On Thursday I was on the road all day with Nora and Nora – we had a list of foreclosures that we were looking at – mostly suburban Northern Oakland County – and we came across this beautiful old house in Birmingham, which looked like it just had some major remodeling done to it recently. The builder had a sign in the front and the front door was open.
Nora calls out to me (we were in Nora’s Land Cruiser and I was as usual driving) and says lets go and check this house out. We walked in, the owner was talking to the builder – we introduced ourselves as real estate investors looking to buy some houses in Birmingham and asked him if he would mind if we could look around his beautiful house.
Obviously he was happy to show us around and then we asked the builder if he could be kind enough to look at house we just saw and give us some ideas of what could be done with this house. And he off course agreed to drive with us couple of streets over.
We drove, saw the house, he gave us his opinion and then we ended up talking for a good hour. We told him that we were looking to buy some properties here and we are looking for good partners in the area.
In the next hour this is what happened:
1. He gave us a complete insider view of what is happening in Birmingham.
2. Gave us pointers on how to evaluate teardowns in Birmingham.
3. Turns out he has no idea about raising private money but he is kick butt builder who has been doing high end remodeling for years. Tons of references.
4. He is building a house right now, his first deal and not any client, right down the street – net profit after five months is around $100,000 net. Not bad for his first build.
5. We both left with a definite understanding that we would be talking more and see what we can do together.
Here is lesson for all of us here – it pays to tell people what you do, what you want to do and ask them if they can help you anyway. What he told me in 60 minutes about Birmingham would have taken me probably 12 months to discover by myself.
It pays to talk to your contractors, lenders, next-door neighbors (Hint: they are happy that somebody is buying and renovating the house – even people in West Bloomfield don’t want to live next to a vacant house.) and more importantly since they live there they might know somebody who came to their house and might want to move there.
The easiest thing in the world is to do “nothing” – blame fate, blame your city, blame me, blame your credit, blame your lack of personal money – that is so easy to do. A little easier to is to open your mouth, exercise some of the 500 billion neurons that God gave all of us and ask some questions.
It is amazing that how many people are willing to help you in Michigan real estate only if you ask. I geniunely belive that most people that you come across in your day to day life and business are more then willing to help you in lots of different ways - if you will give them a chance to do so.
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