The Spouses Flipping Houses Podcast With Doug & Andrea Van Soest

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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Men & Women that chase their dreams, that lead and innovate with purpose, seem to exhibit very similar characteristics, that all contribute to their overall success. These characteristics can all be developed and learned through simple actions that you can start taking NOW.

In today’s episode, we’ll be taking a look at 5 simple actions you can start applying to your life TODAY, to accelerate your success & growth in your entrepreneurial ventures.

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The post Episode 21: Five THINGS that ALL Entrepreneurs do to LAUNCH their Success! appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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When it comes to rehabbing properties it’s important to at least have a MINIMAL knowledge of the process to estimating repairs. This part of the process is where A LOT of beginning rehabbers can easily get stuck!

When we got started, we had next to NO background in construction or repair estimation…but we have learned ENOUGH that has allowed us to still be successful in this business.

In today’s episode, we’ve got 5 tips for you on how to estimate repairs without ANY kind of construction background, so you don’t get stuck during YOUR rehab process!

Download Episode 20 Transcript

Andrea: Welcome back to Spouses Flipping Houses. This is Episode 20.

Doug: 2-0.

Andrea: 2-0. I just told Doug, “I’m really tired. I hope I have the energy to do this podcast.” And he said, “Just slap yourself!”

Doug: Don’t you know when we’ve been on long road trips, and I had to drive all night because you’re sleeping peacefully next to me in the passenger seat, I would slap myself every 30 minutes just to wake up.

Andrea: That’s terrible.

Doug: It works!

Andrea: I’m just going to eat some candy. I think that’ll be better than slapping myself.

Doug: I was doing that too, but there’s nothing like a good ol’ slap in the face to wake you up.

Andrea: Whatever works, I guess.

Doug: Well, we’re excited. We’ve got a great episode today, again, we hope. This one is called ‘A Dummies Guide to Estimating Repairs for Your Rehab Project.’

Andrea: And it’s kind of appropriately titled because we don’t really have a background in construction.

Doug: Just say it. We’re dummies.

Andrea: Yep, pretty much.

Doug: We’re rehab dummies, and we especially were when we first started.

Andrea: Not anymore, but we were when we first started.

Doug: Right, and we’re going to give you some tips today on estimating repairs and learning the construction business enough to be successful in this business. You don’t have to be super knowledgeable about any one subject, but you need to know enough about everything in order to do it, so we’re excited to talk about it today.

But beforehand, we wanted to talk a little bit about what’s been going on this week with us. We had an awesome Sunday.

Andrea: Yes we did.

Doug: At least for me, being a lifelong Denver Bronco fan. I apologize for any of you out there who are Bronco haters, but great time watching the Super Bowl. It was kind of nostalgic for me to see my nine-year-old son there who has just in the last year become this huge football fan and watch the game with him.

And it reminded me of when I was nine or ten years old back in the 80s, but a little bit different outcome in the Super Bowls for the Broncos then. We were getting destroyed by the 49ers and destroyed by the Redskins, and just getting killed, so it was nice to have a different outcome for him and see him celebrate that.

But I thought there was a little lesson in the Super Bowl too, a little lesson in life. So you’re looking at me wondering where I’m going with this.

Andrea: I’m listening, I’m listening.

Doug: So coming into the game, the Panthers were favored. Everybody had the Panthers winning this game. They were 15 and 1 going into the regular season, and had just blown people out in the playoffs, destroying the teams, cruising on the way to the Super Bowl. And they’re the number one offense in the League, looking like they’re just going to roll over the Broncos, and no one really gave the Broncos a chance.

And you know what, the Broncos probably were under matched. I mean, the Panthers had more speed, more talent, probably physically a better football team than Denver was that day. But for whatever reason, the Broncos prevailed, and in my opinion, it just came down to who wanted it more on Sunday.

And you could tell, Denver came prepared, and they came ready to play ball, especially their defense. And you know, they won the game, and they won it pretty handily. So the lesson in life, I think there’s a lesson in life, and real estate, and business in that Super Bowl. You may not think you are the most equipped person or successful person in real estate investing.

Maybe you’re not the best negotiator; maybe you’re not the best with numbers; maybe you’re not good at estimating repairs; maybe you don’t have all of these skills. But the lesson is that if you want it bad enough, and you’re focused, and you’re committed, you can come out on top. You can be successful, so what do you think about that?

Andrea: That’s pretty good babe. You always find a way to relate sports to life.

Doug: Hey, sports is a metaphor for life. I believe that. Teamwork also is another thing, but anyway, there’s a whole other lesson in that one. But yeah, I had a great time watching the Super Bowl. We also had a change in our rehab that we’re doing this week.

Andrea: Yeah, we had a house that was a pretty light rehab, and we went through trying to look for ways to save money and not do too much to it, and so we decided to go ahead and paint the cabinets, which we do a lot actually.

Doug: Yeah, kitchen cabinets.

Andrea: And the counter-tops were decent.

Doug: Yeah, they were like a corian.

Andrea: Yeah, a solid corian all the way up to the back splash, and we thought you know what, those are good counter-tops. Let’s just keep it. We’ll do new floors and new appliances. We’ll paint the cabinets white. We do that a lot, but in this house for whatever reason, man when they sprayed that white paint on there, it just highlighted every crack and ugly thing on those cabinets.

They’re very, very old. They’re not standard sizes; they almost look homemade, and they looked terrible once they were painted. And so basically the house was done. The rest of the house looked fantastic, and the kitchen looked awful. And you just can’t sell a house that way for top dollar. So we are going back in and ripping out that kitchen, kind of a bummer.

Doug: Yeah, but you know kitchens, and bathrooms, and curb appeal are three of the most important things really in a house, and I think the curb appeal would get people in, and then they would walk around and go into that kitchen and say, “Oh. This is not…”

I think that can be one of those tiebreakers that you don’t want to lose.

Andrea: Yeah, it’s totally worth it to go back in and spend a little more, and I think in the long run, we’ll make a lot more because of it. But it just goes to show since we’ve bought and sold hundreds of houses that we make mistakes too.

Doug: Yeah. Important to walk through your house after the rehab and just take a look and try to look at it from a buyer’s perspective. They’re going to come in here and what are they going to see? And they would have really been turned off by the kitchen.

Andrea: I walked through it and was like, “Oh, no way.” And I had my assistant go to the house too just to get her opinion in case I was being too picky, and she was like, “Nope. Not good.”

Doug: So now it’s going to have a brand new kitchen. It’s going to have the dishwasher that wasn’t in existence before because this was like a 50s house. It’s just going to shine, and someone is going to love that, and this might actually help sell the house at quite a bit higher price, hopefully.

Okay, so let’s dive into today’s topic: A Dummies Guide to Estimating Repairs for Your Rehab Project. When we first started, we had zero background in construction or estimating repairs, zero experience. Now since then, Andrea has become our resident expert through her interior design training and also being our project manager. She has learned quite a bit.

And I’ve learned to estimate repairs on the fly and do a real quick estimate, just because we’re analyzing homes all day long and making offers all day long. So you have to have that skill to be able to that. And we’re going to talk about getting those skills today.

Andrea: Yeah, I think that for a lot of beginning investors, this is one of those things that can hold them up because they’re afraid because they don’t understand this process. And it’s just like anything else: you decide to go for it and you figure it out as you go.

Doug: Right, right.  So we have five tips for you here on learning how to estimate repairs. Now again, these come from us being house flippers, not contractors. But this is kind of a practical way, I think, to go about learning it if you absolutely no idea where to begin. This is sort-of how we did it.

Tip number one: learn about the rehabs in your area. So, what do I mean by that? Well, are you in a high-end market or a low-end market? Are homes where you live million dollar homes or are you in a market where they’re $150-$200,000 homes? What part of the country are you in? Are homes in your area that you’re going to be flipping older? 100 year old, 150 years old, 30 years old?

Where we live, almost every house is between 5 and 20 years old. It’s kind of a newer area, so repairs can be very different based on all of that. Are the homes large, on large plots of land, and there’s a lot of landscaping involved as well or are they small, mostly smaller lots, less landscaping?

Maybe you’re in a desert area that doesn’t require that or natural landscaping is the norm. So just learn about your area and what might be unique. Another example of this might be if you, say, lived in the Palm Springs area. Well, you have a lot of mid-century modern homes out there that have a very unique style, and they require a certain type of rehab, finishing, and material in order to sell.

Andrea: Yeah, that’s a great example because that’s one where you can really get it wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you bought a home there, and you’re not from there, you can really rehab it the wrong way to where it will not sell in that particular town. So researching your area is vital.

Doug: Yeah, and we don’t have these so much around here, but maybe back East you might have a lot of older, Victorian-type homes that would have a very similar reaction to the market. You’re really going to have to know what you’re doing in order to rehab those homes a certain way for what a buyer might be looking for.

Also, there could be other issues that you deal with in your area, like maybe certain areas have soft soil and foundations are known to crack and be a problem in a particular city/neighborhood/area. Or maybe you’re in an area that gets a lot of rain, and there are mold issues that you always have to be looking out for.

Certain things like that you need to know what you’re going to be dealing with in your particular market.

Andrea: Okay, tip number two for estimating repairs in your area is to ask other investors what they spent on their last rehab.

Doug: Good tip.

Andrea: And really what you have to do is go to an investor’s club meeting or an investor meet-up group and get to know some other investors. You don’t want to just go to someone that you don’t know and ask them that question, because it might be kind of personal.

Doug: They might feel threatened or something.

Andrea: You probably won’t get a good response, but if you are a part of these groups, and you’re meeting other people, you might get to a place where you could ask them and figure out what the spending norm is in your area.

Another thing that I always do, especially if we’re doing a rehab in a neighborhood where we haven’t done one before or in a new city, I will go through the comps that we find on the MLS that are in that surrounding area, and I will scroll through all of the pictures of the listings of whatever our competition is.

So I’m going to see that if they all have new cabinets, then we probably need new cabinets. Is their landscaping fantastic? Or sometimes, some neighborhoods we have are just dirt, so it’s okay if we have dirt. I’m also looking to see what style buyers are wanting in this area, so is it super modern or is it more traditional.

You can spend a lot of money and build a beautiful, very traditional style home, and kitchen, and bathrooms, but if you’re in an area where people want things super modern, it’s going to sit for a while. It’s going to be tough to sell.

Doug: Yeah, or you might not get as much for it.

Andrea: Yeah, so you need to look at the expectation out there by scrolling through pictures on the MLS, and seeing that this one sold really fast, it’s really modern. So did this one, so did this one— oh man, that one was on the market for 90 days, and it’s more traditional. Okay, bingo. I need to do a modern style home.

Doug: You can get a lot of good information by diving into the MLS and looking at those things, good tip. So tip number three: know your major expenses, know those pretty well. So what are the major expenses?

There’s a handful of them. First would be the first thing I look at when I drive up to a house or if I’m scrolling on Google Street View looking at a house, and that’s the roof. Roofs can be very expensive. Does a roof look worn, old? Is it a shake roof or something that’s going to be needing replacing?

Because if it is, you want to definitely account for that and that can be anywhere from $3-$6 per square foot, just depending on the roof. So know that could be a huge cost. Also, windows, and this is one of those things, again, by researching on the MLS to find out if that’s going to be necessary in your area, but if you need to do new windows, that could be a major expense too.

So definitely account for those, and that’s anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 for a typical, average size house for retrofit windows.

Andrea: Yeah, but that is definitely one of those things where I would say look through the pictures of your competition. If they all don’t have new windows, you don’t need to do new windows. Save the cost.

Doug: You don’t need it, exactly. It just depends on your area, depends on the house. Another one would be heating and air conditioning. Once again, you may not need it depending on where you are, but if all of the competition has forced air and forced heat, and you don’t, you’re probably going to need it.

So that can be a pretty large cost as well. I would figure $4,000-$5,000 for an average house, depending on what you need there. Another one would be foundation. This one gets a little more technical, and this is the one that I think freaks people out the most. But if you have a potential foundation issue, that could be a minimal cost or it could be a huge cost depending on how bad it is.

So keep that in mind, and how do you look for foundation problems? Well the quick tip on that is to walk around the house and see if it feels level. Do you see places where the floor is protruding up or down? Are there major crack? You want to look for horizontal cracks in the drywall as well on the walls and above doors. Those are major hints for a potential foundation problem.

And another big expense would be a pool. A lot of areas don’t have pools, but out here where we live in the desert, there’s a lot of pools. And if the pool has been neglected or if the equipment is old, that can be a $3,000 to $10,000 fix to get your pool up and running like it should.

So those are just major repairs, major expenses that you want to note as you’re analyzing a house, walking through the house.

Andrea: Okay, so tip number four is to get at least three bids on your first rehab project. And there’s a couple reasons that you’re going to want to do that. Obviously number one is to compare prices, but number two is that this is going to give you an opportunity to basically interview several contractors.

There might be certain people that you’re just not going to work well with, and other people that you feel like you’ll work great with, and you’ll really hit it off. So you want to compare prices, but it’s also great to just meet several contractors. It’s nice to have a good, long list of several people you can call.

Doug: Right, yeah definitely.

Andrea: And then the other thing, if you have a chance and you’ve never purchased a rehab before, it might not be a bad idea to get a home inspection. We don’t really ever do this. I don’t know that we have ever done this.

Doug: I think early on we did maybe once.

Andrea: Maybe our first one, yeah.

Doug: First or second, one of those two.

Andrea: Generally, you really don’t have time. Once you get going and you’re in this business, you don’t have time to waste your seller’s time and your time with doing a home inspection. But, especially maybe your first time or two, to walk through the home with that inspector and see what they’re looking for, it would just be an education process for you to figure out what to look for in terms of repairs.

Doug: I think especially if you have a question about the foundation or something. If it’s an older home, and you just don’t know what to look for, yeah get an inspection on that first one, and then walk around with them. Talk to them; ask them questions. What are you looking for in a foundation?

You can get a good education that way so that next time you feel more confident.

Andrea: The tricky thing here is that back when we started, we were buying mostly REO Bank-owned homes, and they were vacant. So we could bring anybody through there that we wanted to. We could bring in 10 contractors if we wanted to. We could do two home inspections if we wanted to.

Nowadays, most people are buying homes directly from sellers, and if you have already signed a contract with a seller, and they’re ready to go, it’s going to make them really nervous if you bring three, four contractors through. And it’s going to make them really nervous if you bring a home inspector through.

So you have to really gauge your situation and figure out how you’re going to do that without freaking out your seller.

Doug: Yeah, you have to play that one by ear. But you know, like we said, especially on your first one, we recommend getting that done, getting bids, doing the whole thing because you want to make sure you’re not making a mistake, or getting into something that’s over your head, or have repairs coming in at 50 percent more than you expected, something like that.

Andrea: One creative thing you could do would actually be to bring a home inspector through your own home, and it would cost you some money, but that would be a great way to educate yourself on what they might be looking for. Same with contractors, even if your home is not in bad shape, you could just find out what it would cost if you wanted to change out these cabinets, or redo all of your flooring.

Just get some ballpark ideas, and then that way let’s suppose you do have a home under contract and you don’t want to freak out the seller, it’s just a good way to educate yourself.

Doug: Yeah, it’s great. Tip number five, so this is the way that I am typically going to estimate repairs now when I’m doing it from the computer or just walking through a house quickly with a homeowner or something like that. And that is to use a three-tier repair estimate model.

So, after years of doing this, and we’ve done hundreds of rehabs, it kind of boils down to thinking, for this type of house, we’d typically spend about this much money for a rehab. And we narrow it down to a real quick estimate based on price per square foot. So you’re not going to estimate based solely on that, but what we have is a three-tier system.

So we have a light rehab, a medium rehab, and a heavy rehab. Light rehab might be if the house doesn’t need much work, maybe it only needs paint, or flooring, maybe you’re just going to paint the cabinets. It’s a very light fix, either because that’s all it requires to sell or maybe it’s going to be a rental property for you, and you don’t need to go high upgrades on that.

But whatever the case, if you determine it’s a light rehab, ballpark right now we’re talking about $15 per square foot to do that rehab for the house. So, if it’s a 1,000 square foot house, $15 a square foot, you’re looking at a $15,000 light rehab for that property.

Now, you want to add in the major items on top of that. So let’s say it’s a light rehab, but you need new windows because that’s required in this area. You’d want to add that on top of the $15 a square foot, so it would be $15,000 plus another $4,000 to $5,000 for windows, so you’ll come in right around $19,000 or $20,000 on your estimate for that house.

Medium rehab would be about $20 per square foot. Now this would be a little bit stronger than the light rehab. You might be needing a new kitchen or a new bathroom, or both, maybe a little landscaping, possibly doing some more work like moving a couple of walls around or replacing some plumbing and electrical. It’s a little more involved, but it’s not a complete remodel.

This is probably the most common that we run into and again, it just depends on your area and your homes, but this would be $20 per square foot and again, add in the major items on top of that. So if you need a roof and you need to redo the pool on top of the medium rehab, make sure to add in another $10,000 to $15,000 on top of that.

And then of course, a heavy rehab you’re going to go $25 to $30 per square foot or more, depending. So this is something that’s going to need everything. It’s going to need all new interior/exterior landscaping, and most of the major items— add those on top of it. But we’re typically spending $25 to $30 or more per square foot for the heavy rehabs.

So again, very quick way to do it. Is it going to be exactly accurate? No, but in most cases when you’re making offers, going through properties, and doing this on a high volume basis, you just need to be in the ballpark. You need to be within about a five to ten percent margin there on what the actual repair bill will come in at.

You want to be as accurate as you can but without knowing everything and just doing a quick estimate, this price per square foot method plus adding in the major expenses on top of that seems to work pretty well for us. It seems to come in fairly accurate.

Andrea: Yeah, and sellers usually want an answer right away. They want to know what you will pay for their house, and so you have to be quick. If you’re sending out contractors to figure out what you can pay for their house…

Doug: Just to make an offer.

Andrea: …you’re going to probably lose out because somebody else can do this real fast.

Doug: Exactly, so you would use this method because you don’t want to waste time. You need to get a decision or an offer to these people. So that’s it. Just again to recap, the five tips. The first one was learning about the rehabs in your area— style, high-end or low-end, different things like that. The second tip was…

Andrea: Ask other investors what they spent on their rehab and scour the MLS checking out pictures of your competition.

Doug: The third tip was to know your major expenses— roof, windows, heating and air conditioning, pool, foundation. Fourth tip…

Andrea: Get three bids, at least, on your first rehab project.

Doug: And then the fifth tip was the price per square foot method. $15, $20 and $25+ for a quick estimate, so I hope that helped. That’s it for today. These are the methods we use, and just you know, I think the lesson here is don’t be afraid of this aspect of the business.

I think it tends to be one of those fear points that holds people back from even making an offer because they’re afraid they’re going to be so far off on this that they don’t what they’re doing. Get in there; get your feet wet; get estimates; learn from people, and you’ll get more comfortable with it really quickly, and it’s not that big of a deal to determine.

Andrea: Yeah, it’s totally a learn-as-you-go type of a thing. And eventually you’re going to look back and think, how funny, I used to be afraid of that.

Doug: Well, that’s all for today. We hope you enjoyed it. We’re going to go head out of here and check out a few rehabs right now.

Andrea: And eat lunch. Can we eat lunch?

Doug: And eat lunch, yes. So we will talk to you guys next week!

Andrea: Have a good week!

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The post Episode 20: A Dummies Guide to Estimating Repairs for Your Rehab Project appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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Today’s podcast is all about arming yourself with, & developing the most VALUABLE skill you can possibly have in the wonderful world of real estate investing. Can you guess what it is? It may not be what you might think at first. But, without it, success will be extremely difficult, if not impossible to come by. Tune in for today’s episode and get ready to learn more about the one skill, that can either make or break your business & the importance of MASTERING it!

Download Episode 19 Transcript

Doug: Hello and welcome back to the Spouses Flipping Houses podcast. We are so excited to be back here with you today. We’ve got a fun topic for you.

Andrea: This is Episode 19, and we are talking about the single most important skill that you have to possess or master to be successful as a real estate investor.

Doug: You must have this skill. You must have this skill. We’re going to get into that in a minute, but before that, we’re still actually recovering from a little bit of jetlag. We flew across the country this week, and that was fun.

Andrea: Yeah, we were at a little Mastermind meeting again. Man, I can’t stress how important and awesome it is to just get feedback from other people that are doing what you’re doing and doing it well. So we had such a great time, but we’re tired.

Doug: Yeah, flying just messes you up for a few days, and we’re still trying to recover from that and figure out what time we’re really in here now.

Andrea: Well it doesn’t help that we took a red-eye home, so that’s what really threw us for a loop. Sleeping on a plane is terrible. I mean you don’t really sleep. You’re desperate to sleep, and then we get back to LAX, we go out to our truck, and the battery is dead in the middle of the night.

Doug: Yeah, it’s not advisable to leave your dome light on if you’re going to be parked.

Andrea: We had gotten there super early the morning that we left and didn’t even realize that the dome light was on. Whoops, that was my bad. I was putting my makeup on in the car.

Doug: I’m running around flagging down some poor stranger to come give our battery a jump, and luckily we were able to get it done.

Andrea: Yeah, I feel like that was really lucky because to have some guy chasing down your car…

Doug: In a parking garage.

Andrea: … in a parking garage in the middle of the night might be a little scary, so I’m glad he stopped.

Doug: He did a good deed. He was a Good Samaritan to us. But we’re excited for this topic. You’re going to use this skill every single day in your business, guaranteed.

Andrea: Without it, you’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to grow, and you’re going to have a lot of gray hair. You might have gray hair anyway.

Doug: You might have gray hair anyways, but you’re going to accelerate that gray hair.

Andrea: Absolutely.

Doug: So, what is this main skill?

Andrea: I feel like we need a drum roll.

Doug: Okay, here it comes [drum roll].

Andrea: Oh, that was pretty good. It felt like an earthquake. Anyways, the number one skill that you must possess to be a successful real estate investor is you have got to be a problem solver.

