Life of a Real Estate Investor - Dwaine Clarke

Simple steps on how to increase your marketing response rate next week

Dwaine Clarke — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:12:58 +0000

Why am I able to receive 20% response rate from my marketing to sellers and others don’t? Many investors especially new investors have a hard time bringing as many leads they need in order to get a deal. Typically on average I am seeing (as well as closing rate and target demographic list) it takes about 25-30 seller calls to get a deal.

So you will have to calculate based on your businesses goal of how many houses you are looking to acquire and how much money and time are you spending to get them. My business we try to improve our marketing campaigns as well as our closing ratios on the leads that we do get in to better our chances but on average we are dealing in that same number. The 25-30 Seller call to deal ratio means the amount of motivated sellers calling you willing to accept your creative or cash offer based on your terms. Its a numbers game. Sorry for getting a little off topic.

Our approach to getting a high response rate to get the most opportunities is basically focusing our marketing efforts to precise demographic and geographic targets and consistently hitting them over and over. Lots of investors will put all their money together and send out 1000’s of mailers or post 100 bandit signs all over the state or put their marketing flyer’s everywhere their is a free space. This to me will cause more work and get you less results. Trust me, I use to do that.

The key is selecting where you want to buy houses or where you end buyers want to buy houses and target specifically in that area ONLY. Go as deep as a specific neighborhood and focus your money and efforts there. Now instead of dealing with a farm area of 30,000 homes you can market to 1500 or 5,000. With it being more targeted now you will be able to hit them repetitively like 5-8 times which we do.

Action Steps:

Research on where you want to invest in. Where are the places you like? Where are people looking to buy? Read about How to find real estate deals in areas that you like!
Select a small area at first and really focus in on that area. Be that Area of the towns expert “Your East Forest Park Real Estate Expert! for all your real estate needs” Focus on a select number of houses and stick to it. “Be a big fish in a small pond”
Create a marketing plan that you will be able to market 5-8 mail pieces, flyer’s, call campaigns whatever so that you can be CONSISTENT with it. It’s all about consistency. Your prospects may not be ready to sell at that time you sent marketing to them but they may be 2 months from now. Situations always changes. Always. So never assume that if you don’t get a call that you wont in the future, be patient.
Follow up. You may receive a good amount of leads and for some reason they didn’t accept your offers. So put them into a follow up CRM or follow up database and follow up with them. You will be surprised on how many deals you will convert on the second try.

Anyone who tries these strategies and have any success with them please post them on the comments section for everyone to see. Also post any difficulties so we can be able to figure them out as a group. Good luck.

Till my next post.

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Are you prepared to take advantage of this Real Estate market?

Dwaine Clarke — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:39:48 +0000

Are you prepared to take advantage of this market?

As you probable already know that foreclosures now are at a all time high and everyday its reported that homeprices are falling and properties are becoming available by the boat loads. According to Standard & Poor’s latest report home prices across the nation is continueing to fall. 13 of the 20 metro areas have posted annual lows and 10 of those 20 have reported double digit declines.

You probable have been beaten in the head plenty of times with this news from everyone already but the next question is are you prepared? I’m not meaning are you mentally prepared to “think” you ready for this opportunity but are you really ready? Not only this business along any others but this real estate business is not easy. It’s like everything in life that has a goal, you must be mentally and strategically ready. Lots of people I work with wants to jump in immediately but doesn’t have a game plan. In this post I am going to write about a few steps. Today I’ll write about 1.

Mental Preparedness:

Lots of people wants to make millions of dollars in this foreclosure business but when it comes time to do the work they never even show up to the plate. You will have to be prepared for anything. Sometimes things won’t go your way but having the metal toughness to keep pushing on will ultimately bring you to success. My most recommended book on that is napoleon Hills “Think and Grow Rich” and Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”

Education:

The number one investment you can do, more so then investing in properties is your education. You always need to be eductating yourself. Wheter it’s a seminar, course or a book at the library take full advantage. Most of the knowledge of marketing, sales, negotation and business strategy was learned from books I found in the library and in Barnes and Noble. If you are on a tight budget at first going to the library and sitting in the lounge area of barnes and noble on a weekend would be well worth your time.

For a list of books check out the Recommended books section for more information

Good news for Real Estate Investors! Anti-Flipping Law temporarily waived

Dwaine Clarke — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:35:35 +0000

If you are a rehabber or wholetaler and you been sitting on the side lines because of the “anti-flipping” law that doesnt allow you to sell a property if you did not own it for at least 90 days then its time to get up. The Federal Housing Administration is temporarily waiving its “anti-flipping” rule which will allow the insurance of mortgages on properties that have been owned for a short period of time.

