"Real Estate Tycoon"

On Wednesday of this week, my phone line for Rent To Own BUYERS in Philadelphia rang 109, yes one hundred nine, times! This, combined with the 91 calls the day after, resulted in 32 applications for homes and 12 booked showings, and my VA’s haven’t even called back the callers whose calls they missed! Here’s the cool part: I didn’t talk to a single one of the rent to own buyers!  As a real estate investor in Philadlephia, one of the most important things for you to do is to automate your investing business…this is my specialty, and I want to share with you exactly how it is that you too can automate your “selling houses” business!

While there are of course many components to my amazing marketing and “selling houses on auto-pilot” machine, I’m going to tell you about the most important (and cheapest!) facet of it — my awesome automated voicemail system.

“If it’s going to be done more than once in your business, it’s worth autmating.” I forget where I heard that, but it makes perfect sense!  To that end, I use the awesome automated voicemail system that not only captures the phone number of EVERY caller, but it also enables me to track my marketing with extensions, create a main greeting that eliminates having my VA’s answer the same questions a thousand times a day, and it enables me to have sub-boxes for each individual property that I’m selling.

When buyers call, they are greeted by a “main” greeting. On this greeting, they are given 3 choices. First, after the “thank you” part and hearing my website (www.JimmyZHomes.com) given, they’re prompted to enter the 3-digit extension for the property that they’re calling about. The caller’s second choice is to enter “1-0-0″ to hear a list of our homes available, and the third choice is for the caller to press “7″ to speak to a representative, which of course is NOT me but one of my VA’s.

Think about this for a second…I don’t care if you’re selling lease options, rent to owns, wholesale deals, rehabs, or even if you’re a realtor, imagine how much this could automate your business and give you your life back! Sometimes, (depending on the deal) I’ll even give the lockbox combination out on the voicemail greeting!

By now I’m sure that you want two things: First, you want hear a real example. If you do, call (215) 525 6806. Secondly, I’m sure you’re thinking, “Ok Jim, where the heck do I go to get this phone system set up really cheap?”

Just go to www.AllDayPhones.com to set up your voicemail system today…you’ll love me for telling you about it!

To YOUR success,

Jim “JimmyZ” Zaspel

www.youtube.com/jimthehouseguy

To your success,
- Jim “JimmyZ” Zaspel

Are houses really selling quickly in today’s market? In a word, YES! That is of course if you follow a few simple rules, which include a TON of effective marketing, which will be the focus of today’s blog. Other investors are always asking me, “Jim, how do you sell your houses so quickly?” Well, this is where I spill the beans…

There are four main resources that I use for marketing my houses: craigslist, Banners (physical banners on the houses), bandit signs, and email blasts to my buyers list. Let’s take them one at a time:

Craigslist

I’ve had some people tell me that it’s totally ineffective, but the fact of the matter is that it IS effective if you use it properly…just like birth control, right? The key is to post your ad as frequently as possible. Since craigslist keeps track of your IP address, if you have two computers, you can post ads almost every day! Another obvious key is to make your headline “jump out” at people as they glance down the list of homes for sale. When creating your headline, make sure it speaks to people’s most urgent needs…i.e. what’s most important to them. For example, “Own this home…even if your credit is UGLY!” One last tip on craigslist…if you’re selling on a lease option, try advertising your houses in the “for rent” section…that can pay off pretty well!

Bandit Signs

What the heck are “bandit signs???” You ever see those plastic corrugated signs along side the road advertising a house for sale, a garage sale, or a home-based business? Those are bandit signs. For me, the most effective ones are yellow with black lettering. Studies have shown that that color combination draws the attention of the human eye more than any other color combination…maybe this is why I drive a big yellow Hummer with black lettering on it! What to put on the signs? Well for starters, your signs should be hand-written. Yes, I have someone hand-write every single sign with a big fat 1” sharpee. Hand-written vs. normal type font gets three times the response rate! You don’t want them too cluttered, so my signs usually are something like this:

Rent To Own!

