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Your Investing Failure Is Not Your Fault - Quick Guide for Success

By: Lou Castillo

If you haven’t moved your business as far along as you want to, here are some quick steps you can take to start your investing. You can’t sit back and wait for that one big deal. Success is the product of applied knowledge. Success is a result of your actions. There is just something about the energy and the momentum behind actions that literally seems to attract new opportunities. If you are doing nothing, nothing happens.

1. Start making things happen so everyone takes notice. The first two years that I was in real estate I basically did nothing. I was constantly spinning my wheels. I was working hard but I was doing the wrong things. Since I had no results nobody was noticing. All of a sudden I changed my business model a little bit. I started marketing. I started doing deals and everybody took notice. Suddenly, all of them were coming to me with these new opportunities. People wanted to lend me money. They had new ideas for joint ventures.

The catalyst was the initial momentum making things happen. As you take your business into motion you will be able to take advantage of more opportunities. It’s like my friend Matt Bacak says, “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.” He really lives that philosophy. I have worked with him on several business ideas and you have to hang on when you work with him because he wants to make things happen yesterday. I tend to be more conservative so I tend to study a little more or make sure I have it at least 90% right. In the end Matt’s way is faster and better. While I am spending time researching and making sure I have it right, Matt’s out there actually making it happen. He knows exactly what’s wrong and where the fixes need to be made. Matt says let me mitigate my risks, limit risks that we might have but let’s get out there and make something happen. Then make needed changes while in motion. You want to be out there making things happen as quickly as possible because you can never foresee all the different possibilities and build in all the different contingencies. You just have to get it going and then improve it while you are in motion.

Get started. Learn from the experience. And then continually make improvements along the way. The key really is getting going.

2. Build a buyer’s list. Do it today. You want a list of investor buyers. If you have ten people on it get fifty. If you have fifty get five hundred, etc., etc., etc. Utilize the internet. (We’ll be talking more about that in the next issue). You can also advertise to REIA’s (real estate investor’s associations). This is a group of exactly who you are looking for. Advertise with these associations and get those people on your list.

3. Subscribe to wholesalers lists. You will be able to start seeing the opportunities that they have. If you are a wholesaler yourself you will learn what other people are doing. Find out how they are advertising, where they are picking up their properties, the kind of pricing that they are looking at. What’s working? What’s not working? If you are looking for houses, a great way to find a deal is to be on the list with the wholesalers. Start networking at your real estate investor’s association. You know first off you have to decide “what is your exit strategy?” What is it that you are trying to achieve? Go to your real estate investor’s association and network and take advantage of the offers from that group. Whether you are trying to find deals, buyers, money, joint ventures, whatever it is those people are there.

4. Create an advertising flyer: a flyer that you can distribute to your targeted area. This is one of the least expensive ways to get your marketing message out. You have a full 8.5 x 11 piece of paper to do messaging for you. We’re talking about five, six cents a copy. You can do thousands for literally pennies. On the flyer you should tell people what you do. Make sure you reiterate that any pain that is going on in their life, you are there to solve their problems. If they don’t have a problem you are not going to buy a great deal from them. You are looking for people with problems so you can show them that you have a solution.

5. Create a marketing letter. Focus on sending it to the owners of vacant houses that need your help. Now, how do I know where the owner of the vacant house is? You can do a little bit of research by going down to the county and seeing where the tax records are being sent. Or you can just mail it directly to the vacant house. Nine times out of ten the owner of the property has a forwarding address. What will happen is your piece is going to go on forward. You don’t have to get it right you just have to get it going.

Drive around, look at prospect houses. These are the ones when you drive through your target area that are in a little bit worse condition than all of the others. This would be a great property. If you don’t have a lot of money for direct mail, narrow your list down to the ones that are most likely prospects. Do you hit all the ones that are possibilities, no? But you have a targeted list you can mail to them more often.