This creates a great advantage for investors performing short sales or rehabilitating properties because he popular FHA fixed mortgage program can allow them to quick turn the deal for a profit. HUD had adopted the 90 day rule after many shady investors were purchasing city property foreclosures and reselling them within a few days to home buyers that could qualify for the FHA loans.

Buyers that were un-educated in the home buying process were purchasing these homes with inflated prices and were shocked that they could not make the mortgage payments which caused a tidel wave of foreclosures.

The revised policy for FHA will allow purchasers to be financially capable of handling as well making sure apprasials are more accurate in the underwriting. This would hope to bring more balance in the market as buyers and bank qualifications are more strict.

If you are an investor or aspiring investor and you would like more information about Property Flips contact me today.

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Research tip: How to find Real estate deals in the areas you like!

Dwaine Clarke — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:34:19 +0000

Clients always ask me where do I start looking for properties? Do I just put marketing out in random places? Where are the deals? I always tell them to buy properties in the exact area that YOU LIKE! Deals are all over the place, you just have to find them and their is plenty of sellers out there that are looking for your services. Here is a quick way to research the preferred area of town or city you want to invest in that I use.

Go to www.melissadata.com
On the main page you should see FREE LOOKUPS
From there in the middle you will see everything zip codes. You can select any option to start but I usually go to Carrier Routes by ZIP
Pop in your preferred zip code or if you want to buy properties where you live pop that in too!
You will come up on a series of “carrier routes” which will display some small demographic statics along with number of residential homes and businesses. (Me, personally I like investing in older, middle income level areas but that is my buying preference) Whichever area you choose would be a great start!
From there click on the “map” link which will display that area based on a mail carrier route. Now you will be able to get a sense of what the area looks like, the streets in the area, home count and more. I always like to start there when I decide on investing in a new area. Some of the areas may not be huge which is good if you decide to go with a specific demographic. The goal is to be a big fish in a small pond and dominate your area.

This should be a good start to research where you want to start investing and focus the majority of your marketing budget.

Read my next post on where and how to select the best mailing lists

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NEWSLETTER

Advantages of the Chamber of Commerce

Dwaine Clarke — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 03:32:07 +0000

Today I went to my first Chamber of Commerce meeting for my town for a networking meet and greet at a local restaurant. It was a nice meeting place with alot of food and drink. The most important part of this trip and my primary objective was to interact with everyone that was there. At the meeting I meet several realtors, bankers, mortgage brokers, and attorney’s, which were just the people who I was looking for and all of which were excited to meet new business people. I gathered as much as 20+ business cards as well as scheduled many meeting appointments to discuss future partnering plans. Each individual I meet I handed them a specified bird dog or networking partner flyer and pitched to them my business, what I do and how we can both benefit. Here you can really start to build your alliances with individuals who know and develop the town around you and can be very powerful. Also in this meeting I was also able to speak to owners of used car dealerships, pizza shop owners, laundry mat service, printing and advertersing services who I was able to pitch to them my business to as well. In Real Estate its all about Network and Marketing, getting your name out their is the most important as the word spreads as your the local hungrey investor. Another great thing about it, it was FREE.

Signing up with your local Chamber is easy, all you would need to do basically is to Google your towns chamber of commerce and inquire about membership. Some Chambers are free and others charge a yearly dues which is not that expensive at all. The value that you get from going to meetings and networking opportunities is great as you can develop relationships and partnerships with business in your town.

Advantage:

One advantage from just going to meetings is being mentioned in the monthly newsletter that is distributed through out the town for free where you can display your services.

Being a member of a Chamber brings professionalism to your company, property owners will have a better sense of security that you are associated with a chamber of commerce entity and will have more comfort in selling their home or working with you.

Chamber of Commerce meetings are sometimes televised for certain events that they put on as well as recieve lots of newspaper coverage where participating companies get free recongnition and publicity. Remember, you want your name out their and finding as many vehicles to do this is key.

If anyone had a good expierences participating in their local chamber of commerce or have any tips on maximizing marketing utilizing chambers please let me know and the community.