Doug: Absolutely. You have to be a problem solver. That might sound, like duh, of course you have to be a problem solver, but seriously. Problems will come up every single day in this business, and not just real estate, but definitely in real estate if you’re doing this full time. You’re going to have problems, and you need to learn how to solve them.

Andrea: I feel like people handle problems in a couple of different ways. They either get super overwhelmed or maybe they even take out their stress on people that are closest to them, people that they love the most, they get angry or frustrated with just because of this other problem that they have. Or they even maybe just want to say forget it, and throw in the towel, and curl up in a corner, and not think about it.

Or then there’s the type of person that goes into problem-solving mode and feels like, okay, we just have to find a solution. That’s the only option. There’s no point in sitting here dwelling on the negative aspect of it. We got to solve this. How are we going to do that?

Doug: You hear people say that you just put on your problem-solving hat. Just get in that mode, like okay, this is our reality, and let’s go to work on fixing it, solving the problem. And you can even twist it and make it look like a positive thing, like hey, I get a chance to solve this problem. Let’s get creative. Let’s make this a game or a challenge here.

The better you get at solving problems, the better you’re going to do in this business.

Andrea: Yeah. Okay, so we thought that it would be kind of fun if we go through five problems that can and will arise in your business.

Doug: Real-life problems.

Andrea: And some possible solutions, and we’ll test Doug’s skill here on how he’s going to do it.

Doug: Alright. I’m ready.

Andrea: Okay. Problem number one: You have a property under contract, and you’re planning to wholesale it, but your buyer backs out one day before closing. So what are you going to do? You’ve got three choices.

Doug: Ugh, I hate that.

Andrea: Your three choices are a) you freak out and call up the buyer, and you chew them out, and you hope that they change their mind and close anyway.

Doug: Yeah that works.

Andrea: Or option b) you pretend like nothing happened. Like it was just a bad dream, and you hope this will somehow work itself out and just kind of put it in the back of your mind. Don’t think about it.

Or option c) you stay calm, you call up the buyer, and find out what is the issue. And you relax because you have their earnest money deposit right, because you should have their earnest money deposit.

Doug: Yes.

Andrea: And you get moving on finding a replacement buyer ASAP, and you let the seller know what is going on, and ask for an extension to close, and reassure them that you will get the deal done.

Doug: Alright, well this one is an easy one. You definitely go with number C, you go with option C. Yeah, freaking out, ignoring it, yelling at people solves nothing. This is a real problem that happens if you’re going to wholesale houses.

Answer C is absolutely correct. You find out what happened, maybe talk to them calmly and see if they will change their mind. If not, you’re going to keep your deposit because that’s how you run your business. Definitely get an earnest money deposit from your buyers. No question about that. Do that.

And then just call the seller. Let them know you’re still going to close. You had some issues, but calm them down, and just assure them that you’re going to close the deal, and get an extension to go find another buyer, and then close it.

Andrea: Yeah, and sometimes we really like to honor our agreements with our sellers, so if you are able to go ahead and close it with your own funds, and then carry on finding a buyer, you can do that too. But I know for some people starting out, that’s not an option.

Doug: Good point. Yeah, if you’re able and have the ability to close it, go for it.

Andrea: Yeah, okay, so problem number two: You’re a landlord, and your tenant is now two weeks late on their rent, but this is the third month in a row that they’ve been late, and they have only been renting from you for six months.

Doug: That’s not good.

Andrea: And they are asking for two more weeks to be able to make this payment. Now you really like this person, and so you feel bad, but you’re realizing that this is beginning to be a pattern, so you’ve got to do something. What are you going to do?

All right, here are your choices. A) You’re going to give them two more weeks because after all, you like them, right? That’s an option.

Doug: That’s an option.

Andrea: B) You’re going to respectfully decline the extension they requested and serve them with a three-day notice. C) You’re going to tell them that it looks like this isn’t working out, and you’re going to offer to release them from their lease if they are out in two weeks, and you will keep their deposit. What are you going to do?

Doug: Hm, okay so this is a good one. I think this one has two possible answers. I would go with B or C, or B and/or C.

Andrea: I think and.

Doug: Yeah, and that’s probably the best option. A is out of the question. At this point, they’re early on in their lease agreement with you, and this is becoming a pattern.

Andrea: You really should have served a three-day notice the first time that they were late.

Doug: Yeah, you’re learning a lesson here at this point in this agreement that you should have done this from the beginning. Being a landlord is a lot like being a parent or a teacher in a lot of ways. I think we mentioned this before, but you really have to set the rule up front no matter how much you like people.

You have to set the rules up front, and understand that is a business you’re running. It’s not a charity. You’re not doing this just to take care of people. I mean, that is part of our business, but the bottom line is that you have bills to pay. You have a mortgage, probably, to pay. You have other things.

And you’re essentially letting this person take advantage of you, whether they intend to or not. Whatever the reasons, you’re not benefiting them, the tenant, by continuing to let them do this in life either.

Andrea: And you’re definitely not benefiting your business.

Doug: You’re not benefiting your business. So B for sure, respectfully decline: “I’m so sorry. We can’t allow that anymore. We’re going to serve a three-day notice to pay your quit.” which is the first process in removing them as a tenant.

Or, maybe they’ll get the message and they’ll come up with the message all of a sudden and pay you. And now you’re setting a precedent for how you’re going to collect rent. And C as well, because if sometimes, if a tenant is not going to pay you, and they’re just going to drag it out and wait for an eviction, it’s better and cheaper for you (and can be better for them), to just say, “Look. I’m sorry, but this looks like it’s not working out. We’ve got a pattern here of for whatever reason, you’re not able to pay the rent. Why don’t you just be out in two weeks, and we’ll call it good.”

But definitely serve the three-day notice anyways, just in case they’re not out in two weeks, you’ve already got the process rolling for a possible eviction in case you have to go that route.

Andrea: Right, and the goal there in telling them to be out in two weeks and you’ll let them free of their lease, the goal is to avoid eviction, because that is a real burden on you, and it’s a long and expensive process. So it might seem contrary to what you would think you would do by telling them, “I’ll let you out of your lease for two weeks.” But really, it’s the path of least-resistance.

Doug: Yeah, right. What’s worse? Going through the whole eviction that could take several more weeks and cost a lot of money, or having your property back in two weeks without having to spend that money and they don’t get an eviction on their record, which for them is better as well.

Andrea: Okay, problem number three: You just sent out a huge mailer, direct mail, to a list of potentially motivated sellers, and no calls are coming in. So you’re a little baffled. Then you notice, you go kind of check out what’s going on here, or you go check out your postcard. And you notice that you put the wrong phone number on the mailer. And we have done this twice.

Doug: Real-life problems here.

Andrea: Real-life problems people. But we came up with a good solution, so Doug, here are your options. A) You can quit this business right now because obviously, you are not detail-oriented enough to be successful, and you’re kind of a dingbat.

Doug: I don’t think that was on there. You added that in.

Andrea: No you’re not a dingbat! You are actually very detail-oriented. See, this can happen to anybody.

Doug: Hey, it happens.

Andrea: B) You can switch strategies to something else because direct mail is obviously too expensive and too risky. Or c) you can laugh at yourself, because it’s kind of funny, and you can try very quickly to purchase that phone number that you put on there that was the wrong phone number, and see if you can still capture any of those leads.

Then, put a system in place so that does not ever happen again.

Doug: The obvious answer is C and yes, this has happened to us more than once. So that’s why C is the correct answer. You put systems in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Make every effort to track down whose number these calls are going to and if it’s some other poor sap who is going to be getting phone calls, hey work with them. Let them know.

Andrea: Ask them to redirect the number, but I thought that was pretty creative that we got in there and purchased that number right quick to be able to capture those leads.

Doug: Yeah, do what you can to fix it, and then move on.

Andrea: Okay, problem number four: You have been working with three realtors lately, and they have sent you a total of about 20 leads from listings on the MLS that they think you might be interested in. So you make offers on each one of them, but you’ve had no luck. And so this agent is getting a little frustrated with you and kind of starting to think that maybe you’re not for real, because they’ve done all of this work, and there’s been no outcome. So what do you do?

Doug: Okay, good. This problem happens, especially if you’re working with agents, and that’s the way you’re trying to find deals. Again, the answer is C. Well a couple of things here. I’ve noticed that you’ve only made 20 offers, and to be honest, this is kind of a numbers game in this business, especially if you’re just making offers on the MLS.

Some people might have better ratios, but we notice that you might get one out of every 50 offers you make on the MLS. It kind of depends on your market, and what you’re going after. So just hang in there, and definitely you want to encourage those who are working hard for you to find a lead.

Educating them on what kind of property you’re looking for and what the benefits are of your offer, and encouraging them that there could be multiple repeat deals if they work with you, and double listings and all of that to keep them motivated to continue to work hard.

Andrea: Right, and the reality is that if they keep getting frustrated, then this might not be the realtor for you to work with.

Doug: True.

Andrea: You need somebody that kind of understands your process, even if you have to educate them on what that is. You need someone that is going to be patient and hang in there with you.

Doug: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We might do an episode some time on working with agents, and what agent to look for, and that whole process.

Andrea: Okay, last one, problem number five: You have completed a beautiful rehab, and I know it’s beautiful, because I did it. And you have listed this house for sale, and you are getting concerned because the house has been listed for three weeks now, and the calls are kind of slowing down. It’s not really being shown anymore, and no offers. What do you do?

A) You totally stress out, 24/7, and you do not sleep every night because you are laying awake worried about the fact that you got into the wrong business, and you’re going to lose all of your money.

Doug: That never happens.

Andrea: No way. Option b) you drop the price by 10 percent, hoping that it will generate some interest, and you’ll get a buyer. And option c) you can ask the agents who have called for feedback on the listing, the agents that have already shown it, and you can go back to them and say, “Can you let me know what the buyers were thinking? How come they decided not to make an offer? Figure out what is wrong.

Is it a price issue? Is it a problem with your rehab? Maybe it’s not as beautiful as you thought. Or is it something else? And then go fix that issue and be patient.

Doug: Okay, so A is the answer that typically happens, just because we’re humans, and that’s natural, and you know that’s what we do. But couple things here, so I’ve noticed that the house has only been listed for three weeks. Now, this may depend on your market and what your history is on selling homes of course, but three weeks, in general, for the most part, that’s not a very long time.

There were times that we’re used to selling properties the first week, when the market was so hot, buyers were out there.

Andrea: And even just certain properties if it’s in a certain neighborhood or the rehab really is exceptional compared to what else is out there and available. There’s always just those certain reasons why one does sell super fast.

Doug: So what I would do is I would check and see what the average time on market for all of the homes in that area— what’s their average days on the market before they go pending? Before you freak out for over three weeks, because you may be priced right. There may be nothing wrong at all, and the average days on market is say six weeks.

So don’t freak out over that. So obviously C is the answer here. You want to do a little more investigating. What is it? Maybe there’s something wrong in that house that’s throwing people off that you could actually go back and fix, be it a little repair item or something.

Maybe it is your price, but we don’t know. You do a little investigating before you freak out. Don’t do B; don’t just drop 10 percent all of a sudden.

Andrea: Right.

Doug: I’m not saying that price drops aren’t in your future, but that’s a huge amount to drop just to generate interest. So it really will depend. Also on the market, you can see if the market is crashing for some reason, you certainly don’t want to be that guy who is chasing the market down, maybe a 10 percent drop is in order at that point.

Andrea: But one more thing about price too is that you don’t have to make a huge drop, but typically, agents have sort-of little parameters set up to be notified by on the MLS when certain things change. So when there is a price drop, a lot of agents have their notifications set up so they will get an email.

So maybe you do a $500 price drop, just to get it popped back up on everybody’s radar.

Doug: You don’t have to go dropping huge chunks.

Andrea: Right, yeah. But if it’s an issue where you tried to cut a few corners and maybe you left the carpet in the bedroom that has stains on it, and the agents are going to tell you when you call them that people were a little grossed out by that carpet, I’d go back in and change that.

Maybe there’s just some little other thing that you can fix right quick that would change the appeal.

Doug: Yeah, and oftentimes that is it. And you can go in and put just a little more money into it to fix those things that are turning people off, and all of the sudden your property will have a lot more interest.

Andrea: So that is pretty much it. I just cannot stress to you enough the importance of being a problem solver. It will keep your sanity; it keeps you sharp in this business to continually look for creative ways that you can solve problems and make things better. And it’s just absolutely essential.

As we sat in our Mastermind meeting and I looked around the room at these 30 other sharp and successful people, the one quality that I could assess that every single person in that room possessed was the fact that they are great problem solvers.

Doug: Yep and just come to expect it. If you expect it, then it’s not such a big shock when a problem arises, and you’re ready for it mentally. Like, okay, here’s another one of these. Let’s shoot the solutions at it and go fix it.

So problem solving, get it down. Gotta have it, and everybody can develop that skill.

Andrea: Yeah, if you tend to be more negative, and you don’t look for the good, you can shift your mindset.

Doug: Yeah, start training yourself, training yourself to react differently to things.

Andrea: Look for the positive.

Doug: That is all. Once again, we want to encourage you to head to our website, SpousesFlippingHouses.com, get your free gifts while they’re still there. We’ve been saying that for a few weeks now, but we are going to be taking those away soon, and probably going to get something else out. Also, like us on Facebook if you haven’t done that. We have a Facebook page.

Andrea: And if you head on over to iTunes to leave us a rating and review, we would really appreciate it.

Doug: Yes, it does help us. Please do that. We love the feedback too, so continue to give us feedback. [email protected]

Andrea: Yeah, that’s for if you have any questions. We’re glad to answer them. Other than that, have a great week.

Doug: Take care!

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The post Episode 19: The SINGLE Most Important SKILL to Master for SUCCESS in Real Estate Investing appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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We have found that the majority of properties we purchase tend to be from BURNT OUT landlords. With about 8 out of 10 American millionaires having found their wealth from Real Estate – according to a survey of U.S. Millionaires by Morgan Stanley – renting-out properties can be a GREAT long-term strategy for building wealth. In today’s episode, we’d like to give you a quick crash course on how to build wealth through Landlording and NOT get burnt out in the process.

Download Episode 18 Transcript

Doug: Welcome back to Spouses Flipping Houses podcast. My name is Doug Van Soesen, and we are excited to be back here today with Episode18.

Andrea: Yes, Episode 18. This has been the week of the squatters.

Doug: Yes it has. What is a squatter, for those who don’t know what a squatter is?

Andrea: A squatter is a person who moves into a house that doesn’t belong to them, and they kind of camp out there for a while.

Doug: And sometimes squat in there.

Andrea: Yes, actually they do squat there.

Doug: Literally, there is evidence of the squats.

Andrea: Oh man, that’s too funny because I haven’t even had a chance to tell you yet because we’ve been so busy, but we’ve been working on this house that’s actually in a nice neighborhood in Riverside.

Doug: A very nice neighborhood.

Andrea: A historic neighborhood, but we’ve had some issues, so we’re waiting on permits. We’re going to be doing an addition to this house, so it’s kind of stalled for a while, and so we’ve had it closed up pretty securely, and we’re just kind of waiting. And that’s…

Doug: Trouble, to have a vacant house for too long.

Andrea: For sure. If they don’t see signs of people working there or a lockbox, and they’re worried that a realtor might be coming through to show it, there’s a good chance somebody is going to break in. So it’s been sitting there a while, I show up with a contractor last week, and we kind of had to bust in the backdoor.

I realized somebody had secured it in a way that we hadn’t secured it; that was kind of funny. We walk in, and the smell just knocked me out because the windows had been secured, and the doors had been secured. And so some guy had broken in there, luckily he wasn’t there when we walked in, and he’s totally been camping out in this house.

The plumbing has been turned off because it’s disconnected. In fact, it kind of goes right out the back of the house into a pile on the ground, but it’s not really been flushed out. So he’s just been using the bathroom, just filling it up. Ugh! It stunk.

Doug: I mean this is a total construction project house too. It’s not like it’s a house that’s basically done.

Andrea: No, and it’s filthy. It was filthy when we bought it. It’s even worse since it’s been sitting this long, so you know the guy is just living in this place, and I feel bad for him that that’s his option. He has nowhere else to go.

So the funny thing is though, Chris and I are walking around just thinking man, this is nasty. I can’t believe someone is sleeping here. I guess it’s a warm place, and that’s what they’re needing, but in the corner, I see this really nice backpack. So the dude’s stuff is in the house.

This nice Adidas backpack, and then his clothes are folded in a nice stack there.

Doug: He’s got style.

Andrea: He’s an organized squatter. So he’s got O’Neal shorts and these nice surfer shirts all stacked there neatly with this nice backpack.

Doug: Hey bro, gotta go surfing during the day, and gotta have somewhere to crash at night. Right dude?

Andrea: So we nicely took his belongings and set them in a nice pile outside the house and screwed the door shut.

Doug: That was very kind of you. Did you leave a note, like thank you for watching over the place and wish you luck in your new dwelling?

Andrea: Didn’t want to make him mad and have him cause any damage, and you know he didn’t do any harm to the house.

Doug: Typically, squatters aren’t the worst thing in the world. They’re really probably just people who don’t have a home, and they don’t have anywhere to stay, and they’re just looking to for somewhere to sleep. And they come in at night usually. They’re not even there during the day.

Andrea: Yeah, I mean maybe he was working. Who knows? Because all of his nice belongings were there.

Doug: Who knows, maybe he was keeping people out who were going to be worse. He was house-sitting. We have another house that is very similar although not quite as nice of an area that we’ve now removed squatters from at least three times from this house. But it’s the same people. And from what the police say, they just go next door and squat at the house next door for a while until we’re no longer on site.

And because the house is a big construction project, lot of ways in, you can break in pretty easily, and they’ve just been coming back and keep moving back in.

Andrea: We’ve had this a lot over the years, different squatters in different properties, and it’s never been too much of a problem. I hear stories of people who have squatters that move in and then produce a fake document of a lease that they supposedly had, and then they have to actually evict the squatters.

Thankfully, we’ve never had anything like that and really nobody that has caused too much trouble.

Doug: Yeah, usually in our experience they haven’t caused a lot of trouble. They’re just there to sleep, but yeah, it can be a problem. And you know what, it’s just a reality of this business.

Andrea: Par for the course.

Doug: Par for the course, something you deal with, something we’re still trying to navigate through on the best way to deal with it, and it’s always an adventure.

Andrea: Absolutely. So that leads us to our topic for today, which is Landlording 101. So we kind of have noticed that a good majority of the people that we buy houses from are burnt out landlords.

Doug: Yeah, they’re probably dealing with squatters. No, actually they could be squatters if they’re tenants and not paying rent, something like that. Yeah, but it’s a good point. A lot of the houses that we end up buying are from people who’ve just been burned out owning that rental property for one reason or another.

Andrea: So we want to talk about how you can be a good landlord and not get burned out. They say that eight out of ten millionaires in the U.S. I guess, or maybe in the world, have found their wealth in real estate, or 90 percent of the world’s millionaires. I think something like that.

Doug: Yeah, and I’ve heard that statistic multiple times on different things that the vast majority of wealth built in this nation comes through real estate.

Andrea: So you have to figure out how to do it, and then you have to figure out how to keep and maintain it. Yeah, exactly.

Doug: So we’re excited to talk about landlording today, because if you want to build wealth with rental properties, which is an amazing strategy, a great thing to do, you’ve got to know how to do it. And set things in place so you’re not going to become that motivated seller someday.

Andrea: Right, and we love flipping houses. It’s fun, but really that is our means to be able to hold properties, which is our long-term end-game plan.

Doug: Right, exactly. So you know, this is not an overnight wealth building strategy. This is a long-term play. This is for the long haul, especially if you’re getting financing on your rental properties. It’s something you’re going to be involved in for a while if this a strategy you’re going to go for, so it helps to have things in place to make it an easy, enjoyable process for you.

Managing rentals takes good management, whether that’s going to be you personally managing it or whether you’re going to hire somebody, a property manager or somebody else in your own in-house business. It takes a good person to manage these rental properties. It’s not something that you can just run on autopilot.

Andrea: Yeah I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong. They think they can buy their rental properties and sail off into the sunset, and you can sort-of sail off into the sunset if you have somebody else managing them. But they have to be managed.

Doug: Right, exactly. So let’s get into it. We’ve got four tips here in our Landlording 101 course.

Andrea: Actually each tip has a whole lot of things. It’s going to be like a one-day seminar crashed into 30 minutes.

Doug: We’ll go over the basics of it here. So the first one is to just know the costs involved with owning a rental property. Don’t think that you’re just going to buy a house, and the rent is going to be $1,200 a month. So a lot of people just glaze over it and go, “Oh yeah, $1,200 a month. So I’m going to make $1,200 a month.”

Andrea: Or, “Oh my mortgage is $1,000 a month, and I’m getting $1,200 per month, so $200 per month cash flow. Sweet!”

Doug: Yeah, no way!

Andrea: You’re losing money.

Doug: If those are the numbers, you’re definitely losing money. People don’t know the costs or they don’t understand the real costs involved, and obviously there’s a mortgage cost, and there’s property taxes. Those are the two costs most people know about already and are aware of.

But there are far more costs that will happen, do happen, and you have to account for them in rental properties, such as vacancies, maintenance, turnover. Different things like that that just cost money, a good percentage of money. So a good rule of thumb that we go buy is 30 to 40 percent off the top of whatever rent you’re getting, you need to count that as expenses.

Andrea: And that does not count your mortgage.

Doug: That does not count your mortgage. That’s absolutely right. The 30 to 40 percent accounts for taxes, insurance, maintenance, vacancies, and management fees. We give a range of 30 to 40 because obviously, some properties that are newer aren’t going to have as much maintenance, maybe that cost is a little bit lower.

Other properties that are older require a lot more maintenance; maybe you have more turnover in certain types of properties. So the expenses can vary, but a general rule of thumb is 30 to 40 percent depending on the type of property you have. You want to plan on that being your actual real cost in owning that rental property.