UGLY Credit is OK!

3bed/2ba

215-525-6806

If you put out 20-30 of these signs for every house that you have for sale, you’ll get TONS of calls just within the first day…they’re awesome!

Banners

Well, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so look at the picture here of a banner that I hand from the front of every house for sale…it works like magic…almost as well as the bandit signs. The signs I use are 2ft x 4ft in size. Try to hang it as high as you can on the house so the most people can see it.

Buyers List

If you’re going to the work of putting up 30 signs and a banner on every house and posting 5 craigslist ads per week per house, then you’d better capture all those people’s information! It is a HUMONGOUS waste of potential profit if you don’t. By getting the potential buyers to contact you, you’ve done the hard (and expensive!) part…why not put them on a data base so that you can let them know when you have new houses available? Every time I get a new home available, I send out an email blast. I have two lists…one list is for owner occupants, and the other is of investors looking to buy fix n flip properties. I have almost 900 people (both lists combined) on my buyers lists…would you like to know how I got that many? Here’s how: meeting people at REIA meetings (investors), respondents to online ads, callers from signs, callers from banners, and people that opt-in to my buyers list on my website. I sell about 8 houses per year…JUST from email blasts!

Oh, one more quick but AWESOME tool to build your buyers list…for an example of it, go to www.JimmyZHomes.com and you’ll see this pop-up thingy that prompts you to register for our VIP buyers list. That alone gets me 5-10 buyers EVERY week!

If you enjoyed this post, please comment and share if you would like more content like this!

To your success!

Jim Zaspel

Marketing – How to get TONS of sellers and buyers to call you!

One of the most frequent questions I get from other investors is, “Jim, how do you find motivated sellers, and how are you finding so many buyers?” In this blog I’ll answer both of those questions by giving you some tangible answers that you can literally put into action TODAY to start ramping up your marketing machine. But before I do that, I think it’s only fair that you know that I’m qualified to give such advice…so, here are last week’s stats in my business:

Total calls from sellers last week: 131

Total calls from buyers last week: 142

Hits on my website (for selling) 144

That’s a TON of calls! Before you can get all excited about getting a ton of calls or hits on your website, you absolutely MUST understand the value of marketing. Here it is:

Marketing —à Leads (calls, emails, form submissions from website etc…)

Leads—à Prospects (i.e. you’ve weeded out the non-motivated sellers)

Prospects —à Deals

Deals —à Money!

As you can see, it all starts with marketing! Marketing is the KEY to any successful business…yes, any business. Hopefully now I’ve shown you two things: 1, the value and importance of marketing, and 2, why I’m qualified to give advice on the matter. On this blog, we’re going to talk about how to find LOTS of motivated sellers…

My Three Favorite Ways to Find Sellers:

1 – Direct Mail. By far, direct mail is my favorite. It’s easy to turn on and off, it’s easy to measure the response, you can target your recipients…it’s awesome. The only downside is that until it results in a deal for you, it’s pretty expensive. Here’s a breakdown: 250 letters (including postage) cost about $250. The list for 250 names and addresses will cost anywhere from zero dollars to another $200, depending on the list and the source. Then, if you have an answering service take your calls, you’re going to pay $1/minute for them to take the call. Then you have to have a VA (Virtual Assistant) call all the leads back to get the rest of the info. All totaled, it costs me about $450 – $500 for every 250 letters that I send out.

I know that sounds expensive, but let’s run the numbers. Those 250 letters will result in about 65 calls. 65 calls will create about 10-20 leads (yes, it varies that much). Out of 10-20 leads from direct mail, I usually close one deal. My profit per deal ranges from $3,000 – $90,000, so obviously it’s worth doing, assuming that I have the follow-up systems in place to take a deal from “lead” status to closing.