Best Regards

Dwaine Clarke

Clarke Real Estate Group

CRM Solutions

Dwaine Clarke — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 18:28:48 +0000

What are Investors using for CRM, lead generation and data base solutions? I attended a phone teleseminar about 2 months ago with Richard Roop and Jeff Adams with RealEstateWebProfits.com where they discuss the power of websites and CRM solutions and how it can benefit your business. He started out by talking about how he started off and how he lost deals thru not following up with sellers for offers and being so disorganized with his marketing campaigns. For my company even though we’re a startup I want to be completely prepared from the beginning so when opportunities come we close and we close big. After our preliminary organization and development process we looked into a few solutions to integrate web leads, marketing leads and also our network partners so we can keep track, follow up and maintain. Studying business in school its definately crucuial for any business especially real estate investment companies. We looked around several weeks for a suite that basically handled all of these needs that we had and found a few.

First one was the solution presented by Jeff Adams which bundles a websites with a lead generation tool were you can drive your sellers and have it inputed to a backend system that you can use to followup, calculate offers, create mailing campaigns and some other features. Pretty good system but pretty costly and for a startup company that was out of the question.

The other good one also highly recommended by alot of investors is Supersmartwebprofits.com with Mike Barnes. I took a online tour with this a by far for what it provides, its one the most robust as far as the website, CRM and marketing features, but the cons is its really expensive, requires monthly hosting fees and pricey add-ons which makes it way out of our budget. Debating to create my own with Microsoft excel and outlook I remembered a CRM solution called Salesforce.com which focused solely on Marketing and CRM. Salesforce you are able to modify the hosted suite for your own personal use, so since we’re all real estate we need follow up features, mail campaign tracking and merging, network contact relationship management, web lead integration, out bound marketing tracking, buyers list management and property list management as well as other things to develop and maintain the business.

I took the 30 day trial and modified my fields to my needs and its been working great so far. It is hosted and requires a internet connection and if you also office if your going to use outlook, word, excel and access. So far I was able to imput all my network contacts do a mail campaign and a out bound mailing thru this with ease. Another good thing is it can be integrated into a website for lead generation like I mentioned before with automatic reply templates and information input. The price is pretty good compared to the other two solutions and definately affordable for the startup investor looking for a complete suite. Along with that, salesforce.com offers a whole line of 3rd party additions from other companies that can be installed into the existing host like budget and marketing tools etc. If anyone trys it out let me know what you think. www.salesforce.com

If their is anything else others are using please let me know I would definately like to explore. Looking for the best possible solutions for the begginner investor

Cheers

Dwaine Clarke

Clarke Real Estate Group, LLC

1-800 Numbers & Websites

Dwaine Clarke — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 14:38:01 +0000

1-800 Phone Numbers: Today I ordered my 800 number for the business. Having a 800 number is a key advantage compared to a local or a direct phone number of yours. Here are some of the advantages: Give your sellers/buyers etc one easy to remember number that they can call from anywhere without any chargeExpenses: Its relatively less expense overall to integrate a 800 number. The reality is that rates for toll-free services, which now include the prefixes 888 and 877, have dropped right along with the rates for other kinds of long distance service. Not too long ago, a company would have paid between 20 cents and 25 cents per minute for an 800 call. Today, they pay as little as 7 cents per minute. Vanity/Extension numbers: With 800 numbers, the companies that you register with will allow for extension or vanity numbers to be connected to it. In Real Estate marketing assigning specific vanity numbers to a campaign or given location will allow for tracking of marketing effectiveness which overall lower your costs and efforts. Professional presence: When motivated sellers and buyers see your marketing and notice a 800 number it instantly builds credibility and professionalism. The 800 service doesn’t have an area code, thus removing the psychological barrier inherent in advertising your telephone number in the areas far from your place of business. Also, 800 numbers don’t move if you ever decide to move to a different location.I got set up with Voice Nation Inc. This seems to be pretty good as well as had some real competitive pricing. With them I received voice mail package with 999 extensions that I can use for my marketing campaigns. It also comes with the option to talk to a live person whom you can assign a 3^rd party call center or yourself. My team will be handling the call traffic in the beginning and think about the call center service for the future.

Website: My Partner Ted and I had a meeting with Marvin a website designer with Bowe Design of Connecticut. He has been in the business for several years and worked with many clients in all types of industries. His process starts from interviewing, analysis to consistent tweaking to the final product which is something I personally look for in a designer. If you are looking for a web designer or anything with corporate image and branding contact Marvin at Bowe Design

Anyone uses any other 800 services or website designers. Let us all know! Thanks.