I go into a lot more detail on this and these costs and breaking them down in the video series we give out on our website. If you haven’t seen that, go get it at SpousesFlippingHouses.com. It’s the “Analyzing a Deal” video course. I think it’s Video #3, not sure, but I go into detail on all of those costs.

So a good mentor of ours, Mike Cantu, who we’ve quoted many times on this podcast.

Andrea: He needs his own podcast. We’re just quoting him.

Doug: He really does. I’m trying to get him to write a book. He’s got so many great stories and one-liners. He’s just filled with those, but he says that all property is cash flow. Some are cash flow positive; some are cash flow negative. It’s so true.

Your property is going to cash flow one way or the other, so why not make it on the positive side. So know your costs going into it.

Andrea: Okay, so the second thing is that you want to keep this property maintained. This is your asset. You don’t want to let it break down. You’re going to want to do those yearly maintenance-type things like going in once a year to change the air filters, and check the smoke detectors, and things like that for multiple reasons.

One, you don’t want these maintenance issues to build up and then you have a big problem later, and then for two, it allows you a chance to get your eyes on the property and make sure that these people are maintaining things and taking good care of your house.

Doug: Kind of like changing the oil in your car, you want to do the best you can to make sure you’re maintaining it.

Andrea: Right, and if you have a lot of rentals, it could be a full-time job going around and inspect the air filters of every single property all the time. And to be honest, we don’t always do that, but if we had three or four properties, for sure we would do that.

Doug: Yeah. So it kind of depends on your operation, and how many you have, and how many people you have helping you in order to get that kind of stuff done.

Andrea: And if a tenant is calling you saying, “Hey, this is broken,” or, “that’s broken,” you want to take care of those things within reason, and we’ll talk about that in a few minutes here probably. But you want to take care of those things for the same reason. You don’t want problems to build on top of problems and then have a huge issue that you don’t have enough money set aside for.

One big maintenance issue can wipe out your cash flow for the whole entire year, like if you need a new roof, or a new air conditioning unit, or you need a new water heater. It can wipe you out for a whole year’s cash flow. It’s gone. So you really need to stay on top of the little things so that they don’t become big things.

Doug: Exactly, and to that point, especially like a leak. If someone says, “Oh, there’s a little leak in the ceiling. I don’t know if it was rain, or under my sink is dripping.” Take care of those things right away because that little leak can turn into a very expensive problem later on with mold and water damage and all kinds of stuff like that.

Andrea: At the same time, you don’t want to let tenants nickel and dime you for things that they have broken. So you have to differentiate between whether or not it’s an issue of something in the house that’s wearing out or if it’s something in the house that the tenant has broken.

If they’ve broken it, then they need to fix it and repair it. But if there’s a leak or something that’s just wear and tear on the house…

Doug: From normal use.

Andrea: …that’s normal use, then you need to take care of those things right away.

Doug: Yeah, mini-blinds breaking in half and windows breaking, or…

Andrea: Ceiling fan blades.

Doug: Or ceiling fan blades falling off, that’s just not normal wear and tear. Somebody hit those things. Holes that show up in the wall, you know that’s not normal wear and tear. Those were damages caused by the tenants or their guests, and they’re responsible.

Andrea: And they need to take care of those issues.

Doug: Yeah, we’ll go over that a little bit more later on.

Andrea: So one thing that makes life a little easier is having hard surface flooring. We’ll usually do carpet flooring in the bedrooms, but in the main living areas of the house, we’ll almost always do tile or laminate wood flooring. If maybe you bought a house, and it’s already got something that’s good enough for a tenant, decent carpet or whatever, and you can go with that for now.

But if you have the opportunity to change it out or it needs to be changed out, I would definitely go with some kind of a hard surface flooring, because people live hard, tenants especially. And if it’s carpet, you’re going to be changing that out all the time. But if it’s tile, you can just clean it.

Doug: Yeah clean it, sweep it up. It’s a little more expensive putting it in, but it is well worth it if you’re going to own this rental property for any length of time.

Andrea: So another tip is that the less things you can have in the house that can break, the better. So I think a lot of first-time landlords think they want to provide conveniences for their tenant.

Doug: They’ve got to trick it out.

Andrea: And they’ll have a nice tenant if they have all of these conveniences, but really, what they’ll discover is that’s just more opportunity for things to break, and they have to replace them. So an example of that would be ceiling fans, which Doug kind of already talked about, almost always get broken. It’s kind of funny how that happens.

Doug: It’s amazing how ceiling fans break.

Andrea: You really don’t need them. You can just have the light fixture up there. If they want to install a ceiling fan, then that’s great, but you don’t have to provide that.

Doug: When we were renters, we would go to Lowe’s and buy a fan, a stand-up fan, when you’re hot. That’s normal! People do that.

Andrea: Also, garage door openers, not necessary. It really is just another thing that can break. So you might think you need to provide that for them, but you really don’t. Also, washer and dryers, I think that’s a convenience that a lot of new landlords think that they need to provide, but you really don’t.

If we buy a house that comes with a washer and dryer, and we’re intending for that house to be a rental, we will pretty much always pull them out because we know that is an expensive item that’s going to probably break.

Doug: Right, no it’s not necessary. People kind of expect to bring their own washer and dryer.

Andrea: Right, and also microwaves. So we only provide the basic appliances— a stove, a dishwasher if there’s already a slot for one, and if there’s not, we don’t. We don’t provide a refrigerator; we don’t provide a washer and dryer; we don’t provide a microwave, because those are extra conveniences that have the opportunity to break, and you will be fixing them.

Doug: And this may vary for you depending on what market you’re in, or if you’re renting to student housing, or you know. We’re talking about the general three-bed/two-bath blue-collar working class neighborhood.

Andrea: Right, and then when you are evaluating a property that you think might be a good rental property for you, take into consideration the age of the home. The older that it is, the more maintenance there will be. So it doesn’t mean don’t buy an older home for a rental. We have tons of them, and they make great rental properties.

But you just need to factor that into your equation that if it’s older, there just are going to be more things.

Doug: Absolutely. The third main point to consider as a landlord is selecting the correct tenant.

Andrea: Yes. This is the number one thing that can make or break your experience as a landlord. I think we tend to sort-of even brand our properties based on the tenant that we have at the time.

So for example, we had this property out in the high desert on a street called Tatum, and when we bought it, I believe it came with some tenants or maybe it was the first set of tenants that we put into that property. They were horrible; they made our lives living hell, and we hated that house.

We talked about it all the time: “I hate Tatum. I can’t wait until we can sell that house. It’s terrible. It’s a terrible house.” Well guess what? Those tenants moved out, and some decent tenants moved in, and we don’t think about Tatum anymore. It’s not on our hate list.

Doug: No, it’s back in our good graces. It’s so true. The tenant is really more than half the battle when you’re talking about the whole scope of a rental property. A very, very important piece here, so don’t gloss over this. Don’t just throw anybody in your house.

You want to do a background check and obviously, you want to check their credit. We just have a rule in our business— absolutely no evictions. That’s just what we do. Other people have different rules on that, but if you were in a situation where that happened at one point, didn’t pay your rent and got evicted, the chances of that repeating are too high for us to risk.

So that’s one of our policies. So you want to check their rental history, and there’s a couple of ways to do that. Not only do you want to call their current landlord where they’re living but more importantly, you want to call the previous landlord if you can get that information, the place they lived before where they’re living now, because that’s likely where you’re going to get the real story on this person.

Think about it. If you’re calling someone who is renting to these people and maybe they’re really bad tenants, and this landlord is just anxious to get rid of them, they might be tempted to just tell you what you want to hear so they can get these tenants out of their place. Right?

So not that all landlords do that, I would say that most don’t, but it’s definitely possible and definitely could happen. So check with the current and previous landlords on these tenants. And I would just ask them one question. You don’t have to go into every little detail, just ask one question: Would you rent to these people again? If they apply for a house, would you rent to them again?

And just let them talk; see what they say. The other thing you want to check is make sure they have reliable income to be able to afford the rent. This is a very important part of renting a property. Can they afford it? A general rule of thumb is about three times the rent for their income.

So you kind of want to make sure that you’re not going to be putting them in a tight spot by paying their rent that they have no other money to live on because likely, there could be problems later. So make sure that they have a sufficient income and that their employment appears to be a reliable source of employment that will continue to be able to pay you your rent.

Another thing that’s important is you need to know your fair housing laws. Do not discriminate. There are serious laws about this and serious penalties. You can’t discriminate based on race, religion, occupation, anything like that. Now you can have your standards for renting your property, but you need to be consistent with those standards.

Apply them to everybody who might be considering renting your house. You’ve got to hold the same standards to them, whether it’s income standards, no pets, whatever it is that you’re doing, keep the same standards.

Andrea: Yeah, and you mentioned you’ve got to know your housing laws. You need to know all of the laws and guidelines that apply to you, as a landlord, because I can guarantee your tenant will know them because they will know the ways to get around them. So you need to know what you’re talking about.

Doug: Yes, because they will. So yeah, you’ve got to be well versed in that.

Andrea: There are certain people they call professional tenants, and they will know the laws better than you do.

Doug: They will, and don’t get overwhelmed by that or frozen and not want to pull the trigger on a rental property just because of that. It’s pretty easy to get familiar with them. Most of them are common sense.

Andrea: A lot of it you’ll learn as you go. You’ll learn with your first property.

Doug: Yeah, another thing we recommend is definitely take a deposit. And here’s a little tip on the security deposit: don’t make it the same dollar amount as the monthly rent. And here’s the reason for that— that could get confused as a rent payment, like a first month’s or last month’s rent payment or something. Make that number very different.

I would say going over what the rent is. So if the rent is going to be $1,000 a month, maybe take a $1,200 security deposit. There’s laws in your state, and you have to know what the maximum security deposit you can charge is, so don’t exceed that. But definitely take a security deposit.

You want people to, number one, have the money to be able to put the deposit in and still afford the first month’s rent, and make sure they have some reserves. But you don’t want to confuse them that they’re actually paying a month’s rent in advance or something.

Another policy that we would recommend is, we just have a no cat policy.

Andrea: No cats!

Doug: No cats. We’ve seen the damage cats can do to a house. Actually, we’ve smelled the damage cats can do to a house.

Andrea: Yes, there is just nothing that can get out the smell of cat urine. It is pungent and terrible.

Doug: Nothing against you cat lovers out there. You know, they’re cute and furry and can bring lots of joy and happiness to you. I understand, but they don’t do well for your carpet.

Andrea: It’s not just the carpet. It soaks into the walls. It is bad.

Doug: Everything. It is bad and even with dogs, we’re very choosey. First of all, your insurance company may not cover dogs. You have to check with your insurance policy.

Andrea: For type of breeds.

Doug: Yeah, for type of breeds. What we do, because we know that dogs cause damage— we love dogs, we have dogs— but dogs cause damage to houses and yards. They just do, so you can either increase the deposit, security deposit required, or charge an additional pet deposit.

What we do is actually call it a “pet rent,” but really we increase the rent, the monthly rent amount if you have a dog by just a minimal amount, $30-$50 a month. And the great thing about that is that you get to keep that. So if they give you a pet deposit, you may have to give that back at the end if their pet doesn’t do any damage. But the reality is, their dog peed somewhere in your house.

Doug: Or chewed something up, or yeah.

Andrea: So the pet rent, you get to keep that.

Doug: We don’t charge an extra pet deposit; we charge a pet rent, and that’s monthly ongoing. So if they’re there for any length of time, that’s just rent. You’re keeping that money every month, and it’s not refunded. So that’s what we do.

Another thing that is extremely important when you’re signing up a tenant is to meet with them in person and before you hand over the keys, you want to go over the lease agreement and your house rules, your expectations on everything in grave detail. Spend some time with them, making sure they know when rent is due, how to pay the rent, where to turn off the water in case there’s a water problem, where to turn off the gas if there’s a gas leak.

All of the different things that could come up, make sure they are aware, that they have the phone number to call for if there’s a maintenance problem or if something comes up that they know who to get in touch with. They have your address, all of the different things.

You’ll hear excuses later on: “I didn’t know where to…I didn’t know who to call or who to send it to.” Don’t let that happen. Another thing that’s good to do is play the role of the manager when you’re dealing with tenants, even if you’re the owner of the property and the sole decision maker. Play the role that you’re the property manager.

Andrea: It just takes the heat off of you.

Doug: Takes the heat off of you, kind of gives them the sense that you’re on their side as well, that you answer to somebody else and can’t make the call all of the time, that you’ll have to go back and ask permission if there’s something that they’re trying to negotiate or what have you. That you’re not the bad guy.

Andrea: And then you also, maybe there’s something they’ve asked you and you need to think about it. It gives you a minute to think about it. You’re not on the spot to answer right there, because you can let them know that you have to check with somebody else and get back to them.

Doug: Got to check with the owner; got to check with the money man/partner, whatever you want to call it. Just play the role that you’re the manager.

Andrea: And then our fourth and last point about keeping your sanity as a landlord is to have good systems in place, and there’s a few ways you can do that. First of all, you want to have a Google Voice number so that the tenants do not have your personal cell phone number. That’s huge.

Doug: The last thing you want is them calling you during dinner or just being caught off guard, not knowing who it is that’s calling. If you have a Google Voice number…

Andrea: Right. You’ll know, even if you don’t necessarily know which tenant it is, you’ll know it’s a tenant and whether or not you want to take that call at that moment.

Doug: And you can direct that to another number later if you have somebody else that you want to take calls. You can, without having to change the number, just forward it to them.

Andrea: Yeah, and then the second thing is your rent collection. You can do that in a lot of different ways. They can mail you a check; they can direct deposit it into your account. However you decide to do it, just make sure that you have a system for it that’s trackable, that your tenants know and they can expect exactly what they’re supposed to do, and that it’s all spelled out for them.

There’s different ways of managing your rent collection too, different kinds of software. There’s Buildium, which we actually use, and that’s a great one. But that’s probably for if you already have several rental properties because you have to pay a fee to use that one.

You can just use a simple Excel spreadsheet, whatever it is that just keeps things organized for you to be able to track when the payments came in, so you can start recognizing if there’s a pattern. If certain people are late, you need to see that and track that information.

We’re building something out in Podio right now, and once we have that we might share that with you as well, but there’s Quickbooks. There’s lots of different ways of doing it. Just pick something, and stick with it.

Doug: Yeah, something that works for you depending on how big your operation is.

Andrea: Then the fourth thing is to charge and strictly enforce your late fees. You know, it’s kind of funny, I noticed a parallel between parenting and landlording.

Doug: Oh, so true.

Andrea: So many similarities here. You need to do what you say you’re going to do. So like with your kids, “If you do that one more time, you’re going to get a time-out.” And then they do it again, “Did you hear me? I said if you do that one more time, you’re going to get a time-out.”

Well guess what? They’re going to do it one more time, and one more time, so same thing with being a landlord. If you tell them the rent is due on the first, it is due on the first. If you don’t have it by the third, they have a late fee. That’s just the way it goes.

Do it the very first month they are late, and then they know that you mean business. You’re serious, and it’s not going to happen again.

Doug: Yep, set the standard from the very beginning. That’s definitely the way to do it.

Andrea: And then lastly, you want to take lots of pictures before they move in to note the condition of the property because they may have discrepancies when they move out: “I swear that hole was there when I moved in. I’m sure it was.”

So you want pictures to have proof of the condition that the home was in when they moved in.

Doug: Yeah, because you’re not going to remember. It’s going to be difficult to remember, especially if you have multiple properties, of what the condition was really like. So pictures or video would be really great.

Andrea: Well, with pictures though, you can print those off and have them sign off on them. So you’ll do a walkthrough sheet, you can let them walk through and see anything that they want to point out, say, “Hey, this was here. I didn’t do this.” And then you both sign that sheet. You both have a copy. And then it’s documented.

Doug: Perfect.

Andrea: So you know what’s funny? A lot of people who listen have been sending me Facebook messages and emails letting me know that they actually take notes as they listen to our podcast, and I just realized. So it’s making me be more aware of how I go through my points here, and I just realized that I said number three, but I didn’t say it was number three.

And then I didn’t say it was number five, so if I’m totally confusing you, I’m going to go back through it. Number one, under have a good system, was have a Google Voice number. Number two is your rent collection. Number three is a software system or some kind of system to track those things. Number four is basically follow-thru. Charge and strictly enforce your late fees. And number five was take lots of before-and-after pictures.

Doug: Yes. Rentals can be a great business. We’re really excited about building our retirement through rental properties, and we encourage people to do it, but landlording can sometimes be so difficult, if you don’t know what you’re getting into, that it just turns people off to the whole rental business.

So we want to help you be successful in your landlording endeavors, and hopefully these tips will kind of set the foundation for that.

Andrea: Yeah, and you don’t have to love every aspect of landlording. It’s okay if there’s certain parts that you really hate, then you can hire somebody else part-time to help you out.

Doug: Train somebody else to do that.

Andrea: Because to be honest, yeah there’s parts of this that aren’t fun, but we’re not going to stop doing it because we know that the outcome and end is so worth it. So just hang in there if there are parts you don’t love. Get help.

Doug: Absolutely, and remember that the tenant is your partner in this whole investment that you’re doing. They really are. Treat the tenant with the respect that they deserve. Treat them like the people that they are, and help them help you in a sense.

They are your partners in this deal, so take care of them and hopefully they’ll take care of you.

Andrea: Yeah, you know there’s this guy out here in Southern California who’s kind of a real estate legend in the investing world here, and his name is Tony Alvarez. And I was lucky enough to spend a few days with him a couple years ago, learning different real estate things from him, and one of the things I was most impressed by him about was how much respect he shows to his tenants.

And he expects them to show the same respect to him, but he does cool things, like at Thanksgiving time, he would give them a turkey. A lot of them were low-income families, and he’d give them a turkey or drop off Thanksgiving dinner fixings to them, or different little things that just go above and beyond, and they want to stay with him.

So he had this one single mom that was kind of outgrowing the little house that she was renting from him, but she liked him so much that she went to him and asked if he had anything else, anything bigger. She wanted to stay with him, which is pretty cool.

So if you can do that and build those relationships, and have tenants respect you because you respect them, it will make your life so much easier.

Doug: Yes, absolutely. Great example. And you know, if it just doesn’t work out— you’ve put a tenant in there, and it’s just not working out for whatever reason— let them go, have them move out, and start again. Go back to the people store as Mike Cantu says, and just do it again.

Like the example of the property we have in the high desert earlier, it’s now one of our favorites because we have a great tenant in there. It really does make a huge difference.

Andrea: So I think that’s all we have for you today. I’ll recap really quick. Number one, know your costs involved. Number two, keep that property maintained. Number three, choose your tenants wisely. If I could say that five more times, I would. And number four, have a good system.

Doug: Absolutely. Well, great episode today. We encourage you to go check us out again at our website, SpousesFlippingHouses.com. We got some feedback this week, and we really appreciate that.

Andrea: Yes, thank you so much to everybody who sent us an email. I really enjoyed reading them. Thank you! I feel like the nicest people in the world are listening to our podcast, and I’m really grateful. Thank you so much. So keep the emails coming if you have any questions or any other ways we can help you out.

My email is [email protected]. And that’s A-n-d-r-e-a at SpousesFlippingHouses. You can also go to our website, check out the free gift, and other than that, have a great week!

Doug: Take care!

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The post Episode 18: Landlording 101: A Crash Course for WINNING With Rental Properties appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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In today’s podcast we’re talking about some creative ways that YOU can use to put deals together. These ways are typically used for when conventional methods don’t work for one party or the other. And since there are many different ways to buy & sell property, we’re going to cover a few of the BEST & most creative ways to structure these kinds of deals.

Download Episode 17 Transcript

Doug: Welcome back to Spouses Flipping Houses podcast. It’s great to be with you! Episode 17 today, I can’t believe we’ve had 17 already.

Andrea: They’ve gone by fast.

Doug: It’s starting to get up there. Hope you had a great week. We’re glad to be back in-studio this time.

Andrea: As opposed to in our car.

Doug: If you want to call this a studio, as opposed to the car, yeah. We had a busy couple of weeks this whole January. This year started off great, so we’re really excited. Five deals under contract this year so far, really excited about that. So we want to keep that momentum going.

Andrea: In fact, we just got back from going to see a house that a seller called us about.

Doug: “House.”

Andrea: Yeah, Doug’s using air quotes over there because we show up, and first of all, it’s off this dirt road, and you’re kind of like, what in the world. Which direction does this road go? Where are we headed? There were all of these strange sort-of shacks and then some nice houses, and it was so bizarre.

And then we get to property, and it’s really a shell of a house. It’s not even a house.

Doug: Yeah, he called it a house, and you know sometimes people talk about the repairs that a home needs on the phone, and we try to get the real information as best we can and get the most accurate description of the condition of the property and what it’s going to need. And he said he had an estimate for $25,000 repair on this house.

Andrea: There is no way. It had a roof and some…

Doug: And some cinderblock walls. And that is it. There was nothing, nothing in this house. It was literally a shell. Part of the walls were even down. It was just some cinderblock walls and a portion of a roof out in the middle of a desert, and so our offer was going to change to land value.

Andrea: Land value minus demo for what was there.

Doug: Minus demo. So you know, sometimes it happens, and that’s the way it goes. This area, I don’t know if you knew this, but this area was actually out where they filmed a lot of those old Roy Rogers movies.

Andrea: I’m not surprised, because it looked like that. It was kind of a cool drive; we had fun.

Doug: Yeah, it’s up near Yucca valley, Morongo valley area. It’s pretty out there. There’s snow in the mountains right now, and it’s nice, but yeah we probably won’t end up buying this property, but that’s okay. Today we’ve got a great topic, talking about creative ways to put deals together.

Andrea: Yeah, most people think that the only way to buy and sell real estate is just through the traditional ways that we all know about, to put it on the MLS, somebody comes along and buys it. You get a 30-year loan and in 30 years you pay it off, and maybe you’re financed somewhere in there, and there’s really a lot of other ways you can do it.

One of the reasons that I love real estate so much is because there are so many creative ways that you can structure a deal. It’s kind of like a fun problem solving strategy that you can use. It’s pretty cool.

