Recently in Doing Short Sales in Michigan Category

If you go and learn how to cook professionally in France, one of the final exams has to do with frying an egg or making a soup. The simple stuff is the good stuff.

I am reminded of this all the time when new Michigan real estate investors ask me the best possible way to get short sale leads?

Most of them think that I am going to tell them to do some complicated direct mail thing (rent a list and mail 237 letters to them for the next 237 days) or setup multiple websites wit h catchy domain name and a 32 step email marketing to back it all up or plastering signs all over their Michigan city on Friday night so the City inspectors don't catch them till Monday morning and so on.

If you are hunting for good short sale leads - focus first on the sub-division across the street wherever you live. There are houses there. Some of them are in foreclosure. I can bet you money on that and I will win. The bigger the sub-division across the street in your Michigan City, the more houses they are going to have in foreclosure.

Make a simple flyer - we buy homes, don't let bank let a default judgment on your credit, if you are ready to move on and don't want the property anymore, we can help - go to Staples and copy it or print it yourself. You are doing small numbers probably less than 200 so it is not going to kill your printer. Hire some kids for $40 to go there and drop them off.

Repeat it 3 times, 10 days apart. You will get deals out of this, either the folks across the sub-division will call you for their own homes OR they will call you for a loved one who is in trouble. Either way the phone + email are going to buzz in your favor and that is a good thing.

Two things to remember:

1. Check the weather before you drop. You want clear weather not rain.

2. Tell the kids not to put the flyer in the mailbox. It is against the law. You can rubber band it on the mailbox or if they go in the morning - they can rubber band it on the door.

Allan Boike and Steve Londeau of Property Solutions of Michigan

Last week Allan Boike and Steve Londeau, two real estate investors who operate a short sale negotiating service for real estate investors, real estate agents and real estate brokers in Metro Detroit area stopped by my office.

These guys are doing some interesting things and have been in the trenches in the real estate investing game for a long time in Michigan. I grilled them about their business and recorded a quick interview.

Here are some of the big things we talked about:

1. What are they hearing while talking and negotiating deals with Loss Mitigation officers every day?

2. How are they selling their own deals even is expensive cities in West Bloomfield really fast?

3. How do they work with real estate agents and brokers so they don't lose out on their commission when banks discount?

4. How come they decided not to charge anything upfront to real estate investors in Michigan for negotiating short sales while everybody else is doing it?

5. My favorite part: What they recently heard on a conference call with some of the top loss mitigation officers of big bank about what banks are planning with regards to negotiating discounts? It will make your head spin.

6. The biggest mistake Allan sees new real estate investors in Michigan make every day? And yeah I made it too and so did Allan but hopefully you will learn from our lessons.

Here is the link to their interview in MP3.

Also their website is here. But please before you call them and drive them crazy with your Short Sale questions, download my interview and listen to it.

I have always said that the best resource for new Michigan real estate investors who want to break into foreclosure investing is the network of existing real estate investors.

You know the people who are already doing it.

They are not that hard to find and most of them if they have been doing it for a while have an arsenal of good advice, contacts, deals etc that they will be sharing with you…

Only if you ask them nicely.

There are 2 way to run this business – one is to practice wholesale paranoia, practice a mentality off poverty which believes that there is ONLY SO MUCH to go around – money, deals, buyers etc.

Or you can run the other way and believe that there is more than enough for everybody to eat and live happily ever after.

If I was completely NEW to this business and lets say starting tomorrow in Sterling Heights – I would go and buy Detroit News, Oakland Press and Macomb Daily. I would also go to Borders and pick up a copy of the local Sterling Heights newspaper – you know the ones that get dropped at your house for FREE every Thursday – C&G Newspapers and Hometown Newspapers publish couple of dozen of these weekly local newspapers that get read simply because they get dropped at peoples houses.

So I would buy these newspapers and look at the Real Estate Miscellaneous / Real Estate Wanted / Flat for Income sections. These are the sections that most real estate investment ads traditionally run.

I would call every single one of them, introduce myself and ask them if they come across deals in Sterling Heights, if they know any good contractors, where they are looking to find deals just in case if I find any deals to send them there way.

Are you getting the point?

You cannot swim in the ocean and ignore the rest of the fishes. For every landlord trying to unload some property – he or she probably ahs another 3 that he will run an ad three weeks from today. They all have contacts, experience, and stories to share and tell.

All you got to do is call.

Flying to a bootcamp in Arizona and hanging out with bunch of investors from Colorado is not going to help you.

Adding 5 investors from Sterling Heights might help you a lot more.

Whether you live in Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Sterling Heights, Lansing or Holt Michigan – you should know who the players are; you should talk to them and they should be talking to you. Not another group of newbies – because that is self defeating.

You need contacts who are playing the game already. In the trenches. Every city in Michigan typically has couple of these. You need to find out who they are.