictive? :)-

So we’re off to the airport in a few hours, baby and all.
In fact, if you’re interested in hearing about our trip not from a business perspective, but rather a family/baby/lifestyle perspective, Dreama has just started her own blog. It’s called Simple Baby Travel, and will give people insight into how you can easily travel with a baby, including to work events and Internet Marketing Seminars.

That’s all for now.

I’ll post again once we arrive (and wilt) in the Georgia heat.

We’re all experiencing it right now:

It’s easy to find good deals and buy properties, but what about selling them? Lots of deals to be found, but you need an exit strategy, correct?

In my business, we sell most of our deals retail. We don’t wholesale that many properties. It’s just our strategy, and there’s nothing right or wrong about it. I can also tell you that the selling of properties isn’t the strongest part of my business. Hey, I’m just being honest here; we’ve always been great at finding properties to buy at a discount, but when it comes to selling them quickly, well, let’s just say it’s a part of my business that I’m working on.

My wife Dreama, as many of you know, is a Keller Williams agent. She has her license there for us to take advantage of the MLS, but is not an active realtor, in the traditional sense. However, when we want to sell properties for full retail value, we leverage her position there, and obviously take a discounted listing.

Well this property wasn’t selling. We weren’t sure what to do, but then, as I have referenced many times in the past couple of months, I implemented a strategy I learned at the Virtual Investing Seminar in New Orleans:

At the seminar, we had a roundtable discussion one day on how to move properties in a slow market. EVERYONE said that you need to sell via auction. This book was recommended:

I immediately went out and purchased it. However, due to our travel schedule and Thanksgiving, we weren’t able to run our auction until this past weekend. If you can believe our luck, it SNOWED on Saturday and Sunday. It rarely snows here in the Pacific Northwest, and when it does, the rain usually comes and washes it away.

Well this past storm, this past weekend, we got a good 3-4 inches of accumulation. Most people here aren’t fond of driving in the snow, and we felt like it might be a disaster. However, we went ahead with the auction nonetheless. While many folks did not make it out, many “real” buyers did. And, just as the book says, we sold the property in 5 days!

I’ll share the numbers with you, so you can see that we did leave some money on the table:

Purchased for $171k
Holding and closing costs, plus cosmetic repairs and staging: $10k
Total cost: $181k

Marketing costs for 5 day auction: $1k
Price SOLD on Sunday night: $213,500

PROFIT: $31k

Now, let me tell you about the downside. I truly feel that the property was worth what we had it listed for; $239k. Take out the buyers commission that we would have had to pay, and we potentially left $15k on the table. I can already hear some of you talking now about how this wasn’t a success, because I left money on the table.

My retort would be that the property is SOLD, and I am moving onto the next deal. We all know that in the current market, holding costs can eat you up. According to my calculations, we sold for 89% of fair market value, with NO commission paid.

Look, I know that this deal isn’t what the GURUs teach you: they would have told me that I should have paid 65% of ARV less the cost of repairs. They would have told me to flip it quickly, and that I never should have closed on it (I used private funds).

But the bottom line is that we made a profit of over $31k in a slower market. Our average profit per deal in our investing business is $43,243.59. We have a TARGET per deal profit of $30k, and we don’t do a deal unless we can make a SLAM DUNK $25k.

I’m sharing all of these numbers with you so that you know I’m not here to play games or make up numbers. 5 day auctions work, and if you’re investing and need to move a property, I whole heartedly endorse this book:

As further proof to my ringing endorsement of this book, my friend Coling Egbert, CEO of RealEstateInvestor.com, is going to interview me about my 5 day auction this Friday. As soon as I get the audio, I’ll post here it here for everyone to listen to.

If you have any questions about the 5 Day auction, feel free to send me an email. Better yet, listen to my audio. I’ll also include some free giveaways that I used in my auction that made it a success.