Doug: Yeah, one of our mentors, Mike Cantu, he says, “All you need for a real estate transaction is two people and a piece of dirt.” Or something like that, “two people and a piece of property.” A lot of the things in there on how that can transfer is all negotiable, and you can be creative, and it’s all legal. So we’re going to go into some of those ways.

Andrea: So today we’re going to talk about five main ways that you can creatively buy or sell a house, and you would typically use these strategies when the conventional way of buying or selling isn’t good for one party or the other.

Doug: So the first way, and these are just five of some of the most popular, some of the ones that we know a lot about. And we’ve done three out of these five before. There’s many, many ways to buy and sell properties, but these are probably the most common creative ways.

Number one is the seller-carry, or also known as the installment sale. So what is this? What is a seller-carry transaction? Well, in a normal transaction, the buyer would either pay cash for the property or go get some new financing, a new loan. They’re going to call up the bank or you know, some hard-money lender or somebody else who is going to lend them the money to buy the property.

Well in a seller-carry situation, the seller owns the property free and clear, so there is no loan against the property. And the seller actually becomes the bank for the buyer. So they are creating out of thin air a loan for the buyer when the transaction happens, and so the buyer will then make payments to the seller for whatever they can negotiate.

So why would this situation be used? Well, there are lots of different reasons, and first of all, no money even has to be exchanged in this type of transaction. That’s right, zero money, depending on how the terms get negotiated. So everything is negotiable, which is the cool part of all of these transactions.

So number one, it could help the seller get the price they’re looking for. Maybe they’re looking for a higher price than a buyer can pay, but that’s because the buyer couldn’t get a loan for that amount or they felt something, they just couldn’t come up with that much cash to pay that price. Well the seller can still get that price and then carry back a note, and they can just get their price in the amount of payments every month with a certain interest rate. So that’s one reason.

Another would be that it could help the buyer get a certain payment that they need. Let’s say they need a low payment, so they can structure the transaction in a way where the payments are low, and maybe there’s a balloon payment down the road for the rest of the property or something like that.

This could also be good for a buyer who maybe just can’t qualify for a traditional loan. These days, the lending standards are pretty difficult. They’re pretty hard to get a good 30-year loan. If you don’t fit right in the box of what the lenders are looking for, you don’t qualify.

So a lot of self-employed people, entrepreneurs, people like that who own their own businesses find it really difficult to get a loan, but they maybe really qualified. They make enough money to make the payment and everything else looks good, but they don’t quite fit in their box of what the lenders are typically looking for.

So this way the seller can provide the financing for them, and they can buy a home. Also, there can be good tax advantages if you’re a person selling a home this way. Every person’s situation is different, but there are definite advantages tax-wise for you to sell a property by carrying back a note or doing an installment sale. So that’s going to vary person-to-person, but just know that that is a definitely an option if you’re a seller.

Another advantage for the seller is that they can actually make additional money by charging interest of course to the buyer. A lot of times when we buy houses, the person selling the home doesn’t actually need the money or a big chunk of money for any particular thing. They’re just going to take the money from the sale and put it in their bank account or somewhere.

Well bank accounts and savings accounts are paying such little return right now, very little. And sometimes, it’s better for them to carry back a note, and then they can make a five, six, or even ten percent interest, whatever is negotiated, on that money. So they’re actually making even more money after they sell the phone because of the bank.

Andrea: Yeah it’s great to know these different reasons why it helps a seller for your negotiation strategies, because ultimately you are looking for what benefits them, what is going to be a benefit to them, why they should go with you and sell their house to you. So you want to look for the reason why a seller-carry option is a benefit to them and try to sell them on that point.

Doug: Exactly. You’ll get much more deals this way if you have these things in your toolbox to where you know that this will actually solve the seller’s problem more than just buying it outright for cash.

Andrea: So the next way you can creatively buy or sell a home is through a method called subject-to. And basically, you are buying or selling the house subject to the existing mortgage that is on the property. And we have actually been on both sides of this kind of transaction strangely enough.

When we were first married, we moved out to Colorado; we had this concessions business; we built a brand new home, our first home, so exciting. We ended up selling that business and wanted to move back to California to be closer to family, and it all happened so fast.

We listed our business, and it sold within three weeks, which was something we were not expecting, and we needed to quickly sell our house to get back to California because we had other business plans there that we already had in motion. So we had a couple things working against us.

The first one being that we were on a time crunch. We needed to sell it quickly, and we knew that if we had listed the property, we’d have to wait however many days to even get an offer, and then have to go through escrow, and we weren’t really in a position to wait that kind of time frame.

The other thing was that we had only owned it for 18 months or so. Prices had not gone up really in that time period, so we would have probably lost money by paying the commissions, and title and escrow fees, and all of that sort of thing. We would have lost the money that we had put into the home.

So we were young and naïve, didn’t really know what we were doing, listed it for sale by owner, and an investor came along, called us up, just like what we do now, and said, “Hey! I will buy it from you at the price that you want. I’ll give you back the down payment that you made as my down payment, and I will take over the loan.”

It was a perfect win-win situation for us because we were able to, literally within a week, walk away from that home, get our $10,000 back that we had put down on that home, and move quickly. He solved all of our problems.

Doug: Yep. It worked out great.

Andrea: So having been on that side of it, I think was a really great experience for us because we can speak to this with such confidence when we come to a prospective seller that hey, we can solve this problem for you. We know we believe it because it’s been done for us. And so then we’ve actually bought many properties this way as well.

So it can be great for the seller if they’re behind in payments or maybe they’re headed to foreclosure for whatever reason. You can bring them current; they don’t have to get a foreclosure on their credit, and then you just take over their existing loan. So it can be great for that.

You can sell for a little equity if the loan is good, which was our situation at that time. The buyer gets great existing financing with less cost and less hassle, so there’s a huge benefit obviously to the buyer. But there is a possible downside with subject-to, and that is something called the due-on-sale clause.

Doug: Dum dum dum.

Andrea: So we have also experienced this. Go ahead, you tell them.

Doug: So most loans that have been written in the last, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years, have what’s called a due-on-sale clause, meaning that if a title transfers, the lender could call the loan due and payable in 90 days or so.

Now, when we were getting trained, taking some courses and going to seminars on real estate investing, you’ll often hear people talk about this strategy of subject-to, and most of the time what you hear from the trainer is, “You know, yeah, there’s this due-on-sale clause, but don’t worry about it. I’ve done dozens of these, and I’ve never been called due. Nobody’s been called due. I’ve never even heard of anybody having a note called due.”

Well, they haven’t talked to us. We have done subject-to, and we have had the note called due. And not only that, but I know several people who have had multiple notes called due. It can happen.

Andrea: You have to be really careful when you take over a property subject-to. There are certain ways that you have to set up the insurance. You have to still carry your own insurance, and what happened with us was that the insurance company mistakenly notified the mortgage company that there was a new seller on title, and that’s what you’re trying to avoid.

Doug: Right. Now I want to be clear that it’s not illegal to do this. There’s actually a line on the closing statement of most escrow companies that talks about whether you’re taking the note subject-to. I mean, it’s actually a common way of buying homes or it used to be more common, and it’s kind of coming back. So it’s not illegal.

It is a violation of most loans though. So if they see it, you know. But if you think about it, people transfer properties all of the time into a trust; they transfer them into you know… or put somebody else on the title. All of those things are also violations of the due-on-sale clause. So technically, they could be called due.

Andrea: This has gotten a lot of people in trouble I think when their loan has been called due, but for us, we always make sure that there is equity built into any transaction. We won’t purchase one that’s under water basically.  So there was enough equity there for us to go and quickly get another loan, and it wasn’t a big deal.

Doug: If that happens, make sure you take care of the problem, and solve it, and don’t just be that guy that makes your seller have a big problem on their hands.

Andrea: Right, recognize that this is a possibility, and if you’re not in a position to quickly fix this problem if it comes up, then don’t buy it subject-to.

Doug: Right. The third creative way we’re going to talk about is called rent-to-own or lease option. A lot of people have usually heard of this way of buying homes, so it is kind of what it sounds like. The buyer will actually rent the property from the owner for a period of time, usually with some type of option to purchase the home later.

So why would they do this? Well, it sort of locks down the property for the buyer and gives them time to go get traditional financing or get a loan of some kind. So it gives them time to repair their credit, or just come up with a down payment, or whatever it is that they need to get the financing.

It also can be a good for a buyer in an appreciating market, because typically you’re locking in a price once you rent the home. You’re saying, in a year or two, I’m going to buy it for this price, and if the market appreciates, that can be a great thing for you. All of the sudden you have built-in equity when you go to actually close on the home.

And it can be good for the seller also because, typically in this situation, the buyer is not just renting from you at a usually higher than market rent rate, but they’re also paying for maintaining the home because they have the mentality of an owner because they’re planning to buy this property.

Usually they’ve put down a little bit bigger down payment also— so it’s good if you’re the seller— and they’re invested in the house, so they’re trying to take care of it. And so usually you don’t have costs of maintaining it, and you get a higher rent in the meantime. So it can kind of be a win-win situation that way.

And if the buyer can’t come up with the financing down the road when it’s time to exercise the option, usually that down payment they have put down is non-refundable, and the seller keeps that for their trouble. And they move on; they can do whatever else they want with the property.

Andrea: Okay, so our next creative way to purchase or sell is through a land contract, also known as a contract for deed. So this is really similar to a lease option. It is a purchase, but the title doesn’t transfer until all of the payments in agreement have been satisfied, so the seller does retain the title.

This is something you might want to use in place of subject-to if you’re worried about triggering the due-on-sale clause. In this case, the buyer doesn’t need a new purchase loan because the seller is providing it through their payments, so that is a great benefit to a buyer.

Now if you’re selling a home this way, it can be a benefit to you in the event that you need to foreclose on your buyer. It’s a much easier way to go about it than if the title had transferred, because then you would have to go through the whole foreclosure process, file a notice of default. It can take a long, long time.

Doug: The laws are pretty crazy about that now too. It takes a long time to do that.

Andrea: Right. So one downside to this is the fact that the buyer is unsecured, and the rules for this sort of thing and for securing yourself are probably different in every county or state. I have no idea, so you want to look into whether or not you can get some kind of memorandum of sale that you can record.

You’re going to want to ask an experienced title rep what you can do to secure yourself. So you’re going to want to basically cloud the title, so that the seller can’t go and sell it out from under you or take loans against the property. That would be really terrible.

Doug: Right, yeah. So you definitely want to try to protect yourself in any way you can. We’ve never done this type of transaction, but we have heard of it, and it is one of the types of ways in which people buy or sell homes.

Andrea: Yeah, and the last benefit to this one is that all of the terms are negotiable, just like most of these.

Doug: Yep, everything is negotiable, which is really cool. So the last strategy we’re going to talk about for buying homes is trading. So it’s just what it sounds like. You can trade a house for a house, if you want. We have a friend who actually traded, I believe, a house or land for RVs and boats, you know.

There’s all kinds of different ways. Again, you need two people and a piece of property, and you can figure out how to make it work. And one of the reasons that this might be used is it can be good for someone who has, let’s say they’ve got a bunch of property, but they’ve also got a bunch of debt against that property, and maybe they’re not able to make those payments.

And they just want to get out from under that debt, but maybe they couldn’t sell it in a traditional manner or they needed to sell it quickly. And somebody else, who has something else that is desirable to the person with the land, doesn’t mind the debt. They can afford it or they see the potential in that property, and they can trade.

Andrea: Maybe they have a sweet RV or something, and that’s their down payment.

Doug: Yeah, and in this case they would trade a sweet RV that has no debt on it for a piece of land with some debt on it. So they’re just swapping. Now the person no longer has debt, and he’s got a sweet RV, and this person has land that he wants to build on or whatever. So that is one way to buy and sell properties. You can actually trade.

Andrea: So we’ve only just barely scratched the surface here with creative deal structuring.

Doug: The sky is the limit.

Andrea: The sky really is the limit. You can just get creative, and think in terms of just solving someone’s problem and out-of-the-box ways that you can do it. And it makes this business so, so fun. So again, our five ways that we went over today were seller-carry, subject-to, rent-to-own or lease option, land contract, and trading, which is kind of cool.

Keep in mind though that if you’re going to go about doing one of these options, you need to make sure whomever you are entering into this agreement with or doing a deal with is a person that you can get along with long term, because you are entering a long-term relationship with this person.

And so you’ve got to make sure that they understand that you guys are in it for a while. You’re going to need to be in contact with that person for different reasons. Things will come up, and so may make sure that you guys can deal with each other for a few years, or however long this contract is in place.

Doug: You’re, in a sense, married to these people in a way. So definitely make sure you can work with them, get along, contact them after the transaction is over, very important, because you never know what documents you may need or they may need to cooperate with you later on.

Also, we mentioned it before, but you can creatively buy properties in lots of different ways, taking over loans and things like that, but I highly, highly recommend, we both recommend, that you don’t overpay for a property. That is, don’t takeover a loan that owes more than the property is worth. Don’t over-encumber yourself. Don’t make silly decisions like that.

Make smart decisions. Still buy with equity. It doesn’t have to be as much, but make sure you have an exit plan if something were to go wrong.

Andrea: Yeah, or let’s say I know people that will takeover loans or will structure seller-carry deals where there is no equity, but the person selling the home doesn’t have a loan against it, and their payments are going all towards principal. So let’s say it’s paying down super, super fast.

So just have some kind of a safety net plan for yourself if you don’t have equity, be smart.

Doug: Things can go bad, and we’ve heard of people who have built a business around this kind of thing, and it went really wrong. So just make sure you’re smart with each decision or each purchase that you do. And that’s it!

Thanks for listening today. Be sure to head on over to our website if you haven’t, SpousesFlippingHouses.com. Even if you have, visit us again. Get your free gift, lots of cool videos and stuff on there as well.

Andrea: Yeah, and if there is anything that you’re struggling with, questions that you’d like answers or something you’d like to hear us talk about, shoot me an email: [email protected]. I would love to hear your questions.

Doug: And her name is not spelled like the Starbucks’ baristas spell it.

Andrea: They never get it right, not once.

Doug: There’s no “u” in her name.

Andrea: It’s not —ia.

Doug: There’s no “i.”

Andrea: A-N-D-R-E-A at Spouses Flipping Houses, and I promise I’ll email you back.

Doug: Sounds good, so we will catch you next week. Bye!

Andrea: Bye!

If you would like to learn more information from our Podcasts, check us out on iTunes & Subscribe. Also consider leaving us a rating (5 stars would be great) and a review would also be helpful so others can learn more about us and get in on our upcoming episodes.

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The post Episode 17: Get Creative!! 5 Out of the Box Ways to Structure a Real Estate Deal!! appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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We recently received an email from a Real Estate Club here in Southern California. One of their speakers will be talking about how the real estate market is going to be worse off than in the previous decline! Today we wanted to talk about this and “settle the score” so to speak, on this very important topic. We’ll cover what you should be aware of, what to look out for in your own market and how to mitigate your risks & be successful in this business.

The Norris Group

Download Episode 16 Transcript

Andrea: Welcome back. This is Episode 16.

Doug: Spouses Flipping Houses.

Andrea: And this is the first work week of the New Year, 2016, and Doug and I always get super hyped up for the start of a new year. We always have these goals that we’ve lined out, and we’ve got a plan of how to get there, and we’re always super excited, and we kind of hit the ground running fast and furious, pretty much every year at this time.

And so we pretty much have thought that there would be no way we could record a podcast this week because we are so busy, but we had a topic on our mind, and we decided you know what, let’s just record it in the car.

Doug: Yeah, because we are spending the majority of our time in the car this week, in the rain, in the car.

Andrea: Yes, so if you don’t know, Southern California is pretty much under El Niño. It has hit; it’s crazy; it’s wild out here, so that combined with the fact that it’s just been a great start to this new year, lots of deals and appointments already under contract, and so we’re getting going. It’s exciting.

Doug: It is. It is.

Andrea: So anyways, that being said, sound quality might not be so good. We’re in the car today. We got our nine-year-old son in the backseat. Say hi Weston—

Weston: Hi

Andrea: And he’s hanging out with us today.

Doug: There was snow on the road. Well, slush or snow or something in San Diego. Crazy! I’ve never seen that before.

Andrea: Yeah, pretty wild for Southern California. Yeah, so we are in the car. We just drove down to San Diego to meet with a new contractor and get him started on a job down there, and we’re headed back. And then Doug is going to turn around and head down to La Hacienda Heights, which is north from where we are. It’s literally been wild.

We’ve been all over Southern California this week, but it’s fun, and it’s exciting, and good stuff is happening over here.

Doug: Good stuff’s happening, moving and shaking.

Andrea: So anyways, what we wanted to talk about today is the fact that we got an email from one of the real estate clubs here in Southern California, and they have a speaker coming up, and his main topic is just this huge doom and gloom type of a thing.

Yeah, the sky is falling and this next year, the real estate market is going to be worse than it was in the previous decline, and that sort of thing.

And just really kind of a fear based thing, and so we’ve had people saying, “Oh are you going to stop working? What are you guys going to do? Are you scared? How are you going to mitigate your risk?” And so we wanted to chat about that.

Doug: It’s interesting the effect that the media plays on just the general public and on what people think is going on in the market. It just might come from something they saw on Nightline or the Nightly News, and generally that information is really dated. It’s usually like six months behind already on what’s actually happening in the market, and sometimes it’s not even accurate at all.

It might just be based on a little local area or something that might be going on in a particular community that they’re talking about, so you know, just take all of the information you might hear or read about with a grain of salt. And really, the point we’re going to make today is to know what’s going on in your own local market.

Andrea: Yeah, so people will ask, “What is the best market for real estate investing?” And the answer is that there is no such thing. You can be successful in a market where prices are going up.

You can be successful in a market where prices are tumbling. You can be successful in a flat market, a buyer’s market, a seller’s market. It does not matter.

The thing is that there are different strategies that some might use in different markets, and you need to be aware of what those are. Can you hear the rain on my windshield?

Doug: It is raining. We’re not really sure what to do with rain here in Southern California. It doesn’t happen that much. So the freeway is going to slow down here in a second, I know.

Andrea: That’s hilarious. It’s pretty loud. So anyways, you just kind of need to be aware of what is going on in the market, and then know what strategies to use in each particular kind of market, and just be aware and make smart choices. It’s not as terrifying as I think people might lead you to believe.

So we want to talk about a few of the ways that you can sort of mitigate your risk when the market is changing. The first one is don’t speculate.

Speculating, if you’re not sure, is what people were doing back in 2003, 2004, in California where they would go into a homebuilder’s office basically, and put down money on a house, and they were just basically banking on the fact that when that home was done in eight/nine months later, that prices would have increased so much that they could make a profit, because prices were increasing pretty rapidly at that point.

And this became a strategy for people making money, and it happened to be working, but that was all by chance. That is not investing; that is absolutely speculating, basically gambling.

Doug: Yeah, and people were literally camping out at the sales offices for the release of the next phase or whatever, just to get a chance to purchase one of these lots that were going to be built. So when you see stuff like that happening, it might be time to raise an eyebrow and say maybe I should sit on the sidelines for a second. When your barber is talking about flipping a house, and they’re going to do this kind of thing, I don’t know just a red flag there. It might be a bubble forming.

Andrea: Yeah, and not to say that one is right now, but something to be aware of. And the other thing that you can do to mitigate your risk is to understand how global and national trends can affect your local market and the market in general. So rapidly rising interest rates would be something to look out for.

I know the Fed has already raised rates, and I don’t think it has trickled right down to the mortgages yet, but it probably will. So just keep an eye out on that.

Doug: Can I comment on that real quick. Raising rates doesn’t necessarily equal prices going down either. People will tend to think that. Generally, at least from our experience and experts we pay attention to, when there’s a slow increase in interest rates, especially when they’ve been low for a long time, that typically gives a bump to the market for a while and gives fuel to it.

Prices actually go up for a time because it plays into people’s emotions of the rates might be going up, I better buy a house now while I can lock-in at a lower rate than it will be maybe in three or four months. And that can go on for a while, so it’s just not a cut-and-dry rates are going up, Oh no! Prices are going to fall. That’s typically not the case.

Andrea: Yeah, another thing to watch out for though or keep your eye on is the fact that it is an election year, and so there may be tax rule changes and unknowns that come along with a new president coming into play. So just keep an eye on the tax changes that might be taking place and anything that affects home ownership or investors can be big.

I know in the 1990s, there was a change in the depreciation rules for investors, and that had a big impact, so you do need to keep an eye on what’s happening nationally as well as your local market.

A source that we really love is The Norris Group. And Bruce Norris is a very well-respected market timing expert for Southern California. He’s got really great data. He pays attention like nobody’s business. I mean these documents that come down from the government that nobody reads; he reads them.

Doug: He puts together his own conclusion based on the data that he collects, and reads, and researches, and the reason we really like him is because he’s an investor. So he’s invested, with his own funds and his own company money, into the market, and so he doesn’t have an agenda.

He’s really just trying to figure out what is the best strategy for his own investing. And he obviously shares that information and does some training and things, but we really, really respect the predictions and the market conclusions that he comes to because of that fact, that he, himself, is fully invested in the market.

Andrea: Yeah, another source that we like is The Realty Track. They’ve got a lot of great data on there as well, so that’s something that you can kind of look through just to keep yourself informed. It’s really important to be informed, but you also want to be aware of where you’re getting your information.

So you know, if you’re getting reports from the National Association of Realtors, well keep in mind that they don’t ever want to tell you that the market is going to be bad, because they want their realtors to be selling houses, and that affects them.

Doug: And they want people to be buying houses as well, so it might be skewed a little bit.

Andrea: Yeah, you just need to know what is their benefit, and what’s their angle, and just keep all of these things in mind.

Doug: Right.

Andrea: Another way that you can mitigate your risk is to keep an eye on the amount of inventory.

Doug: Yeah, so typically what the general assumption is that six months of inventory is considered a balanced market. And you know, what is months of inventory? Sometimes you hear that and people don’t really know what that means.