Another list to get is the dispossessory list. That’s the landlords that are filing evictions against their tenants. Why is that a great list? When is a landlord most unhappy with the house? When they are filing an eviction, right? Chances are the tenants haven’t paid. The tenants probably made a mess of the property and the landlord is asking himself “Why am I in the rental business?” That is when you want to send them a letter. How do you get that list? You go to the courthouse and find out where landlords file for eviction. You ask to see the actual dispossessory filings. Take that list and mail to them on a regular basis.

Sit down and right a letter. Start off talking about their pain and their solution. Then make sure that you have a call to action.

6. Go out and get some bandit signs. Bandit signs are the little 18x24 inch signs that you see on the side of the road. Why do they call them bandit signs? They look like a bandit put them up in the middle of the night when nobody is looking. Are they legal? No, of course they are not legal. There is no community that says please put up bandit signs in my area. The idea is you put them up and you see if your community actually enforces their sign ordinances. And yes, I know these are really cheesy, but they work. Bang for the buck the signs really work and get the phone ringing.

Another thing you can do within you targeted area is go door to door and pass out your marketing information whether it be a flyer or a business card. Now if you are doing a business card make sure that it is a marketing message in the shape and size of a business card. Don’t just do a standard business card with your name and a title and a phone number but actually have a marketing message in there. Go out and meet people, talk to them, see them face to face. What are you going to tell them? Say “If you know of anyone that is interested in selling their house please have them give me a call.” The other thing you are doing is learning from those people. Learning what’s selling and what’s not selling. What other people are looking for. What do you know about the crime in the area? Who’s buying, who’s not buying? They may say no I don’t want to sell my house right now, but you know Suzy down the block is just going through a divorce and she was just saying the other day that she has to get rid of this house.

I had a student one time whom was busy. He had a regular full time job and his son was playing college ball. He was traveling city to city watching his son play football and said “you know I really just didn’t have time to get my marketing going and do anything.” All he did was take his business card and put that on the gas pumps every time he would pump gas. He got a deal from it. Now am I saying this is your best marketing tool? No. You see what happened even though he wasn’t doing a lot he was at least taking some action and that action was rewarded with a deal. Let’s say if you make a minimum of the $10,000 on a deal was it worth it to you to pass out the business cards at the gas pumps to do one deal and make $10,000. I got to believe the answer is yes. Would that have happened for him if he said “oh well I am going to take these three months off”? No. You’ve got to do something.

8. Be sure you have a web presence. Get a website on the internet. You know this is a new day and age and everybody is going to the internet. If you don’t know how to get a domain, just go to godaddy.com and buy one. It’s $10 or less to get a website address. I have hundreds of website addresses.

9. This is the quick easy way to start making money. So many people tell me they don’t have the money to start marketing. Just $500-$1,000 a month will get your marketing going. You can quickly make that amount of money by selling information products that other investors can use. By using the internet, you can sell those products to the list of wholesale buyer’s list that you built. Everything ties together and makes a circle of money. It does not have to be your information products. You can become an affiliate and sell other people’s products. What a great way to start having cash flow coming in on a regular basis. Use that to fund some marketing for your real estate. Then you will start doing a deal, two deals every month. Then we are talking about 10, 20, and 30,000 dollars coming in each and every month. It’s doing the little things that all of a sudden build up and make big things. Don’t go for that home run, but continually hit singles.

10. Line up you financing. If you found a deal what would you do with it? You are either going to wholesale it or you also might want to buy it yourself. Do you have the financing set up? You can buy it by dollar financing. You can also go out and get hard money loans. Have you worked with any hard money lenders in your area? Have you gotten preapproved for that? Take those steps so that you will be ready to go when that opportunity occurs.

Article Source: http://www.purearticle.com

Lou Castillo is a national real estate investing expert and mentor to thousands of successful investors. Lou specializes in creating powerful systems that allow investors to work less and earn more using the power of the internet in the real estate investing business. To get more information or get Investing tips straight from Lou, visit: www.FreeRealEstateStrategies.com

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