I am going to share with you today some very simple ways to get the best deals in specific neighborhoods. If you are someone who is just looking to do 3 – 5 deal a year, and do not want to travel far, this report is for you. There is no reason you can’t make an extra 50K – 150K per year working your own backyard. I have worked this technique to cherry pick some of my best deals.
You can expand upon the below methods and take it to a much bigger level, but I want to start you off on a very simple approach that’s getting a handful of quality deals that will really turn into a good year if you just focus on doing the right ones.
I particularly wrote this report for people who have no money, no credit, and may not have the confidence to work outside their local area.
The techniques will help you as a smaller investor to become the King of the Hill that people will turn to. Why? As you get to know the smaller areas intimately, you are getting to know them inside and out. You become the expert for a small target market segment. You get to know each and every street. In many cases if you are out there all the time and you’re really working your deals, you’ll get to know the houses.
Often times, someone calls me up and tells me the address and I know exactly what house they are talking about because I know the market so well. You probably won’t even have to get in your car to go out and see the house. As you become familiar with those areas, people in those areas will also become familiar with you.
When you are intimately involved with your target neighborhood and everybody knows you, you tend to find out about all the potential deals long before others do. When you’re very familiar with the neighborhood, if there’s someone who passes away, and half are going to be coming on the market soon, you tend to know about that information long before they’ve ever hit the market.
Another advantage is that your marketing is actually cheaper because it is laser focused. With these techniques, it doesn’t cost that much and it’s very easy to keep your name in front of these people. So if you become known and your goal again is to do a handful of real good quality deals. The people I know who use this approach do extremely well with it. The four people I know have actually moved or work the area they live in.
One of the marketing steps is to actually be a part of the neighborhood. If you’re investing in an area and that’s the area you’re going to focus on and not do anything else outside of it, it does help to be there and people get to know you.
But, let’s just about all the ways that you would get your name out there. This is pretty much the same type of marketing that you would do if you’re trying to make your name out in the broad market but you’re going to be much more laser focused.
Doing a mailer is a great, great way to get your name out to smaller neighborhood. If you’re just focusing on, most of the times a neighborhood doesn’t event take up the whole zip code. In some cases, it might only be 500 houses and as you do got all the 500 address within that neighborhood you could conceivably so relatively cheaply send a letter or a postcard to every single house in that neighborhood every single month.
However, you can also get your FLYER hand delivered by the postman for as little as 12 cents a piece by using the mailing type “Postal Carrier Walk Route”. Ask your local postmaster!
Many times working the local market, a very personal letter gets the best results. My letters are always very personal. I introduce myself by name. If I’m sitting here in the neighborhood I’m going to say “Hello my name is Duncan Wierman, I’m a local investor. I want to come across to them a normal guy who they can relate to. I just say that I am looking to purchase homes in this particular neighborhood and if you happen to know anybody who has anything for sale or if you got a property you like to sell yourself please give me a call.” I’ll pay referral fees. I might tell a little bit about of what I do. It’s my hope and my desire to pick up some of the run down properties in this neighborhood and to renovate them and to help boost this neighborhood up.
I make my direct mail very personal. It doesn’t matter really what you say, as long as you are saying it! Keep your mail pieces short. I don’t write long letters. If it’s too long, people aren’t going to read it. I just tell them a little bit of who I am and give me a call. It always serves me well.
And for mailing on a very small, I would do letters not postcards. Test Test Test
Send a batch of letters; Send a batch of postcards, Send Flyers. See what works for you. Use USPS.gov to manage your mailings.
Keep in mind when you’re doing that type of marketing is that you’re not going to convert as many as those postcards and flyers into deals as somebody who has say a specific mailing list for landlords or bankruptcy or probate or something along those lines.
You will get less calls but the purpose of you doing mailing in this neighborhood is to become very well-known. You’re goal is only to pick up 4 or 5 good deals a year and the way that you’re going to do that is when everybody in the neighborhood knows who you are in moment that there is need to sell you’re the first person who comes to mind.