So what does six months of inventory really mean? Well, they get that number by taking a segment of the market, or maybe they’ll take a zip code or a community or state, whatever it is, and they figure out the number of homes that are currently available for sale in that particular segment of the market. And then they will figure out over the past period of time, how many sales have actually happened.

Let’s say it’s a chunk of time like a year— they’ll take a number of sales that have happened in the past year in that market, and then they’ll divide that by the months and figure out how many months, I’m sorry how many sales occurred each month.

And they’ll take the current number of homes for sale and divide that by the sales per month, and that comes up with how many months it would take to sell all of the homes that are currently listed.

So six months of inventory would mean that it would take, in a normal market, if the market continues as it is, it would take six months to sell off all of those homes that are available. That’s what that means, so how we use that information is say you’re under six months of inventory. That typically is a seller’s market because there are less homes available for sale.

So right now in California, we’re hovering around four months of inventory on average, and in our market that’s the same. So we’re slightly a seller’s market. During the crash, when Andrea and I first started investing in 2008, I think it got up to maybe 15 or 16 months worth of inventory sometimes, which is an over flooding amount of available homes for sale, which is a buyer’s market because of the simple fact that there are tons of homes available.

So people are dropping prices to get their homes sold. That’s a buyer’s market. So six months is kind of considered balanced, just so you kind of have a gauge on what that months of inventory really means.

Andrea: And how can they go about finding out the amount of inventory for their market?

Doug: Yeah, so you mentioned Realty Track. That’s probably a good source nationwide to go to. I think they would have that information. Zillow is actually becoming pretty good at providing that information as well.

Zillow.com, I’m not sure exactly where in there, but you can type in your zip code in there or something, and they would usually give you about a six month or year history. And you can see a little graph on the inventory levels and the number of sales, things like that.

Or if you happen to have access to the MLS or you’re an agent, you can go on your MLS and get that information, or go to your local realtor board. In California, it’s called C.A.R., the California Association of Realtors, and just Google that. And they’ll have that information as well. It’s usually about 30 days behind, but it’s pretty good information for finding your inventory in your market.

Or you can do the search and math yourself. I do that sometimes for specific communities, like say a golf course community out in the desert, because it’s going to be very different (as far as the supply and the months inventory versus just your typical track neighborhood in Riverside).

So I would narrow it down to just that particular community, and then I run the sales, and I run the listings and figure out what the inventory is myself. So I can kind of have an idea what it’s like to buy and sell in that particular community.

Andrea: So good stuff! Another way to mitigate your risk is to make sure that you’re getting the right deal based on what’s happening in the market.

So what I mean by that is back in 2009 when prices were declining pretty rapidly, we were usually buying properties at between 60 and 65 percent of the after-repaired value, and then subtracting out repairs after that. That would be our purchase price.

Well nowadays, it’s kind of a flat market, but prices are up from there, and it’s fairly predictable what we’ll be able to sell a home for. So we’re paying 76 to 78 percent of after-repaired value minus repairs.

Doug: Yeah, quite a bit more because it is, like I mentioned, sort of a seller’s market right now, and it’s a lot easier to sell your house now than it was in 2009.

Andrea: So if you are out there trying to get a 65 minus repairs deal right now, you’re probably not going to get a deal. But, if things do change and prices start declining, and you’re trying to get a 78 percent minus repairs deal, you’re going to lose your shirt. You have to just gauge what’s happening and know where your offer should be.

Also, if prices are declining, what we did back in 2009 and those days was to be really cautious with our after repaired value that we would determine. So we would kind of get an idea if prices were declining, say one percent per month or two percent per month, then take that out of your after-repaired value. Don’t assume that what it’s worth today is what it’s going to sell for in three or four months.

Be aware of the fact that if prices are declining, what it’s actually going to sell for in the future.

Doug: You have to know the trend that you’re in. If you’re in a declining market, which is when we started, there’s still a good strategy for that, but just like you said, you have to plan ahead and know that you’re probably going to be listing this home in 90 days, 120 days, whatever it is, and take that percentage off o your value, because that’s where your prices will realistically be at that time.

Andrea: Okay, so our last tip for mitigating your risk in a changing market is to have multiple exit strategies. So for us, that means we pretty much hang out in the first-time homebuyers inventory. And especially right now, that will not change for 2016. The reason for that is that there is a lot of things we can do with those properties if for some reason, we can’t flip it like we thought.

So we can keep it for a rental; most of them, they’ll rent. It makes sense.

Doug: There’s a couple reasons to hang out in that type of inventory, and if you don’t know what first-time homebuyer inventory is, it’s kind of starter homes, smaller homes, two/three-bedroom homes. Typically, it depends on your area, but under 2,000 square feet, usually around 1500 square feet or so.

There are a couple reasons, yeah, but those are rentable homes. Those are great homes to rent out to families. People are looking for that type of home, young families, even single people like the have an extra bedroom or two. And also, I don’t know the exact percentage, but the majority of sales and transactions that happen for homes take place in that first-time homebuyers inventory.

So there’s always people looking for that, and you can sell it usually easier than if you have a McMansion that you’re trying to unload.

Andrea: Right, because lending rules are different for those higher price points. There’s just a lot of things that can affect.

Doug: The FHA limit is another factor in there. You want to stay at or below that FHA loan limit for your area.

Andrea: And you know, other people have the strategy of buying the expensive homes and flipping those, and that’s a whole different ballgame. But in a changing market, that just might not be where you want to be.

Because if you’re trying to sell, let’s say a $2 million dollar home, and you’re only way to sell it is for somebody with either a whole lot of cash or a whole lot of lending power to come in and buy that from you, you might be in trouble. The great thing about real estate is the fact that it is not like the stock market, which can drop off of a cliff overnight.

With real estate, you can pretty much keep your eye on things and watch where it’s headed, watch the trends. It doesn’t change overnight, and that’s the great thing. It gives you time to kind of adjust, and figure out what you’re going to do, and how you’re going to acclimate to what’s coming.

Doug: Right, yeah even in 2007/2008/2009. If anytime real estate in California fell off a cliff, in any of our history, that would be the time. And it still took a couple of years for it to go all the way down to where it bottomed out, two to three years. I mean it took a long time, so you don’t lose half of your value in a matter of hours like you can in the stock market. So yeah, that’s just one of the reasons we like real estate as an investment.

Andrea: Yeah, so basically, all of this is to say just be smart, keep your eye on what’s coming, pay attention. Know that it’s a possibility that prices could decline in the next couple of years, but don’t necessarily operate from such a place of fear that you’re not going to take any action just because you’re afraid.

As long as you’re being smart, you know what’s happening in your market, you know the inventory, you can make good choices and still be successful.

Doug: And another thing, especially if you’re going to be keeping houses as rentals, if that’s your strategy, make sure it works from a rent standpoint, because prices go up, prices go down. If you’re going to have that house for a long time, you’re not as concerned about that if you’re going to keep the house for cash flow and rent it out.

Andrea: Yeah, if the cash flows, then you’re okay. You’re okay if prices decrease a little bit. If you can still cover the mortgage with your cash flow, you’re good. So that’s pretty much all we have for you today. This is kind of like a real day-in-the-life for us because we’re on the road.

Doug: Got our kid with us.

Andrea: Headed back from a job site, got a lot of great stuff going on, and we’re really, really excited about 2016.

Doug: Yeah so please if you haven’t, check us out on our website and get our free gifts if you haven’t done that, SpousesFlippingHouses.com. We really appreciate all of the nice feedback and comments we’ve received on iTunes, so keep those coming. We really appreciate it.

Andrea: And we will be back next week in our recording studio/office not in the car, hopefully!

Doug: Have a good week!

Andrea: Goodbye!

If you would like to learn more information from our Podcasts, check us out on iTunes & Subscribe. Also consider leaving us a rating (5 stars would be great) and a review would also be helpful so others can learn more about us and get in on our upcoming episodes.

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The post Episode 16: Changing Market?! How Can You Successfully Invest in an Ever Changing Market? appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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For our end of the year podcast we’re talking about Goal Setting and the importance they carry to fulfill YOUR personal goals – specifically in Business. Without goal setting you may or may not end up where you ultimately wish to be. In this episode we’ll share a few of our best tips (that have kept us on track) to help you know and accomplish YOUR personal business goals in 2016.

Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki

Sean Terry – Flip2freedom.com

Download Episode 15 Transcript

Andrea: I feel like goals are sort-of like our roadmap in life. If you do not have an end destination in mind, who knows where you’re going to end up.

— Intro/Music –

Doug: Well hello and welcome back to the Spouses Flipping Houses podcast. We are so excited to be back here with you. We have a great topic today, very timely being the end of the year and beginning of a new year, and the topic is Goal Setting, The Truth About Setting Goals and Achieving Them. So we’re really excited to dive into this today. This has been a big part of our lives, really, and especially in our business life.

Andrea: Yes, I think it’s our favorite part of the New Year, sitting down and asking, “Okay, what do we want to do this year? Let’s plan it out.”

Doug: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a lot of fun. We like to review where we’ve been and kind of get down on paper where we’re going and where we want to be, and it’s been a huge part of our driving force behind what we’re doing. So, glad to be here! How are you Andrea?

Andrea: I am great. We are still kind of in vacation mode. Christmas was last Friday, and our kids are still home on break. In fact, it’s a little noisy around here, and our neighbors gave our kids a karaoke machine.

Doug: Great gift by the way!

Andrea: Great gift. She said, “It’s the gift that keeps on giving. It really does.”

Doug: In more ways than one.

Andrea: In more ways, yes. Our daughter’s room is right above our office, our home office here where we record this podcast, and so I can hear her up there. It’s so funny. So if you hear a little T-Swift in the background, just ignore it.

Doug: Yeah, you’ll know what’s happening. So before we get into the main topic today, I just wanted to send out a big thank you to all of you that have left us a rating and review on iTunes. It’s really cool to read some of those, and get the feedback from you. We really appreciate it.

I wanted to read one in particular that we got recently. It’s from, forgive me if I butcher your name here, it’s Ricci, and it’s five stars. “Good Stuff” is the title. It says, “I recently attended a free class on real estate investment, and I left more confused than I already was.

By no means was I going to give up $1,696 for info I knew I could find on the web. That being said, I went to work reading and searching for answers. This gave them to me. I am on Episode 5 and have learned more than I would have ever expected. They discuss things in a calm and fun way.”

Andrea: Thanks!

Doug: “The old saying goes, ‘If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.’ This shows clearly through Doug and Andrea. Thanks guys, keep them coming. Three thumbs up.” So really excited, thank you so much. It meant a lot, and it’s good to hear that people are getting good information from us. So we’re going to keep it coming!

So yeah, I encourage you if you haven’t to please leave us a rating and review on iTunes. It helps our ranking, helps other people find out about us, and it helps us to kind of get some feedback from you, so please go do that.

So now on to the good stuff. I wanted to start with a quote today from the famous Yogi Berra, and the quote is, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”

Andrea: I really like that because I feel like goals are like our roadmap in life, and if you do not have an end destination in mind, then exactly what he said, who knows where you’re going to end up. It might be somewhere good and you get lucky, but it might be somewhere not good.

Doug: Yeah, you’re just kind of drifting, just kind of floating without any kind of direction I guess. So goals are super important. They’re actually essential for achieving any kind of dreams that you may have. There are all kinds of goals— there’s financial goals, business goals, maybe lifestyle goals, personal goals and relationship goals. But today we’re really just going to focus on business goals.

Andrea: Okay, so the first thing is that you have got to write your goals down. It is so important to write them down, and get them out of your head and onto paper. You can’t just trust that you’ve got this great idea in your head, and you know you’re going to work towards it. You’ve got to write them down.

We found another cool quote by an unknown person that says, “Written goals have a way of transforming wishes into wants, cant’s into cans, dreams into plans, and plans into reality. Don’t just think it, ink it.” A little cheesy, but it’s really important. You’ve got to write them down.

Doug: In fact, there’s a study done at this Dominican University that proved people who have written goals are nearly twice as likely to accomplish them as those who don’t have written goals. So writing them down, just that sheer fact of getting them on paper, was proven to help you accomplish your goals almost two to one.

Andrea: When we were first married, we had read, we’ve talked about this before, but we had read the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and it kind of inspired us, and we had all of these dreams, and goals, and aspirations, and that was when we first started writing our goals down. And we didn’t really even know what we were doing at that point.

There wasn’t even a plan associated with the goal; we just knew we had these certain things we wanted to accomplish, and so we printed them off on a piece of paper, framed it, and we had it in our closet so that we looked at it everyday, and it was our reminder. And even though we didn’t do it exactly right, we didn’t really even have a plan, just looking at that everyday was so motivating that we have actually now accomplished most of those goals, just because we wrote it down and kept it in front of ourselves.

Doug: Yeah, it just kind of got permanently imprinted in our brains from looking at it over-and-over and having it written down to look at.

Andrea: Another thing that’s important once you have decided on your goals and written them down is positive accountability. And some people will tell you, “Oh, go make it public and tell the world, and you’ll be more likely to accomplish it.” But, we kind of disagree with that, and I found some other studies that also disagree with that.

You want to share your goals with people that are going to give you positive accountability. So really just share them with people who are going to help you achieve those goals. You don’t have to do a Facebook post letting the whole world know what you plan to accomplish, because you’re going to have naysayers. And that might inspire some people, but for most people, you just don’t need the negativity. So only share your goals with people who have your back.

Doug: Yeah, people who have your back and can help you, and want to help you achieve those goals.

Andrea: So this is how we set our goals every year. We basically back our way into them, so we work backwards and start with what we want the outcome to be, and then we figure out what steps we need to take or what our plan is going to be, to achieve that outcome.

Doug: Yeah, so let’s give you an example of that. Let’s just say, and these are just general figures for somebody who might want to get into wholesaling in the real estate field, and let’s say they want to make $200,000 over the course of the year in wholesale deals. So then they need to figure out the average profit per deal, and let’s say it comes out to about $10,000 average profit per wholesale deal.

So that’s 20 deals. So how many leads do I need to get for that deal? Let’s say you kind of work backwards or figure out you need about 50 good leads to get one deal. So then you have to figure out how many mailers you need to send out to get 50 good leads, and maybe that’s 5,000 mailers to get 50 good leads.

So now you’re getting really specific on something that’s actionable and something you can measure that is a goal. Say if you want to get a deal, what is it, 20 deals per year, so you want to do about two deals per month, so you need to send out about 10,000 mailers per month to reach this goal, if those are the numbers involved. So you can get really specific on what you need to do.

Andrea: Maybe you don’t have money to send out mailers, and you’re a door-knocking person, and you’ve kind of realized, Okay, if I knock on 20 doors, I generally get one deal. So if I want to get two deals this month, I’ve got to knock on 40 doors.

Doug: 40 doors, or I’ve got to call 50 agents to ask what they have for sale. Whatever it is, whatever your form of getting leads is, you can work backwards and figure out what goal you need to set there. The next thing to keep in mind when setting your goals is that you want your goals to challenge you. You don’t really want to set them too low.

Make sure that you are setting a goal high enough that it’s going to be a challenge for you to reach it. In fact, what we typically do is think here’s the absolute maximum we think we can accomplish this year, and let’s go 50 percent more then that. Let’s set that as our goal. Make it a little bit higher than you think you can actually accomplish. Think big! And generally, you’re going to accomplish more just by having a higher goal.

And even if you come up short of your new extended goal, you’re probably going to exceed what you originally thought you could do.

Andrea: So definitely challenge yourself, but keep it reasonable too. If you’re just starting out and say, I want to make $10 million dollars next year…

Doug: Keep it realistic.

Andrea: Yeah, you’re probably going to get disappointed and maybe even quit, because that’s not an achievable goal, so keep it realistic.

Doug: Yeah, but like in our prior example of $200,000, maybe make it $300,000. Go a little bit higher, set that goal a little bit more challenging to reach.

Andrea: Okay, so now you have your goals, and you’ve written them down, and you’ve thought through what your plan is going to be to accomplish those. The next thing you need to do is figure out a way to keep those goals in front of your face. So maybe you frame it like we used to do, and you keep it in your office, or maybe you just print it out and tape it up on your bathroom mirror, something that you’re going to look at everyday.

It just kind of needs to be in a place that you’re going to glance at and be reminded of these things pretty much on a daily basis.

Doug: Make it your desktop background on your computer.

Andrea: Yeah! You could do that. So for Doug, he’ll talk about this probably in a minute, but he likes to do more of a letter-style or just written bullet-point goals. For me, I’m a very visual person, and I need something that is more visually stimulating, and so I love to do a vision board.

And so my goals are usually in the form of pictures that inspire me, so I have personal ones, and workout type goals, and I have spiritual goals, and devotional things that I want to do throughout the year, and then business things.

And it’s always just these pictures that inspire me with maybe a few words, but I know what it means, maybe other people don’t know. But for whatever reason, those pictures inspire me and keep me motivated.

Doug: We used a form of this early on in our business, before we really started getting serious about goal setting, when we were just starting to flip houses. I think we got this idea from a friend, but we basically put up a monopoly board, sort-of, on the wall, and it was just the green houses and the red houses. And the green houses represented the number of flips that we wanted to do, and the red houses (or hotels in Monopoly) represented the renters, the keepers, that we wanted to keep that year.

So we put maybe 12, I don’t remember the goal exactly, but it was like 12 flips and maybe 4 rentals we wanted to keep that year, and as we would get a flip in our pipeline, we would replace that green house with a picture of the actual house that we were doing the flip on, same with the rental.

And so we could see our progress through the year, and it was really kind of a cool way to keep track, visually on our board, of what we’re doing and keep us motivated.

Andrea: Yeah, for us it was the best form of motivation because it was so exciting every time we got to take off one of those green pictures and replace it with an actual house. So one idea that I really love is to make sure that your goals are things that pull you not things that push you, or things that you have to push for them to happen.

And so what I mean by that is a goal that pulls you will be something that you are passionate about, something that is really motivating to you. So an example of a goal that is a pushing goal, a goal you have to push for, would be like I have $100,000 of debt that I want to pay off this year, and it’s just kind of this burden.

Doug: It’s a weight.

Andrea: Yeah it’s a burden you’re trying to maybe alleviate in some way. It’s more of a negative goal. You do need to accomplish those things, but that’s not going to be super motivating to you. That’s going to be more of a drag. You want goals that pull you.

So maybe an example would be to spend more time with your family, or to be able to take this amazing trip. So whatever it is that motivates and drives you, things that you’re passionate and excited about, make sure the majority of your goals are that kind of thing, because if you have too many of the push-push goals, it just wears you down.

Doug: So Sean Terry uses a unique method for setting goals that I’ve kind of adopted as well, and it doesn’t really work for Andrea so much, but I really like it. And it’s an example of a pulling way of setting goals. So what he does is called a January Letter, and I’ve done this the past few years.

So every January, I will write a letter to myself as if it’s the future. So this January is the January of 2016, and I will write a letter that’s dated January of 2017. And it will just be talking about whatever it was that happened throughout the year that are your goals kind of incorporated into this letter.

Andrea: As if it happened and you accomplished those goals.

Doug: Exactly, as if it has happened, and life is now where it is a year from now, and these goals have happened. And it’s a very positive letter about the family, personal things, business things, spiritual things, whatever our goals are, and it’s a very positive letter. It’s the future, and all of these goals have been accomplished.

And that letter, I would read it say quarterly, or hopefully more than that, throughout the year, and it is just a pulling method. It pulls you towards that to think, yeah, this is inspiring. This is how we want our life to be at this point in time. And it’s a really good method; it works for me.

Andrea: What I like about that letter is that it’s changing your mindset to be more positive, and you’re basically telling yourself, I can do this. I believe in myself. This can happen for me. And I think that’s really cool. It doesn’t work for me because I write that letter, and then it’s somewhere in a Dropbox folder in my computer, and I never look at it again.

And Doug’s really specific and focused, and he will go back and read it, but I won’t. I need things that pop out at me and are more… just a better reminder, and that just doesn’t work for me.

Doug: You know it has worked amazingly well for me actually. There’s very specific things in there that I’ve written in there, and we have ended up doing and accomplishing during the year.

Like, we wanted to go on a trip to New York— that was in there, and that happened. Not every little thing happened, but a lot of it does, and it’s just kind of interesting how when you have it written down and it’s a pulling method, it kind of just leads you to that. It’s really cool.

Andrea: So the next thing that we would suggest is that you don’t have too many goals. In fact, people who’ve done a lot of research on this will suggest five to seven things that you really want to pour your heart into accomplishing, and you’ll have a better result. So maybe there’s a hundred things you want to do, and that’s great, but it’s not super realistic. There’s only so many hours in a day.

So take the biggest and best things that you think you can and want to accomplish, and try to narrow it down to maybe five to seven things.

Doug: Yeah, and then the other thing would be to have a way to monitor your progress. We did talk about this earlier, but have a way to keep track of how you’re doing. One method would be like a weekly scorecard where you have those five to seven items, maybe they’re broken down into actionable items that you can take, and you can check of the list. Ask yourself, how did I do this week?

Okay, I’ve failed this week in this arena, so I need to focus on that. You can keep track of how you’re doing throughout the year on your goals.

Andrea: And then you want to revisit your goals and be adaptable. So four times a year, for us at a minimum, we’ll go through our goals. Actually we do it more than that…

Doug: Yeah that’s just a bare minimum, like quarterly. You need to at least be refreshing yourself and reminding yourself of what your goals were.

Andrea: Maybe even weekly or monthly.

Doug: Yeah, I think that’s better.

Andrea: It’s really important, because if you realize something isn’t working, you need to change it. They say that if the plan is not working, change the plan not necessarily the goal. It doesn’t mean that your goal is bad, but your method for getting there might need to be tweaked.

Doug: Right.

Andrea: So the last thing is to celebrate your success. You’ve really got to take time to reward yourself for the milestones you hit or certain goals you achieve.

Once you get there, celebrate it! Because that is definitely something to be excited about. Doug mentioned that in his letter last year he had talked about the fact that we wanted to go to New York, and for us, that was a goal-based thing.

