Wet Feet - Online Marketing and Real Estate Investing Blog

The very first step in the process of flipping a house is to attract sellers. Without sellers calling you, you will not be able to buy a house, renovate it, sell it and make a profit. So, in my personal oppinion, you must do at least 3 things to attract sellers. Here they are in order of importance:

1. Direct mail
2. Referrals
3. Signs

Dirtect mail : the most cost effective and predictable source of leads. 80% of our leads at the moment of writing this come from direct mail. A lot of people I meet say that direct mail does not work. It does not if you do it wrong. For direct mail to work you must have 3 things right: the list, the message and repetition.

First of all you need a list of people to market to - a targeted segment of people. What would be a good target to mail to? People who really need to sell their home? People behind on their mortgage payments? Someone who has recently been divorced? I think all of them are perfect candidates to receive a letter from someone offering to buy their house.

Second you must write to your list about their problem. They are not interested in how big your company is or how long you have been in business. All they care is how they can get rid of their problem. So write to the people who are behind on payment about their situation and how they can benefit by calling you.

Third thing you have to mail them multiple times. Sending one postcard to 1000 people will not do the trick. You must, I repeat, you must mail them at least 4 times. Would you like to convince 1000 people 25% of they way or 250 people 100% of the way? The choice is yours.

Referrals : do not be afraid to open your mouth and tell other people what you do. The longer you are in business the more people will know what you do and refer othes to you. Do not be afraid to ask the sellers to refer others who need to sell their house to you. This does not cost you a dime, but brings great results with time.

Signs : the best way to get a quick inflow of leads. Follow county and city ordinances -you do not want to pay fines for illegal signs. Signs work great for a very short time. Put out 20 “we buy houses” signs and you will get 20 to 100 calls depending on the weather and where your signs are. The only catch is that the leads are unpredictable: your sign may be on the north side of town and the lead will come in for a house on the south side, more then 1 hour away, or better in a different city or even state.

If you do these 3 things and do them right your phone will ring day and night with motivated sellers calling you with houses they are ready to get rid off.

So what are you doing now to attract sellers? Is it working? Are you ready to try something that does?

I got into a conversation with one of my friends why would someone buy a house from me Sub2. Let’s look at the deal like this: $5,327 down and take over payments of$1,307 per month, you will buy $14k worth of equity. Which in essence means, that you are taking over payments on a mortgage which stays in seller’s name, you paying $5k out of pocket for a house worth $163k with the loan balance of $144k.

So what other ways can you purchase this house? The conventional way would be to go to the bank and get a loan. But wait, there is more. With current situation in lending industry the best deal you will get will require you to put at least 10% down and your interest will be somewhere in 9-10% range. So you will need about $15k to put down and you monthly payment will be $1,140 just for principal and interest. Add taxes and insurance and you are looking at $1,400+ per month. So the conventional way you need more money to put down and your payment is higher.

Also you can go and borrow hard money. Hard money is called hard money, because there are hard rules. You will have to pay about 5 points which is 5% of the loan amount and you will be able to borrow about 70% LTV. LTV stand for loan to value. So if in this case the value is $163k, so LTV comes to about $115k. So you need to buy properties way bellow market value and it will cost you about $6k to get this loan. So in this case you need money up front and the payments are high and LTV is low.

So considering the 3 ways you can buy houses, the Sub2 way looks pretty darn good. You do not need to go to the bank and apply for a mortgage and you do not need to borrow hard money. Plus the monthly payment is usually lower and the mortgage is not showing up on your credit report. Once you get about 10 loans in your name you will see that it is very hard to get more.

So the moral of the story is that in current market, at least in Atlanta area, there are so many houses for sale that we do not buy any other way, but subject to existing loans.

These three strange concepts are tightly related and may make or break your deal.

Chain of Title is the real estate property ownership history. You may think that only current state of title is important, but in reality last couple years of ownership are important because of two words: mortgage fraud.

Here is the most common scenario of mortgage fraud. A scammer, mortgage broker and crooked appraiser work together to pull this off. Let’s say a scammer buys a house worth 100k, appraisal is done to show that house is worth 150k, mortgage broker falsifies documents and buyer from behind the interstate overpass is brought to the closing to sign the papers. The homeless buyer gets his $100 for troubles and $50k get split up by the 3 scammers. New mortgage never gets a single payment made and the house goes into foreclosure.

Banks are not dumb, after couple hundred cases like this they instituted a new requirement – Title Seasoning. What they saw is when house gets sold 2-3 times in a short time period the loan goes bad in much higher number of cases versus the cases where houses where sold only once every 2-3 years. So if the buyer wants to get a loan to buy a home the present owner has to own the home for at least 12 month in most cases.