2 – FSBO’s. There is a RIDICULOUS amount of “For Sale By Owner” (fsbo) leads all over the internet and local newspapers! If you are dead-broke, can’t afford to pay for anything, and don’t have the credibility to bring in referrals, then get ahold of a good script, calls some fsbo’s, and you’ll have a deal in no time if you call a decent number of ads. Now, there are two downsides to calling fsbo’s…1, it takes lots of time. 2, it’s dis-heartening and discouraging for newbies because of all the rejection they face from NON-motivated sellers. Nonetheless, it’s a great source of deals. If you give me a big enough stack of FSBO’s to keep me busy calling for one solid hour, I will ABSOLUTELY come up with a deal that, once marketed properly to sell, will net at least $5,000. If you don’t believe me, get me a stack of leads to call and I’ll prove you wrong…every timeJ

Some of the best places to find these houses are www.craigslist.com, (for rent and for sale sections), www.homesbyowner.com, www.fsbo.com, www.forsalebyowner.com, and of course your local newspapers.

3 – Referrals. What do you think is the #1 key to successfully getting referrals on a regular basis? Without a doubt, the #1 way to get lots of referrals is to provide extreme value to your clients and ensure that they are 100% satisfied with you, what you had to offer in the deal, and with how you treated them during the process. Assuming that you treat people well and maintain a good name in your community, you will do 2-6 deals every year from referrals within your first 2 years of doing business. It’s free marketing!

Lease Option Strategy Webinar

Register Now

I have this friend, Cam, who is a HEAVY-hitter in the real estate investing business. He helped me get started about three years ago. He’s a great guy who has secretly been watching me make a killing in Real Estate, using a strategy that’s as old as dirt; the Lease Option.

The data is in. The profits are in. The Lease Option strategy is back and IS the next wave in residential Real Estate profits.

Think of all the people that have been foreclosed on, that know the best time to buy a home in almost 2 decades is right now, but can’t buy because their credit’s trashed.

Enter the Lease Option!

And if you’re in Texas… you’ll do it just a little differently.

There’s a huge wave of profits for investors who see and act swiftly on this economic phenomenon.

Here’s why this message is important to you.

Cam asked if I’d let him interview me on a live lease option strategy webinar and actually, we just nailed this down, so it’s short notice. We’re doing this lease option strategy webinar TONIGHT night, Wed 10/12/11 at 8:00 PM East, 5:00 PM Pacific.

I’m not a Guru, so he’s got nothing to sell.

There won’t be an encore or replay either. This is a one shot deal, live.

Register now for thie lease option webinar.

Again, please keep this to yourself.  You and I can get in early and quietly, before everyone figures this out. The money is huge, easy, and the time to act is now. Join us in this lease option strategy webinar.

-          Jim

PS. Go here to learn about this content only lease option webinar .

Do it quick because this lease option strategy webinar is TONIGHT!

Lease Option Strategy Webinar

Have you ever wished you could have more cash-flow on your lease-option deals?  Of course you have!  Who hasn’t?  What I’m about to share with you has increased my monthly cashflow significantly, and the best part is, all you have to do is ask your tenants to pay it and at least half of the time they do!  As I like to say…Craziness!

In case you aren’t aware what a lease-option is, it is simply a scenario when someone who wants to buy a house isn’t able to because of credit issues or whatever.  For example, let’s say that someone wants to buy my $90,000 house, I’ll likely get a $5,000 downpayment from the tenant buyer that get applied to the purchase price when they exercise their option to buy. Typically, the tenant-buyer then rents the property until he/she buys the house by getting a loan or paying cash.  Now, how to get someone to pay you an extra several hundred bucks a month…