We had set up certain goals that if we got so many properties under contract by a certain time of the year, we were going to reward ourselves with this trip to New York. So we worked extra hard; we wanted to make sure that happened. And then we got to have an amazing trip and get away, and be re-inspired and invigorated, and it was so awesome.

And your rewards don’t have to be something so big as a trip. It can be simple, like go out to dinner and a movie, or take a morning off and go do something fun that you enjoy doing, or a little shopping trip. Whatever it might be, just something to keep yourself inspired and encouraged.

Doug: Yeah, celebrate it when you accomplish those things.

Andrea: So to recap, you want to set your goal, make your plan and write it down, keep that plan and those goals in front of you, somewhere you can see them. Then you’ve got to monitor your progress and adjust as needed, and then celebrate your success.

Doug: Celebrate it. All right, well we really hope that you enjoyed this episode on setting goals. Do it! Take some time right now. It doesn’t have to take a long time, just an hour or two. Sit down, think about what you want to do, write them down, and get it done.

Andrea: Yeah, don’t make it a bigger deal than it has to be. We have goals written on napkins, and it has been just as effective.

Doug: Just as effective, just make it happen. So that’s it for this week’s episode. If you haven’t done so, please had over to our website and get those two free gifts before they are gone or before one of them is gone. And that’s SpousesFlippingHouses.com. We will be back next week with another great episode, and until then—

Andrea: Happy New Year!

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The post Episode 15: Goals!!! The TRUTH About Setting & Achieving Your Goals appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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Last week we talked about the process to acquiring leads through Direct Mail. Once you have people calling you, it’s important to know how to respectfully handle these calls for the best possible outcome for you AND them. How you speak to sellers can make or break any potential deals you may be able to get. In today’s  episode, we will be giving you some of our BEST tips on how to handle your leads & yourself, once your phone starts ringing.

Download Episode 14 Transcript

Andrea: Figure out what is their true motivation, because it’s not always money. You might think that it is, but a lot of the time, most of the time, that’s actually not their main driving force.

— Intro/Music –

Andrea: Hello! This is Episode 14 of Spouses Flipping Houses, and we are excited about our topic today. It’s kind of fun. It’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of dealing with sellers.

Doug: Most of it is good, a little bit bad, and a lot of it can get ugly.

Andrea: Yeah, not a lot, but some things can get ugly.

Doug: Not a lot, but some things can, some things can. But overall, it is really actually a lot of good, dealing with the sellers. So I’m really excited about getting into this topic today because this is what we spend the bulk of our day doing a lot of the time, dealing with people.

Andrea: Yeah this is definitely a people business; that’s for sure.

Doug: Yes it is.

Andrea: So anyways, this morning I was at a Christmas breakfast with some friends doing a little gift exchange, and I’m sitting there, and I get a text message from Doug that one of our rental properties had a fire last night. So I have not even been debriefed on the situation… what happened?

Doug: Yeah, it doesn’t really even bother me anymore. This is the third fire we’ve had in a property. Luckily, nobody has been hurt ever in these fires, which is a good thing. So yeah, we have one of our rental properties. The tenants were actually in the process of moving out. They’re going to be leaving before Christmas I think was their plan.

And yeah I got a message from Kristen this morning that we had a fire, and apparently the heater caught on fire. It has been cold here lately.

Andrea: Man, a wall heater?

Doug: Um, it’s a gas/floor. This is a really old house, like a hundred years old, and apparently it’s a gas heater, which is also kind of strange because I don’t know there’s no electrical circuits there. I don’t know, but somehow there was a fire around the heater, and it didn’t really do a whole lot of damage to the house, just a little bit where the heater was so.

Andrea: Oh man, but everybody is okay? Did their belongings caught on fire or is their stuff okay?

Doug: As far as I know everything and everybody is okay. Just the house has some black hole in it.

Andrea: Well that will be fun to deal with.

Doug: Yeah, so that’s going to be fun to deal with, but these are the kinds of things that happen in rental properties, and that’s why you have insurance, and that’s why we set aside extra money and have a reserve for unexpected fires and things like this.

Andrea: Yes, because unexpected things will most definitely happen.

Doug: They will. That’s why you want reserves, but yeah. So that’s what happened today. All in all things are well, and we’re really excited about Christmas moving forward here, and I’m excited to get into this topic today.

So last week we talked about direct mail, and that whole process on how to get the phone ringing with leads. And today, we’re going to dive into what you do know when people start calling.

You have three main purposes when someone calls in that you are ultimately trying to determine. And what you’re trying to determine is you want to gather information about the person and their situation, who’s calling. Then you want to gather information about the property in question, the property they’re calling about, and everything involved with that: the repairs that may be needed, who’s living there, what’s the situation with the house itself.

And then the third thing you’re trying to gather here are their expectations, at least a ballpark idea, because some people will tell you flat out, “I won’t take anything less than $400,000 for my property.” And then when you look it up and see that its worth only about $200,000, you know you can end your conversation quickly and move onto the next one.

So that’s your main purpose here when someone calls in. Those are the three main things you’re trying to gather. People will call in and whether they leave a message or whether you take the call live, you need to learn how to talk to people. So the first thing I would say about this is just be friendly, be yourself, just talk to these people, kind of look at it from their perspective.

They’re calling off a mailer, either a letter or a postcard, or something about selling their house and that you buy houses, and they are probably skeptical. So as anyone would be maybe calling on something like this, so they’re going to be skeptical. They may not open up to you immediately or be real warm and friendly. They want to sniff you out and find out what this is all about, what are you really doing, what’s really going on here.

Say you buy my house, tell me about that. That’s kind of the attitude that a lot of people will take when they call you, and your goal here is just to be friendly, be professional, but be friendly and warm and open, and understand that people need a little explanation and might need a little hand-holding to help them understand what it is you do, what you can provide for them. You want to build a rapport with people.

Now on the phone is a lot different than in person, but do what you can to try to build rapport with the caller. So if someone is calling in, maybe they mentioned something about their lives that you could kind of connect with, or have a commonality with them, or maybe you saw that the area code was from a certain place that you recognize and you could start asking them, “Oh, are you from ____? I’ve been there. It’s cold this time of year…”

Anything at all to start having a conversation with them, and don’t just jump immediately into, “What’s your address. Tell me about your house. I’ll make you an offer.” Because that’s just not really warm and friendly.

Andrea: Maybe if you hear kids in the background or a dog barking you could ask them about their kids or their animals. People love to talk about their kids and their pets.

Doug: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrea: And their favorite sports teams. But that may not come up right away in a phone conversation, but any little thing that you can connect with them on, try to do that.

Doug: Yeah, so do what you can to build or find some common ground with the seller and break down those walls. So then you want to start finding out obviously about the property. So ask what the address is; make sure you get the correct address. Actually you know what, back it up. Before that you want to make sure you get their phone number and also an email address.

You want to know how you can connect with them later on after you hang up, so get that information and make sure you have it right. Then ask for the property address, ask for the bedroom/bathroom count, ask about the square footage, and you can look all of this stuff up later to verify it, but you want to get them talking about the property.

So when I’m trying to find out on the phone as much as I can about the property without going super in detail, I try to ask about the high dollar items that come up in rehab. So you want to ask about the roof: how old is the roof? When was the last time the roof was replaced?

Ask about the heating and air conditioning, and this is going to vary depending on what market you’re in. If you go to San Diego, a lot of homes don’t have air conditioning, and that’s totally fine because you just don’t need it there, but you go a little further inland where it’s hotter and air conditioning is almost essential. You’re going to melt in the summer.

So things like that, you want to know what condition they’re in, how new they are. Windows is another one if you have an older home especially. And then ask about other items, like a pool. Pools can be very expensive to re-plaster or get new pool equipment. So those are the kind of high dollar items, and through the conversation you’ll get maybe more things that will come up that you can ask them about, and hopefully they’ll start opening up and tell you what’s wrong with the property.

Another way you could phrase it would be, “Hey, if you had a whole bag of cash, what would you do to this house? What’s it going to need?” or “When I go to your house, what kind of repairs am I going to find that are needed?” And just let them start telling you about the house. If you are able to meet somebody at the house in person, this is always a better way to go in my opinion.

It’s just easier to trust somebody when you can look them in the eye, and it’s much, much easier to build rapport in person with somebody. Here’s an example: I was meeting with someone yesterday, and I walked into this condo, and you could tell he was all business. He was not planning to open up and start talking. He was very professional: “Hey. Here it is. Here’s the rooms, this is the kitchen, and here’s the bathroom.”

Not a lot of small talk initially, and I walked around and was looking at the property, just taking it all in and getting an idea of the kind of work it needed, but I wanted to build rapport with this guy. And I happened to notice he had a Philadelphia Eagles hat sitting on his counter, so as soon as I said, “Oh, you’re an Eagles fan,” oh man. The floodgates opened, and he was like, “Yeah, and I’m so frustrated. Their coach…”

He was telling me all about how he wants the coach gone, and how they shouldn’t have picked up the quarterback that they did, and we had a good 20 minute conversation about the Philadelphia Eagles, and football, and how they did for our fantasy football teams years ago, and just this whole thing really. That’s how we built rapport. We got to sit down on the couch and talk about this, and I could tell the guy was getting to warm up to me and build that trust.

That’s a good example of something you can do if you notice things around the house, pictures of kids, sports memorabilia, that kind of thing.

Andrea: So once you have built a little rapport with the caller, and you’ve gotten some information on the property, the next thing you want to do is figure out what their true motivation because it’s not always money. You might think that it is, but a lot of the time, most of the time, that’s actually not their main driving force.

So you want to ask some questions like, “This sounds like a really great property. Why are you selling it?” If you ask questions like that and try to get to the bottom of why it is that they want to sell their house, you will kind of uncover what their problem is. And your goal here is basically to figure out what their problem is and how you can solve it, and how you can convey to them that you can solve it, and have them trust you and believe that you can.

So a lot of the time they’re not going to come right out and say, “Hey, this is my problem. This is why I need to sell.” They don’t really want to show all of their cards, and they don’t completely trust you, especially if you haven’t met them in person just yet. So you may want to ask questions like, “It sounds like a great house. Why don’t you just list it with a realtor?”

A lot of times questions like that will uncover the truth: “Well I can’t list it with a realtor because the foundation is cracked.” Then that’s where the truth starts to come out, or, “So if you’re really determined to get top-dollar, and it’s in such good condition, and you need to move, why don’t you just rent it out?”

Well then they might tell you that, “Oh actually I need the cash because I want to put a down payment on the house we’re moving to,” or, “If it doesn’t need that much work, why don’t you just fix it yourself and try to list it for retail price?”

Asking little questions like that will bring out the truth and help get them talking. Most of the time, these are actually solutions that they have already thought of, and they already know that it’s not good for them for whatever reason. So if you can…

Doug: That’s the reason they’re calling.

Andrea: Exactly.

Doug: Off of a mailer or postcard.

Andrea: And there is a reason. You just have to uncover it, and they’re most likely not going to be forthcoming about that reason right off the bat. Sometimes they will, but a lot of the time you have to try to subtly and gently dig it out. And then beyond that, you have to know and believe that you are a good solution for them.

Otherwise, if you’re not, and if you know you’re not, then be honest, and you need to refer them to the person that would be the best solution. Because a lot of times, Doug will just straight up tell them, “Look. This is a great house, and I’m not your best option. You should really list it with a realtor. Let me refer you to a good one.” You can sleep good at night knowing that you did the right thing.

That’s absolutely 100 percent the way to go if you’re not their best option. But if you are, then know and believe that you are and that you can help this person because that will come across.

Doug: It will. It comes across genuine that you really care about them, about their situation, and that you’re really there to help them, which you are. And more often than not, the reason they’re calling is because there is some underlying catalyst. There’s something driving them that is the reason they’re calling you to try and sell.

Win-win is the goal. You’re trying to find a win-win solution, and I say that, those exact words: “Listen, I want to come to a win-win scenario here. If this isn’t good for you, if this isn’t good for me, then let’s not do this deal.” You also need to let them know that you are in business. This is not a charity.

Most people call, and they’ll understand that, but if you can explain to them that you have to have some kind of profit here built in or otherwise we’re not going to be in business anymore: “The only way we can buy your house is if we have some kind of way to make money in some fashion. You understand that, right Mr. Seller?”

“Oh yeah. I understand that. I expect that.” So that they know you’re not coming in there to pay a top retail price. Letting them know it has to be a win-win. This has to make sense for you. It has to make sense for them as well.

So at this point, after you’ve gathered all of your information about the house and all of the information about their situation, at least as much as you can possibly get to understand what’s really driving them, what problem they’re having, then you want to start to form a solution for them.

And bottom line is that typically it will come down to a price, a price point. So there’s a couple different ways to go about this. If you’re on the phone, a lot of times what we will do is go ahead and try to come to an agreement of price on the phone in the first call. You kind of have to read the person on the other end of the line on what they’re feeling, like if they’re super motivated to get going or if you can tell that they’re looking around and going to talk to three other people after you, and they’re motivated to go, you might want to do that and go that route.

Try to come to an agreement on the phone so that they don’t have to worry about talking to anybody else. If not, and they’re still trying to figure you out (and you can tell), another way to go is to say, “Listen, I’m going to take this information. I’m going to do a little more research on your property, and then I’m going to call you back with an offer.” So there’s that route to go.

But the best way to go in my opinion is if these people are local and you can meet with them face-to-face, is to go that route and actually set up a time to meet face-to-face with the person, preferably at the house that you’re going to be looking to buy, so that you can physically inspect it yourself, you can shake their hand, look them eye-to-eye, build that rapport in person, and then try to come to an agreement on price with them there.

So once you’ve come to an agreement on price, the final step is to get that property under contract. There are lots of different real estate contracts out there. I recommend using a simple, one-page contract, something that’s not confusing to someone that doesn’t have a background in legal wording, something without a bunch of wording that doesn’t apply or can be overwhelming.

Use a simple, one-page document that’s very easy to understand, very clear of what’s happening, and get the property signed so that you can take the property to escrow and open escrow. Also sit down with them and explain exactly what will be happening after we take the document to escrow and open escrow, all of the steps that are going to occur so that they feel good dealing with me. They’re confident that I know what I’m doing, and that things are going to happen: “So-and-so is going to call you. You’re going to have some more paperwork. This is going to happen, and then we’re going to close the deal, and you’re going to get your money and be on with your life.” So a little explanation goes a long way.

Andrea: Okay, so here’s a few of our best tips for working with sellers. Always treat them the way that you want to be treated, and keep in mind that if they’re calling you, and willing to accept a lower price, and they need to sell really fast, they’re probably going through a really difficult time in their life, which is their reason for selling. So just be sure to treat them with dignity and respect throughout the whole process.

Doug: Right. Another one is to always do what you say you’re going to do. So don’t make promises you can’t keep, be honest with people, and if you say you’re going to call them back tomorrow or you say you’re going to do something, do it. Follow through. That means a lot to people, and it really shows that you’re a man of your word (or a woman of your word), and you do what you say.

Andrea: And then our third and final tip is to have thick skin, and this goes back to what we talked about in the beginning: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Sometimes the ugly is really nasty phone calls unfortunately. We get a lot of people that will call and want you to remove them from your list and don’t ever call again, but yet they can’t say it in a nice way.

For some reason they call, and they just want to scream at you, and they’re so mad for some reason that they got a postcard in their mailbox. They’re really, really mad.

Doug: So the vast majority of people are really nice, respectful, and sometimes people will call and request in a nice way to be removed from our list, but there are those few people that to this day, I can’t understand how someone can be so angry over a postcard in their mailbox and call.

Andrea: I do not understand. I do not get it. Do they call Domino’s Pizza and scream at them for sending a coupon? If you don’t want to sell your house, just throw it away. I don’t get it.

Doug: That’s what we do. We stand over the trashcan and throw stuff away that we don’t want, right? I mean that’s what most people do, but there are those few. And initially, early on, we would get some of these calls, and we would just take it personal. These people are not understanding me; they’re misjudging me; they’re calling me all of these names and these terrible things. And I wanted to call them up personally and say, “No, no, no. I’m not a bad person. This is just, never mind. Ignore the message.”

I just wanted to tell them not to hate me. But we learned over time that this is just part of it, and we’ve actually been able to turn around how we view those messages that we get, and we actually rather enjoy them now.

Andrea: It’s kind of funny if you can just shake it off and let it roll off your back, and have a good laugh. Now we really do find them quite funny.

Doug: So we actually save them. We’ve saved probably over 20 of our favorite messages from calls over the years. Actually, it’s just voice messages that people leave, just angry about whatever.

Andrea: It’s our best-of list.

Doug: It’s our best-of.

Andrea: So every once in a while when we need a good laugh, and we need to remind ourselves not to take this business too seriously, we’ll go back and listen to some of these, and it’s pretty funny.

Doug: It just brightens our day.

Andrea: So we pieced together a few of our favorites, the most G-rated ones, because unfortunately some of the funniest ones are filled with terrible cuss words, and we’re trying to keep this a G-rated family show, so some of our most appropriate clips that we can share with you.

Doug: Yeah, so here it is: our favorite seller calls, volume one.

Caller 1: “Good morning. This is uh…I’m not even going to tell you that. I don’t know why you’re bothering us with money to sell our house. If I want to sell my house, I’ll do it the regular normal way. Okay, we do not want to be bothered by you [?], okay? Find something else to do!”

Caller 2: “Don’t leave your junk advertising in my mailbox. You stay out of my mailbox.”

Caller 3: “The property I’m calling about is…It will be completely unnecessary for me to leave you my number, and for you to leave me alone because my house is not for sale!”

Caller 4: “I’m rich, super-rich, and I’ve got more money than you do. But if you want to buy a good deal, go to the county auction. You don’t want to buy my house because I own it. I own most of [?]. Alright, I’ll see you.”

Caller 5: “Idiot. Do not send any mail to be me anymore. Go get your home from real estate office. Go buy there. Do not send idiot any letter to me, or note to me, or postcard to me any longer. You are psycho and sicko. Go buy your own home. Don’t send any more mail to me anymore. You got that, idiot?”

Caller 6: “Yes Doug, I am not interested in what you have to sell or what you want to buy. I’m not selling, will not sell. I would appreciate you not sending anything, anymore to my post office box. You do it again, and I’m going to hit you with harassment. Stop doing it. I am not interested. I am the owner. I am the owner, and I don’t want to sell. And you better stop harassing and sending things because next time, you will be getting a letter from the courthouse saying Cease and Desist to stop sending me these stupid, idiotic postcards.

And hearing your stuff on the line, on the telephone, you’re redundant because you keep repeating yourself.  You bother me again, I will personally find you, and you and I are going to go. You understand me? Leave me alone. Leave my property alone, and I will never sell to you. Stop sending stuff to our post office box. I am saving everything you have sent before, and tomorrow I am going to turn it over to the police department. Do you got it? Get it? Got it? Good. Don’t ever, ever do that again. Bad boy.”

Andrea: That one gets me every time, “Bad boy Doug.”

Doug: It sounds like her and I are going to go. We are going to go. So stay out of my mailbox!

Andrea: So we hope you enjoyed those as much as we did. Remember that if you’re going to send out mail, you’re going to sometimes get nasty calls, so just shake it off and have thick skin.

Doug: Yeah it’s just part of it. Don’t take it personal. Just remember that these people, something is going on, and they’re having a bad day, and they’re really just taking it out on you, on your voice message. So don’t take it personal.

Andrea: So that’s it for How to Deal with Sellers. To wrap things up, remember that you want to be friendly and build rapport, find out as much information as you can about the property, meet them in person if possible, find out their true motivation, and what is their problem/how can you solve it. And then create a win-win situation for the both of you.

Doug: Yep, that’s it. And get that contract and rinse and repeat. So that’s it for today. Again if you haven’t checked us out on iTunes, please do so. Leave us a rating and review if you haven’t. We’d love to hear from you, and that’s it for us.

We’re off next week because of Christmas, so we’ll be back in two weeks talking about goal setting for the New Year. We’re excited about that, so enjoy the holidays with your family.

Andrea: And have a Merry Christmas!

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The post Episode 14: The Phone is Ringing…Now What? How to Deal With a Seller Lead appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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Direct mail has been our primary source of leads for the past 4 years and can work great to get deals when you know how to use it. In today’s episode, we share a wealth of information on how to first get started with direct mail, some great services you can use to save money, as well as some simple strategies you can follow to increase your chances of getting a deal, and how to scale the entire process. If you want to start getting deals this is one episode you won’t want to miss!

ListSource.com

yellowletterhq.com

Google.com/Voice

Download Episode 13 Transcript

Andrea: And the most important thing about direct mail truly, truly is consistency.

Doug: Welcome back to Spouses Flipping Houses podcast. This is episode number 13, lucky number 13. Today we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite topics, direct mail. This is Direct Mail 101, Everything You Need to Know About Direct Mail Marketing. Andrea, how are you over there?

Andrea: I’m good. How are you?

Doug: I’m good, I’m good. What’s been happening this past week in our business?

Andrea:  A lot has been happening actually, but a crazy thing happened last week on Wednesday. We were out in San Bernardino, and we were getting ready to stage a house, and we got into town and were hungry and thought let’s eat first real quick, and then we’ll run stage that house and then be back in time to pick up the kids.

So, we’re actually in line at Chipotle, and the guy in front of me is on his cell phone looking at Facebook, and all of the sudden he looks up with a panicked look on his face looking around and kind of as if is anybody else seeing what I’m seeing here right now?, and he says, “Somebody is shooting people, like right around the corner.”

And everybody was like, “What? Do we leave the restaurant? What is going on right now?” So we all got on our phones, and sure enough that shooting was taking place not far from where we were. And so we weren’t really sure what to do. They were saying on the radio to get out of the area if you were nearby, and we had to go down Waterman actually which was where it was taking place to get to this house we were going to stage.

Doug: We were a little bit north of it. There wasn’t a lot of information at that time.

Andrea: Right.