So if you just bought the home for 100k, put in 20k worth of renovations and now are trying to sell this same home 2 month later will you have a title seasoning issue? To the bank this looks very similar to the mortgage fraud. House was bought for 100k and being sold for 150k in 2 month period – red flag goes up.

So how can you overcome this little issue? The answer is Land Trust. Land trust in essence is just a bunch of papers. It is designed to own real property. For the Land Trust to exist there has to be 3 ingredients: Land (we have a piece of dirt with everything stuck to it in semi permanent way), trustee and the beneficiary. Beneficiary is the entity who will benefit from this trust and trustee acts on behalf of beneficiary. Conveying the property into a land trust does not break the chain of title. If you own the property for 2 month and the previous owner owned for 4 years, when the new lender will request a title binder from the closing attorney title seasoning will show 4 years and 2 months. The event of conveying property to the land trust will show, but not break the chain of title.

Here you have it. We buy all our properties now into a land trust. This has too very good side effects: limited privacy and limited liability. I will not go into details, but if you will be dragged into a courtroom that is where that limit will end.

And one quick note. Never, ever buy property on Quick Claim Deed. Always go the real estate attorney’s office (title company, escrow agent), order title, pay closing and get title insurance. To close on 200k home here in GA costs me around $700 and title insurance another $700. Considering how much money is at stake this is a small price to pay.

What is wholesaling? In short wholesaling is selling to a reseller, not an end user. So wholesaling real estate means that you are selling the property to someone else who will be selling it to the end user. Wholesaling can be done with deals for all cash, subject-to (sub2) or with financing.
Let’s look at some examples.
We went out and put a nice 4 bedroom home under contract to buy it subject to the existing loans with no money coming to the seller at closing. House is worth $230k on a bad day, existing loan balance is $202k. We marketed it as take over payments deal for only $6k plus closing costs, which makes purchase price $208k and leaves $22k in equity for whoever buys it. So you need $6,000 to get it and you make $22,000 profit at the closing table. That makes 366% return on investment (ROI) on this deal.

All three parties benefit in this situation. Obviously we benefited by 6k, the seller benefited, since they got rid of the house they did not want or can afford to keep and the buyer benefited by purchasing 22k of equity with 6k.

On one hand wholesaling is the great way to make a quick couple thousand, without taking possession of the property. All you need to do is to market to attract sellers, prescreen sellers, go out construct and present offers, negotiate, sign the contract and do the due diligence. Once you have the contract signed with the seller you must market to attract buyers, show them the property, etc.

On the other hand wholesaling is the great way to buy properties. You do not have to do any of the above! All you have to do is bring 6k to the closing and you own property without signing for debt or borrowing hard money and you made 22k. This is a great way to buy your rental properties, since now the lending industry is in big turmoil and it is almost impossible to get 100% financing for investment loans. Think about is, on the home worth 230k the bank will ask you to put down at least 10% which is 29k. You can buy 4-5 subject to wholesales with that kind of money.

Let’s be hones, the current lending situation sucks. Sub prime lending industry disappeared literally overnight, banks stopped giving out loans to everyone and their sister. The situation is such that if your credit is less then perfect, no bank will lend you money to buy your own home. So the only option is to rent? Not exactly. There are still couple ways to make your dreams come true. Those creative solutions are: lease option, take over payments and owner financing.

Today we will take a closer look at the Lease Option, also called Lease Purchase or Rent to Own. Like name implies there are two ingredients in this cocktail.

First ingredient is the lease. You are renting your dream home and get to enjoy almost all of the benefits that home ownership offers. You can try out the schools, shopping and dining in the neighborhood and the home itself. This lease period gives you time to improve you credit situation to be able to qualify for an excellent loan.

Second ingredient is the Option. An option give you an exclusive option to buy the home for a set period of time – the seller is obligated to sell but you are not obligated to buy. So if after living in the home for 6 months you realize that this is not the home for you can walk away and not buy this home. The downside of doing this is that you loose your option fee which is non refundable.
The only difference between Lease purchase/rent to own and the lease option is that you are obligated to buy at the end of the lease period in lease purchase case.

To get into your dream home on a lease option program require a little bit of capital up front. Option fee is from $3,000 to $10,000 and largely depends on the price of the home. Expect to pay $3,000 for a home around $150,000 and closer to $7,000 for a home worth $300,000. Do not forget that the rent is paid in advance, so you will have to come up with first month’s leas payment at the time of move in also. If you do not have full option payment amount, part of can be spread out in terms of monthly payments.

As far as monthly lease payments, expect to pay market rent with no money going towards purchase price, but you may elect to pay extra to accumulate bigger down payment for the purchase day.

Next time we will tackle how to buy the home by taking over payments on existing financing.