The conversation I have with my tenant-buyers is a 2-step conversation.  First, I ask them how much above and beyond the monthly rent they would like to pay if every dollar above and beyond the rent went towards the purchase price when they buy the house.  This amount usually ranges from $75 – $300.  Then, step 2 comes when I say, “Now Mr. Buyer, I don’t want you to be strapped, but I want to mention an opportunity to you, and I’d like for you to tell me what you think of it.  So far we’ve agreed (for example) that the monthly rent is $900 per month, and you just told me that you’d like to contribute an extra $250/mo towards the deposit that gets applied to the purchase price, right?  Great.  Now let me ask you something, how much more could you pay above and beyond the $1,150 ($900 rent + $250 extra = $1,150) if not only did it count towards the purchase price, but I also matched it dollar for dollar by reducing the purchase price? In other words, Mr. Buyer, let’s say that you want to contribute and additional $150/mo, here’s what it would look like in real numbers: You would pay $1,300 each month with $900 of that going towards rent and $400 of that towards the purchase price, and the purchase price of the house would be reduced by $150 for every month that we did this.  Would you like to get involved in this program like so many of our other buyers have done?”

I’ll  write out the numbers in a second, but I’m sure that you can already see how beneficial this could be to not only you but also the tenant-buyer!  It truly is a down-payment assistance program that works for everyone involved.

I can’t wait to hear your success stories!

-          Jim Zasepl

Example after 12 months:

Price:  $90,000

Rent:  $900

Initial deposit: $5,000

Additional downpayment: $400/mo x 12 = $4,800 additional deposit payed in

Price reduction: $150/mo x 12 = $1,800 in price reduction.

So, at the end of 12 months, this tenant-buyer would have given you $9,800 towards the purchase price which now has been reduced to $88,200.

(Besides the fact that it’s a HUMMER!!!)

So there I was, 22 years old and only 3 or 4 deals into my real estate investing career in May of 2009 when I got a call from my best friend, Carl, who said, “Jim, I know you were thinking about putting some lettering on your pickup truck, but I just saw a yellow Hummer for sale, and they dropped the price from $25k to $21k. I thought that might be a better vehicle for advertising for you.” I’ll spare you the details, but when I told the salesman, “Hey, if you’re telling me that for that butt-ugly, gas-guzzlin hummer you can’t come down at least another $4,000, then I’ll go down the road and get something else” and he agreed, I knew I had just negotiated a deal that would serve me very well for months to come.

If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably seen the pictures of the ridiculous-looking lettering I have all over the Hummer, but before I give some tips on designing the decals for your vehicle, I’m going to give a reallyquick breakdown of some of the deals I’ve done as a result of the lettering on this truck.

• Dudley street – $5k profit on a simple wholesale deal
• Watkins st. – $22,000 spread on a Lease-Option deal
• Sears St. – $1,500 – wholesale deal. (I know…not much money, but it’s not bad for 1 visit to the house and 5 short phone calls )
• Walnut st. – $18,000 spread on Lease-Option deal
• Newkirk st. – I got a building lot for free as a finder’s fee for wholesaling this house!

I laugh to myself everytime someone has a mild heart attack when I tell them I drive 25,000 miles per year in a vehicle that gets 10mpg! If I drove a PRIUS, at the end of the year, I would have less money than if I drove the Hummer. If you don’t believe me, just do the math. Add up the profit on those deals and calculate the potential difference in my fuel bill for the year. Besides, if you’re worried about gas prices or mileage, you’re just not making enough money!

Ok, now for some quick tips on designing the decal job for your vehicle:

• Less is more – Don’t clutter up your car/truck. It’s got to be easy to read at a glance
• Use the glass – Your windows are the most visable, so make good use of them
• Initial Caps – I never use all capital letters in marketing, but somehow I forgot to abide by that rule when I got my Hummer all lettered up!
• Business card holders – Mine are affixed using double-sided 3M sticky tape, but you can get magnetic ones at http://www.mytakeacard.com/. Just google “acrylic business card holder” to find what you need. Be sure to get a spring-loaded lid!

So, besides the fact that it’s a Hummer, it makes me tons of money, I don’t get stuck in snow (ok…sometimes I do ), and it’s just the “maucho thing to do” as Ron LeGrand would say, it provides a tremendous amount of credibility when I pull up to a house that I’m looking to buy. Sellers often say, “Wow! That’s a nice truck you got there. You must be buying a lot of houses.” Credibility issues for a (now) 24-yr old….gone!
Jim