Doug: We didn’t know what was going on or…

Andrea: And there had been early reports that they thought the people were contained in the building, so we thought let’s just run and stage the house really quick, and we’ll get out of town. So we get over to that house and as we’re getting in the front door, we start hearing police sirens. It was like a mile away from where we were at.

Doug: Helicopters flying around.

Andrea: Yeah. Pretty crazy.

Doug: Yeah. It was pretty surreal, and you know we didn’t know the gravity of it at that time and all of the tragedy that ensued, and our prayers are obviously going out to the victims and families, and it’s just kind of a scary time, especially when it hits this close to home.

Andrea: Yeah

Doug: Where we were.

Andrea: Because the people were literally driving around the neighborhoods right where we were.

Doug: Yeah. And this house is like what, a mile, mile and a half from where all of this happened. And we were staging it at the time, so. Interesting story about that house too actually related to direct mail, and this is just a good lesson for anyone who’s working leads of any kind in this business, follow-up. Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up is so huge.

This house that we bought, and we rehabbed it and listed it this past weekend, we actually got it from direct mail. It was a direct mail lead, and I was looking at my notes this morning on that lead because we take deliberate notes every time I talk to a potential seller of a house so that way I can remind myself of everything, and we have a follow-up system.

Well, they initially called in December of 2013. So two years ago this lady called, and we touched base probably twenty times between then and July of 2015 when the time was finally right for her to sell the house, and we bought the house. And it’s going to be a great deal for us, so really exciting. And it helped her out a lot. She had gotten to that point where the city that the house was in was really bugging her about inspections and different things, and she did not want to deal with them anymore, and it was time to sell.

Andrea: It turned out to be one of those really, really great houses. I knew it was going to sell right away, and I’ll tell you about that in a minute, but the structure of the house was just so cute. The layout was great. We didn’t really have to change a whole lot, just cosmetic paint and flooring. We did completely redo the kitchen, and that ended up looking really awesome, but it was just one of those houses where I just had a feeling.

I knew it was going to be desirable, so sure enough we staged it on Wednesday, got professional photos on Thursday and listed it on Friday. We got three over asking price offers over the weekend and have accepted one this morning, so it’s pretty exciting.

Doug: Yeah, very exciting. It doesn’t happen on every house these days. It’s a little bit more stable, but that was a hot one.

Andrea: Yeah, there’s just certain ones where you get a feeling. Like ooh, there’s a couple little funky things about this one. It might take a little longer. But that one I just knew.

Doug: It had some good features to it, a big bonus room in the back.

Andrea: Pull-through garage that was already there, so people really like little things like that.

Doug: Big lot. Lots of positives going on with that one, and it was just a good looking house too so, that was really exciting, and it really relates to what we’re going to talk about because it was a direct mail lead from the beginning.

Let’s dive into it: direct mail. One of our, like I said, one of our main sources of leads probably still our main source of leads for the past probably four years that we’ve been doing it, so let’s go ahead and dive in.

Andrea: So what is direct mail? We want to be a little more intentional about explaining things as we go along, because we’ve had a few questions lately after different episodes of people saying, “Hey, what’s a VA?” Or certain abbreviations we’ve used because it’s just so common to us we don’t want to assume that everybody knows what all of these things are.

So direct mail basically is where you are identifying a property address or a property owner, and then you’re sending them a piece of mail to let them know that you can be of service to them, and buy their house quickly, and solve some kind of a problem for them. Then they will hopefully call you; you negotiate, and you buy their house. So, how you go about doing that… there’s different ways.

Doug: So first of all you start with a list. Like, who are we going to send this letter to? And there’s lots of ways to go about that, but essentially I recommend picking an area, obviously, that you want to buy houses in, that you want to do deals in. Pick a geographical area.

And where do you get a list of houses? And there’s lots of different ways, different companies that can provide lists, but here’s a few of the ways that most people get started and ways we might recommend finding addresses to send mail to. So you can check with the title company. If you have a relationship, even if you don’t, you can usually call up a title company, and they’re very willing to give you lists of properties.

You can usually narrow that down to, based on maybe bedroom/bathroom count or the age of the home or different things like that that you really want to target, and they’ll provide you a list of houses in that area. There are some list providers out there that I’ve used in the past and other people recommend as well.

One of those is ListSource.com, probably the most common I would say, ListSource.com. PropertyRadar.com, if you’re on the West Coast, is what we currently use, one of my favorites. Sean O’Toole is an excellent resource and website there. You can get lists monthly through his service, and it’s very affordable.

RealQuest is another one that is very popular. That’s CoreLogic data, and one I heard about this morning that I’ve never used is Listability.com. I don’t know anything about it, but a credible investor mentioned that one so you can check that out as well.

Andrea: So once you’ve got your list, then you’re going to choose what kind of mail piece you want to send. There are a couple of different options here. First thing and usually the cheapest would be a postcard. So you can send out a postcard; usually it’s just text, nothing fancy. If you get into photos and glossy print and all that, you’ll totally blow your budget.

Doug: Yeah, that can get expensive.

Andrea: So I’m talking just a simple white or yellow postcard with block wording on it. That’s about it. That ranges from $0.37 to $0.50 per piece usually. The benefit to that is that people don’t even have to open it to see the message, so that can be good or bad. They might throw it right away, but generally they’ve seen it and kind of know the concept, and if that is something that’s even crossing their mind, they might hang onto that.

So then your next option would be to send them a letter. Letters are a little more expensive than postcards, usually $0.55 to anywhere to $1.10 or so, and pretty much everybody has heard of the yellow letter. It’s kind of the standard, go-to marketing thing within real estate investing.

Doug: But if you haven’t heard of the yellow letter, it’s basically a yellow-lined piece of paper with a handwritten note that is very simple, and it basically just says, “Hello. My name is so-and-so. I would like to buy your house at 123 Main St. Please give me a call, and here is my phone number.” It’s that simple, or it can get obviously more complex than that, but that’s generally known as the yellow letter.

Andrea: Yeah, so there’s a few important things with sending a letter, and it just kind of goes along with the psychology of direct mail, and that is the fact that if it is handwritten, it is so much more likely to be opened, the address on the envelope as well as the letter on the inside. People are much more likely to read it if it is handwritten, for whatever reason.

Even if they don’t know who it’s coming from on the return address, they’re just curious if it looks like it’s from a person.

Doug: Who wrote me a letter?

Andrea: Yeah, and the other thing is the stamp. You want an actual, live stamp, and the funkier the better. We try to get Disney stamps, or I always ask if I can see what they have, and I’ll take the weirdest ones.

Doug: We’ll take the biggest, brightest…

Andrea: Nothing offensives, but yeah, bright and colorful. It just works. People are much more likely to open a letter with a live stamp as opposed to one with those corporate, bulk stamp-looking things that they just kind of know it’s from…

Doug: Kind of a bulk mail thing.

Andrea: —from a corporation or something like that. So you can do printed letters and you can print the envelopes. It’ll be so much easier for you. You can crank those out really fast. There will be some people that will open them; I’m sure. But they’re just not as effective. It’s kind of proven that it’s just not.

But the one thing I would say, whether you do a post card or a letter, doesn’t really matter. Just pick something and go with it, and don’t get too hung up on your wording and what you’re going to write. Just write something. You can tweak it and adjust it as you go. The most important thing is that you sell them on the fact that you’re going to be a benefit to them, and you want to help them.

And as long as that is genuinely what your intentions are, it’s going to come across, and people will appreciate that, and they’ll be more likely to give you a call. But don’t get hung up on exactly word-for-word. It’s really not that important.

Doug: Yeah. Like you said, I loved what you said about how it can be tweaked later.

Andrea: Yes.

Doug: Just get your message out there that you’re willing to buy houses, and you’re looking for houses, and you know you can change it and test it later on. But the important thing is to just start sending it with the message. Oh and make sure you have the right phone number by the way.

Andrea: Oh yeah, we’ve done that. That’s a very expensive mistake.

Doug: Speaking from experience, you don’t want to put the wrong phone number on these mailers, double or triple-check that.

Andrea: Yes.

Doug: The next step would be to send these mail pieces out. So there’s a couple of different options there. If you’re on a super tight budget, and you’re just kind of getting started, and you want to test this out, which is totally normal and exactly what we did when we first started, you can do this yourself. You can pop-in Netflix, do some binge-watching of some old seasons of Lost, and start hand-writing.

Get your pencil sharpened, actually your pen, and start hand-writing these letters sitting in front of the couch at night and driving yourself nuts.

Andrea: You will drive yourself nuts.

Doug: You can do that. You can absolutely do that though, and you will save some labor costs doing that. It’s still going to cost you for the stamps; it’s still going to cost you for the envelopes and what not, but it will be cost-effective. But if you’re doing this on a really small scale, you can try that and do that.

I would recommend not doing that if you’re really going to take this serious and actually hire a mail house. Or, well there are a couple options there, you can hire someone locally in your own business. There are plenty of people out there who will, for not a lot of cost, do this for you, hand-address envelopes, hand-write letters. That would be far superior than doing it yourself. So that’s one option.

But the most common way, and if you’re going to be doing it in a larger volume, would be to get a mail house service to do this for you. There are a lot of services out there, and we’ve used quite a few of them, but my absolute favorite if you’re going to be doing yellow letters is YellowLetterHQ.com. It’s a friend of mine, Todd; he’s out of San Diego, and he’s got the best deal around by far for sending out yellow letters.

I think it’s $0.55 per letter right now to send out, so you can’t even do it that cheap on your own sitting in front of your house, and it does have a live stamp on it, and he can explain the whole process to you and what the letter looks like. You can customize it, so give him a shout-out and check that out if you’re going to be doing yellow letters.

Another service that we used to use and still use on occasion for postcards is Click2Mail.com. They’ve recently kind of changed their format, and it’s a little bit tricky to figure out, but once you kind of get the process down and get your templates built in there, it becomes easier, and you can mail merge in a list, and make these postcards, and send them out with a few clicks after a while.

That’s one service, but there are a ton more out there, and those are just the ones we’ve used that we’re most familiar with.

Andrea: So then once you’ve sent out letters, you’re going to then start taking calls. Calls are hopefully going to start coming in, and at that point, you’ve got two options. You can answer the calls live, or you can send them to a voicemail service, and you can call them right back. So, answering them live is the most recommended thing to do, not always the easiest, but it will produce the most results if you’re able to do it.

Doug: It will be the most effective.

Andrea: The reason you want to do this, or one of the pros, is that the seller is usually the hottest when they are first calling you. In their mind, they’re ready so they’re calling you. You don’t want to get back to them if you can answer the call right then because they might not call anybody else. They may go with you because you picked up the phone. So, if you can do that, that’s the most recommended thing.

The cons to answering the calls live is that you need to be available at all hours to be answering your phone. So if you’re doing this long-term and trying to grow your business, it’s not sustainable because it will wear you out. So eventually you’re going to need to hire somebody to take these calls for you.

If you are taking them yourself, you know, you’re going to be out picking up your kids from school or doing whatever it is that you do, so you’re going to end up writing down notes on post-it cards, on a napkin—

Doug: It gets crazy.

Andrea: —managing all of that can get pretty nuts. So that’s one of the cons to answering live if you’re doing it yourself. So then there’s a voicemail service, which is actually what we do right now, although we are about to hire somebody in-house to start answering the phone live as well. But right now we have it set up for our calls to go to a voicemail service.

So the calls come in; they go directly to a voice message that the person can listen to and hear more information about what we can do for them, how we can help them; they leave a message, and then one of our sales team members calls them back as quickly as possible.

Doug: There are actually two schools of thought on this too, and we’ve tried both. There’s the message that just says, “Hey, this is Doug. Thanks for calling. I’m out, so leave me a message, and I’ll call you back.” Just kind of like it’s your cell phone, and almost like they’re calling you personally on your cell phone.

The other school of thought, which we’ve used both of these, is you give a long message where you’re giving lots of information about what you do, about who’s a good fit for how we buy houses and whatnot, and that’s sort of used as a screening process in and of itself. So if people listen to it and go, oh well, this isn’t for me, you may be saving yourself the time of talking to them later. So that’s kind of two schools of thought, but we’re, like Andrea said, converting to just answering everything live, and we can determine as we talk to them whether it’s a good fit or not.

Andrea: Right. But the benefit to a voicemail service, if you choose to go with that, is that you can capture all of the phone numbers. So that’s really a great thing, and the voice messages can be saved and referenced later. For example, we have some hilarious voice messages that we’re probably going to play on our next episode.

So the next benefit to a voicemail service is the fact that these calls that are coming in can integrate directly into your lead software system, and for us that’s Podio. So it can automatically populate right into there; tasks pop-up to call the people back or certain reminders; it can keep your organization and lead-management—

Doug: Well-organized.

Andrea: —really well organized, so that can be a great thing. The negatives or cons to voicemail services are the fact that you are not answering live, so you will have lots of hang-ups, and you’ve got to figure out what to do with those. And it can be really difficult to call the person back because for one, they may have already called somebody else and you’ve lost them. For two, maybe they’ve lost their motivation, and you didn’t capture them right away when they were motivated. So those are the negatives.

If you do decide to do voicemail service, it can be good. I know I just made it sound really bad, but it can be a good thing.

Doug: I mean that’s what we’ve used for the last four years, so it works.

Andrea: Yeah, your options for that are Google Voice, which is free but very limited. Then if you’re willing to spend a little bit of money, you can use CallRail.com or RingCentral.com.

Doug: We currently use CallRail.com. We’ve been using it for about six months, and we really like it. There’s a lot of other ones out there, but those are kind of the main ones. And then the last step, I mean you get the calls coming in, you’ve talked to the people, and then the last step is to get the deal.

So you talk with the seller; you talk with this person who has called in. Go out and inspect the house if you can, or in some cases you’re just negotiating on the phone. And we’re going to get into that whole topic of working with sellers and talking with them in a future episode. It’s a whole topic in itself, but essentially you want to analyze the property and then make an offer.

Very important step is making the offer. If you don’t make offers, you’re not going to buy a house. I mean it’s pretty simple, but a lot of people don’t. Maybe they’re afraid they’re going to offend the seller or think they’re never going to accept their offer, but for whatever reason they’re not making offers.

If someone calls in and they’re at all interested in selling, make them an offer and put your contact information at the bottom of the offer— that’s another little tip there because they might hang on to that. They might keep that and put it in a file somewhere, put it on their fridge. Who knows? And down the road when they’re ready, if your contact info is on there, they can call you back and say, “Hey, are you still interested in buying my house?” That does happen.

Andrea: We’ve even had contracts sent back, offers mailed back to us weeks or months later with their signature, like okay, ready to go.

Doug: Yeah, and we never even spoke with them. We just, in some cases, have sent an offer. So that’s not the norm, but it does happen, so definitely send an offer out. And then if it’s not accepted initially, follow-up, follow-up, follow-up, very important. As I mentioned at the beginning of this show, the way we got this property in San Bernardino was a series of following up with that particular property owner.

I don’t know the percentages, but I’d say a third, maybe even 40 percent of properties we buy come from follow-ups. They don’t come from the initial contact, so that’s a huge amount. So follow-up is very important, and you need to have systems for that. But that is also another podcast episode someday.

Get the contract signed however that comes, and do it all over again. Rinse and repeat.

Andrea: Yeah, and the most important thing about direct mail truly, truly is consistency. So if you think you’re just going to scrape together all of the money you cans scrape together and send out 5,000 mailers and hope this is really going to just be the thing that triggers your business, it’s not.

You may get a deal or two, but if you want to set yourself up for success, you need to be consistent. So spread that money out, determine how many mailers you can send out monthly, and do it that way because you need to be keeping yourself in front of these people consistently.

Doug: Right. Studies show people that are much smarter than us, I think it’s your name has to get in front of the average person five to seven times before they will respond to that call to action. So sending it one time, you may get lucky or get somebody on the right day, but it’s not going to be that breakthrough in your business that you’re looking for.

If you’re going to do direct mail, even on a small scale, I recommend committing to it at least six to twelve months, six months at a minimum.

Andrea: Yeah and for each list you’re sending them a series of postcards and letters. It’s not just a one-time thing.

Doug: I didn’t even mention that, but you know, you want to consistently send these people things, anywhere from every month to every two months, maybe every three months. Whatever it is, continue to send out mailers so that your name is in front of them, and they begin to recognize you and subconsciously they know, oh this guy is legitimate. He’s continuing to try to contact me, and that might be someone I want to work with.

Consistency is very, very important. And then as you do some deals, as you start to make some money with projects you’ve purchased from direct mail, then increase your budget. Put a percentage of those profits back into marketing so that grows a little bit. And it’s just this cycle that feeds on itself, so then you can send out more letters. And just like anything it will bring more deals, and then you increase your budget some more. So that’s how we recommend doing it. But definitely give it a good period of time to try it out.

Andrea: And some of our best tips are call back the hang-ups. So if you do use a voicemail service or if you don’t and there are calls that you missed, call them back or send them a text message.

Doug: Yeah, texting is another thing. A lot of people prefer, myself included, love to communicate via text these days.

Andrea: It’s less threatening, and they may be more likely to respond.

Doug: And not everybody has a cell phone, so you may get an error that it was not a cell phone, but you’ll at least know. Try to text them; try to leave a voice message back; try different things to get back to those people who hung up the phone when they called you.

So that is Direct Mail 101 in a nutshell. Hope you got a lot of info from that.

Andrea: If you have any other questions, or if there are any other resources we can try to provide, or specific questions, please feel free to send us an email. We like this stuff. We like talking about it, and we’d be happy to answer your questions.

Doug: Actually, you can just get on our website and go to the “Contact Us” section and send us an email right through there. And that’s SpousesFlippingHouses.com. Hit the “Contact Us” tab and shoot us a message. We’d love to hear back from you, and don’t forget to head on over to iTunes if you haven’t. Please do so and leave us a rating and review.

It really helps our ranking on iTunes. It helps to get the word out and helps our podcast to be found by more people. It really, really does, so we appreciate any feedback you can give us.

Also, if you haven’t already, head over to our website and get our two free gifts that are available for a limited time. We are going to be changing those gifts up. We’re talking about that this week, not sure which ones are going away or if both of them are going away or if just one, but go to our website.

For now, you can get the “How to Analyze a Deal Like an Appraiser” video course that I made, and you can get the e-book on 11 Tips to Working Successfully with Your Spouse that Andrea wrote, so get those free over at SpousesFlippingHouses.com. I think that’s it.

Andrea: Yeah, I just want to put in a little plug though for our next episode. We are working on something that I hope will work out. If it does, I think it’s hilarious. Certain things in this business can be negative sometimes, and you have to find a way to deal with that, and kind of have fun in the process and make light of it. So we’re going to show you how we do that, and I think it’s hysterical.

Doug: A little teaser. So come on back next week, and until then, I just hope everybody has a great week. We will talk to you soon.

Andrea: Talk to you later.

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The post Episode 13: Direct Mail 101: Everything You Need to Know About Direct Mail Marketing appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.

by Doug & Andrea Van Soest | Spouses Flipping Houses

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For this episode, we really wanted to focus on what has helped us build a happy & healthy working relationship.

We’ve had the opportunity to speak at a few different events and surprisingly, the people that have come up to us have asked more about how we’re able to work together successfully, than real estate.

So in this episode, we’re going to cover the 11 points (we feel) that have really helped us to accomplish this & hope this will also help you to do the same.

Tony Robbins Disc Test

Gratitude 365 App

1000 Gifts – Ann Voskamp

Download Episode 12 Transcript

Andrea: Take time out for fun.

Doug: Yeah.

Andrea: Who wants to work all of the time and be serious all the time.

Doug: Boring.

Andrea: It’s not fun.

— Intro/Music —

Andrea: Welcome back to Spouses Flipping Houses. We hope you had a great Thanksgiving!

We did. It’s always awesome to take a few minutes out of your life to remember what you’re thankful for and to eat good food with friends and family, so.

Doug: That’s right. I think you had those switched, to eat good food and then be thankful for it. I hope everyone is fat and happy out there and feeling good. We had a great break.

We are glad to be back at it though. Sometimes, for me especially, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, well yeah you have noticed Andrea because we’ve talked about it here the last couple of days, but I’ve been a little bit all over the map getting back to sort-of the normal flow of work.

And it’s not like we’ve been gone that long. But here’s what’s happened and what I’ve been going through the last couple of days. So we went to a Mastermind meeting, which we talked about in the last episode, which was great.

We got lots of good information. Andrea and I have talked a lot about things we want to implement into our business, and changes we want to make, and just all positive good stuff.

But just a lot of information that’s just sitting there in your head, trying to find a way to get out. And then we take a break and have a Thanksgiving, which was great also. We got to be with family and have a good time away, so then Monday comes after Thanksgiving, and I’m ready to get back to it, and all energized to get back to work, get back to our business, implement everything.

And then Monday happens, and it’s like spending a whole day just catching up on stuff we’ve missed. Emails, things that needed to get done, all things that weren’t really what I wanted to do that way but needed to be done nonetheless. And then kind of the stress sets in, that overwhelms you. So all of the energy I had Monday morning, Tuesday morning was completely gone.

You just kind of feel overwhelmed, and it’s like, “Oh, how in the world am I ever going to get this stuff that we need to get done, done. And yet make the changes and implementations and good things that will move our business forward in the way we want to. How are we going to get that in there as well?”

Andrea: And the thing is, I think that this happens to everybody, but some people allow it to shut them down.

Doug: Yeah and I can see how. I can definitely relate to that over the last couple of days, how you can just shut down, and it becomes so overwhelming you just think, okay, I’m not going to deal with it. I’m just going to go back to what I know and get the tasks done that I normally would do, and nothing really happens. And the stress kind of sits on your shoulders and just stays there.

So, how have I been dealing with that? Well one thing that I’ve noticed that seems to be helpful for me is number one, getting it out of my head and onto a piece of paper. That is basically a simplified task-list of the things, a bullet-point list almost, of the things I want to implement in our business, our priority list really. And you make the most important thing at the very top, number one.