So your mailing is going to take on different approach. Eventually somebody’s is going to contact you and you are going to get a deal from it. It is all a numbers game after all. The primary focus of it is to establish you as the “go-to person” in that neighborhood.
The second thing I suggest is to get your name in some of the local papers. Many times, neighborhoods may put up their own newsletter. My previous neighborhood even had a website to go along with their newsletter for only 10 dollars an advert! You want to be having an ad up on that paper on a regular basis. Again along with the mails and having something on the paper is just solidifying who you are, you’re branding yourself on that area. If you’re going be on that area all the time you’ll going to want have signs on your vehicle the same way that you would that if you’re driving anywhere else. FREE from www.Vistaprint.com now.
Continue to keep your name out there. Let people see you. Let them see you in the area. Let them see your houses, your car parked in front of the house that you’re renovating that you’re currently working on. Just keep your name out there. Every time that you do a rehab, you should put a banner or a sign out in front of your property letting everybody know whose doing it and that you’re looking for other properties. They can get the name of your website out there and go ahead and put something on there that you’re looking to purchase more properties and the way they can contact you.
It is all a big branding exercise for you and in a small neighborhood that is easy to do. Talk to everyone you get a chance to when driving the neighborhood. Let them know you are buying property and ask if they would help you. Let them know that you can offer free help and a consultation if someone has any problems.
One of the other ways to drill down to local areas is to use FaceBook.com. You can easily extract people’s names, phone numbers and email address from a specific area. Introduce yourself to them online; let them know what you do! This really is a very quick way to get into the market place.
I would also suggest establishing relationships with the local business owners. Maybe even use them for your own business that way they’ll get to know you and they see that “hey this guy is real” and every time you’re in there just say “Hey, listen you have anybody who wants to get rid of a house”?
An example is to get to know the local restaurants and bars and get to know the owners of these places because they know everybody else in the neighborhood. They know so many people in the neighborhood particularly those who have been there for a long time. They know most of these people on a first name basis. So you want to get to know these people and the thing that I suggest is going into a co-op with these business owners.
Just mention to them “Hey, listen if you know anybody who wants to sell his house this area, get their information from them, get their phone number and then call me up and if I purchase the house I’ll pay you $2,000 , $3,000”. Basically you will be using the local business owners to be bird dogs. Through their normal businesses they hear about these things. They know what’s going on.
Another thing that you can do with the local businesses is that if there are any opportunities for you to advertise through their businesses, you want to take advantage of it. That’s going to be done very cheaply. Whether it’s flyers, if it’s a restaurant you might be providing their placemats that has your information on it.
I have one student who puts up his “I buy houses signs” inside pawnshops. The owner hardly charges them anything to have them up in there. They’re just happy for the extra income. But they generate deals for him. Sure, you are not going to get a ton of deals, but if you only pick up one a year from each of them? Would that small effort and investment be worth it? Sure! The key to it all, in a large market or a small market is just to get your name out there. And for the part time investor it’s very, very easy to do in a small market.
Remember to come up with a catchy “signature” ( a branding tag line) so when people get to see it they’re always seeing the same thing over and over and over again and they know that it’s you. And you’ll eventually want to get to be known just if you’re walking down the street or you’re out inside the restaurant yourself and the people know who you are.
You want to do something to that house that stands out that only you do. For instance, one my friends what he does is every time he renovates a house does an absolutely beautiful job with the houses that he always paints the door red. It looks good but you can go up and down the street and see all of the houses that have red doors and everybody knows that he’s done that houses. Come up with something unique to you that you can do that separates you from the crowd to get people to think of you!