And don’t make it a 30-task list. Five to ten at the most, so it’s not overwhelming in itself. And then, maybe just focus on one the first day. And once you start checking those off and they get done, you start to feel productive and energized again and notice that you’re making progress, and just having it on paper and seeing it going, okay, I can do this. This is manageable. That helps me.

Andrea: I love that because I think when it is all bouncing around in your head, it feels so overwhelming. So to get it out of your head onto the paper, so you can look at it. And then at least for me, I love checklists. So when you start checking something off it’s exciting, and you feel like you’re accomplishing something, and you’re moving forward. So that’s good stuff.

Doug: Yeah, definitely good stuff, but we have a great topic today, and we’re really actually happy with it. This is a great episode, and you’re really going to like this one, a lot of good information today.

Andrea: So yeah, our topic today is our eleven tips to working successfully with your spouse. And so this is actually an e-book that I wrote, and we’re just going to go through it a little bit and each of the different points. And I think this can pertain to people who work with their spouse, but also people who maybe work with their son, or brother, or even just a business partner.

A lot of it is just pertinent to relationships in general and how you can work together successfully to be more efficient, and get things done smoother, and have a good relationship while doing it. And so the reason that I decided to write this e-book is because we’ve had the chance to speak at a few different real estate clubs and things, and afterwards the people that come up to talk to us have more questions about how we work together than they have about real estate actually.

And we thought that was so interesting. We didn’t realize how many people either do work with their spouse and struggle with it or they would like to work with their spouse or loved one but are afraid to do it.

Doug: Right, yeah.

Andrea: So some of the main questions that we get are number one: how do you work together and not kill each other? And so that’s what we’re going to go through with these eleven points. But then also a lot of people would come up to us and say, “I would love to work with my spouse, but they hate real estate. So what can I do?”

And my solution to that is to find out what they love and how can you incorporate that into your business. Because real estate is just a means to an end; it’s just a part, an aspect of your business. So maybe your spouse, or son, or brother, whomever, maybe they love marketing, and you can incorporate them in that way.

Maybe they love social media, and there’s for sure a marketing angle with that. Maybe they love crunching numbers or they love systems and tech stuff. If you take the time to figure out what they love or what they’re good at, there’s a good chance you can find a place for them in your business.

It doesn’t have to be looking at the houses. It doesn’t have to be the thing that you do. Find what they love and try to figure out how you can be creative and incorporate them if you really want to work with a loved one.

Doug: Yeah, I think that’s an excellent tip right there. Real estate is not just “here’s a house, what’s it worth, let’s fix it and sell it.” You know, that can be completely boring to some people and overwhelming, not any interest in that at all, but there are so many other aspects to working together in this business and other businesses that have so many different parts, like you mentioned, that people can fit in.

Andrea: And then we’ve talked about this before, but we really recommend that you take a strengths finder test. So we’ve talked about the Colby test I believe, the actual strengths finder test, and then Doug and I took another one last night just for fun called The DISC Test by Tony Robbins. So you can just Google Tony Robbins DISC Test, and it’s free. So that’s the cool thing about that one.

It’s very in-depth. I found it really, really interesting, and it tells you how to communicate with a person that is whatever you’re…

Doug: Whatever your strengths happen to be on that particular test, whatever category you fall in essentially. It will tell you, “Here’s your report Andrea. Now the best way to communicate with Andrea is this.” And it will list five or six bullet points, and “Andrea may have weaknesses in this area,” and five or six bullet points.

Andrea: Yeah, so you can read on your own and learn more about yourself, but then read your spouse’s so you can learn how to communicate with them effectively. It was really, really cool. I liked that.

Doug: We are going to have all of our team take this test, and that will hopefully help us to know how they operate. Maybe we need to talk to them with this angle or encourage them this way. You know, those kinds of things. They’ll be happier doing these kinds of tasks. You might even have to shift roles around a little bit within your business, which is good. These tests are great, so yeah definitely go check out the DISC test.

Andrea: So working successfully with your spouse. The first thing I want to say is I want to give a disclaimer: the fact that we are not relationship experts.

Doug: We’re not?

Andrea: We have been working together successfully though for the last 15 years. We’ve been self-employed our entire married lives. We enjoy it. We enjoy each other’s company, so we do feel like we have something to offer, but we’re not perfect. And we’re just going to give you what works for us.

Doug: Yeah. It doesn’t mean that everyday is just easy breezy, and there’s no challenges at all. There definitely are, and we’re always trying to work through those things and improve. So the first tip for successfully working with your spouse is number one: put your relationship first.

This may sound like common sense or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it gets breezed over or isn’t even something you would think about because you’re so invested together in growing this business, but put your relationship first. You’ve heard the saying, “Happy wife, happy life?”

That’s not the best statement because that’s kind of a one-sided thing, so I love that Andrea has switched that around, and we have a new sort-of motto here in our business, which is “Happy spouse, happy house.” You’ve got to remember why you even got in this business in the first place, and usually it has to do with bettering your family’s situation or being happier just in life.

And who is more important to you than your spouse or your significant loved one, whoever it is you may be working with? So keep that in mind and put that before your business. I actually read a book recently that tried to make the opposite argument that by putting your business first you’re somehow putting your spouse first, because you’re building the nest egg and providing.

And I just disagree with that. I think that’s wrong, and I think your priorities can get misaligned if you’re prioritizing your business and your things to do over your spouse.

Andrea: And your family in general.

Doug: And your family in general. Remember what’s really important in life, and that boils down to your loved ones, so that’s number one.

Andrea: Okay, number two is assume the best of the other person’s intentions. So I think a lot of times we can get stuck in sort of a negativity trap where once somebody does something that bothers you, or bugs you, or annoys you, you assume that they did that on purpose: He was trying to be a jerk to me. And most of the time they weren’t.

So if you stop and think about it for a minute, sure there are people that do jerky things on purpose, but I think most people don’t set out to be mean or rude to you. They just have something else on their mind, they were focused in a different way, or maybe they didn’t mean to. So I think it’s really important to give each other the benefit of the doubt and don’t just assume you know what the other person was thinking before they acted that way.

Talk it out in a nice way and just assume the best of the other person’s intentions.

Doug: Yeah, definitely good. Number three: treat them with as much or more respect than everyone else. So it seems to be that we tend to take things out on people we love. Isn’t that interesting?

Andrea: It’s so interesting, and it’s so true because they are our comfort zone.

Doug: Yeah I don’t know if it’s because they’re our comfort zone or maybe you feel like they’re always going to love you no matter what. I can kind of air my dirty laundry out on this person and just kind of take it out all on them. But for whatever reason, this is the person you love more than anyone in the world here. Why do we do that?

So when working together, try to remember that there is a respect factor you have for your other employees and people you work with. Have that same (or more) respect for your loved one that you’re working with.

Andrea: I think it’s really important that you respect their strengths and what they’re good at and possibly even more importantly, respect your partner’s weaknesses. Don’t expect them to do things that you know they’re not good at or don’t set them up for failure in that way.

Doug: Take the strengths finder test and know what your loved one is good at and what they’re not good at.

Andrea: Yeah, they’re not perfect and neither are you. So don’t expect them to be and just I think keep respect in the forefront. Okay so number four is to take time out for fun. Who wants to work all the time and be serious all the time?

Doug: Boring!

Andrea: It’s not fun. So for us, this is what we do. We have set aside time every Friday morning on our calendar to do something fun. We had told ourselves originally that we were going to go find a new paddle boarding spot every Friday morning, and we haven’t done that. So maybe it’s really good that we’re looking at this right now to remind ourselves.

But it could be as simple as sometimes we’ll just go to a pancake house that we love or we’ll go for a walk. just anything that takes our mind off of business and we’re just hanging out and having fun, remembering why we like each other.

Doug: And it’s like a scheduled time every week that we can look forward to, that Friday morning. It doesn’t have to be super long. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy like we talked about, but yeah, let’s take a little time out and enjoy this, enjoy what we’re doing together.

Andrea: I think it can really reenergize you personally and as a couple, and it just gives you that motivation to get back to work.

Doug: Yeah it’s like recharging your batteries.

Andrea: For sure.

Doug: Along those lines is also taking time to reward yourself. In your business you’re going to set goals, and milestones, and marks of achievement, and when you hit those marks and reach those goals, go celebrate! It doesn’t have to be major, just go out to eat at your favorite restaurant. Enjoy the ride here and reward yourselves here for accomplishing those things. And then you’ll look forward to the next one.

Andrea: Definitely. Okay, so number five is define your roles. This one, for me, is so important. It is really, really important for me to feel like I know what is expected of me. Because if you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing, then you end up floundering around, and you cannot be successful if you’re floundering around.

You need a direction. Everybody needs to know where they’re headed. So we’ve said it before. Figure out what your strengths are within your business and what you enjoy doing, and then the things that you don’t enjoy doing or that you’re not good at, what you need somebody else to be doing.

And then I would honestly, honestly take the time to write out a clear description of what you believe your role is and then what your partner’s role is. And then have them do the same thing. And then make sure it is in alignment, that you are expecting the same thing from one another, that you guys are on the same page basically because if you take the time to do that, you might realize oh wow, you were expecting me to do this, this, and that. I didn’t know that so I haven’t been doing it. That’s why it’s not getting done. I’m sorry. I thought you were going to do it.

It’s really important that you guys be on the same page, and know what is expected of you, and stick to your own roles, and don’t step on your partner’s toes.

Doug: Yeah and Andrea says that with a smile. This is one of the things that we’ve had to learn sort-of the hard way I guess working together. We didn’t do this for the first several years in our house flipping business, and I tend to be the kind of person that just, I don’t know, doesn’t talk about these things as much.

And I just tend to put my nose down and start doing, and before you know it I’m doing little bits of everything, and I’ve sort-of infringed upon or creeped over into some of the tasks that Andrea had defined as her role to do. And so I was stepping on her toes a bit, and she would have to talk to me about it, and just say, “Hey, that’s what I handle. That’s what I’m good at. What are you doing here? Are you doing my role and yours?”

So that’s encouraged us to really clearly define that this is what I do, this is what I’m good at; this is what you do, this is what you’re good at. That’s really helped us be productive.

Along those same lines is tip number six, which is hire someone to do the minimum wage tasks or the things you just don’t like doing or aren’t good at. This was probably the single best thing we’ve ever done in our business.

Andrea: Absolutely.

Doug: So early on when you’re starting your business or if you’re an entrepreneur, doing anything, you are every role from day one.

Andrea: And it’s okay to start that way.

Doug: Absolutely. Yeah it’s okay. You don’t have a budget to go hire everybody or even know what roles you need to fill early on. So we were our entire business. We did everything for the first several years, and one of the tasks that was necessary that we had to do was bookkeeping. We both hate it.

Andrea: And we’re not good at it.

Doug: Somehow I forced Andrea into doing that, and that became her role early on. So she would have to do the books, and she just despised it. It was a stressor, and she would do it, but she just hated doing it, and we realized early on that we needed to hire someone to do this.

So we did. We hired a bookkeeper and huge change. All of the sudden, Andrea likes going to work again, likes doing things. And the books get done, and they’re probably done better than— they are done better than what we could do.

Andrea: It was such a burden lifted off of my shoulders, but then it also freed me up to do more things to help grow our business, so it was the best.

Doug: Another thing we used to— and we’re talking about things that are important in your business. We don’t want to downplay the roles of all of these different moving parts that need to get done, but some things you should just hire out.

Andrea: For sure. Like when we first started to do direct mail, we were a little bit nervous about the cost of that. We had never done it before. We weren’t quite confident that it was going to work, so we would literally sit in front of our television at night, stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on hundreds of letters. That is insane.

Doug: For hours and hours. Sometimes you have to do that to get going. I get it because you’re on a budget, but we did that for far too long. And we would spend hours and hours stuffing envelopes. Listen; there are services out there that can do that for far less than your time is really worth.

Andrea: Absolutely. Value your time. I think that’s what it boils down to.

Doug: It definitely boils down to valuing your time. What is your highest and best use as a business owner, as an entrepreneur? Is it stuffing envelopes at night?

Andrea: No!

Doug: No. It could be marketing; it could be negotiating; it could be working on systems of your business. It could be a hundred other things that are far more valuable than that. So the next hire we made was an administrative assistant, because paperwork began to get overwhelming.

And we’re talking about just filling out forms, signing papers, you know checking checkmarks. Things like that, calling the utility companies and spending hours on hold to turn on the gas at a certain property.

That stuff can just drain you and take up all of your time. So hire that out. You can get lots of people that will work and fill those roles for you, and probably do a better job than you would do.

So tip number seven is to not throw each other under the bus in front of others.

Andrea: This one I think is really important. You guys have to be a team and have to stand united. So basically that means having each other’s back no matter what. You need to trust that your spouse or business partner will not talk negatively about you in front of others, and you need to not talk negatively about them.

So that means not ever, not in front of your employees, for sure not in front of your employees.

Doug: For sure not in front of your employees.

Andrea: Not in front of your contractor or clients. It just really dilutes your strength as a team. It makes you both look weak, and it can ruin your relationship. So stand united and don’t talk bad about each other.

Doug: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrea: Okay, tip number eight is be each other’s cheering squad. And in this little e-book I tell a little story about how I ran track in high school, and my race was the 800. And it’s basically two laps of sprinting, and a lot of people say that it’s one of the hardest races in track because you’re basically sprinting for two laps. It’s a lot.

Doug: Half a mile.

Andrea: And so the way it was set up at our school is that the cheering stands, where people would sit to watch you, was all on one side of the track, like at the starting line. And so all of your encouragers were right there. So you would start out, and when you would get around past that cheering squad, you feel great. I can do this. I’m going to win.

And then you get past them around the backstretch where you can’t hear the cheering squad, and you feel like okay, I’m going to die. I can’t do this anymore. And you realize how much that cheering squad motivates you, and keeps you moving forward, and it’s so important.

And I think it’s true in business. It’s true in life that when people encourage you and tell you that you can do it, you’re more likely to do it. My mom used to always tell us that you treat people like they are who you hope they will become, and they will likely become it. I think there’s so much truth to that and so much wisdom.

And your business isn’t going to be fun every single day. Some days you just have to do the hard work. Some days you’re going to feel more stressed out than others. So be there to encourage each other and to cheer each other along, and it will just motivate you as well.

Doug: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve noticed that sometimes our business— excuse me, our relationship and our business is kind of like a teeter-totter. There will be days where I just need that encouragement. I’m feeling overwhelmed, or I’m stressed, or whatever is happening, I’m down.

And Andrea is there just lifting me up with her encouragement, with her positive attitude, with her being my cheerleader essentially. And then they’ll be days where it’s switched.

She’ll be having a bad day for whatever reason, and I’ve got to be there to kind of bring her up and encourage her, and it just kind of goes back and forth.

It really has been a positive thing where one person can help lift the other one up, and together that lifts both of you up.

Andrea: And you keep seeing things move forward. So, awesome. The next one, number nine, is no business at the dinner table.

Doug: Nope. Food at the dinner table.

Andrea: And talking.

Doug: Oh, and talking.

Andrea: Talking to your family. So I read this little book by Anne Voss Camp called One Thousand Gifts, and she said something that I will never forget. It was so powerful, and I try to remember this all of the time. She said that, “you will be remembered for what brings you the most joy in life.”

And I love that, and someday when I pass on, I don’t want my kids to say, “Well, she sure loved real estate.”

I want them to say, “She loved me, that I brought her joy. I could tell that she was happy when she was around us.” And so one way that we know we can always do that everyday, I hope we do this in a lot of ways, but at the dinner table.

That is our time. We are not going to talk about business. We put our phones away, and we go around the table asking, “What was the best part of your day? What was the worst part of your day?”

And Doug and I will tell them about our best parts and our worst parts, and usually everybody’s best part of the day is “right now.” That’s what they always say: “Right now with you guys!” So I just think it’s always good to have time that is set aside that you are not talking about business.

So maybe you don’t have kids, but that’s okay. You have to have time where you just don’t talk about business.

Doug: Right, your business can’t dominate your entire relationship. You have to take time to focus on your relationship, and your family, and what’s important. So number ten is to listen as much as you speak. And I kind of feel like this one was written right for me.

Andrea: Nah.

Doug: So, you know you’ve heard it said that when your mouth is moving, your ears don’t really work. True. And God gave us two ears, one mouth. All of those things are very true, so by listening, the important thing here is that you’re not just listening, you’re focusing, and you’re taking in what’s being said.

I think it’s especially important for guys, or at least for me, I can’t speak for all guys, but I know that when Andrea wants to talk to me about something. I’m very focused, so if I’m doing a task, if I’m watching a football game (which is a task sometimes), and she wants to talk to me about something, I need to pause the game and turn, and look at Andrea, and really listen to what she’s saying because I cannot do both.

If I’m writing an e-mail and she wants to talk to me, I can’t write the email and really listen and hear what she’s saying. So listen as much or I should probably say listen more than you speak.

Andrea: You’ve probably all talked to that person that you can tell that when you’re talking to them, they’re not listening to what you’re saying, they’re planning out their next statement that they’re going to say in their head. And you don’t ever walk away from that situation feeling good or feeling like you were heard.

It’s annoying, and it does not help your relationship. I never walk away from a person like that thinking gee, I want to hang out with them more.

Doug: Yeah, like they really cared what I was talking about and paid attention.

Andrea: Yeah, so I think it’s good personally and professionally to be sure to listen to what people are saying. Take it in.

Doug: Make sure they’re heard, and they know it.

Andrea: Because it makes people feel valued.

Doug: Right, exactly. Last tip.

Andrea: Last tip, number eleven is always be grateful. Life will always be filled with stress and difficult things, so to either start your day or to end your day by reminding yourself of everything that you have to be thankful for in your life can completely change your mindset. And I think you might hear to always be grateful and think okay, that’s silly or that’s simple.

Well the truth is that in business or in life, there is no magic formula. I think people are constantly going to these “Get Rich Quick” seminars and different things thinking I just need that one magic formula thing that somebody is going to tell me, and that’s going to be it. No, the truth is you just have to do it. You just have to do the hard work, and sometimes it’s as simple as stopping to think about what you’re grateful for everyday.

And we’ve noticed a tremendous difference in our own lives as far as fulfillment since we have taken the time to do this. We discovered this app called Gratitude 365, and by literally taking a couple of seconds to remember what you’re grateful for, jot it down, it can transform you. And there have actually been studies done on the physical effects it can have, psychological effects, social effects, and it’s amazing.

So for physical, they say that it can give you a stronger immune system; you’ll be less bothered by aches and pains in your life, have lower blood pressure. People who are grateful exercise more, take better care of their health. They sleep longer and feel more refreshed when they wake up. Psychologically, they have higher levels of positive emotion, more alert and awake, more joy, more optimism and happiness.

And then socially, they generally feel more helpful, and generous, and compassionate, more forgiving and outgoing, less lonely and isolated. So gratitude is so important.

Doug: Yeah, so important, and we’ve talked on this before. But it helps you focus on the things that are good in your life, and everybody has things that are good in their lives. And it keeps you in a positive frame of mind. So important. Very critical.

Andrea: They say that it’s not happiness that brings us gratitude; it’s gratitude that brings us happiness.

Doug: So true.

Andrea: Maybe you’re like me or maybe you’re not, but I am such an “out of sight, out of mind” person, and so I wrote this little book thing, and it’s great. But it’s kind of thick, and it’s a lot of stuff, and I need, in order for me to remember things, I have to have it in front of me sometimes.

And so we’re going to add a little bookmark to the end of this e-book that is just bullet points of the eleven tips.

Doug: A literal bookmark.

Andrea: Yeah, if maybe you’re a person that’s just like me, and you need to have certain things in the forefront of your mind, and that will help your relationship to be focused on these eleven things and just be a good reminder, you can print out that bookmark and tack it up somewhere, stick it in a book that you’re reading, and help keep these things in the forefront of your mind.

Because it’s one thing to read them, but if you forget it, you’re not implementing that into your relationship or your partnership. So if you can take them and put them to action…

Doug: It’s so much more valuable. Yeah to have them right there in the forefront of your mind.

Andrea: You’re much more likely to work successfully with your spouse.

Doug: You are much more likely.

Andrea: And so we will be putting this bookmark up in our office.

Doug: So we hope you got a lot out of this episode.

Andrea: Yeah, you know we really tried to sit down and truly think about what are the most important things that have contributed to us having a happy and healthy working relationship, and we feel like these are the eleven things. So we hope that it is helpful to you in some way, and we’ll continue to strive to do them too.

Doug: Absolutely. We wanted to encourage you to head over to the website and get that bookmark as well as get a copy of this e-book that Andrea wrote. And the website is spousesflippinghouses.com. What else do we have? Anything else to wrap it up?

Andrea: We had somebody write a review that got me all giddy last night. It’s kind of exciting when you get a review from somebody that you don’t actually know.

Doug: Yeah, it’s neat to see that wow, people other than maybe our close friends and family, are listening. They’re might be somebody out there who is actually benefiting from what we’re saying. We don’t know who this person was, but they wrote a great review, and I’m trying to pull it up here so I can read it.

So the review comes from “SWhite37,” and they said, “Five stars. Life changing information. As someone who is looking to get into real estate, specifically flipping, this podcast, website, and resources are simply unmatched. I have learned so much in such a short period of time, and the information they are giving is priceless. Thank you so much for sharing your ideas and insights. It brightens my day each and every time I listen.”

Thank you SWhite37 for your kind words. This keeps us encouraged to continue to record podcast episodes.

Andrea: Yes, for sure. Thank you so much! We appreciate it.

Doug: Thanks so much. If you haven’t left us a review or rating, please head over to iTunes and do that. We really appreciate that and like to hear the feedback from our podcast.

Andrea: And besides that, it also helps our ranking in iTunes which just keeps it kind of out there for other people to find this podcast, so thank you so much. We really do appreciate it.

Doug: Absolutely. So on that note, we are going to wrap it up, and we will be back with another episode soon, and we will talk to you later!

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The post Episode 12: Can You Really Work With Someone You Love? appeared first on Spouses Flipping Houses.