Remember, it’s not about trying to dominate so you can buy every single house but it’s dominating to a point where you are the first person who gets the phone call and you can pick up the best deals. If it’s your goal to do four or five deals a year that makes you $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 each this is a very effective strategy. It will produce the results if you’re getting your name out there and making everybody, making yourself known. The marketing is actually a whole lot cheaper than if you’re trying to market to a broad market like all of Charlotte. But more importantly it’s just, you can feel more comfortable in just knowing that if I focus on the right deal, I only need a handful of deals a year and I can really make a good living. If your marketing is designed or your business plan is designed where you need to come up with 25, 30 deals a year to make a living, you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself. You’ve got to do an awful lot of marketing to make that happen. And you know I never had a peace of mind that these investors who only need a handful of deals a year needs to get in order to have a good living.
Recap of the three main benefits of this approach.
1. You are the first to know about opportunities in your farm area.
2. it’s easier to become known by the people in that area than by those who have to advertise all over town.
3. Marketing is cheaper because it’s laser focused on that geographic area.
I want to share with you one more great tip to become the local market expert fast and create additional income streams. This is very easy to pull off in small markets. This is especially handy when there is no local paper serving a geographic area. Create your own newsletter!
One of my farm areas had 700 houses in it. Yet they had no area “gazette”. It was very easy to put a few pages together and publish it as the South Hills Gazette. My whole agenda was advertise myself and write some articles on what is happening in real estate market there or write about this beautiful home that Duncan Wierman rehabbed and things like that.
I like it when some of the local businesses just to put small business ads or something in there make it look like something but when you’re dealing in a small neighborhood that is not that hard to do and you don’t have to do it all the time. You might do it 3 or 4 times a year. Maybe every time you buy a new house you just go and you work in putting one of these things together and you get on to every house in the neighborhood.
Get some other business advertising on it or something giving people reason to open it up. And especially if you call it the name of the neighborhood gazette or something like that. People don’t want to open it up and say,”Hey, what’s going on here?” But by doing this you can begin to create something that people will look forward to. So this becomes something where you are really keeping everybody updated as to what you’re doing and what’s going on. They get to see the progress. They may out of curiosity go out start driving by. And now people are really beginning to see you as a real player in what you do. Because it’s such a small neighborhood that’s a very easy thing to pull off.
You just kind of go a couple of 8.5×11 piece of paper you can print with Vista Print for next to nothing. Make it look nice and appealing to people who’ll open it up. You start to create a little neighborhood paper and maybe get some other people, some businesses to contribute some articles but you can always get something in there about yourself. It gives you the opportunity to obviously not just write articles about yourself but you can put your ads wherever you want it to be. And it gives you “public endorsement” of your business.
The types of neighborhoods I suggest would be the 1,000 homes or less, nothing too big. An area of one thousand homes or less if want to dominate in that neighborhood. That size will generate all the deals that you need. NOTE: Now, you’re not going to want to go into a newer subdivision or something like that because you know the homes are relatively new. You’re not going to get the turnover. You really want to focus on older neighborhood that’s where people have been living there for many, many years where there are some rental properties. And when I say many years and you want people who you know where properties are being turned over to states, properties are being turned over where landlords have them for many years. And they’re just tired of them now. So you got to be in older neighborhood. Ideally if you could be in a neighborhood where everything is gentrifying and they’re really tearing down the old or completely rebuilding the old and upgrading everything and making it new that’s your obviously your best places but it can work in many other areas as well.
I hope that you can see that this report has given some “eye opening, kick in the butt motivation to get started. You don’t need money, or credit. When I got started in the business, I didn’t have any money and so for me I was doing a couple of different things that require money. I was always hitting the streets just looking for houses that would possibly fit the wholesale model, looking for run-down properties, looking for places that had signs in front of them, going through classified ads of newspaper. I had to do a lot more leg work just because I didn’t have the money.
I also was getting to the MLS and just going through it and finding deals. I was always making offers on the MLS. Now I know you are probably wondering, how to you make offers with any money.
I got involved with a person that I did bird-dogging for. The other person was the one who is actually buying the property. I was just doing all the leg work. And if you’re the person who’s going to go out there and hustle there’s plenty of people who would want to work with you. You just need to present yourself as somebody who’s credible, who comes across as professional. So focus on all the cheap types of marketing and create the name for yourself. Its all about taking Action! Just take the action to become successful!